Ever since Will posted about Roger Ebert earlier I’ve been reading Ebert’s blog (which is fantastic) and came across this explanation of why he never formally reviewed the Ben Stein mockumentary (er, documentary) Expelled.  For those of you who don’t know the premise of that film, it’s basically Stein’s extremely dishonest propaganda exposé on Intelligent Design.  Here’s a passage (though you should read the whole thing):

This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.

And there is worse, much worse. Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actuallydid want to title it “From Darwin to Hitler.” He finds a Creationist who informs him, “Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism.” He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment.

Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one “result” of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. “As a Jew,” he says, “I wanted to see for myself.” We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. “It’s difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place,” he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.

I know that both Ebert’s post and Expelled are old news at this point, but the debate itself is ongoing.  Will linked to this frightening story of the revanchist push in Texas to infuse creationism into Texas public school classrooms.  Whatever else Texas may have going for it, teaching religion in science class is inexcusable, whether or not it’s dressed in the deceptive language of intelligent design.  My (very) conservative Catholic grandma believes that evolution and faith are compatible.  Plenty of people do.  That’s because they are compatible.  The evolution vs. creation debate is less about that issue than it is about cultural dominance in general. It’s just one battleground chosen in the ongoing culture wars. [Read more →]

In the wake of several high profile setbacks, a recent Politico article casts doubt on one of the gay marriage movement’s core assumptions: namely, that public acceptance of same-sex partnerships is an inevitability. I hesitate to describe just about anything as “inevitable,” but I still think gay marriage advocates have the better argument here.* The best (only?) point opponents raise in Politico is that young people’s attitudes change as they age – witness the persistent divide over abortion or the fiscal conservatism of older voters. While I don’t doubt this is true, it’s pretty easy to identify a plausible connection between aging and conservative attitudes on taxes or abortion. Balancing a checkbook and raising a family might give you second thoughts about the IRS or Planned Parenthood, but what does getting older have to do with your views on same-sex marriage? Nothing we know about older voters’ attitudes suggests a causal relationship between aging and anti-gay sentiment.

Maggie Gallagher offers a few more reasons to be skeptical of the movement’s inevitability claims here. Most of this amounts to precautionary arguments against assuming the inevitability of anything, but she also suggests that changing demographics ultimately favor same-sex marriage opponents because socially-conservative families have more children. I can’t speak to the accuracy of this assumption, but I think it’s worth noting that younger social conservatives’ attitudes on gay marriage seem to be changing pretty dramatically. So unless the aging process magically incites anti-gay hysteria, celebrating Alabama’s official recognition of same-sex couples sometime in the mid-2020s seems like a pretty distinct possibility.

*For the record, I think individual states have the right to determine the status of gay couples. If Virginia holds a referendum on same-sex marriage, I’ll vote in favor, but I emphatically disagree with efforts to recognize same-sex marriage through the Supreme Court.

Well, this is the trajectory of the modern Christian right.  Its leaders have signed this declaration, further entwining religion and politics, and further entrenching the culture wars in the useless “us against them” language that has proved so ineffective for so long.

I prefer the Nicene Creed, myself.

But we’d have to be naive or worse to think that either the religious right or the most extreme secularists on the left have any intention of letting go of this fight anytime soon.  It pays dividends to be at war, even if only the participants of that war reap the benefits and everyone else is a casualty of some sort.  Peacemakers would find a way to compromise, not because compromise has any inherent value in and of itself, but because there are times when fighting a war endlessly does more damage than good.  In fact, I’d say almost all wars fit that description.

The Christian right should back off the gay marriage fight and focus more on pro-life issues – and not merely abortion, but also the death penalty and war.  The left isn’t nearly as organized in these matters, and will likely suffer defeat simply by having one fewer cause to take up arms against. [Read more →]

“E.D., please note, is a supporter of same-sex marriage, and believes the Catholic Church is very wrong to oppose it. But he’s starting to see that gay marriage really is a threat to religious liberty. Read him here, here, and finally here.” ~ Rod Dreher

I have all the respect in the world for Rod Dreher, but I think he’s reading too much into my position here.  I don’t see gay marriage as a threat to religious liberty in and of itself.  I think any serious political issue like this – where the issue of granting rights is at stake (I don’t like the phrase “granting rights” but I’m at a loss for something better) – anyways, this sort of conflict can be tricky if it also involves potentially infringing upon another group’s rights in the process.  Handled poorly – as it has been in D.C. – the push for gay rights can pose a threat to religious liberty.

Handled properly, however, I think our system is the perfect one to preserve both.  I don’t see churches being forced to marry gays in the future. I think that would be deemed unconstitutional rather quickly.  Mark Thompson does a really bang-up job with the details of this here.

First, the conflict here is definitively not between gay marriage and religious liberty.  It is instead between laws regarding private discrimination and freedom of association, or perhaps between licensing laws and freedom of religion….

What is important here is that to the extent there is a conflict between gay rights and the free exercise of religion, it is solely within the context of whether anti-discrimination laws writ large present an unacceptable conflict with the free exercise of religion.  Same sex marriage, in and of itself, thus presents no greater a problem for religious liberty than does no-fault divorce.  It is only laws that prohibit private discrimination in the first place that actually present a conflict with the free exercise of religion.  It has also quite often been the courts who have had to step in and create exceptions to those laws to alleviate the conflict with religious liberty and freedom of association due to the legislature’s failure to adequately do so.

I’m glad Mark took the time to lay all this out, and you should read the whole thing because it goes into a ton of details that I didn’t excerpt.

My point in arguing over the religious liberty question last week was three-fold:

• first, to point out that there was a ton of spin going on in the press, essentially blaming the church when in fact it was the city threatening to pull contracts;
• second, to point out that religious liberty is also an important issue and one worthy of our support because no matter how you spin it, we are all of us effected by it whether we’re religious or not;
• and third, that gay rights advocates should be careful not to support measures that really do threaten religious liberty – it’s bad strategy, and risks small victories at the expense of later defeats.

I still support gay marriage and all that it entails.  I still support religious liberty.  I find no incongruence in this position.

Thomas J Reese sums it up nicely, and says it all better than I have.

Catholic Charities competes with private and nonprofit agencies for these contracts with the government deciding which organization will provide the best services for the money. This is a good deal for state and local governments because these Catholic Charities programs are efficiently and effectively run with both professionals and volunteers.

Meanwhile, the City Council for the District of Columbia has decided to enact legislation forbidding discrimination against those in gay marriages. This legislation would not force churches to perform gay marriages or to change their moral doctrines, but it would require any organization with a contract with the District to provide medical benefits to a gay partner just like it provides them to the heterosexual partner in a marriage. It would also require adoption agencies to sponsor children to gay couples if the agency is under contract with the city.

The archdiocese says that it cannot do this because of its moral opposition to gay marriage. This is not new. The Archdiocese to San Francisco had the same fight with its city council, and the adoption programs of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts were shut down because the state legislature insisted that they sponsor adoptions to gay couples while the bishops insisted they would not.

It should be clear from this review of the facts that the church is not threatening to withdraw its money from the poor. It is simply pointing out that it cannot observe these new requirements and therefore the city will cancel its contracts. It is in fact the city council that is closing down these programs, not the archdiocese.

[Read more →]

When the House recently passed a healthcare bill which included restrictions on the use of federal money to subsidize abortion, liberals were up in arms.  ”It restricts choice!” they cried.  Let’s oppose it!  Let’s vote down the entire bill even if that means more people in the country will remain uninsured.

Now the Catholic Church in Washington D.C. is being told that in order to receive government funds, they must abide by a new D.C. anti-discrimination law in all their charities and employment practices in those charities.  The Church in Washington – part of a much larger, global organization – feels that it cannot submit to those rules and therefore will be forced to refuse said funds and close the doors on a number of the charities they currently run.

Liberals are once again up in arms.  ”What about the homeless?” they cry.   “How dare they not change their fundamental religious beliefs when that means leaving more homeless and poor without charitable services!”

Something about this smacks of double standards.

And thus we come to a very fundamental aspect of government involvement in just about everything.  The government limits choice.  The trade-off can be worth it.  It may mean less affordable abortions but more people covered.  It may mean gay people are given the right to wed, but religious charities have fewer dollars to provide for the poor.

The point I’m making is that there is such thing as consensus, but it usually comes at a cost.  It can’t simply be that everyone gets what they want, nor is it merely a question of ethics.  Reasonable people disagree on issues like abortion.  And we have a system of government that separates church and state, for better or worse.  This leads to concessions and compromises and trade-offs and people are always unhappy at the end of the day.

If we want government health care, maybe we have to give up federally subsidized insurance plans that cover abortion.  If we want gay marriage in D.C. and we also want religious charities to keep doing their good work, maybe we have to make exceptions for those institutions on religious grounds.  Or we can refuse them funding and find ways to implement those charities via the state or some other private charity.

Either way, I see pro-choice advocates and the Catholic Church doing very similar things here.  They’re both up in arms about the government making rules about how they spend the government’s money.  But it’s the government’s money, or rather it’s our money.  And that’s the way it rolls in a representative democracy.  Deal with it.

” The premise of today’s story was that the Catholic Church was threatening to cease to provide charitable services if the law legalizing gay marriage is passed. In point of fact, it is the DC government that would cease to license or contract with the Church unless the Church conformed to a definition of marriage that violates its faith tradition. Without a set of broader legal exemptions allowing for the Church to remain faithful to its definition of marriage, it will cease to be permitted by the City to provide the contracted and licensed services that it has for well over a century. The Church’s fundamental desire in this controversy is to continue its desire and freedom to serve.” ~ Patrick Deneen, responding to news that the Catholic Church will end social services in D.C. if a gay-marriage law is passed there

I think the Catholic Church is wrong about a lot of things, including its stance on gay marriage.  I also think that they’re wrong when they go political and actively seek funds to oppose same sex marriage at the ballot box.  But on this one, I think they have a pretty valid stance.  Religious liberty is a fundamental American value, and even the ACLU thinks the D.C. gay-marriage law goes too far, and provides too few religious exemptions.  For instance, any church that hosted any public event at all would be required to also host events for gays.  This includes weddings.

John Wimberly, the president of the ACLU in Washington and a pastor, agreed the current phrasing could cause problems. He told the council that while the ACLU supports the bill he would recommend taking out part of the exemption to avoid confusion.

“A church shouldn’t have to host a wedding it doesn’t want to host,” said Arthur Spitzer, an ACLU attorney who reviewed the legislation.

This isn’t the Catholic Church simply saying that if gay-marriage is passed in D.C. they’ll stop providing services.  They’re saying that they won’t receive contracts for services that they won’t provide due to religious conflicts of interest.  The Church hasn’t stopped providing services in all the states where gay marriage has passed, after all.  In New Hampshire the religious exemptions are written in such a way to avoid these conflicts. In Massachusetts, on the other hand, the state has pulled many contracts from the Catholic Church because their exemptions are not as strong.

So I have to disagree with Jamelle on this one, who writes:

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has always been a bit more measured in its approach.  This might be my naivety talking, but I expected a bit more of the Catholic leadership. Sure, the Catholic Church isn’t particularly enamored of gays, but as an institution (and at least in the United States) it’s always seemed much more concerned with fighting the war on poverty than the war on gays.  What’s more, unlike evangelicals – who are overwhelmingly Southern and conservative – Catholics represent a wider geographic and ideological cross-section of America, which had a moderating influence on the church’s leadership.

But things changed, and in the past decade or so, Catholic leadership has become more and more committed to a socially conservative political agenda.   If given the choice between saving the needy and sticking it to the gays, these Church “elders” would rather let 68,000 of the most vulnerable Washingtonians suffer in the dead of winter than have to extend basic legal protections to gay people.

The misreading of what’s actually going on aside – this is not a simple threat, as many are painting it – I think Jamelle makes a good point.  The Church has become too politically involved in all of this.  But they’ve done so because they’re legitimately worried about religious liberty, and moves like this reaffirm their fears.  Gay marriage advocates, and I am one myself, need to craft legislation that doesn’t impinge upon one set of liberties in favor of another.  This is a matter both of respect and practicality.   The Church shouldn’t be politicized, but its leaders will continue to take on political causes if they feel their own rights are threatened.

I hope that one day the Church will change its positions on many things, but until that time it isn’t the job of the state to do it for them.  There are devils in all the details here, and turning it into an Us vs. Them moment only helps to avoid addressing those devils we don’t know, in favor of the ones we do.

Update.

Commenters are pointing out that there have been some revisions to this bill.  That is true.  Religious organizations would not be forced to provide space or perform marriages for gay couples.  They would still be required to do a number of other things, including provide benefits to gay couples, offer other charitable services to gay people, and so on and so forth.  Again – I think they should do this, but what I think really isn’t the issue here.  The issue is whether they should be required to by law.  If they are required to follow specific rules in order to receive federal funds, and they believe that those rules are in conflict with their beliefs, then they will have no choice but to refuse those funds.

You can’t really have it both ways.  These funds are used to provide for the poor.  You can’t complain that the Church is awful for receiving the funds on the one hand and awful for not providing these services on the other.  The two are connected, and if the law makes it impossible for the Church to do both, then there really is little that can be done except change the law.  Or change the Church.  And so this comes back to a question of religious liberty.

[updated]

Maine proponents of gay marriage rights woke to defeat today, which is a shame and another signal that the country is still bitterly divided on this issue.  The New York Times reports:

“The Catholic Church was a leading supporter of the repeal campaign, even asking parishes to pass a second collection plate at Sunday mass to help the cause.”

Which makes me sad as well.  I support religious institutions’ beliefs, however wrong-headed I think they may be, but I wish they’d afford the same dignity to others.  Nobody is trying to force the Church to support gay marriage, to allow gays to be married in its churches or by its priests.  What business did the Church have interfering with civil marriage laws – passing out second donation plates to oppose equality?

This is especially difficult for me because I’ve been taking RCIA classes at our local parish, which lead in April to confirmation in the Catholic Church.  I’ve always loved catholicism.  My family is largely Catholic, though I was raised non-denominational.  I went to Catholic school for a year, and always loved the saints, the rosary, the colors, the solemnity and the joy involved in the liturgical year, the intellectual and mystical traditions of the Church.  It all felt, and still feels, more real to me somehow.  Catholicism has a communal and spiritual depth to it that I never experienced at the Methodist or any other protestant church.

There are things that bother me about it, though.  I am a decentralist at heart.  I believe in the decentralization of power, no matter what the organization.  If there is to be a hierarchy, I want it to be a hierarchy that is still very flat, with power spread as far and wide as possible.  The very Catholic notion of subsidiarity plays a very strong role in my thinking on this – and, paradoxically perhaps, a very weak role in the Church itself. I’m not against the papacy.  I’m just against the level of power the Pope seems to wield.

Then, too, I think the treatment of women and gays is wrong.  I think women should be able to be priests.  I think, if Jesus were alive today, he’d agree.  I just find the notion that Apostolic succession ought to be confined to men a bit outdated.  Like a great misunderstanding of the universality of Christianity and Christ and what it means to be human and in communion with God.

I’m a little mixed on married priests, though I think by and large marriage should be allowed.  I just know enough pastor’s kids to know that dividing your life between God, your flock, and your family can be extraordinarily difficult – especially on your children.  Maybe there’s some wisdom in wedding priests to God only.  Maybe not.  People divide their lives similarly in a host of other professions.

In any case, the fact that the Catholic Church was instrumental in defeating marriage equality in Maine is saddening to me.  The Mormons did it in California, and they were an easy target for my ire, I have to admit.  I’ve always had issues with Mormonism, whether that’s fair or not.  But Catholics?  I mean, here is an institution devoted to peace and justice!  Catholic priests were at the vanguard of the anti-war movement during Vietnam.  The Pope came out against the Iraq war.  Catholics were social activists against slavery, against the slaughter of native Americans….

But not for the gays who want – shudder – to marry.  To become families.  To join one of the most important social institutions our civilization has to offer.

It’s a shame, and it makes me wonder at the thrust of my heart.  It makes me question whether I should be in this RCIA class at all, whether I should join an organization which I simply want to change.  Is there a conflict of interest here?  Should someone join a cause or a religious group or any other affiliation if one has such fundamental disagreements?

Update.

Andrew has a few more things to say about this:

The hard truth is: people are still afraid of this, and our opponents knew how to target their fears very precisely. They have honed it to an art – their prime argument now is that although adults can handle gay equality, children cannot. And so they play straight to heterosexuals whose personal comfort with gay people is fine but who sure don’t want their kids to turn out that way. One way to prevent kids turning out that way, the equality opponents argue, is to ensure that they never hear of gay people, except in a marginalized, scary, alien fashion. And this referendum was clearly a vote in which the desire to keep gay people invisible trumped the urge to treat them equally.

The truth about civil marriage – why it is the essential criterion for gay equality – is that it alone explodes this core marginalization and invisibility of gay people. It alone can reach those gay kids who need to know they have a future as a dignified human being with a family. It alone tells society that gay people are equal in their loves and in their hearts and in their families – not just useful in a society with a need for talented or able individuals whose private lives remain perforce sequestered from view.

This is why it remains the prize. And why our eyes must remain fixed upon it. In my view, the desperate nature of the current tactics against us, the blatant use of fear around children (which both worries parents and also stigmatizes gay people in one, deft swoop) are signs that what we are demanding truly, truly matters.

So, true to form, there were problems hooking the discussion up via Blog Talk Radio, but Dan, Conor, and I gave Skype another whirl and managed not just to get through over an hour of conversation, but also had a really great and spirited dialogue. [Read more →]

Via Cascadian in the comments: [Read more →]

“The notion that differences of opinion between the Catholic church and U.S. law will somehow render Catholic judicial nominees unconfirmable is demonstrably ludicrous. In addition to opposing gay marriage, the Catholic church also opposes divorce, birth control, abortion, and any number of other things that are permitted by U.S. law. Indeed, the Supreme Court has recognized a constitutional right to many of these activities. And yet, somehow, even after those decisions, we’ve gone from having one Catholic Supreme Court justice in the 1980s to having five Catholic justices on the current Court.” ~ the Anonymous Liberal

It must have been caused by a gay marriage in Vermont!

~commenter jaycbird over at Dreher’s digs, on why Mel Gibson’s wife is filing for divorce.