Bishops and the Flat Earth: Denying the Poverty-Abortion Link

Do the U.S. Catholic bishops really care about abortion as the overarching moral issue of our time? I’m beginning to wonder.

To be more specific: I’m beginning to wonder if the opposition of the U.S. Catholic bishops to abortion is all about abortion. Or if it’s all about saving the lives of unborn children. I’m wondering if it’s primarily about that often-professed concern, or if it’s actually about something else.

If it’s about diminishing abortions and thus saving fetuses, why did Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), recently inform a reporter that "it's still to be proven what the connection is between poverty and abortion"? Cardinal George made the remark at a press conference during the recent USCCB meeting in Baltimore. He was responding to a question about whether the U.S. Catholic bishops support a focus on reducing abortions by combating poverty and providing better social services to women who are pregnant (www.usccb.org/meetings/2008Fall/cns_story_0805714.shtml).

As Jill Filipovic notes on today’s Alternet blog, the evidence for the link between poverty and abortion is solid, well-researched, incontrovertible (www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/107615). Filipovic cites current National Right to Life statistics showing that 23% of American women who terminate pregnancies report that they do so because they cannot afford a baby (www.nrlc.org/abortion/facts/reasonsabortions.html). An additional 19% indicate that they cannot undertake responsibility for a child when they have other children and family commitments that prevent their giving birth.

Filipovic also cites a 2005 Gutmacher Institute study published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 37,3 (Sept. 2005). In this report, entitled “Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives,” Lawrence B. Finer and other researchers show that 73% of American women surveyed cite inability to afford a baby now as their reason for choosing abortion (www.guttmacher.org/pubs/psrh/full/37110005.pdf).

As Filipovic notes, the discrepancy in the findings of the two studies is explained by the fact that the Gutmacher questionnaire allowed respondents to choose more than one answer when responding to questions about why they had abortions. The National Right to Life study confined respondents to a single answer.

Hard empirical data that completely contradict Cardinal George’s assertion that "it's still to be proven what the connection is between poverty and abortion.” So why does the leader of the U.S. Catholic bishops make such a bold counterfactual statement about abortion and poverty—a statement it is hard to believe he does not know to be incorrect?

Filipovic suggests that he does so because the U.S. Catholic bishops are aligning themselves with far-right fringe groups within the anti-abortion movement that resist social service programs for pregnant women and attempts to reduce poverty on ideological grounds. This may well be part of the explanation for Cardinal George’s denial of the link between abortion and poverty. I think, however, there are others that should be considered as well.

Certainly, as a body, the U.S. bishops have aligned themselves with the Republican party for several decades now, and in aligning themselves with a single political party, have also been willing to toe a neoconservative political line. Neoconservative thought resists the “intrusion” of the state into the lives of citizens (except, of course, where neoconservatives claim that such intrusion is warranted for moral reasons). Neoconservatives place the onus to care for one’s needs on the individual, not the state.

There are moralizing presuppositions underneath this neoconservative ideology of no-state-intrusion when it comes to women and their reproductive lives, as well. There’s the assumption that women behaving well won’t place themselves in positions in which they will have to entertain abortion as a choice. There’s the belief that those who have fallen to the bottom of the social ladder have done so through immoral behavior and lack of self-control.

There are, in other words, all sorts of nasty, untenable assumptions (untenable from a religious standpoint) lurking inside the ideological political worldview to which the American Catholic bishops have cozied up for some years now, and those assumptions can’t be discounted when one looks at the perplexing assertion of Cardinal George that the abortion-poverty link is not yet proven. The bishops have chosen strange political bedfellows, fellows not only disinterested in but positively antithetical to Catholic teaching about solidarity and the common good.

And they’re now paying a price for that allegiance—now that many people of faith in the U.S., including a majority of American Catholics—question this ideological alliance, with all the selective blindnesses it requires of true believers.

I would argue, however, that there’s more going on with Cardinal George’s denial of the abortion-poverty link. There is the obvious fear of the U.S. bishops that dealing with poverty and the needs of poor women will become a back-door way to continued legalization of abortion. There’s the fear that, if the bishops do not attack abortion outright and call for its outlawing, attempts to reduce abortion by addressing its root cause will not ever eradicate abortion from the U.S.

Having watched the bishops react to abortion for decades now, and having watched them consolidate their fateful alliance with right-wing political and religious leaders, I suspect that there are some much larger fears driving many bishops’ resistance to abortion, however. The bishops are afraid of women and the feminine (e.g., of gay men, who are"feminized" in the minds of straight men). Flatly. Pathologically.

They belong to a club of men who fight tooth and nail against female intrusion, at all cost. They are intentionally enmeshed in clerical structures for which attending a women’s ordination is a crime more severely punished than molesting a minor.

The bishops are afraid of women, of women’s power, of women’s freedom to make their own choices and to control their own lives. The bishops are determined to check that control in every way possible, through staunch resistance to abortion and through any and all political avenues to curb women’s autonomy.

I don’t like coming to these conclusions, because the moral calculation and behavior to which they point is so indefensible. I don’t like putting the point so bluntly. But there it is, the unavoidable (and often unacknowledged) driving center from which the bitter struggle against abortion emanates. This battle is a power struggle in which a caste of celibate (or ostensibly celibate) men intend to band together, lock arms, and fight to the end, to preserve their boys’ club intact, with all of its power and privileges.

Insofar as they have determined that the system of clericalism is to be maintained at all cost, the bishops will (and must) do anything possible to combat all social (and ecclesial) forces that threaten their sense of control. The struggle against abortion may well be about saving babies, but it’s about a lot more. It’s about saving men’s control of the world, or illusion of control—the control of heterosexual-identified men. It’s about asserting male power over the feminine as the despised Other. It’s about making men feel safe and secure in a world in which they seem to have been losing power for some time now.

And until we admit and address those underlying concerns in how right-wing Christian men, including Catholic bishops, frame the abortion debate, we will never get very far in discussions of abortion. Or, perhaps better, we won’t get very far until we acknowledge these concerns, admit that the bishops and their cronies do not intend to move beyond them, and make an end-run around the concerns and around the bishops, with other people of faith who really do want to diminish abortion, and who don’t have anything at all invested in preserving clerical power and privilege.

When Master and Slave Reverse: The Gay Struggle for Human Rights

I have never been entirely sure that I understand Nietzsche’s concept of the transvaluation of values. I know that he aims the idea at Christianity, which, in his view, perverts “natural values,” turning morality on its head in the process.

My primary entry point into Nietzsche’s concept of transvaluation in general has long been Hegel's master-slave analogy. What intrigues me there is how the slave, from her position of subordination and dehumanization, ends up claiming a humanity the slave system is designed to deny her—and which it ironically removes from the slaveowner himself, who imagines that his rules of subordination and dehumanization extend out into the entire cosmos.

In the folly of his belief that he can control the definition of morality, the slaveowner ends up being captivated by the very system of slavery he invents. The system subverts itself—it transvalues its moral basis—such that it is the slaveowner himself who ends up being enslaved. It is the slaveholder himself who is dehumanized, not the slave whom he seeks to dehumanize.

The slave system effects this because it forgets or glosses over a pivotal human reality, a moral reality, that the slave herself never forgets. This is the humanity of the one we seek to dehumanize. Try as we might, invent any rules we like to subordinate others and rob them of humanity, there is still something inside each human heart that affirms the humanity of the one treated as an inhuman object, something to which human beings cling desperately in the most dehumanizing circumstances imaginable.

What the slaveholder forgets—the humanity of the person he is treating as an object by buying, selling, controlling—the slave herself never forgets: that she is human, and not an object. So the slave system ends up dehumanizing—ironically!—the very one who sets it into place to dehumanize others. The slave ends up being master, insofar as she never forgets her humanity despite constant assaults on her humanity, while the slaveholder forfeits his humanity by holding a human being as chattel property.

This analysis of the transvaluation of values has been constantly in my mind lately, as I read some of the commentary on right-wing blogs and in the media about the response of the gay community nationwide to proposition 8. It is mind-boggling to read commentary suggesting that gay human beings who protest the removal of a fundamental human right are somehow debasing their humanity by protesting! Animals rampaging in the street, a right-wing maven informed readers of the Arkansas Times blog recently . . . .

It is amazing to see the same folks who have, for decades now, done all they can to assault the humanity of gay human beings and to remove human rights from gay human beings suddenly claiming that they are the object of attack, when the human beings they’ve been bashing cry out in protest. This process whereby the oppressor seeks to claim the status of the oppressed is fascinating to watch: and utterly grotesque. It is a transvaluation of values that tries to take the concept of oppression and apply it to the one being oppressed, as a reduplication of the initial oppression—a revictimization of the victim.

I began to understand these philosophical concepts existentially some years ago, when I received an unexplained one-year terminal contract at Belmont Abbey College. I had taught theology there two years. I had received outstanding evaluations from students, peers, and supervisors.

In fact, several days before receiving the terminal evaluation, I had my annual oral evaluation by the academic vice-president, who told me that I had published more than any other faculty member that year, that my teaching evaluations were outstanding, that I had given good service to the college—and that I would receive a one-year terminal contract. When I asked him why that would be the case, given his evaluation (which he never placed in writing), he told me he was not obliged to give me any reason for terminating me.

The story has many twists and turns, and it ended with my resigning when I met a total stone wall (and encountered one lie upon another) as I sought to be given a reason for the terminal contract. What I want to focus on here is the involvement of the abbot of the monastery that owns Belmont Abbey College.

That gentleman was, at the time, Abbot Oscar Burnett. When I was issued the terminal contract, I was still so naïve that I assumed the monks would be appalled to have their college treating any employee so inhumanely and dishonestly—violating core Christian moral principles in their treatment of an employee.

I naïvely asked to see Abbot Oscar to discuss the termination. I intended to tell him that my conscience was pointing me to leaving a college that was assaulting my faith in what the Catholic church stood for, and that I wanted to do him the courtesy of discussing that with him before I resigned.

Abbot Oscar ignored a series of phone calls from me, requesting an interview with him. When I finally placed the request in writing, he wrote me back a cold note informing me that he did not meddle in the affairs of the college (which his monastery owns and controls).

And here’s where the transvaluation of values bit comes in: down the road, Steve did manage to meet with Abbot Oscar for an interview—one in which he sat in front of Oscar for a good part of an hour as Oscar ranted, screamed, and threatened. I made a transcript of that “interview” afterwards, based on Steve’s oral report, which he told me through tears. It makes . . . interesting . . . reading.

One of the most hilarious things Oscar told Steve as he raved was that I had tried to assault him: yes, you read that right—I, the one fired, without a job, without health coverage, the one lied to and dehumanized, I had tried to assault Oscar, who had food, shelter, health coverage, social status, everything of which his Catholic college had robbed me.

Oscar told Steve, in fact, that I had caused his blood pressure to rise and that I was a malicious person akin to the man who had sought to assassinate Pope John Paul II. He said that for such persons, there can be no forgiveness, only prison, since they are evil and to be cut off from society and the body of Christ.

And—get this—Oscar informed Steve that I had caused all this suffering to him because I had not come to tell him that I was resigning! He refused to see me. He slammed the door in my face when I repeatedly asked him for an interview—to tell him I feared I had to leave a Catholic college that could violate core Catholic principles so egregiously.

And yet I had assaulted him by not coming to tell him that I was resigning—when he refused to see me. Mind-boggling, isn’t it?

But not uncommon, I have since found. It is a typical response of oppressors to those they oppress. The body of literature dealing with the twisted relationship of sexually abusive priests to their victims reveals that, over and over, priests who abuse children blame the children for their abuse. The children who are molested are flirts; they draw the priest in and cause him to rape them. It is the child's fault and not the fault of the adult, the pastor, who assaults the humanity of the child to its very core.

Sick. And a sickness that lives right in the heart of the church. A sickness that inhabits the heart of all systems in which power is unequally distributed, so that a person can have power over others from which those others have little ability to escape. A sickness that thrives on turning the moral universe topsy-turvy, so that the oppressor genuinely believes he is the oppressed, when the “object” he has continuously assaulted finally speaks back, and proves him wrong, in his fundamental assumption that the objectified person is less than human.

That is what is happening now with gay people in this society. We are speaking back. We are refusing to live with the strictures placed on our humanity by those whose only concern is to read our humanity as less than their humanity.

And how amazingly angry the oppressor is when he has even the tiniest taste of the dehumanizing aggression he has doled out decade on decade. What a surprise for him to learn that dehumanization doesn’t taste very good after all—not when he is the taster and no longer the disher.

Weeping in Gethsemane: American Catholic Leaders and Obama's Election

Andrea Mantegna, "Agony in the Garden"

Because I’m an historian by training—an historian of Christian theology—I try to imagine some of the reactions of American Catholic pastors to Obama’s election from an historical perspective. How will historians judge the recent outburst of Father Jay Scott Newman in Greenville, South Carolina, I wonder?

Corporate Greed and American Higher Education: More Signs of Leadership Failure

Troubling news today about the growing disconnect between the values American higher education actually practices in its allocation of salaries, and those it proclaims as it inculcates democratic values in students.

A study to be released on Monday in the Chronicle for Higher Education shows that, in this period of economic downturn when faculty salaries remain frozen or are declining and when tuition is rising, salaries for university presidents at public universities are growing rather than declining. As Joel Siegel’s ABC summary of the Chronicle report, “College Presidents Cashing In, Study Says,” notes,

The number of college and university presidents taking home eye-popping paychecks continues to climb even as more and more students have trouble paying their tuition bills. Fifty-nine presidents of public universities reeled in more than $500,000 in salary and benefits during the 2007-08 academic year, more than double the number who broke the half-million mark three years earlier, according to a survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education released on Monday (www.abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=6266263&page=1).

As Senator Charles E. Grassley of the Senate Finance Committee observes, “It’s surprising that many public universities are raising their presidents’ salaries. In these hard economic times, apparently belt-tightening is for families and students, not university presidents” (see Tamar Lewin, “Presidents’ Pay Rises Faster at Public Universities Than Private Ones, Survey Finds,” www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/education/17college.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink). Grassley concludes that the Chronicle’s study “shows that the executive suite seems insulated from budget crunches" (www.abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=6266263&page=1).

As Sigel notes, “College presidents defend their compensation packages, saying they function, in effect, as chief executives overseeing complex, multibillion-dollar enterprises and are still paid far less than CEOs in other lines of work.” The Chronicle report also indicates that presidents of private universities have, in general, always been paid more than those of public institutions. The rise in pay scale in recent years is particularly noticeable in publicly funded universities.

As Bilgrimage readers know, my concern with this issue has to do with the role institutions of higher education play in shaping the values of graduates (see, e.g., http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/leadership-crisis-role-of-american.html).
In many previous postings on this topic, I’ve noted that, in the American democratic experiment, taxes and donors lavishly support higher education (both public and private) because Americans assume that universities help build a democratic culture by instilling in students the values necessary to sustain such a culture.

This was a key insight of the educational and social philosophy of the pioneering African-American educator Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, whose work I have often quoted on this blog. When she founded her own college, Bethune-Cookman at Daytona Beach, Florida, Dr. Bethune explicitly built the values component everywhere into its curriculum, because she believed that colleges have a critical role to play in building a participatory democracy that brings everyone to the table.

Dr. Bethune also insisted that institutions of higher learning should model inclusive participatory democracy, since students learn what they experience and see more than what they are told. Her belief in the role of colleges as learning “collaboratories” led her to create a cross-racial and cross-cultural leadership team for her new college, as well as to sponsor public forums at which members of various communities could meet and discuss their shared concerns, collaborating as equals in solving social problems and involving students in the democratic process.

Colleges and universities play a premier role in keeping democracy alive and extending its values—in building a democracy that actually fulfills the founders’ ideals by achieving ful participattion. They cannot play that role when their own practices belie the values they proclaim.

Rising pay for those at the top of the university pay scale—while faculty salaries do not rise and tuition is increased—sends a contradictory signal regarding values to a university’s constituencies and to the public at large. It suggests that universities value the culture of corporations more than the culture of democracy.

The claim of university presidents to merit higher pay because they are CEOs should trouble anyone interested in the values American higher education has traditionally served. In order to be educational leaders, university presidents need to value education rather than profit. University boards should be rewarding educational excellence and success in teaching values, not dollar signs. University leaders who see themselves as CEOs rather than educators have departed from core values essential to the mission of higher education, if it is to fulfill its traditional function in the democratic social contract.

One of the primary reasons our nation is now on the brink of cultural collapse is the failure of its institutions of higher learning to produce leaders for a new millennium. And universities can not produce good leaders when their own leadership is shoddy—when this leadership models itself around values of the corporate boardroom and not of the academy.

The choice of university boards to reward CEO-presidents with obscenely large paychecks and perks and privileges that often extend those paychecks even more than the public realizes (particularly in private institutions, where salaries and perks are often not disclosed), is a dismal choice. I hope that in a period of concerted effort to rebuild our democratic culture, university boards will begin to pay attention to the values their institutions should be serving, and not primarily to charts showing higher profit margins.

Otherwise we’re lost.

A Table with Room for All: Celebrating Steps to Racial Inclusion

I awoke in the night with the picture at the head of this posting in my mind. It’s a picture taken from the first dinner the president-elect and his wife Michelle were able to have together following the election. The picture appeared on many news sites last Sunday, following the Saturday night dinner.

That picture sticks in my mind largely because of the radiant smile on Mrs. Obama’s face. It’s a smile that brings light to one who sees it. And I hope that it’s a smile of joy at a long struggle ended, of a victory won.

Not just a personal victory, but a victory for an entire group of citizens whose rights have been assaulted time and again over the course of American history . . . . As I lay awake remembering this picture in my head, I thought, too, of all the pictures from my own lifetime, pictures of pain and hardship as people of color fought for basic human rights. I thought of pictures of the Little Rock Nine integrating Central High School, as white students and adults jeered and screamed beside the sidewalks on which those students walked to school.

I thought of the pictures from Birmingham, of Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses turned on peaceful demonstrators. I remembered the pictures of the churches in which black children died after those churches were firebombed. I thought of pictures taken in the period of slavery, of somber faces, work-worn bodies.

It gives me great joy to take the picture of Mrs. Obama smiling as she leaves a dinner with her husband and juxtapose it with all those other pictures in my head. A diptych of hope to keep in mind as we struggle to extend rights to other groups of despised human beings . . . .

And a reminder that as I continue to fight for my rights and the rights of my brothers and sisters, I should stop and celebrate the accomplishments of other groups who have achieved a measure of victory in the ongoing struggle to bring everyone to the table of participatory democracy . . . .

Rally Against Proposition 8: A Report from Little Rock

We went to the protest today at the state capitol in Little Rock. I’m not good at estimating the size of crowds. I’d say there were perhaps 100 people there, or somewhat over that, standing on the steps of the capitol facing a podium at which speakers addressed the crowd. Not a bad turnout for our sleepy little city, particularly given the cold wind that was blowing hard under glowering skies.

The speakers were good. We didn’t hear all of them, since we have one of our grad school professors, now up in years, visiting from Montréal, and we didn’t want to tire him. Since our state passed its own homophobic legislation at the same time that California rescinded gay marriage, our rally focused both on proposition 8 in California and on our local legislation.

A gay man who’s a grandfather spoke about the new Arkansas legislation that will prevent unmarried couples from fostering or adopting. He appealed to the group to work to rescind this draconian law, noting that if, God forbid, something should happen to his son and son’s wife, he would be prohibited from adopting his own grandchild—despite his son's and daughter-in-law's express written wishes that he be the adoptive parent of their son in case of their death.

A law student who has formed a gay support group at the state law school (if I was hearing correctly through the wind) read sections of the California Supreme Court decision permitting gay marriage and commented on them. It was poignant and bittersweet to hear these ringing affirmations of the right to marry as a fundamental human right, in light of the vote in California.

A Unitarian minister told us that his church would host a gathering following the demonstration, to allow people to interact and to have a session to strategize about next steps. He noted the longstanding support of his church for gay unions, and his own history of celebrating these.

This demonstration was important since, if the blog of the statewide free paper Arkansas Times is any indicator of the mood of some of my fellow citizens, we're in a period of growing anger against the LGBT community. This anger is coming from a very specific subset of citizens: from white men who are enraged that "they" lost the recent elections, and are looking for somewhere to focus that anger.

And they've found it: it's my brothers and sisters in the gay community, and me. The right-wing old boys' network of the state is all lathered up these days, as they watch the protests against proposition 8 on television. Riots, they claim. Animals, they're saying--faggots and queers running through the streets, defying law and order and the vote of the people, pushing old ladies down, interrupting church services.

And so it goes. The battle continues. The march to progress takes a step forward and a step backwards, but it will not stop as long as the moral arc of the universe bends to a justice denied to some human beings. I was particularly encouraged to see that the crowd gathered today was a largely young crowd—young adults in their 20s, for the most part. That’s a testimony to the power the internet is now exerting on political movements. It’s also a hopeful sign for the future, in my view.

*I should give credit for the illustration at the head of this posting. It's Shepard Fairey's poster advertising today's nationwide Join the Impact protests--see http://obeygiant.com. Since many websites are replicating this image as they talk about Join the Impact in recent days, I'm assuming that it's not inappropriate for me to do so here. If that's not the case and any reader has information to the contrary, I'll be grateful to hear from you.

One Great Fellowship of Love: Mormons and Catholics United

In all the fallout over what happened in California with proposition 8, I think we must not lose sight of a modern-day miracle. With signs and wonders from the hand of God at a premium these days, we need to celebrate each and every one that comes our way.

Gay people—gay lives, gay loves, gay flesh and blood—have just accomplished what ecumenists (not to mention the Spirit Herself) have tried to do for decades, and have failed at: the Mormon and the Catholic churches have just found common ground. In fact, it’s not a stretch to conclude that the Mormon and the Catholic churches have just declared themselves one church now, a church united in a common cause (www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/politics/15marriage.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink).

They’ve united. And they have the gays to thank. Gay people, gay lives, gay loves, gay flesh and blood: gays as juicy diversionary targets for a culture in which the power of religious groups to coerce democratic voters is waning and needs a booster shot. We gays turn out to be just what the Mormons and the Catholics needed to get themselves recognized as movers and shakers again: a shared enemy over whose prostrate body the two religious groups can shake hands, exult in victory, and declare themselves one great fellowship of love.

The Morlic Church. Bishops calling prophets calling elders calling priests, burning up the phone lines. One great fellowship of love. Yes, indeed!

Mind you, I’m not sure the-gays-as-despised-victims are going to be able to do all that needs to be done to hold the new Morlic Church together. After all, we’re talking about religious groups with wildly disparate belief systems, radically different rituals. And head-butting truth claims that wipe each other out. We’re talking about two churches that both claim to own God and God’s absolute revealed truth—unilaterally and exclusively.

So I anticipate some fireworks when the position of pope and prophet gets sorted out in the new Morlic Church’s one great fellowship of love. The polity of these two churches is certainly very much alike. If you wanted to identify the two most hierarchical, male-dominated churches in all of Christendom, I don’t think you could come up with a closer match than Mormonism and Catholicism.

Top-down, males on top, truth owned at the top and disbursed in tiny tidbits to a faithful constantly enjoined to be obedient and receptive or be damned: that’s Catholicism. And it’s Mormonism.

And the closeness of the two may make not only for one great fellowship of love, but for sparks, when the two unite as Latter-Day Morlickism. When pope and prophet both claim the uncontested right to speak God’s word to the flock today, who’s going to be on top? Who’s going to give?

Since strong currents in both groups insist on women’s subordination, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that the fancy frocks Benedict sports (sometimes misconstrued as female attire) might give President and Prophet Monson an edge? If males are on top, President and Prophet Monson surely does dress the part.

But popes do have that well-known and sometimes a tad bit refractory penchant for wiliness. I can admit it. I’m Catholic. I know my people. And if I have learned one thing from years of watching my people, it's that, though clothes may make the man, lace and silk frocks do not the woman make. Not when a man is wearing them.

So I wouldn’t count on the befrocked Pope to submit to the business-suit attired President and Prophet. Not without a struggle. But all normed by the one great fellowship of love, of course. With its shared disdain for gay human beings, gay bodies, gay loves.

It’s going to be interesting, watching the fireworks at the love feasts. But, heck, if religion doesn’t provide us with interesting shows in American culture, what on earth does it do?