Losing Natural Law.

James Kalb writes:

The result is that natural-law moral reasoning loses its basis in how reason and reality are publicly understood, and comes to seem an imposition of arbitrary demands that are at odds with perfectly valid (because peacefully achievable) human desires. To make matters worse, as moral standards come to conform themselves to what is now understood as reason, and to the tendency of a bureaucratic, commercial, and technocratic society to view everything from the standpoint of obvious immediate utility, natural-law moral reasoning comes to appear actively evil. After all, it tries to bring human life within natural patterns that are traditionally recognized, and that means stereotyping and discrimination, which are now considered the worst sins imaginable.
That’s why Barack Obama got a rainbow-colored halo on the cover of Time Magazine when he came out in favor of “gay marriage.” Indeed, the requirement under international law that governments suppress attitudes and practices stemming from belief in sexual complementarity suggests that extirpating natural-law considerations is now considered, by our most authoritative institutions, a basic responsibility of government.
Under such circumstances, intelligent discussion of the public good, and of the complex and multi-leveled patterns and goals that shape human life, becomes impossible. So what do Catholics do when confronted with social authorities that insist, as a matter of fundamental principle, on replacement of human nature and the good by will and technology as the highest standard, and demand the imposition of their vision on the whole of life everywhere?
It’s a difficult question, especially when the state and other centralized forms of social organization are as pervasive as they are today. What we obviously can’t do, though, is support the realization of the progressive vision. The egalitarian, bureaucratic, and centrally-administered conception of social justice on which it is based is something we can’t cooperate with. When we support it, as the case of Obamacare illustrates, we are strengthening what will crush us. We might as well support the construction of a universal caliphate.
Instead, we must insistently, in season and out, in every possible setting, assert, argue for, and act on our own contrary understanding of human life. When there is a fundamental misconception the answer is not to join in the projects of the people who suffer from the misconception. It is to do whatever is needed to correct it. Today the Catholic view is simply not a presence in public life, and at best is misunderstood as an eccentric variation on some other view. Our most important political task is to change that.

A Primer on the Natural Law...

...by J. Budziszewski.

It's a video with these topics:

Key Take-Aways
• 1:30 – What is Natural Law? (3 mins)

• 5:00 – We’re not at war with our nature when we reason (40 sec)

• 6:00 – How discipline and virtue define character (1 min)

• 8:00 – Challenges of a disordered moral culture (3 mins)

• 11:30 – The false promise of the sexual revolution (2 mins)

• 14:15 – Students seek out an self-crafted Liberal Arts (1 min)

Here's the Youtube video:

Evangelicals and Natural Law.

Given that Martin Luther founded the Evangelical position on the proposition that "reason is Satan's whore," it is a hopeful sign that Christianity Today can find that the Evangelical antipathy for Natural Law is softening.

This is an interesting observation - at least for those few who read Communio -

Second, the authors' account of marriage depends upon their understanding of the physical body that is not opposed to evangelical theology, but is certainly not a mainstream view. As they put it, "The body is a real part of the person, not just his costume, vehicle, or property." Yet as adults, we are naturally incomplete "with respect to one biological function: sexual reproduction." For this reason, inasmuch as marriage is a comprehensive union, it is "oriented toward children."


The nature of this "real bodily union" has drawn the most attention from their respondents—and evangelicals would do well to attend to it as well. Whatever our concerns about natural law in general, the philosophers' argument about marriage depends upon the fact that the body is a "real part of the person," which cuts against many evangelical understandings of the body and its relationship to the soul. The argument itself isn't new—they draw upon George's work with Patrick Lee in Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics—but the way they unpack it in relationship to marriage and sexual arrangements deserves careful consideration, especially given the reaction in the past decade against forms of "dualism" that value the soul over the body.

This a theme of a lot of articles in Communio, but then it is also a theme of Aquinas for whom, pace Aristotle, we are always embodied spiritual beings who are incomplete without a body, who are, in fact, not "us" without a body, and for Pope Benedict XVI, for whom a love that omitted eros is a human impossibility.

So, why can't a father marry his daughter, I mean, if they really love each other?

John Zmirak enjoys a moment of schadenfreude:

The event that's tempting me to make like Tertullian and pop myself some popcorn while I watch the souls in hell is the very public scandal of Columbia professor (and Huffington Post blogger) David Epstein. First, let me lay out why I'm inclined to detest the man: He is the icon of leftist academic self-righteousness, the kind of Ivy League teacher who sneers at the Bible readers, homeschoolers, gun owners, and pro-lifers who keep this country livable. And he does so in the language of high moral dudgeon. Witness his response when Sarah Palin -- who's certainly flawed, and I've criticized her myself -- decided to resign as Alaska governor: "Palin has done what weak, self-centered people do when the going gets tough -- they quit and blame someone else." (Hat tip to Robert Stacy McCain.) Epstein elsewhere accused conservatives of "taking hypocrisy in their personal lives to new levels of self-indulgent weirdness."


This week, we have learned just a little of what Professor Epstein means by "self-indulgent weirdness," as news came out that Epstein has for three years been having an affair with his own daughter -- his biological daughter, whom he raised himself. The young woman's mother is also a professor at Columbia. I am relieved to report that she is not standing by her man.

Now facing a jail term for his actions, Epstein hired an attorney who made the kind of arguments we should by now realize are obvious: The young woman was over 18, she wasn't coerced, so what's the harm? What right does the state have to interfere? As Epstein's lawyer told the Huffington Post, "What goes on between consenting adults in private should not be legislated. That is not the proper domain of our law . . . . If we assume for a moment that both parties are consenting, then why are we prosecuting this?"

Swiss activists agree: There's a law under consideration in that once-sane country decriminalizing incestuous relations among adults: brothers and sisters, and parents and children. Such laws are already on the books in China, France, Israel, the Ivory Coast, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and Turkey, according to ABCNews.com.

This side of the ocean, secular news sources are actually connecting the dots between this case and the 2003 Supreme Court decision striking down Texas's (long unenforced) sodomy laws. Family law expert Joanna Grossman told ABCNews.com that the decision in Lawrence v. Texas meant that states cannot prohibit "private, consensual, sexual or intimate conduct that does not involve minors or coercion." I'm glad they're making the connection, because when conservatives say things like that, they're dismissed as alarmist cranks. Sen. Rick Santorum, whose defense of natural law I discussed last week, said ruefully during his talk at the Harvard Club that he was one of the few Republicans in Congress who warned where the Lawrence decision might lead: "I said that this ruling made gay marriage inevitable, and I caught a lot of heat for that. Sometimes you hate to find out that you were right."

Even Santorum wasn't alarmist enough to see legalized incest on the horizon, but Epstein's attorney is right: If our Constitution (as reshaped in the warm hands of activist judges) has morphed into a document that protects every form of private, consensual activities among adults, there is literally no basis for punishing a man like Epstein. Squirming frantically, psychologists consulted on this story are trying to find some way to assert that every form of incest, even among adults, is "inherently coercive" because of the lingering "power differential" between, say, a father and a daughter. Their arguments won't prevail. You can't infantilize an adult that way; grown children defy their parents all the time and in all sorts of ways. I distinctly remember fighting with my elderly mother over the remote control, trying my best to turn off The Jerry Springer Show, to which she was addicted. I'm confident I could have fought her off, if things had gotten even weirder . . .

Zmirak also added this observation about the "slippery slope" of natural law theory:

My old friend Br. Andre Marie was at the same event and heard Professor Hadley Arkes' brilliant discourse on natural law. He went up to Arkes -- a recent convert from Judaism -- and asked him about the connection between natural law and revelation: "'Do you know anyone who defends the natural law, who is not a Catholic?' His response was 'Yes . . . but they eventually become Catholics.'" That led Brother Andre to investigate what the Church teaches about this linkage, and he found in St. Thomas Aquinas a perceptive observation: While the general outlines of natural law are clear to the honest thinker, original sin tends to make us fuzzy about the details: "The natural law can be blotted out from the human heart, either by evil persuasions, just as in speculative matters errors occur in respect of necessary conclusions; or by vicious customs and corrupt habits, as among some men, theft, and even unnatural vices, as the Apostle states (Romans 1), were not esteemed sinful." Because of our weakness and sinfulness, we really do need the Church to clarify and sometimes to defend (almost alone) the contents of natural law. God gives us the Church's teaching authority as an act of mercy to help us in our weakness -- since not all men are philosophers, and not all philosophers are honest.

Chimp Warfare.

Scientists have observed bands of Chimpanzees using raid and ambush techniques similar to those used by foraging cultures.

There have been several books that have demolished the "peaceful savage" model, which argues that it was civilization - or religion if you are a nutcase New Atheist - that led to war.  A book on the subject that I recommend is "Warfare before Civilization" by Lawrence Keeley.  Keeley's book is interesting for pointing out how much self-delusion anthropologists must engage in to to identify obvious defensive structures - such as thick walls - as mysterious cultic artifacts of no particular pragmatic consideration.  Keeley also explains how one community can devastate another community over the long term by periodically raiding and murdering isolated indviduals of the other community, which it seems is a strategy that Chimpanzees engage in.

Via Mark Shea.

Tip of the iceberg

From the Central Valley Business Times - Straw buyer sentenced in mortgage fraud case:

Manpreet Singh, 25, of Stockton has been sentenced to six months of home detention and five years’ probation for mail fraud for her part in a mortgage fraud scheme, according to Acting U.S. Attorney Lawrence Brown.

She has also been ordered to pay $1,000 a month in restitution to the victim of her mortgage fraud scam, as well as paying $163,500 in restitution.

Ms. Singh pleaded guilty on March 31, 2008.

Ms. Singh purchased two homes as a “straw buyer” for Ifthikar Ahmad, a co-defendant in the case, federal prosecutors say.

Straw buyers are loan applicants who buy homes on behalf of others with no intention of actually occupying the property they are purchasing. In exchange for the use of their name and credit information, straw buyers are often compensated.

In this case, Ms. Singh received $15,000 from Mr. Ahmad for her role in signing falsified loan documents, court documents show.

In the first transaction, Ms. Singh stated that she earned more than $5,500 per month and in the second, she stated that she earned $8,500. In truth, Ms. Singh worked at Alfalfa’s Pizza in Stockton and made approximately $8 an hour.

As a result of her fraudulent transactions, the homes purchased with Ms. Singh as the straw buyer were foreclosed on, causing a loss to the lender of $163,500, prosecutors say.

How crafty of Singh and Ahmad to pull the wool over the eyes of the bank with such a well-honed scheme of lying about their income. And, of course, the banks did nothing to verify that what they were told was true.

Multiply this by a million and the economy of Iceland implodes.

But it's not like public virtue matters.

"Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women."

Spengler on Iranian whores and why Iran is passing as a nation.

Fascinating.

Here's Spengler's latest contrarian essay, which describes why a nuclear armed Iran is so very dangerous:

Their efforts to isolate Iran from the cultural degradation of the American "great Satan" have produced social pathologies worse than those in any Western country. With oil at barely one-fifth of its 2008 peak price, they will run out of money some time in late 2009 or early 2010. Game theory would predict that Iran's leaders will gamble on a strategic long shot. That is not a comforting thought for Iran's neighbors.

Two indicators of Iranian morale are worth citing.

First, prostitution has become a career of choice among educated Iranian women. On February 3, the Austrian daily Der Standard published the results of two investigations conducted by the Tehran police, suppressed by the Iranian media. [1]

"More than 90% of Tehran's prostitutes have passed the university entrance exam, according to the results of one study, and more than 30% of them are registered at a university or studying," reports Der Standard. "The study was assigned to the Tehran Police Department and the Ministry of Health, and when the results were tabulated in early January no local newspaper dared to so much as mention them."

The Austrian newspaper added, "Eighty percent of the Tehran sex workers maintained that they pursue this career voluntarily and temporarily. The educated ones are waiting for better jobs. Those with university qualifications intend to study later, and the ones who already are registered at university mention the high tuition [fees] as their motive for prostitution ... they are content with their occupation and do not consider it a sin according to Islamic law."

There is an extensive trade in poor Iranian women who are trafficked to the Gulf states in huge numbers, as well as to Europe and Japan. "A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women," I wrote in a 2006 study of Iranian prostitution, Jihads and whores.

Prostitution as a response to poverty and abuse is one thing, but the results of this new study reflect something quite different. The educated women of Tehran choose prostitution in pursuit of upward mobility, as a way of sharing in the oil-based potlatch that made Tehran the world's hottest real estate market during 2006 and 2007.

A country is beaten when it sells its women, but it is damned when its women sell themselves. The popular image of the Iranian sex trade portrays tearful teenagers abused and cast out by impoverished parents. Such victims doubtless abound, but the majority of Tehran's prostitutes are educated women seeking affluence.

Only in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of communism in 1990 did educated women choose prostitution on a comparable scale, but under very different circumstances. Russians went hungry during the early 1990s as the Soviet economy dissolved and the currency collapsed. Today's Iranians suffer from shortages, but the data suggest that Tehran's prostitutes are not so much pushed into the trade by poverty as pulled into it by wealth.

A year ago I observed that prices for Tehran luxury apartments exceeded those in Paris, as Iran's kleptocracy distributed the oil windfall to tens of thousands of hangers-on of the revolution. $35 billion went missing from state oil funds, opposition newspapers charged at the time. Corruption evidently has made whores of Tehran's educated women. (Please see Worst of times for Iran, June 24, 2008.)

But, hey, public virtue doesn't matter that much, does it?

Pay your debts, keep your word...

and you might be an "idiot."

We live in a world where humble virtues like individual responsibility have been sneered at for so long and now we're finding out that the virtue of responsibility makes a collective difference. Apparently, we are not immune from the Natural Law and inevitably the Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter returns.

As the Prophet Rudyard foresaw:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

...............................


In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

If only gays could marry....

...uhm... never mind.

Sean P. Daily reports:

Craig Faunch and Ian Wathey were one of the first homosexual couples in the country to be officially approved as foster parents. They looked after 18 children in only 15 months. With no previous convictions, they came across as respectable men who simply wanted to help boys with a variety of problems.

In reality, they were paedophiles, who repeatedly abused the children in their care. Between them, the couple abused four boys aged between eight and 14.

According to the story, social workers knew about it but did nothing for fear of being branded "homophobic." Nice.

Sean's post title is an homage to Mark Shea's "Two phases of history: First, what could it hurt? Second, how were we supposed to know?

(Apologies to Sean's commenter "Trubador".)

In the merry land of whatever-you-say-three-times-is-true, you can fall from the top of a skyscraper and land on your feet and pretty unicorns eat rainbows and poop butterflies....

...you can sensibly have a news article report that a "man" became a "woman" "but kept his vagina."

Here is the full context:

An Oregon man who used to be a woman says he is pregnant with a baby girl.

Thomas Beatie's first-person story appears in a recent issue of The Advocate, a Los Angeles-based newsmagazine for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people.

According to the story, Thomas was born a woman but decided to become a transgender male and legally changed his sex to male. He had his breasts surgically removed and started bimonthly testosterone injections, but kept his vagina.

Now identifying as male, Thomas legally married Nancy, the story says. The pair wanted a biological baby but Nancy was unable to carry a child. So they decided Thomas would.

"How does it feel to be a pregnant man?" Thomas writes in the article. "Incredible. Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant. To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child . . . I will be my daughter's father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family."

Before getting pregnant he stopped injecting testosterone, and his body "regulated itself after about four months," he writes in The Advocate.

In the real world, however, a member of the human species that can get pregnant is called a "woman."

Such a person is called a "woman" even if when that person is no longer able to get pregnant.

Hence, a woman who surgically mutilates herself because of a psychological disorder that makes her want to pass as a man is still gramatically referred to as "her" or "she", notwithstanding how many times she says otherwise.

[Via Mark Shea.]

Update:

Wesley Smith's take on the subject:

They will be a family, but he is not really a man. She is a woman, biologically. That's why she is capable of having a baby. So, the facts are that a woman, who identifies as a man, is having a baby. That's not the same thing at all as a man having a baby. We can redefine all we want, we can say that legally she is a he, but that doesn't change biology. A woman is having a baby and that is not remarkable at all.

The Right of Revolution.

Mass unrest in China over China's brutal policy of forced abortions.

Odd how that human rights issue never seems to get real attention.