bearing blog

Ugh: Anti-sibling messages.

Normally I am very pleased with the children's magazines put out by Carus Publications, producers of Cricket, Ask, Ladybug, and several other titles.  Each of my children receives one subscription.    Generally they're very child-positive, and the science articles in particular tend to be well done without much dumbing down.

Boy, howdy, though, I couldn't let this one slide.  This is the back cover of the January 2012 issue of Odyssey, the science magazine aimed at kids aged 10 to 16:

 

Yeah, you read that right.  The little sister is hugging the big sister, and the big sister is rolling her eyes and wishing the little sister had never been born.

The context here is that this month's issue is about "annoyance."  The consulting editor for the issue is a professor of psychology as well as brain/cognitive science.  There are articles about the role of cortisol, about talking being more effective at calming oneself than texting, about how the sound of whining children distracts mothers more than the sound of whining table saws, and about how psychologists classify "annoyance" among five basic emotional states.  There's even a sidebar explaining that some sounds, such as crying babies, are annoying for a good reason:  because they signal a need that we're supposed to meet.

But that picture... I'm sure it's supposed to be funny, but I'm disturbed even by the notion that this appears in an educational magazine.  If they had pictured a girl sitting in a desk rolling her eyes at a teacher and thinking, "Tell me again why I haven't dropped out yet," I bet they'd get an earful from the classroom teachers who make up a sizable portion of their subscriptions.

Anyway, I called.  "I'd better leave the room," said the 11yo as I dialed the phone, "because I don't want to hear you yell."

"I'm not going to yell," I said.  "It's not the fault of the person who answers the phone number published in the magazine."  So the kids watched.

I talked to a very nice young woman named (I think) Kirsten, who when I said, "I have a comment about the January issue of Odyssey" told me to hang on while she got a copy of the magazine to look at.  Once I got her onto the back cover, I described what I saw.  

"I see a younger sister giving a hug to her big sister.  The little girl is looking up at her big sister with a loving smile.  The older sister is looking away and expressing regret that her little sister was ever born."  I went on to explain that I found it disturbing, that my children found it disturbing (the 11yo was the one who showed it to me), and that I assumed it was supposed to be funny; but that the "funny" fell flat, because it's just not representative of the child-positive messages I expect to see in the Cricket family of publications.  Children aged ten to sixteen are exactly the age group who are most susceptible to negative messages about the value of younger siblings, I went on.  I am happy to have every one of my kids.  My children are happy to have every one of their siblings.  I want it to stay that way.

"See, I didn't yell," I pointed out to the kids after I had left my contact information, acquired the name and email address of the person to whom my message should be directed, and ended the call.  

"Sometimes you yell," observed my 8yo.

I thought about it.  "Yes, sometimes I do.  It helped that I knew the person on the other end of the line didn't have anything to do with the cover, and that she was very polite and listened to me.  It's much harder to keep yourself from yelling if the other person is rude."

The senior editor of Odyssey is Elizabeth Lindstrom, and her email is [email protected] .  

(NB. If you're reading this long past the issue date of January 2012, consider the post outdated.)

 

Double effect, in the bathtub.

Jennifer Fitz, as part of a longer discourse on lying, offers a novel explanation of the principle of double effect.  I think it's very approachable (and as far as I can tell, accurately represents Church teaching) so if this oft-misused principle has ever confused you -- please, check it out.

Hint:  The principle of double effect is not just a way of saying, "We can do something bad if we can think up a good enough reason."  Money quote:  "That's the clincher of double effect -- there are two effects."

Double effect (also called “parallel effect”) is actually one of the two principles that work together to keep our moral system sane.  The other is ‘ends don’t justify the means’, but that isn’t our topic today until way down below where I go out on a limb and guess things.  Back to Double Effect:

#1 Reason to love Double Effect: It lets you take a shower.

Because here’s what: Showers and bathtubs are super dangerous.  You could slip and crack your head open. And if the bathroom weren’t bad enough, you probably keep a stove and a water heater around the house, and perhaps even some kind of Vehicle of Death in your garage.  (Or, if you are a Luddite, a Pack Animal of Death for your transportation needs.)

Double effect says that you are allowed to have all this and more!  Because you aren’t actually trying to drown, scald or maim anybody.  Those are unintended consequences of your perfectly reasonable efforts to stay clean, fed, mobile, and so forth.   You’ll try to avoid those bad effects if you possibly can.

[What you can't do: If your enemy fails to drown in his bath, you can't hold him under.  In fact you can't even lay out the bath things and light a scented candle in an effort to lure him to his death.  You may only lead him to the tub for a legitimately good reason, such as to reduce the general stinkiness and discourage the spread of impetigo.  Or perhaps so that he might unwind after a long day driving. you. crazy.  But not to kill him. Barring circumstances we'll get to down the page.]

So that’s the use of double effect.  It lets us do something good, even if there is a some risk of something bad happening in the process.

Now unless you suffer from deep scruples, you probable don’t lay awake nights wondering if your really did the right thing, caving in and buying a water heater.  So where double effect gets famous is because it permits seriously dangerous action if there’s a genuine need for it.

You may not, for example, throw yourself in front of a bus in order to get that drat fly at last. (Even though the fly is germy and annoying, and you only want to give your beloved a peaceful picnic.  Good cause, good action, but the risks are disproportionate.  It’s a no-go.  Hope the bus gets the fly, and live to swat another day.)  But if it is to push your hapless child out of harm’s way, yes you may take the risk of your likely death in order to save the child.  You aren’t trying to die.  You hope to avoid dying.  Everyone will be much happier if a guardian angel steps up and takes care of things.

And that’s the clincher of double effect — there are two effects: There is one thing good you are trying to achieve, and one bad bad you hope to avoid. Even if the bad effect is 100% likely barring supernatural intervention, you can’t be trying to achieve the bad effect.

There's more -- go read the whole thing.  I think Jennifer's explanation is really helpful.  Double effect is a seriously hard-to-understand principle.  I think that's because there's a long separation in logic, and usually time and distance, between convincing yourself in the abstract that the principle of double effect is correct and morally right (which isn't so hard), and many of its applications, which can sometimes seem convoluted and (shall I say it?) jesuitical.    To navigate some of these situations, it's like you have to wander through a long, twisty tunnel.  At the beginning of the tunnel, the principle of double effect is well understood.  At the end of the tunnel, you see the conclusions it leads to.  The principle goes with you through the long, twisty tunnel, your only source of light, and it remains true all the time, but once you get to the end sometimes the conclusion is surprising and hard to understand.

Take one example:  the end-point of Catholic moral theology with respect to ectopic (tubal) pregnancy.  We wind up with what must seem a very bizarre conclusion:  

• A persistent ectopic pregnancy creates a life-threatening disorder from the point of view of the mother.  
• Yes, the out-of-place and growing embryo is a human being who deserves our protection. 
•  No, that doesn't mean that the mother doesn't get medical treatment, because she is also a human being who deserves our protection.  
• So yes, she can seek treatment for it, treatment which will end the pregnancy and inevitably kill the embryo.  
• But (assuming the mother wishes to remain true to Catholic moral understanding of life issues, and understands all this) she won't choose to use the drug methotrexate to end the pregnancy by killing the embryo, even though it is first treatment choice of many doctors and is probably physically the least dangerous option that doctors offer her, 
• and it may be she won't even choose the least-invasive surgical method, salpingostomy (incision in the fallopian tube) followed by killing the embryo by removing it and its amnion;
• but she can choose salpingectomy, which is the removal of the section of fallopian tube containing the misplaced embryo, 
• even though that removal inevitably results in the death of the embryo,
• which we knew all along was going to happen,
• and even though it would be objectively physically safer for the mother to undergo methotrexate or salpingostomy,
• and even though the salpingectomy will likely damage the mother's fertility.

I mean, if you don't have any understanding of the principle of double effect, this sounds nuts.  Even if you do have an understanding of the principle of double effect, it might still sound nuts.  You have to sit down and take time to connect all the dots to figure out how we got from here to there, or why it matters that we prefer one option to the other when the end result is a no-longer-in-danger mother and a dead embryo for all of them, and especially why "but the salpingectomy is more dangerous!" isn't a good enough reason to use one of the other methods, considering that the embryo is dead either way.

And yet, this is where double effect, properly understood, gets you.  If it isn't obvious, why not head over to Jennifer's blog and see if you can make the connections between her bathtub assailant and the unfortunate ectopic pregnancy problem?  If nothing else, the exercise illustrates why it's important for ordinary Catholics who desire to follow Church teachings -- whether they understand them or not -- to be confident that their local Catholic hospital faithfully follows it, and why the bishops have to guard that confidence even if it means getting bad press.

 

(UPDATE.   Edited slightly to avoid implying that salpingostomy is definitively considered illicit.  See first comment.)

Challenge.

On my post about explaining abortion to kids in the context of American history education, in which I wrote that I would treat the subject as part of a unit on the changing experience of American childhood, I received a good question from "emma" in the combox.  Here it is:

Do you also ask them to put themselves in the positions of their once-younger siblings, now grown older, and facing an unwanted pregnancy?

I gave a quick answer for the combox:

Emma, that's absolutely got to be part of their education, yes -- just as I ask them to put themselves in the position of all kinds of people facing challenges in life. I've tried to do that repeatedly as we've studied American history: asked them to put themselves in the place of marginalized people as well as in the place of people who've done terrible things. I've asked them to put themselves in the place of undocumented immigrants, in the place of people who supported immigration amnesty, and in the place of people who support strict immigration law enforcement -- so they can understand where everyone is coming from. I asked them to put themselves in the place of white antebellum Southerners and white antebellum Northerners and free blacks and slaves. Heck, a couple of weeks ago I even asked them to put themselves in the place of Richard Nixon. "Can you understand how a person could imagine that their political opponents were really *enemies?* And if you thought that, would it still be okay to lie and cheat to win elections?"

How else can "do the right thing, always" sink in, how can "never help people commit injustice, never" sink in, until you really understand that sometimes doing the right thing is terribly, terribly difficult? That sometimes contributing to injustice is terribly, terribly tempting?

 I think it's a question worthy of highlighting for further discussion, don't you? 

My point, in putting Roe v. Wade within a unit on the experience of childhood, is to point out that it affected the legal status of children primarily -- much more than it did the legal status of women.   Of course, this only follows from the notion that unborn children are, in fact children; but I am sure the commenter understands that this is a fundamental assumption in my homeschool.

As with all my educational theories, we shall see how it plays out as my children get older and ask tougher questions. My philosophy about imparting the conviction that the unborn deserve protection  is that it's necessary to go beyond "abortion is bad, so don't ever have one or pay for one or recommend one, try to help people who think it's their only choice, and vote against it whenever you can."  

What's more fundamental than that?  What's more necessary than that?  Well -- ask yourself why abortion is a bad thing, why people shouldn't have them, pay for them, promote them, why it's better to help people make different choices, why its legal status should change.  The only good answer is that the unborn are persons, children, and all those judgments follow from it. 

The Catholic novelist and short-story master Flannery O'Connor once famously said about the Eucharist, "If it's just a symbol, then to hell with it."  Well.  About the anti-abortion movement, I can say:  "If the unborn aren't persons, than to hell with it." 

And so the thing that must be imparted is the gut-and-brain knowledge that unborn children are nothing more nor less than children, younger than themselves.   A ten-year-old boy will protect his little sister like a Rottweiler:  I have seen it.   A four-year-old girl will carefully care for her baby brother:  I have seen it.  The whole family will gather eagerly around Mom's belly to watch for the tiny kicks:   I have seen it.  They know.  They mustn't lose this knowledge.

If you know that an unborn child is a child, you don't need to be told that she needs care, not violence.

If you know that an unborn child is a child, you don't need to be told that a scared pregnant girl is a scared young mother with a baby, that a boy with a pregnant girlfriend is a worried young father.   I'll have completely failed any one of my sons if he makes it to adulthood without being able to imagine what it might be like, what it is like for too many American men: to fear that he can't care for his family.   I'll have failed my daughter if she grows up without putting herself in the place of a mother who's afraid she can't care adequately for herself and for her child.  

I believe that to awaken compassion for young mothers and young fathers and their children is to awaken a desire to help them all, not a desire to harm any of them.  Political positions come long after that.

Readers:  What do you think of Emma's question and challenge?  A good one, no?

Commenter ChristyP on blogtalkradio.

Link here to blog-friend Christy P promoting the Creighton model study that she posted about here in a guest post.  She explains a little bit more about what the study's for.  If you're interested or know someone who's interested, check it out! 

Here's the link - audio will play at the link.

A blog post with no audio here.

Especially if you know someone who's looking for a new method, or is engaged, you might want to recommend it.  This strikes me as a good way to broach the subject of NFP with an engaged couple you know.

Model election: "Life" language part II.

Last week I wrote a post in which I suggested I was going to explore further the nature of the obligation that Catholics have to "vote pro-life."  Assuming that we do have such an obligation, what does that mean?  Let's review:

Some think the obligation is only that we cannot prefer the pro-choice position.  We may (reluctantly) vote for Pro-Choice Charlie over Pro-Life Louie if Charlie has a better stance on other issues and if we think those issues are more important.  This is the answer which, if correct, restricts our voting behavior the least.

Others say, no, we are obligated to consider life issues as most important, and we may not vote for any pro-choice candidates over any viable pro-life candidates:  if Pro-Choice Charlie runs against Pro-Life Louie, we may not vote for Charlie.  However, if there are no pro-life candidates who have a chance of winning -- if we have to choose between Pro-Choice Charlie and Pro-Choice Chester -- we may vote for Charlie if his stance on other issues is better.  This form of the negative obligation would be a bit more restrictive than the first.

A third interpretation would be that we commit actual sin if we cast a vote for any supporter of legal abortion at all.  If there are no viable pro-life candidates, the only moral choice is to withhold our vote or "throw it away" on a non-viable pro-life candidate.  If Charlie is on the ballot running against Chester, then we are stuck with writing in Louie or else not voting.  This negative obligation is still more restrictive, as it strikes some candidates permanently off our potential list of choices.

And a fourth interpretation is that we must orchestrate our support so as to maximize the possibility that a pro-life candidate will be elected in the general election. This is a different, positive obligation, and also quite restrictive.  (In the case that no pro-life candidate can possibly be elected, the positive obligation disappears and you're left with one of the two latter negative obligations.)

I think it is instructive to consider exactly how our voting behavior is constrained under each of the four interpretations of the obligations of a Catholic voter.  So I want to consider a stripped-down model of a race for one office:  two election days, two parties, two issues.

Here are the rules:

There are two political parties.  Call them the Canine Party (C) and the Feline Party (F).   Each party holds a primary election to decide which candidate will win the nomination for the general election.   A voter may vote in either the Feline primary or the Canine primary but not both, and then of course can go on to vote in the general election.

There are two political issues.  In principle these could be almost any two features that influence voters to pick one candidate over the other -- you might think of them as two quite specific policy questions ("Shall we promote single-payer health care?" "Shall we build a wall across the Mexican border?"), or you might think of them as aggregations of related policy questions ("The Economy" and "Social Issues"), or you might think of them as features of the candidates themselves ("Policies" and "Character").  For the purposes of setting up the model, though, they are simply two generic political issues:  Issue 1 and Issue 2.    Each issue has two possible policy positions, which we will call Yes or No. 

In the model, party affiliation and policy positions are the only meaningful distinctions among the candidates. It just so happens that all possible unique candidates happen to be running in this race. So four candidates will compete in the Canine party, representing the four policy positions:

Yes on 1, Yes on 2 (candidate yyC)
Yes on 1, No on 2 (candidate ynC)
No on 1, Yes on 2 (candidate nyC)
No on 1, No on 2 (candidate nnC)

And, of course, there are four candidates competing in the Feline party, which four are yyF, ynF, nyF, nnF.  Eight candidates.  The winner of each primary competes in the general election.  That's sixteen possible head-to-head pairings in the general election.

(My more smartypants readers have probably already noticed that this model can be generalized to the case of p political parties and n political issues, each with m possible policy positions.  You can even generalize it to a multi-level model election that will have little model people setting up "November Madness" brackets and placing bets around little model water coolers.  Go ahead and set up the equations if you like.  I'm not going to.)

 Now, let's imagine a rational voter:  Alice.  Alice doesn't need anyone to tell her how to vote in the general election, because she's so very rational that she could tell you not only who are her favorite candidates, but she can rank all eight in order of preference, and so given any of the possible sixteen head-to-head combinations, Alice knows who will get her vote.  This is because Alice follows a very rational algorithm to choose between two candidates:

(1) Always choose "Yes on 1" over "No on 1."
(2) If the candidates have the same position on  Issue 1, choose "Yes on 2" over "No on 2."
(3) If the candidates have the same position on Issues 1 and 2, choose Felines over Canines.

Clearly Alice's favorite candidate is yyF and her least favorite is nnC, but Alice is not completely specified until the three features (issue 1, issue 2, and party) are ranked in order of importance.  Her friend Bob also loves candidate yyF and hates candidate nnC, but his voting behavior is different because he always chooses a Feline over a Canine first, then moves on to consider Issue 1, and finally Issue 2.   Mathematically attentive but non-smartypants readers may have noticed that there are 2 x 2 x 2 x 6 = 48 different kinds of rational voters in this election.  (My smartypants readers, working out the general case, are deep in matrix algebra by now.)

This model offers us a lot of ways to play.  We could, for example, populate the electorate with so many rational voters like Alice, so many like Bob, so many like Carol, and so on.  We could sprinkle in a bunch of irrational voters, too, who don't follow any discernible rules in choosing one candidate or another.  We could pretend that we had poll results that allow us to predict the outcomes of the sixteen hypothetical general-election face-offs.  And then -- we can ask ourselves interesting questions, like:  "Given her preferences and this set of predicted general-election results, whom should Alice support in the primary election?"

I haven't brought any Catholicism into the model yet -- I've just tried to set up a simplified structure for thinking about it, one that perhaps can be enlarged upon later.  More on that in a subsequent post, in which we consider the constraints introduced by the various interpretations of the "Catholic voter's obligations."

"Life" language: political vs. pastoral, political vs. Christian.

I have been doing a little bit of out-of-season pondering about politics and morals.  No election is coming up, so maybe we can explore the topic of "single-issuevoting" without being bogged down in discussions about any particular candidates or ballot initiatives.  

(N.B.:  For simplicity and clarity, I am restricting the following discussion so that "pro-life" and "pro-choice" refer primarily to legality of abortion.  I won't be discussing in this post issues that many people find blurrier, like cloning or same-sex marriage laws.  I might generalize my arguments to these in a later post, but for now "legal abortion" is the model "life" issue:  that is, I will write as if it is the only one.)

* * *

Not quite two years ago I wrote a post called "Putting the careful thought up front," in which I described a conversation which gave me insight about being a so-called "single-issue voter:"

 

[My friend] said she appreciated hearing about my decision (not made without some struggle) to become what is often called a single-issue voter.  So often the so-called single-issue voters are derided for not putting much thought into the decision.  But in describing the process by which I became convinced to vote pro-life, I'd pointed out without noticing that there is usually a great deal of thought put into those decisions up front --- and that careful and reasoned thought shouldn't be discounted.  

I really appreciated that insight, because to be honest I hadn't been giving myself much credit for that up-front deliberation.  I'd sort of internalized that "single-issue-voters-don't-have-to-think-hard" message and have been kind of quietly bummed and embarrassed about being a primarily pro-life voter, as an identity, even if I've been fairly confident about each vote I've cast... 

 That struggle, that thought, isn't nothing.  It doesn't become nothing just because it is over and it ended in a firm conclusion.  

 

That conversation still ranks as one of the most personally important political conversations I've had, because it allowed me (finally) to "own" my identity as a voter who votes pro-life first.

So I was thinking a little bit about various bishops' directives of varying forcefulness exhorting the Catholics under their jurisdictions to avoid voting for pro-choice candidates.  I don't have a catalog in front of me of which bishop said what when, so I'm going with my general impression here which is that there's some variety in how they've phrased it:

• some have said that a Catholic incurs sin who votes for a pro-choice candidate over a pro-life candidate without a "proportionate reason," i.e., some political reason that the voter honestly believes is as grave as the life issues
• some have said that it's practically impossible for a Catholic to vote for a pro-choice candidate over a pro-life candidate without incurring sin, which is basically the same as the last category except that added to it is the force of the bishop's specific teaching that there is almost never an issue as grave as the life issues 
• some have only gone so far as to teach that a Catholic incurs sin who votes pro-choice candidates "on purpose," e.g. who really does support the pro-choice position and isn't even trying to balance the life issue with other political issues
• some may have been basically silent except for activities as part of the bishops' conference.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this sums up the various bishops' public pronouncements.  

Side note:  One thing I do not know anything about is whether any of the bishops have spoken about the case when voters are deciding only between pro-choice candidates -- may Catholics cast a vote for one of them, or must we withhold our vote?  I have generally assumed that if there aren't any viable pro-life candidates (this happens a lot in my Congressional district), we're still obligated to exert our voting power usefully, which to me means voting for the best candidate available, but I respect the choice to abstain from voting in this situation and, as I said before, I do not know whether any bishop has expressed an opinion or a directive telling his flock to avoid casting votes for pro-choice candidates even when there is no choice, or no viable choice, of pro-life candidate.

OK, so back to my main question.  One thing I want to know is:  What is the primary purpose of the bishops' teaching their flocks, with any strength at all, to avoid "voting pro-choice?"  Does that sound like a dumb question?  It's not.

Is it primarily:

(a) a warning to each individual Catholic to help each one of us avoid committing a sin in the voting booth, and to call to repentance those of us who have knowingly supported pro-choice candidates to a degree that constitutes sin.  This would be the bishop speaking to, and teaching, each Catholic as an individual.

or 

(b) a means of organizing Catholics into a bloc in order to get pro-life people elected so that we will get pro-life policies in our country.  This would be the bishop speaking to Catholics as a group, i.e., to the local church.

or 

(c) a means of spreading the Gospel, i.e., educating anyone who happens to hear or read the bishops' words, Catholic or not, about the operative principles here:  just about our highest worldly responsibility is to protect innocent and powerless people, and that means all kinds of innocent and powerless people, and when we live in a democracy we have to use our voting power as a means to do that.   Also known as:  converting hearts and minds.   This would be the bishop speaking to the whole population living in the boundaries of his diocese.

So, I'm thinking that all three of these purposes are probably in play, but that (a) and (c) are together the ones that actually comport with the bishop speaking in his role as a bishop.  (B) certainly is part of it, but I'm inclined to suggest that this constitutes what we would call "political activity" rather than "pastoral activity."  A bishop is a citizen, a voter, and a public figure and so he's certainly able to engage in political activity, so I'm not censuring him for engaging in it.  But I'm inclined to view the political purpose as secondary to the pastoral purpose.  After all, the role of the bishop is, mainly, successor to an apostle.  He is a pastor, which means that he properly confers sacraments and teaching.   (A) and (C) are teaching.  (B) really isn't.

So, why make the distinction?

Well, it occurred to me that a lot of Catholics speak about our religious obligation to vote pro-life as if it were equivalent to a religious obligation to get pro-life people elected.    These are not the same thing, and I think we should be more careful with our words, because of the logical consequences.  

The obvious difference here:  Individual vs. corporal.

To "vote pro-life" is an individual act, one act per vote, you could say.  I have a ballot before me:  assuming I understand the candidates' positions well, marking some of those boxes (depending on the roster of candidates) might constitute committing actual sin.  The bishop's role here in purposes A and C above is to help me understand the ramifications of the political positions so that I cast my vote in full knowledge and thus full freedom (even though with fuller freedom comes fuller responsibility and thus the possibility of fuller guilt).  The bishop's directive engages me just as if I were sitting in his office and he were telling me, "I really want to help you avoid doing something wrong, because I'm concerned about your soul."  He has a responsibility to teach in this way to every one of the Catholics in his diocese, and in a slightly different way to teach the non-Catholics he can reach as well.

But to "get pro-life candidates elected" is not like this.  No individual can "get pro-life candidates elected."  No individual can bear the responsibility to "get pro-life candidates elected."  

And yet, many Catholics who (like me) are personally convinced that they must vote only for pro-life candidates, at least when they have a chance of winning, put it in these terms.  

Why do you always vote pro-life?  Why are you a single-issue voter?  

 "I vote pro-life because the life issues are the most important, and we have to get pro-life candidates elected.  If only all the Catholics would consistently vote pro-life, then we would elect so many more pro-life candidates."  

This is probably true, but it is also a political answer.  When we answer that way, we are answering as a political actor, not as a Christian.  It is answering the question on a particular "turf":  the sandy ground in the arena of politics.

Now, in truth, we are both Christians and political actors, and so maybe in some situations the political answer is appropriate.  But the Christian doesn't have to answer on that turf, in those terms.  We could answer differently.  

Why are you a single-issue voter?  

"I vote for pro-life candidates when I can because I know that if I cast my vote to support abortion, I'd be committing a real sin.*  I can't have that on my conscience and I won't take part in it, even if that means I have to sacrifice my best interests when it comes to the other issues."

This is a Christian answer and an honest one.  Of course, it is guaranteed to lead to an awkward silence in certain situations.  Because it is a Christian answer and an honest one.

In this post, notice that I haven't said whether Catholics do have an obligation, not just to cast our own votes without committing sin (a negative moral obligation in our political lives), but to do all we reasonably can to get pro-life people elected (a positive moral obligation in our political lives).  I want to explore this more and I will do so very soon in a future post.  To get you started down the same road I'm looking at, you could read this short post at Disputations.

________________________________________________________________

*Note that this answer involves I-language:  "if I voted to support such-and-such a candidate, I'd be committing a sin."  This is intentional and is more than psychobabble interventionspeak:  it would be false to say or imply, "if YOU voted for such-and-such a candidate, YOU would be committing a sin," because this rests on the assumption that the "YOU" has full knowledge of the candidates, comprehension of the issues, and the conviction that pro-life voting is necessary.  It isn't fair to hold people to that standard unless you know them very well and you are sure they meet it, or you are a bishop and it is your job to teach them and bring them up to that standard.  But it's always fair to hold yourself to a strict moral standard.

 

Putting the careful thought up front.

One of the nice things about catching up with distant friends by going to stay with them for a couple of days is that you can spread your conversations out.  While I was in Iowa with Kim-in-IA we were able to chat about pregnancy, homeschooling, politics, home renovation, books... lots of stuff.  At a good leisurely pace, too.

So, politics and identity re: politics.  One of the things that bugs her a little bit about the local Catholic homeschooling group is that she gets email messages through it that promote generally conservative politics.  "I understand sending out political messages about life issues, or schooling stuff," she said, "but it bugs me that they would just sort of assume that just because I'm a Catholic and I'm in this homeschooling group, that I am a party-line Republican."

Yeah, that kind of stuff bugs me too.  And so we talked a bit about that.  I mentioned my post a while back about "conservative creep," and about not always being real happy about winding up voting Republican all the time just because I've made up my mind to vote pro-life. 

The answer, of course, is to get more politically active in general --- go to the caucuses, support the best candidates in the primaries (the ones who are pro-life  and who agree with me in other things besides that)... it could mean going to Democrat and third-party primaries and casting lonely votes for the struggling pro-life Democrats, God bless 'em, or it could mean getting more involved in the Republican party and trying to adjust the other planks in the platform.   Doing that requires identifying with one or the other.  

Sometimes I think that  pro-life voters who will always vote pro-life might have more inherent power to change the Democratic party (making it more pro-life) than to change the Republican party; after all, we can promise our final vote to the Democrats if they will only nominate a pro-life candidate, whereas the Republicans know damn well that until the Dems get more diverse with respect to life issues, they can put pro-lifers in their pocket and not listen to any other concerns we might have.

But I digress.  Anyway, Kim made a comment that struck me --- she said she appreciated hearing about my decision (not made without some struggle) to become what is often called a single-issue voter.  So often the so-called single-issue voters are derided for not putting much thought into the decision.  But in describing the process by which I became convinced to vote pro-life, I'd pointed out without noticing that there is usually a great deal of thought put into those decisions up front --- and that careful and reasoned thought shouldn't be discounted.  

I really appreciated that insight, because to be honest I hadn't been giving myself much credit for that up-front deliberation.  I'd sort of internalized that "single-issue-voters-don't-have-to-think-hard" message and have been kind of quietly bummed and embarrassed about being a primarily pro-life voter, as an identity, even if I've been fairly confident about each vote I've cast. 

 (Why are we all so wrapped up in what our vote says about what kind of person we are?  Can't it just be a tool to get done what we think should be done, and leave the personality out of it?)  

But Kim is right:  Like most so-called "single-issue voters" I know, I did put a lot of thought into that, and tried to figure out whether it was important to vote pro-life in, e.g., the "Soil and Water Commissioner" race, or what to do in various hypothetical combinations of three or more candidates with various likelihoods of winning and various levels of political attractiveness, things like that.  Looked for rules of thumb.  Weighed hopeful idealism vs. pessimistic pragmatism.  Had to consider how it all played out not just in final elections, but in primaries, and also how it plays out locally in a city and state where frequently Democrats (that is, "DFL-ers!") run opposed only by Greens and independents.  Struggled with the imagined consequences of becoming One Of Those Kind Of Voters.  Struggled with my conscience.

That struggle, that thought, isn't nothing.  It doesn't become nothing just because it is over and it ended in a firm conclusion.  I have settled on "the way I will vote" probably permanently.  One must always leave room for the possibilities of new evils coming along, graver than anything seen in this generation; but that's a hypothetical, and I live in the real present.  I did put a lot of thought into my vote, how to spend all my votes.

Anyway, I appreciated the kind word, which gives me just that much more confidence in my political decisions.   And that makes me feel readier to speak openly about them, and to defend them to others.

"Poster at prayer service saves a life"

Actually, it was a poster still in the print shop, in the hands of a pregnant print shop employee.

It really drives home the power of a quiet personal witness, and of simply facing the truth.

The political football.

We all knew the Mexico City policy would be reversed, no?  It has not showed up yet at whitehouse.gov, but the media has assured us that President Obama rescinded it on January 23.  So, for the next four to eight years, your tax money and mine is now permitted to be allocated toward foreign non-governmental organizations which perform and promote abortions as part of their holistic family planning and population control missions.

(I'm so tired of the "but the money doesn't have to go to pay for abortion, it can go for other things including things that prevent abortion."  Money is fungible.  The point of the policy is clearly not to prevent abortion or to reduce it, because as everyone has observed by now, there is no way it can do so, at least not on its own.  The policy per se provides for the US to be neutral -- to decline to provide money for foreign abortion-as-international-family-planning-aid --- and because money is fungible, you can only do that by declining to give money to people who perform and promote abortion.  And pressure matters.  Thousands of people (rightly if you ask me) boycott Nestle because of aggressive baby-formula marketing, despite the fact that Nestle also puts some of their profits into poverty reduction programs world wide.  They do good stuff; that's no reason to take the pressure off them, in fact it's an argument for continuing to keep the pressure on.)

When President Clinton rescinded the MCP on January 22, 1993, pro-life activists are reported to have taken the choice of the date as a slap in the face.   When President Bush reinstated it on January 22, 2001, did they take the choice of that date as a signal of warmth towards the cause?  I suppose we are to take it as something different from a "slap" that President Obama chose to rescind the MCP on the day after the hot-button date, the one that would have been the "slap."  

I am not sure about that.  On the one hand, the result is the same.  During Republican administrations the policy is in place and the U. S. is neutral towards abortion as family planning/population control.  During Democratic administrations the policy is rescinded and the U. S. is willing to send international aid to fund abortion as family planning/population control.  Flip.  Flop.  Flip.  Flop.   

Looked at with as critical and dispassionate an eye as I can muster, it is certainly interesting that, in an age when issues like the economy and health care and education and the state of the Middle East are all larger than life, this one teeny tiny piece of foreign policy has been among the first items to receive the full attention of incoming administrations, three times in a row.  

Anyway, back to the date.  Can we assume that the date was January 23 and not January 22 "on purpose?"  Is it a gesture at all?  Is it a gesture without any meaning at all?  Do you think President Obama thought it was meaningful from his end?  

I subscribe to the theory that, when politicians who support legal abortion, or who belong to a party that supports legal abortion, make any move at all in the direction of protection of the unborn or acknowledgment of their humanity, the pro-life moment should celebrate that and let them know that the effort (however small) is really appreciated.  

A gesture of waiting one day to do what was to be done anyway is a pretty small crumb.  Microscopic.

Still...  if the pro-life movement took Clinton's 1/22 action as a slap, not just a rescinding of the policy but a deliberate nose-thumbing, maybe it's fair to say, "OK, it's a piece of foreign policy, one we expected, it's not meant to mock American activists or as a specific response to the March for Life or anything like that.  It's not like we don't already know that President Obama's not on our side."

And yet... this football, this little thing, is always one of the first things on the table.

That, not the date per se, that is significant.

UPDATE:  Here's another view.

Today is a day of penance in the dioceses of the United States.

Fast and pray.

For the small people who enjoy no legal rights of their own.