The Poor You Will Always Have With You, So Let Them Suck It Up Until I Come

A Dominican nun, Erica Jordan, asked Paul Ryan at a CNN Town Hall meeting how he reconciles his economic policies with his Catholic faith.  His predictable answer was that social welfare programs have failed the poor, but his "small-government" budget-cutting programs will succeed, so "For me — for the poor that’s key to the Catholic faith. That means mobility, economic growth, equality of opportunity."  According to ThinkProgress, he told the audience:

We have to fix that, by making sure we can customize these before the to help a person get to where she is to where she wants and needs to be…The model I’m talking about is the Catholic Charities model.  Cristo Rey parish has cafeterias that do an amazing job, in spite of government, doing wrap around visits for the poor to making sure they get to where they need to be. If government will help do that I think we can go a long way in fighting poverty.

ThinkProgress said this was an "awkward" response, though they went on to point out that it was also dishonest:

Moreover, Catholic Charities doesn’t do its work “in spite of” government. It relies on it: Catholic Charities USA gets nearly half of its operating budget from the federal funds, as do scores of other faith-based charities. When Ryan championed president Donald Trump’s budget proposal—which slashed welfare programs—earlier this year, an anti-hunger faith group released a study estimating that every religious congregation in America would need to raise $714,000 a year for 10 years to shoulder the burden of caring for the poor.

Ronald Reagan could be similarly "awkward":

One day in the 1980 campaign, Reagan visited the Santa Marta Hospital in a Chicano area of Los Angeles.  He told the institution's staff that he had asked a nun there whether the hospital got "compensation from Medicaid or anything like that."  According to the candidate, she answered "no."  "I appreciate your pride in that," he told the group.

A "puzzled senior administrator" later informed supporters that 95% of the patients at Santa Marta Hospital were subsidized by either Medicaid or Medicare.  (Time, 10/20/80)*

I have mixed feelings about this.  There's an American tradition of demanding that Roman Catholic politicians remain independent of the Great Satan in Rome, instead of letting its dogmas guide their decisions.  If a Catholic religious were to confront a straying Catholic (or even non-Catholic) politician for failing to conform to Catholic doctrine on contraception, abortion, homosexuality, or gender, I would certainly not cheer them on.  That I might agree with Sister Erica's opinions in this case doesn't mean that I think the Church has any authority in matters of morality or public policy.

What amused me were some of the reactions to the story on Twitter.  Quite a few said they wanted to commit violence (that one has a Ph.D.!) against Ryan.  That's how you know they're real Christians.  They're not the reason I'm an atheist, but they certainly do reaffirm and enhance my faith.  I've been known to indulge in such rhetoric myself at times, but I'm not a Christian and I don't claim to be guided by a Higher Love.

I myself was reminded of Barack Obama's answer, at one of his town halls in 2010, to an African-American supporter who told him she was "exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now."  Predictably, she was attacked for undermining her President, for being a spoiled privileged brat, for letting herself be used by the Lying Media "to create a meme and narrative pertaining to African American dissatisfaction with President Obama."

Speaking of Obama, there were several references to Ryan's "smirk" in those angry tweets.  I can relate to their anger about that issue too.  Obama also has an infuriating smirk when he's condescending to the victims of American power (some of whom are American nuns, killed with US government collusion), dismissing their concerns as mere "suspicions."

I doubt, however, that Obama would agree with either Sister Erica Jordan or the angry folks who attacked Ryan in social media.  After all, Obama appointed Ryan, along with a bipartisan array of deficit hawks, to a commission on reducing the national deficit, aka the Catfood Commission.  It was actually somewhat surprising that this handpicked group was unable to agree on recommendations; maybe, as with some Republicans' refusal to vote for Trump's repeal of the Affordable Care Act,  they thought the plans weren't cruel enough.  But not to worry: the chairmen of the commission submitted their personal wish list as a memo to the President, which he and the media accepted as if it were an official report of the commission itself.  In the 2012 debates, Obama declared that he and the Romney-Ryan ticket had a "somewhat similar position" on Social Security.  As late as 2016, the Washington Post was touting the substantial agreement between Obama and Ryan ("For two men of goodwill, this is a bridgeable divide") on addressing poverty.  All this had gone down the memory hole long before Donald Trump became President.

If Jordan had asked Barack Obama the same question she asked Ryan, would his answer have been very different?  I doubt it.  Most likely she'd be attacked for undermining POTUS by the same people who cheer for her now.

* Mark Green and Gail MacColl, Reagan's Reign of Error: The Instant Nostalgia Edition (Pantheon, 1987), p. 86.

L'Esprit d'Escalier

I was going to add this to Tuesday's post, but time got away from me again.

As I've said before, I'm baffled by how many people, even non-Catholics, even some secularists, think Pope Francis is a sweet old guy.  It's still too early to tell, he might surprise me, and he has said some appealing things about clergy who live luxurious lives, but he still thinks that homosexuality is a sin, and is intransigent on the ordination of women.  He seems to be ready to loosen up on adulterous men, however.  Funny, that.

But I wanted to get more into the background.  I remember when the new catechism came out and how many gay people were thrilled because the Church had come into the nineteenth century.  Which is progress, of a kind.  So let me quote some Mark D. Jordan at you, from The Silence of Sodom (Chicago, 2000). Referring to the Vatican's 1975 "Declaration on Certain Questions concerning Sexual Ethics," he wrote:

It is the rhetoric of nineteenth-century Science that explains the much-discussed distinction in the document between two kinds of homosexuality. Some Catholics wanted -- and want -- to hail this distinction as a great advance in official teaching. The Vatican was finally admitting that a homosexual disposition is not itself sinful! I don't think that the Declaration does that. Rather, it adopts a nineteenth-century model of the "causes" of homosexuality. The Declaration distinguishes curable homosexuals from incurable ones; it then asserts that the pathology in the former comes from transitory causes, in the latter from permanent ones. This is hardly ground-breaking moral thought.

Views of homosexuality as incurable pathology appear in other Vatican documents from these same years, most notably in opinions on annulments. From 1967 on, the Vatican's appellate courts for marriage case began to hold that "perpetual" or "incurable" homosexuality produced an "incapacity" either to consent to marriage or to achieve its union of souls and bodies. Something like this view was written into the 1983 Code of Canon Law, though in much vaguer language. Medical language runs through these texts, which reminds one too often of the cases in Krafft-Ebing where an anxious "homosexual" seeks a cure in order to be properly married.

We should not celebrate the fact that the church is now ready to regard homosexuality as an incurable disease [29].

And on the 1986 US Conference of Catholic Bishops' "Always Our Children: A Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children and Suggestions for Pastoral Ministers":

The bishops do say that Catholic parents should urge the child to stay in the Catholic church. This means that they should offer her or him a life of sexual abstinence, frequent penance, religiously informed therapy, and diocesan support groups (289a, 290b, 291a).

What if the child decides against these options? What is the Catholic parent to say then? And what if the Catholic parent should want more for the child -- say, an ordinary human life with loving, intimate relationships? "Our children" remain "our children" only so long as they dwell in the melodrama of coming out - but not when they begin living as lesbian or gay adults.

Lesbian and gay Catholics frequently find that church documents speak as if there were none of them already in the church, especially in positions of church leadership. Always Our Children is no exception. The letter assumes that no Catholic parent could be lesbian or gay, as it pretends that no [46] Catholic pastor has any personal acquaintance with gay cultures. It tells priests: "Welcome homosexual persons into the faith community." As if they weren't already there, presiding at the altar [45].

During Barack Obama's first presidential election campaign, he made the same error the bishops did. In an interview with the Advocate he said, to justify his "outreach" to antigay bigots:

Part of the reason that we have had a faith outreach in our campaigns is precisely because I don't think the LGBT community or the Democratic Party is served by being hermetically sealed from the faith community and not in dialogue with a substantial portion of the electorate, even though we may disagree with them.

As I pointed out at the time, it takes a special kind of stupid to think that either the Democratic Party or the LGBT community is "hermetically sealed from the faith community."  Any division that exists is the work of antigay elements in "the faith community."

In 1992, just a few years after the Bishops' letter, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued "Some Considerations Concerning the Response to Legislative Proposals on the Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons."  While protesting that the Church opposed "unjust discrimination" against homosexuals, it stated,

[II.]10. "Sexual orientation" does not constitute a quality comparable to race, ethnic background, etc. in respect to non-discrimination. Unlike these, homosexual orientation is an objective disorder (cf. "Letter," No. 3) and evokes moral concern.

11. There are areas in which it is not unjust discrimination to take sexual orientation into account, for example, in the placement of children for adoption or foster care, in employment of teachers or athletic coaches, and in military recruitment.

12. Homosexual persons, as human persons, have the same rights as all persons including the right of not being treated in a manner which offends their personal dignity (cf. No. 10). Among other rights, all persons have the right to work, to housing, etc. Nevertheless, these rights are not absolute. They can be legitimately limited for objectively disordered external conduct. This is sometimes not only licit but obligatory. This would obtain moreover not only in the case of culpable behavior but even in the case of actions of the physically or mentally ill. Thus it is accepted that the state may restrict the exercise of rights, for example, in the case of contagious or mentally ill persons, in order to protect the common good.

Of course, many people focused on the statement's assertion that homosexual persons, "as human persons, have the same rights as all persons", ignoring the examples of domains where discrimination is not "unjust."  (There's a fierce irony here, in that at the time this statement was issued, the Catholic Church around the world was protecting Catholic priests who preyed sexually on the young.)  Notice too that the statement distinguishes between sexual orientation and qualities like "race, ethnic background, etc. in respect to non-discrimination."  I wonder what that "etc." points to -- religion, say, which is covered by civil rights legislation in the US?  That, too, is not comparable to race, ethnic background, etc.

The Church and its spokesmen have occasionally made conciliatory noises with respect to gay people, welcoming us into the Church as long as we submit to its authority.  And why not, after all, since it expects everyone to submit to its authority?  But these carefully crafted messages should not be confused with actual acceptance of gay people as gay people.  I've had some revealing disputes with gay and lesbian Catholics who tried to burnish the Church's image, and became indignant when I confronted them with the Church's actual positions.  Most hadn't even heard of the documents I've just mentioned, which undercuts their claims to know what they were talking about.  So, again, I exchanged some words with someone on Facebook yesterday who insisted that Francis' remarks on that plane constituted some kind of "first step" toward acceptance of gay people in the Church.  Not when "acceptance" is as qualified as it is here.  (Or when the nice old man in the beanie proceeded to declare that "the door is closed" on the ordination of women.  I'm not a one-issue guy myself, and even if the Pope did mean to change Church teaching on homosexuality, it's not the only problem with contemporary Catholicism.)

Maybe time will prove me wrong.  We'll see.  But for now, it's too soon to get excited about changes that haven't happened yet, which is the usual response to media moments like this one.