Defining Life

Let’s abandon economics, that dismal science, for a day and contemplate something simpler, like the nature of life.

Sarah Palin was challenged the other day on a strictly logical basis ( a refreshing change of pace) by an editorial writer who wondered why her Down syndrome baby Trig’s life was considered too precious to be aborted while, at the same time, Mrs. Palin supports capital punishment. How does she reconcile the two views as a Christian?

Good question. This has come to be called “the seamless garment” argument, recalling the seamless cloak Jesus wore and which the soldiers gambled for as capital punishment was being administered to Him.

Flipping through Bible pages back to the original Torah, the five books of Moses, we find the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 1- 13), the literal translation of one of them being “Do not commit murder.” When King James the First’s scholars were translating Exodus, no doubt cribbing from Tyndale, they rendered it in the now obsolescent second person as “Thou shalt not kill.”

For me, “kill” and “murder” are absolutely interchangeable so far as connotation is concerned. Both verbs refer to an unjust ending of a human life, such as a slaying for profit or out of anger. Elsewhere in the Torah, as crimes against God and man are enumerated by the Lord and the punishments prescribed, we find the death penalty. The point of noticing that is not because I propose that we “shall not suffer a witch to live,” but to demonstrate that the taking of life is permitted in a judicial setting. A crime is committed, a guilty party is named and suffers the penalty prescribed by the Law.

Here then is the difference between Trig Palin and, say, man on Alaska’s death row for murdering a convenience store clerk. Trig is innocent. Baby Palin was accused of no crime other than having a disability his family will find inconvenient. Death Row guy, on the other hand, took a human life for profit. He is actually guilty of something for which death is an appropriate punishment. Thus, Sarah Palin –and the rest of us morally opposed to abortion but favoring capital punishment-- wears a seamless garment, if the criterion for preserving life it its innocence.

As an unobservant Catholic I suppose I should be the last person in the world to stick up for the Magisterium, the teaching authority, of the Church. But the last two elections have been made interesting by candidates who seek to substitute their wisdom for the theology the Church has been struggling to evolve over the past 2,000 years.

We’ve had, in the most recent cycle, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Senator Joe Biden weighing in –as Catholics— on when they think that a fetus becomes a human being. The two of them got bogged down in Augustinian and Thomist arguments as to when the soul first inhabits the body –while ignoring the teaching of the Church that abortion is illicit at any time during a pregnancy –the status of the soul notwithstanding. They both got sharp raps on the knuckles from the Catholic bishops for that.

Most pro-choice Catholic politicians subscribe to the Mario Cuomo doctrine, which he enunciated at a speech at Notre Dame University some years ago. Briefly, Cuomo said that although on a personal level he accepts the Church’s teaching on abortion, as a public servant he cannot impose that personal, religious viewpoint on the general public, which may not share his faith.

It makes you wonder what he believes. If he believes –as a Catholic-- that abortion is the non-judicial taking of a life (remember “Do not commit murder?”), which is what the Church teaches, then as a pro-choice politician, he believes that a species of murder is allowable.

So how does a Catholic politician resolve this conflict? The answer is that he doesn’t.

Catholicism is not a buffet from which we might sample some dishes and leave others alone. It is in his acceptance of the Church’s teachings by which a Catholic is defined. If, especially in matters of life and death, a politician cannot accept church teachings, he or she should not identify himself as a “Catholic.” This leaves the Catholic politician with the stark choices of getting out of politics or changing one’s views at the risk of alienating the voting public.

There is the argument is that the Church has no business imposing its morality on the secular state. My answer is that it has already. What we consider to be right and wrong traces back, inevitably, to religious beliefs, be they pagan or Judaeo-Christian.

Certain acts, by their intrinsic injustice, were set apart as crimes by the earliest human societies. Not even a cannibal in a lost valley in New Guinea is free to steal what he wants or to kill without paying some form of compensation. Even in the most remote reaches of the Amazon, honesty is honored and liars execrated. From this most basic, instinctual understanding of justice have come our laws, sometimes defined in religious terms along the way, but always recognizably founded on an instinctual, visceral notion of what is right.

When we begin to redefine justice to suit our convenience or to evade responsibility, we open a Pandora’s box of troubles.

Critique of Obama Becomes Thoughtcrime

Barack Obama would like to see a Dallas billionaire, Harold Simmons, prosecuted and sent to jail.

Now there is nothing novel about a Democrat at the far left of his party wishing ill for a billionaire. They hate billionaires on principle, if for no other reason. But Obama’s complaint comes straight from George Orwell: Thoughtcrime.

Specifically, Simmons funded and bought television time for a commercial detailing Barack Obama’s relationship with radical bomb-thrower and former Weatherman Underground member William Ayers.

I can call him a “bomb-thrower” without facing libel, because he is admittedly the guy who planted bombs at the Pentagon, New York City Police Headquarters and the U.S. Capitol and who was on the run for 10 years. His wife is another ex-Weatherman fugitive Bernadette Dohrn.

In a 2001 autobiography Ayers said, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Another interesting Ayers quote from back in the day was, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents." "What a country," Ayers said in 2001, after having met Obama years before; "It makes me want to puke."

In the 1990’s the couple hosted the Obama at a meet and greet for his first State Senate run. This was the launch of Obama’s political career. Ayers served with Obama from 1999 through 2001 on the non-profit Woods Fund of Chicago as paid board members. Ayers has donated at least once before to an Obama campaign.

Ayers has not expressed any regret for having set bombs in public buildings.

Now that is the content of the ad, which you can see here: http://www.americanissuesproject.org/. Obama general counsel Bob Bauer is calling for the prosecution of Simmons for what he alleges is “a knowing and willful violation of the individual aggregate contribution limits.” (Politico Aug. 27, 2008). In other words, he is not challenging the content, but the legality of running any such ad in the first place.

Of course it is the thought that counts. Would Bauer be calling for a prosecution if the ad were just another item in the media worship of Barack Obama?

Ed Martin, president of The American Issues Project, observed acidly that despots in the past, “generally had to wait until they were in power to throw people who disagreed with them into jail.”

Nancy Pelosi has just as little patience with thoughtcrime. The Savior of the Planet, as she describes her mission, was confronted by demonstrators yesterday chanting “Drill here! Drill now!” reflecting the views of about two thirds to three quarters of the population.

Pelosi responded, “Right here?…Can we drill your brains?” Charming. Congressional Majority Leader Steny Hoyer chimed in saying that “thinking Americans” (his emphasis ...remember only liberals are officially intelligent) know that Americans don’t have a quarter of the world’s oil, though we use 25 percent of all fossil fuel energy.

Meanwhile Ms. Pelosi’s new career as a Catholic theologian continues to attract, if not rave reviews, raving Catholic bishops. You may recall Pelosi appealed to her ardent Catholicism as authority when she claimed on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” that the “doctors of the church,” by which she meant its most distinguished theologians, have been unable to state when human life begins.

So far Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, CT, the chairman of the Bishop’s Committee on Doctrine (what the Church teaches), Archbishops Donald Wuerl of Washington and Charles Chaput of Denver, Cardinal Edward Egan of New York and Cardinal Justin Rigali chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Pro-Life Activities, have all had the audacity to contradict Ms. Pelosi by stating that Catholic doctrine has always taught that human life begins at the moment of conception.

Brendan Daly, a Pelosi spokesman, set these thoughtcriminals straight saying the congresswoman bases her statement on Saint Augustine who wrote that “the law does not provide that the act [abortion] pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation.”

Cardinal Rigali and Bishop Lori responded stating that while uniformed and unscientific beliefs about embryo development in the Middle Ages led to differences in the penalties for commission of the sin of abortion, “the Church's moral teaching never justified or permitted abortion at any stage of development.''

Daly was obliged to fall back on the final, lame argument of pro-choice Catholic Democrats, saying that many American Catholics disagree with the Church’s teaching. Anyway, he observed, Pelosi believes making family planning more available could reduce the number of abortions.

The Church forbids contraception, too.