-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
The current Archbishop of Chicago, Francis George (left), recognizes the “difficulty of public discussion … is that the political is the highest level of public discourse.” In explaining the Catholic Church’s concern with the HHS mandate regarding contraception. His Eminence said the first question to ask is: “Is it true or false?”
The product of reason is truth. British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, defined logic “as the science which treats of the operations of the human understanding in the pursuit of truth.”
George told members of the Union League Club of Chicago that offering birth control is “operating with evil,” and that:
the Church may otherwise sell its hospitals, pay penalties, or in a last resort, close them altogether, rather than offer birth control.
In George’s argument, he commits the logical fallacy of ad baculum, the Appeal to Fear. It is a well known tactic when your conclusions cannot be reached through logical reasoning. The use of the Appeal to Fear tactic is an admission by George that his conclusions are not sound.
As an example of an Appeal to Reason, Eleanor Schwarz, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, said:
When we keep it within the purely health-and-science realm, we understand it saves people’s lives. All available contraceptives are much safer for women’s health than an undesired pregnancy.
George’s primary concern is obviously not women’s health. His primary concern is his church’s health and well-being. Contraception lowers birth rates and fewer babies means fewer potential Catholics. George does not trust women to make the pregnancy decision for themselves.
James in LA: MOVE OVER DOCTOR FREUD! You meant RCC and you accidentally typed RNC! Hey — I want you to do some “automatic typing” (like “automatic writing”) for me on some news reports that I cannot untangle; you might really get to the bottom of the matter in a quick minute!
Years back, when I commented to someone (forgotten whom) that I did not like being compared to Mother Theresa (she was still alive at the time) because I really felt queasy about her ministry and didn’t completely know why, that woman (I remember gender only) said to me: “Mother Theresa has opposed government-assisted birth control in 60 developing nations, very successfully. She has used her status as a living saint to stop the heads of government from allowing women to access birth control in places where you have a baby and it starves before your eyes!” I checked into this at the time, although there was no Internet available, and I remember thinking, “Damn, I bet she’s right!” but I couldn’t find the direct evidence of it. Later, when the Internet was available, I did check into Mother Theresa, looking for this kind of data — and I know, she is OT and so forth — but really, I found lots of detractors for lots of reasons but did not find the information that would have led to the sentence that floated verbatim in my memory for two decades.
Birth control is not the same as abortion, of course. My own theory about nuns and their habits (double entendre) and their role as nurses and staff at orphanages and hospitals may or may not fit into the available evidence (I just pulled my theory out of thin air without doing historical research on the history of the church and various Catholic societies) but here it is: I believed that in centuries past, probably Catholic girls who got pregnant had to go to nunneries and wear big black habits until their babies were born and those babies were then brought up in orphanages and the training those girls would get in the nunneries provided daycare providers, nurses, etc. for the population. I’m just sayin’…
But these were disposable kids. Whether they were nuns’ kids, other kids, whoever they were. They were disposable kids and grew up to become, in most circumstances, disposable adults. Our society and the other societies, Catholic or not, do NEED disposable (and exploitable) people.
Birth control does not just provide a way for an individual woman to protect her own health and make decisions about the use of her own body, it provides a way for a society to develop the resource of its women and children without overpopulating itself into crisis, BUT — BUT — BUT — it DOES limit the supply of disposable (and exploitable) people.
In a “not quite post-slavery” culture like ours, where we cannot simply grab one kind of people and automatically force them into disposable (draft) and exploitable (slave) positions BY LAW, we may need to cannibalize our next generation in a different way: by making them so populous that it becomes impossible to allow them to have life interests. By making the poverty level so severe that they need to cheat or steal somewhere, some way, to survive, so that we can then imprison them and force their labor at 17 cents per hour for clips of ten years at a time — selectively. By making the health care and welfare issues so insoluble that we finally accept the system where exploitables and disposables just DIE quickly rather than recover from injury or illness at the same rate as their rich counterparts — we are heading there, and we will not be able to resist it.
STOP ME STOP ME!
Meanwhile, what about an individual woman who has an individual baby? She is now deprived of rights automatically. In prior times she could move from state to state and out of the country at will, if she had money for a ticket. Once she has a child, if the biological or legal father of that child claims rights against her, she automatically loses the right to travel unless she gives up her child, and if she gives up her child, she will then have to financially support “her child” which includes the custodial owner of that child and so she may not be able to travel or choose her life because she is essentially indentured during the child’s minority and perhaps well beyond. A pregnant woman in Indiana was ordered not to leave the state because the purported biological father of her child (no forensic test yet) was claiming pre-birth custody and the judge issued an injunction against her removing his alleged child from the jurisdiction where he wanted to sue for custody at the time of birth. Women do not realize what they’re in for when they get pregnant. There have been attempts to criminally prosecute women for conduct during pregnancy that the state deems potentially dangerous to the unborn. I haven’t kept up with the stats on this — it may be law in some states already. I spoke with a constitutional law professor at George Mason University, about one of these issues (trying to interest him in the life interest test case proposition) and he ended our conversation with the adminition: “PEOPLE NEED TO STOP REPRODUCING!”
But about fear. Folks, if you can, go see the PROPAGANDA exhibit at the US Holocaust Museum in DC. You can use fear to accomplish damn near any goal, and you need not have any facts that support the real basis for any fear. Oldest, most effective, most universal trick in the book. But of course, to keep it working at top efficiency, you need to back up that fear with some “examples” that you make of people — you make those “examples” of your disposable people. You need to have disposable people exactly for that purpose.
Ho-hum … typical religious response … if we can’t get our people to do what we want, let’s see if we can get the government to do it for us through law, crime and punishment.
The RCC lost the battle to frame this issue weeks ago. They are an active participant in the War on Women and stand fully exposed as such.
Swathmore, although RNC seems to work in most contexts as you suggest, the abbreviation I meant was RCC.
Cardinal George is unfit to wear the robes of a Bishop. What Would Jesus Do Cardinal George. You and your fellow Bishops and Cardinals should be ashamed of yourselves. The Vaticans recent censure of the American nuns that backed the Health Care law is a travesty. These men are worried about money and controlling the masses and nothing else. Great article David.
James, Many of the new catholics in Texas are coming from Latin America, Asia and Africa. RNC stands for the Republican National Committee. Are you equating the two? If you are I can see why.
Swathmore mom, the bishops grow restless. They are beginning to see he handwriting on the wall: Pay Up.
Swathmore mom, the generation right behind the church-builders in Texas could not be less interested in the corrupt RNC, or any church for that matter. Whatever “boom” is occurring, it will be temporary. The future for the RNC is payments to victims and lawyers, and not much else.
The trouble for the RNC is all of this can be known in 3.5 seconds from the palm of your hand anywhere in the world. A whole generation now walks this earth who understand information is king, and they are now entering the work force. They are going to listen to information FIRST, and people SECOND. This is a huge change from the past.
The RNC cannot fight this control of information, as they persist on the control of human thought. They know no other way. Fewer and fewer are intimidated any longer. So they will perish in the info age unless they make radical changes, assuming there are any assets left. Compared to pedophile priests, the low-info problem pales in comparison.
“Also during his homily, Bishop Jenky blasted what he called “the calculated disdain of the president of the United States.”
George declined to weigh in on that statement, saying, “I’m not privy to the president’s inner life.”
The church’s anger grows out of the recent flap over contraceptives and healthcare reform known as “Obamacare.”
The head of the Chicago Anti-Defamation League is calling the bishop’s words on Hitler, Stalin and Obama way over the top. He wants the bishop to apologize.
Meanwhile, an advocate for the separation of church and state is urging the Internal Revenue Service to investigate Jenky.
United Church of Christ Minister Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says the bishop’s comments violate the federal tax code provision that bars churches and other non-profits from intervening in political campaigns.
“If you can get away with this, you might as well tell parishioners to put money into the collection plate on Sunday morning Mass and simply turn that over to whoever is running against Barack Obama,” Lynn said.
A spokesperson for Jenky says the bishop’s comments were taken out of context and misconstrued.”
Contributing: wire service reports
There is a catholic church building boom going on in Texas along with a mega church building boom.
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-welcomes-news-of-rapid-church-growth-in-texas/ The catholic church is growing in Texas as diversification takes place, James. I know it is shrinking in Europe though.
The truth is the RNC is shrinking by the hour in direct proportion to the number of people who care one fig what ANY corrupt child-molester-protecting cardinal has to say on ANY matter. The tithe now goes to pay lawyers to defend that which cannot be defended. Hiding behind birth control won’t cut it.
Produce Bernard Law for trial.
Ad baculum. That said it all to me. The Catholic church, all organized religion, is based upon this. Their primary goal is not to bring people closer to GOD, but to bring their purses closer to the church’s coffers. And, the level of misogyny, especially in the Catholic church, is a stench in the nostrils of GOD. Where is all their righteous indignation when it comes to the victims of those forever scarred by the pedophiles they protect?
The Catholic church can’t afford to close their hospitals. The financial effect would be devastating. If they choose to sell their hospitals, there will be plenty of buyers in the private health care industry to step in and take control.
“operating with evil” therein lies the rub, the “truth” for the church is often not the “truth” for others but they want to push it on the entire country.
(and I love their Christian concerns: Heck, you don;t like our position we will just close our hospitals, the heck with the population we have been serving. Jesus would be proud..
There is a phrase employed within Catholic universities among the priest or brothers who teach and that phrase is “publish or parish”. It means that if you do not excel in the educational baliwick and demonstrate it by publishing your own works then you are going to be sent off to preach at a parish congregation. The phrase has double entendre here for the master of ceremonies of the pedophile church in Chigao. If you Catholics as a group do not out populate the protestants (and now its the Muslims et al) then the tribe will perish. Among Catholics around the world this obsession with outpopulating the rivals is most concentrated amongst the Irish. European Catholics do not have to listen to the likes of this schmuck unless they live in Ireland. But, also, I might add an observation I made yesterday when some priest was preaching the godspell and he too, like this Cardinal, was a fat head. What is it about fat heads who preach that makes them into a class of their own. I know that Randy Newman had a song called Davey The Fatboy and there was something about it that reminds me of all of these pedophile priest herders.
Just A Dog Talkin
Eleanor Schwarz is right when she says “When we keep it within the purely health-and-science realm, we understand it saves people’s lives. All available contraceptives are much safer for women’s health than an undesired pregnancy.”
So why is government controlling oral contraceptives that have been used safely for decades?
If this administration really believed in health, science, women’s health and saving lives they would be directing the FDA to move oral contraceptives from prescription to over-the-counter status. Instead, the government is more interested in a political sideshow with the RCC.
Moving oral contraceptives OTC would benefit millions of women by lowering prices and dramatically increasing access to contraceptive protection. Despite pandering on the issue, science and reproductive freedom is clearly not government’s real goal in this case.
Elaine…..
In my experience only if the woman said so….
What I find very interesting is allegiance is paid dearly to the Jewish and Greek orthodox mothers….. Interesting enough the bible even has accounts of extremely strong women…. Wealthy and wise….. One forgotten is Lydia… The Dyer……
Nal,
Can’t have women making decisions about their own health and lives and how many children they bear, can we? That’s a man’s job, doncha know?
Glad I left that hypocritial church & religion yrs ago. Religion is a type of insanity in my not so humble opinion. For sure it’s the greatest hoax ever pulled on the human race.
This is a great topic…. Fear is a motivation that has many reactions…..
I hope this does not go into moderation.