Friday, June 12, 2009
Patching up the seamless garment
With the appointment of Alexia Kelley, until now executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG) to a Department of Health and Human Services headed by the shameless
Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama Administration is not merely paying off prominent Catholic supporters. It is seeking systematically to co-opt those Catholics who
still buy into the "seamless-garment" approach to social issues named as such, and pioneered, by the late, widely loved Joseph Cardinal Bernardin
of...ahem, Chicago. For the moment it's working politically; but intellectually, there has been regress not progress among Catholics.
Since the late 1990s, the US bishops have on the whole been abandoning the seamless-garment approach. With increasing clarity, they have insisted on assigning greater weight to combating certain practices called "intrinsic evils" by the Magisterium, such as abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage, than on promoting certain social goods, such as universal health care and humane immigration policy, which reasonable Catholics can differ about how and how much to promote. That shift of emphasis is only logical given the clear content of Church teaching. But President Obama's having won the election with almost 54% of the Catholic vote has re-energized Catholic progressives to patch up a seamless garment that's become rather tattered. If only to vary my intellectual exercise routine, I had been hoping to hear fresh arguments from them. But the patching process exhibits precisely the same shoddy reasoning so long characteristic of the Catholic left. Herein I shall discuss two examples.
The first is the performance of Pepperdine University law professor Douglas Kmiec, a prominent Obama supporter, at a recent debate with Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and founder of the American Principles Project. (You can watch the Windows Media video here; at about an hour and twenty minutes, it's long for those who don't enjoy this sort of thing, and too short for those who do.) For a Catholic intellectual who once sported conservative credentials, Kmiec's arguments are remarkably weak. The following account by attendee Michael J. New, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama and a visiting fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, sums up the debate accurately: ....
Continued, click here!
