Contraception Battles: More Commentary Hot off the Presses

I'm immersed in mounds of footnotes for my book right now, and working in a chair beside a long table stacked high with books, which Steve has helpfully set up for me so that I don't have to run from bookcases in one room to bookcases in another as I write.  I can glean all the books I think I'll need for a day's work early in the morning, stack them on the long table, and then have at the niggling footnote work.

And for this reason, I'm not so engaged with the news (that is, with the news of the 21st century) as I might be, and what I have to say here for a number of days may be limited.  Even so, it's impossible for me not to keep following the faux "religious freedom" controversy of the bishops and their "liberal" Catholic co-belligerents.

I can't avoid that news, because it's everywhere these days, from an article today at Alternet by Adele Stan about how the bishops' political powerlessness has been definitively exposed, to  a similar statement by Joe Conason at Truthdig, to a piece by Gene Lyons at Salon about the bishops' cynical political power play and how it (and the response of "liberal" co-belligerent Catholics) exposes Catholic hypocrisy at its worst, to Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches unmasking the dirty "abortion pill" lie that the bishops and their "liberal" Catholic co-belligerent allies keep trying to shop around to conflate contraception and abortion in the current manufactured political controversy.

Garry Wills's essay "Contraception's Con Men" at New York Review of Books is typically brilliant.  His incisive statement about the "omnidirectional bad-faith arguments" of "pusillanimous Catholics" supporting the bishops is right on the mark, as is his scathing takedown of each bad-faith argument the vacuous centrists are trying to use to defend a supposedly embattled "faith" that's not in the least embattled by the HHS guidelines.

Wills says,

Pusillanimous Catholics—Mark Shields and even, to a degree, the admirable E. J. Dionne—are saying that Catholics understandably resent an attack on “their” doctrine (even though they do not personally believe in it). Omnidirectional bad-faith arguments have clustered around what is falsely presented as a defense of “faith.” The layers of ignorance are equaled only by the willingness of people “of all faiths” to use them for their own purposes. Consider just some of the layers: . . . .

And then he goes on to deconstruct the phony religious freedom argument, the phony contraception argument, the phony "church teaches" argument, and the phony "undying principle" argument being used by those supporting the bishops to keep this phony crusade for a phony "religious freedom" that amounts to the demand of a minority to ignore the freedom of the majority on grounds of conscience alive.

This is a must-read essay by a Catholic scholar who has more knowledge stored in his little finger about Jefferson and the foundations of the notion of religious liberty in American thought than all the pusillanimous Catholics advancing false omnidirectional arguments for "religious freedom" have in their entire bodies.  Did somebody say phony?

Also important: Andrew Sullivan's just-published Newsweek article about the contraception battle.  Sullivan finds "the Republican fusion with the Vatican" deeply destructive for the Catholic church and its teaching.  In his view, this fusion threatens "core priorities of Christianity.  Sullivan observes,

And the obsession among Catholic and evangelical leaders with an issue like contraception stands in stark contrast to their indifference to, for example, the torture in which the last administration engaged, the growing social inequality fostered by unfettered capitalism, the Christian moral imperative of universal health care, and the unjust use of the death penalty. 

And here's his summary of what the battle for "religious freedom" has actually come down to among the bishops and their "liberal" co-belligerents:

So Catholic doctrine should, according to the bishops’ spokesman, also apply to non-Catholics—even if they are merely selling burritos. 

This kind of rhetoric is not about protecting religious freedom. It is about imposing a particular religious doctrine on those who don’t share it as a condition for general employment utterly unrelated to religion at all. And if that is the hill the Catholic hierarchy and evangelical right want to fight and die on, they will lose—and lose badly. 

(Also worth reading, Sullivan's series, possibly an ongoing series, on how Obama is winning with this wedge issue: here, here, and here.)

America has also just published an editorial about these matters, which finds the bishops over-reaching in their response to the Obama compromise, and in doing so, abdicating their role as pastors appealing to "gospel values, conscience and right reason."

Meanwhile, even as polls show large margins of American Catholics opposing the bishops and their "liberal" co-belligerents about these issues (these polls are cited in several of the articles to which I link above), said co-belligerents just won't stop with the phony omnidirectional bad-faith arguments, which jump from "it's not about contraception" to "it's about abortifacients" to "it's about how prescient Humanae Vitae was" to "it's about the acids of modernity eating away at authentic Catholic faith" to "it's about how informed conscience always does what church leaders instruct" to (and this is the ultimate bottom line for these reactionary tribalistic Catholics) "our bishops, right or wrong."

I won't even link to these statements.  Just go to the National Catholic Reporter site, for starters, and begin scanning for the latest statements by writers there who have pressed these and other arguments in the past (and whose statements about these matters I've critiqued in the past),  and you'll find them continuing to do so even more belligerently.  Even now.  Now that the fatuity of their bad-faith arguments has been definitively exposed by the bishops' insupportable behavior after they were offered a viable compromise.

No grace.  No dignity.  No scintilla of a chastened recognition that they've been led spectacularly astray.

Instead, a seeming total lack of moral insight, which makes one wonder about the moral (and intellectual) formation of those who lead the American Catholic conversation.  And about their inability to understand how they're marginalizing the Catholic voice in the public conversation by their defensive tribalistic parochialism,  And about their cold-hearted obtuseness in not recognizing the damage they and their episcopal leaders are inflicting on so many fellow Catholics as they identify the only acceptable Catholic voice with a tiny minority of believers.

Most of all, I'm astounded that the graceless and unrelenting "liberal" co-belligerent allies of the bishops imagine that the argument "they're our bishops and we must follow them" will really still fly in 2012--that it should continue to have force even now, given all we have learned about "our" bishops in the past decade.  As Andrew Sullivan notes in one of his pieces on how Obama has won this wedge-issue war,

I'm sorry but I find the protectors of child rapists preaching to women about contraception to be a moral obscenity. When all the implicated bishops and the Pope resign, ther replacements will have standing to preach. 

And he's right.  And it's hardly to the credit of the "liberal" co-belligerents, either intellectually or morally, that they appear oblivious to this recognition as they keep hounding fellow Catholics to follow the bishops' conscience, since the only real conscience any true Catholic can have is a bishop's conscience.  Do they truly not know what the bishops have done to survivors of clerical sexual abuse in recent years (and to gays and lesbians and to women)?

Or do they just not care?