As I said last week, I had hoped to put the discussion of the Catholic bishops' war against the Obama administration over the HHS guidelines behind me on this blog. Then along came the kerfuffle over the decision of the Susan G. Komen foundation to withdraw support from Planned Parenthood, and the unholy war (which hasn't really gone away at all, of course, since it's about the bishops trying to influence the fall elections on behalf of the Republicans) flared up again.
For Catholics, these two stories are naturally closely connected (on this point, see the Joan Walsh article to which the previous link points). The Catholic right (which is to say, the bishops and their allies within the church) have been hounding legislative bodies for some time now to withhold funding from Planned Parenthood. And many of those centrist Catholics who voice "the" Catholic position in the blogosphere and media and who have been carrying water for the bishops in their current war against the Obama administration have also, for some time now, assisted with the attack on Planned Parenthood.
As a result, what has just happened with the Komen foundation--its reversal of its initial decision to defund Planned Parenthood under intense pressure from many stakeholders--is naturally eliciting commentary now in the Catholic blogosphere from those who see the HHS situation and the Komen story as linked, and who support the bishops in their attack on the Obama administration. As an example: Catholic News Service put out an article soon after Komen announced its defunding of Planned Parenthood, which I read (and to which I responded) at National Catholic Reporter when NCR picked that article up.
However, the article you'll see when you visit the preceding link is not the article to which I and others responded yesterday. (You can tell this immediately if you look for the reference in the initial text to Father Shenan Boquet of Human Life International to which the first commenter responds; Father Boquet has been scrubbed from the article.) The initial article with CNS's byline had noted that Catholics and pro-lifers are jubilant that Komen had defunded Planned Parenthood. But just as that article was being published, the Komen decision to reverse its defunding had occurred, and the article was prefaced with a note stating that the situation had radically shifted after the CNS article had been written, and CNS would offer more information when it knew more.
By this morning, I find that the entire article has been re-written (but it contains no notice to this effect!) to convey what is now becoming the party line of the political and religious right (and of Catholic centrists colluding with the right) about the Komen reversal: the article now quotes Charmaine Yoest, CEO of Americans United for Life, to say that Komen has just endured a "vicious attack" by Planned Parenthood, and that Planned Parenthood is engaging in "scorched-earth" politics against Komen.
This rhetoric echoes right-wing Catholic media commentator Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review Online, whose claims that Komen is the victim of liberal "bullying" are incisively dissected by Alex Pareene at Salon this morning. As Pareene notes, Lopez exulted (as did the now-revised CNS article about which I've just written) in Komen's initial decision, stating that Komen had "won" a battle in the war against abortion and contraception. She then helped Komen CEO Nancy Brinker (formerly a member of the George W. Bush administration) shop around a video in which Brinker claimed that the Komen decision to defund wasn't political in any shape, form, or fashion.
And then came the significant public outcry from many quarters about Komen's politically charged decision that targeted poor and minority women receiving essential health services from Planned Parenthood, and Lopez changed her tune. As Pareene notes, she is now saying (as is Yoest) that Komen is the victim of outrageous bullying--evidently from all those who had once given to and supported Komen (I'm one of these), but who were outraged when Komen decided to extend the culture wars to an attack on economically struggling women needing health services they get no place else than through Planned Parenthood.
(Which is to say, many of us are angry at what Komen sought to do to Planned Parenthood because we're pro-life). And all of this is leading up to my response to another statement that appeared in the Catholic blogosphere yesterday discussing the nexus of issues related to the Catholic bishops, HHS contraceptive coverage decision, and Komen-Planned Parenthood debacle. This is a posting of Kevin Clarke at the America magazine "In All Things" blog site.
I'm responding to Clarke's posting for a very specific reason: using other, but parallel, terms, it talks about what I've been calling all week long the tribalism of many Catholic responses to the bishops' latest anti-Obama war-cry. Clarke describes what I've been calling a Catholic tribal impulse as an "atavistic response mechanism," and he notes that he himself is feeling this urge in the wake of both the HHS decision and the Komen-Planned Parenthood controversy.
Clarke writes,
PP may be overdoing the victory dance on this one; watching the self-righteous counterattack against the bishops and noting the increasingly Nativist tone of some of the sentiment expressed on that vast wasteland of the Interent, I can feel some atavistic response mechanism kicking in myself. Will liberal Catholics come home to stand by their bishops despite their differences?
As this excerpt from Clarke's posting suggests, he and I don't see some of the most significant events now occurring in the American Catholic community in quite the same way. And because Clarke has chosen to talk about what's now taking place as an appeal to American Catholics to obey an inbuilt "atavistic response mechanism" and "come home to stand by their bishops," and because I've been writing about this same mechanism as a tribal urge that poses some serious dangers to the church itself and to the body politic, I'm choosing to respond to Clarke's analysis here.
First, it's worth noting that, like Phyllis Zagano (see the preceding link), where Kevin Clarke appears to see black and white I see shades of gray. And what I seem to see as black and white (e.g., one doesn't score pro-life points by attacking health care provision for poor women), they may well see as gray.
For Clarke and Zagano, as for many centrist Catholic media commentators now "standing by their bishops" along with their allies of the political and religious right, it appears to go without saying that Planned Parenthood = abortion = immoral = Catholics must stand by their bishops. As I've noted in previous postings about Planned Parenthood, however, I see quite a bit more gray regarding organizations that, while they provide abortions, also 1) provide essential health care for socioeconomically marginal women who have little access to health care elsewhere, and 2) provide contraceptive services that, to my way of thinking, stand to diminish abortions.
I'm well aware that Planned Parenthood does also provide abortion services in some areas. I'm also well aware that the vast bulk of the services Planned Parenthood provides are not abortions, and many Planned Parenthood affiliates throughout the U.S. do not provide abortion services at all. If Clarke and Zagano wish, as I assume they do--and as I myself do--to see abortions diminished, then I am unclear about precisely how we're pursuing that end on which we all agree by seeking to have Planned Parenthood defunded and shut down.
I conclude, as I read Clarke and Zagano and think about my own position, that I must part company with Catholic centrists who make common cause with the religious and political right vis-a-vis these issues because my own Catholic pro-life ethic forbids me to use the provision of health care to poor women as a political bargaining chip to score anti-abortion points. I also conclude that I do not see abortion per se as the defining characteristic of a Catholic or a pro-life Catholic.
I see being pro-life across the board and consistently as the defining characteristic of a pro-life Catholic. And so as a pro-life Catholic, I find it incomprehensible--I find it outrageous and shameful--that my church's leaders are willing to ally themselves with political leaders whose goals are in no sense at all pro-life, except that these political leaders continue to promise to outlaw abortion if they're elected. (But they haven't done so when elected and given a chance to move in that direction.)
In short, I refuse to be herded where the bishops, the political and religious right, and centrist Catholic media spokespersons like Zagano and Clarke wish to herd me. I refuse to be herded onto the Catholic tribal reserve designated for me by their definition of Catholicism, for which opposing abortion at all costs is a defining characteristic of a true Catholic. I refuse to be so herded because I'm a pro-life Catholic.
And I'm not in the least convinced by Clarke's and other centrist Catholic media gurus' persistent talk about the resurgence of ugly anti-Catholic Nativist impulses in American culture. I find this overdone (and downright false) rhetoric about Nativism unconvincing in the extreme.
What the appeal to the Nativist bugbear is overlooking is that it's not the public at large who are resisting the bishops' attempt to herd their atavistic sheep vis-a-vis Obamacare and Planned Parenthood. It's Catholics who are resisting.
Go to any Catholic blogsite--including America and including Clarke's own posting--and read the comments readers are making about these issues, and you'll immediately see that those logging in to avow their refusal to be herded into the bishops' pro-Republican and anti-Obama political corral are Catholics. Many Catholics, who have nothing at all to do with Nativist attacks on the Catholic church, but who are the descendants of Catholics who resisted Nativism in the past, now choose to define ourselves vis-a-vis the bishops and their politics differently than our bishops want us to define ourselves.
We choose to define ourselves as Catholic--we choose to define our Catholicity--in ways that part company with the bishops over issues like contraception, pro-life politics, and, yes, even abortion. And telling us that we've chosen to side with 19th-century Nativists who have long since lost any significant influence in American culture as we claim our right to define our Catholic identities as adult Catholics isn't going to stop us from being adults. It's not going to turn us back into atavistic sheep who line up behind a bishop when a bishop commands us to get into line.
This appeal to the tired, hoary specter of Nativism attacking the Catholic church in the U.S.: it really does need to be laid to rest, in any case. It no longer has any compelling explanatory value for most Catholics in the U.S., outside certain cultural enclaves in which Catholic identity was once defined in highly tribalistic terms to resist the Nativism prevalent in some parts of the country. Many of us do not live and never did live in those tribal Catholic cultural enclaves (which happen to coincide with the cultural enclaves that have most influence in defining "the" Catholic voice for the media).
Writing the voices of large majorities of brother and sister Catholics outside the Catholic conversation simply because many of us happen to live in areas of the country whose cultures were never dominated by Nativism and by the tribalistic atavism bishops once used to keep Catholics in line in response to Nativism and other threats: this hardly strengthens the Catholic witness in the public square or Catholic presence in the culture at large. It does the opposite.
It does so because it deprives the American Catholic conversation of a vital diversity that is apparent throughout the American Catholic church when one moves beyond the tribal enclaves, and which vastly transcends the univocal voice that reactionary cultural enclaves haunted by the specter of Nativism keep trying to impose on the entire American Catholic church. In the conversations now taking place in American Catholicism about the role of the bishops, contraception, political responses to the Obama administration, abortion, etc., there's a growing diversity that has nothing at all to do with the bugbear of Nativism. And that has everything to do with the rich, creative contributions of many different Catholic voices that tribal Catholicism seeks to discredit and exclude at serious cost to the church, and to the church's engagement of the public square.
It's high time American Catholicism began to grow up, if it really does want to make any serious contribution to the public political conversation. Intelligent, thinking, morally sensitive adults resist the attempt of any leader, religious or otherwise, to appeal to their atavistic urges and to herd them like unthinking sheep. Intelligent, thinking, morally astute adults learn to think critically about what's going on when tribal leaders dust off old shibboleths and order the tribe to fall into place as the shibboleth is taken out of the closet and once more brandished about.
Intelligent, thinking, and morally sensitive adults don't try to shift blame for their contemporary problems onto non-existent explanatory factors like a Nativism that hasn't had any serious influence in American culture for a century now. Intelligent, thinking, morally perceptive adults don't offer 19th-century shibboleths as solutions for 21st-century problems. Not if they really want to be taken seriously in 21st-century adult conversations about significant public issues.
Above all, adults who think and apply moral reasoning don't keep trying to apply solutions to problems that have proven unworkable again and again in the past, since they know that trying to solve a problem in the same unworkable way over and over again is the very definition of insanity. For many of us who have decided that we are adult Catholics and who have no mind to be herded back to dependent childhood, the fact that the bishops and their allies imagine they can still make the Catholic-identity conversation and the Catholic political conversation all about abortion in 2012 is simply laughable. And it's a sinful waste of Catholic creativity to keep reverting to this problem every election cycle, as if it's the only problem ever to be considered as Catholics engage the public square, and the only way to determine who's really Catholic and who's not, who's inside the conversation and who's not.
We're not going back. Nor, I suspect, is the culture itself going to do so, no matter how much you may kick and scream and try to force it to fit the confines of your narrow models. If your goal really is to engage the culture effectively regarding the value of life, you need to find some new ways to do so, and stop the silly appeals to Nativism and atavistic tribal urges demanding unthinking loyalty to Father Knows Best.
Because Father Knows Best is a figure who, for growing numbers of Americans--and, specifically, growing numbers of Catholic Americans--really doesn't have much at all to do with the pro-life ethic that you claim is all-important to Catholic identity and the Catholic contribution to the public square. No matter how lovely and long the cappae magnae of our ecclesiastical Fathers Who Know Best grow, or how resplendent and high their miters.
No comments:
Post a Comment