Category: Attitude

Doubling down on dumb

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg has written another liberal-baiting book, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. The American Conservative’s Scott Galupo reviewed it a few weeks ago and revisited it today.

What I get from today’s piece is a reminder that movement conservatism is no less riddled with clichés than is liberalism.

I can’t tell a heckuva lot of difference between Republican and Democrat policies day-to-day, political rhetoric aside, on matters of business. Both are beholden to Wall Street. Neither has anything worthwhile to say about the bizarre and ominous development of “finance” ceasing to be a utility for real industry and having become a very, very lucrative (however temporarily) and major industry in it own right.

This fabulous industry brings us wonders like this, in connection with which which Scott McConnell comments:

I remember a time when financiers who talked about themselves in such language  would have been laughed at — yes, even in the Hamptons. There was a Wall Street, and people who worked there made good money.  But Americans’ admiration went to the people who actually created tangible goods or developed innovative products. Talent, drive, dedication were admired, and there  was no big brief for a leveling equality. No one thought that Henry Ford (before my time, actually) contributed no more to the common good than the average assembly line  worker. But neither did anyone believe in the absurdity that financiers –the lubricants perhaps of a successful economy–were synonymous with the engine itself.

When it comes to economics, in short, the Republicans are doubling down on dumb, at least rhetorically. I have to consider the possibility that they mean it, unlikely as that is in politics.

Understand: from religious freedom to liberal groin pieties (Obama’s support for abortion, gay marriage and his refusal even to defend DOMA being notable) and probably several less important things, I’ve got huge issues with Obama. It is unlikely that the Republicans could disgust me enough into voting for him.

But don’t try to sell me the “voting for anyone but Romney is voting for Obama” crap. I didn’t vote for him in the primary and you can’t foist him on me now and tell me I’ve got to vote for him. Just watch me.

Or rather (the secret ballot not yet having been abolished by some Orwellian “Patriot Act”) just guess how I’ve voted as I leave the polls, green at the gills at the nauseating choice between the two top dogs.

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Church history (according to the Mormons)

Thanks to fellow-Orthodox blogger John, I discovered this Mormon version of Church history, for which I explicitly claim “fair use” and provide the obligatory link to the original.

The basic storyline is this: “Regardless of the valiant efforts of Christ’s apostles and their faithful followers, the original church that Christ restored began to fade away.” Then along came Joseph Smith. Woohoo. (Italics are in the original. My comments are not italicized.) Continue reading “Church history (according to the Mormons)” →

Breaching the Wall

John Garvey, president of the Catholic University of America, a former dean of Boston College Law School and co-author of “Religion and the Constitution,” had an excellent op-ed at the Washington Post Friday: For the government, what counts as Catholic?

He likens the HHS employer mandate for contraception, sterilization and abortifacient coverage to “compelling Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag, or Quakers to fight, or Jews to eat pork.” But then he shifts to separation of church and state.

Or so he says he’s shifting. I’m not convinced that freedom from compulsion to act against one’s faith is really a different topic than separation of Church and state, but let’s move on.

What idiot ever started the idea that only the Church can breach the “wall of separation”? Au contraire, mon frère. As a matter of law, only the government can breach it. Maybe the Church can do things that are provocatively political, or can violate the “spirit” of separation, but the limits of the Constitution are, fer cryin’ out loud, limits on government. The Constitution is, first and foremost, so much the charter of our federal system of  government that there was considerable debate about the need for a Bill of Rights to define government’s relationship to individuals and what we today call “mediating structures.”

But the current Administration is tacitly pushing the statist spin on separation again and again and again.

There’s an analogy to the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, where not engaging in commerce by not buying insurance is re-cast as commerce within the power of Congress to regulate. Here, it’s rather the opposite: activities that everyone has always thought religious (not that atheists can’t do the same things, of course) are insufficiently religious for exemption from government’s heavy hand.

This invasive approach to religious institutions is, I am afraid, becoming all too common. Recently, in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission , the Supreme Court considered whether the government could regulate the firing of a religion teacher. The teacher, who had filed a disability claim, was fired for suing the Lutheran grade school rather than settling her claim out of court. The commission and the solicitor general argued that the government need not give any special deference to employee relations at religious organizations. A unanimous court found this view “remarkable” and the government’s action unconstitutional.

In two other recent cases, the National Labor Relations Board’s regional directors have held that Manhattan College in Riverdale, N.Y., and St. Xavier University in Chicago are not Catholic schools for purposes of exemption from the National Labor Relations Act, which regulates collective bargaining. The cases stressed that the colleges do not require students to attend Mass and do not engage in “indoctrination” or “proselytizing.” Rather, they observe norms of academic freedom. They also hire non-Catholic faculty, and their boards of trustees are dominated by lay people.

Notice the similarity to HHS’s view of what counts as Catholic. A “real” Catholic college would be inward-looking. It would inculcate religious values and censor contrary views. It would hire Catholics and not other people. Its board would be dominated by clergy. It would admit Catholic students but not others.

There is a pattern to these cases. The government has been eager to regulate the behavior of churches in ways more to its liking. It does this by defining religion down, so that only the most rigid and separatist groups are exempt. The rest are, for constitutional purposes, no different from the Jaycees or the Elks Club. We might say that the wall of separation is intact, but the government has made it so small that it encloses nothing more than a flower bed.

Thank you, President Garvey.

I’m starting to entertain the thought that a litmus test for bad guys versus good guys is that the former want to limit religion by arbitrary state redefinition, the latter to limit government to the terms of the Constitution.

I’ve been concerned with religious freedom pretty keenly since well before I set foot in law school, and I know that this issue is one where, whatever his other defects, Romney stands in stark contrast to Obama and his administration. “We’re all Catholics now.”

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G.K. Chesterton on Biblicism

Catholic writer/blogger Mark Shea today delivered up this Chestertonian gem, in response to a question about the Dan Brown-ish sort of “lost gospels” nonsense, and how Evangelicals who get a lot of book larnin’ are apt to throw over the Bible, as has pop scholar Bart Ehrsman:

Every great heretic had always exhibit three remarkable characteristics in combination. First, he picked out some mystical idea from the Church’s bundle or balance of mystical ideas. Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea. With a queer uncanny innocence, he seems always to have taken this one thing for granted. He assumed it to be unassailable, even when he was using it to assail all sorts of similar things. The most popular and obvious example is the Bible. To an impartial pagan or sceptical observer, it must always seem the strangest story in the world; that men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes inscribed “Psalms” or “Gospels”; and (instead of throwing them on the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking all the other arrangements. If the sacred high altar was all wrong, why were the secondary sacred documents necessarily all right? If the priest had faked his Sacraments, why could he not have faked his Scriptures? Yet it was long before it even occurred to those who brandished this one piece of Church furniture to break up all the other Church furniture that anybody could be so profane as to examine this one fragment of furniture itself. People were quite surprised, and in some parts of the world are still surprised, that anybody should dare to do so.

This is one of many issues on which Catholic and Orthodox traditions (which were unified for the first millennium) are in substantial agreement. We would differ in emphasis if not in substance from Shea’s oversimplified version how the canon of Scripture came to be the canon (from which Protestant Bibles omit a number of books, by the way), but we agree on this:

  • The early Church had no canon other that the Old Testament, with lots of evidence that the Septuagint was favored.
  • The early Church had a vital Christianity before the first book of the New Testament had been written.
  • Gnosticism beset the Church early on, and many gnostic pseudo-Christian documents were written.
  • The Church rejected those writings in practice and eventually in precept.

I’m not foolish enough to try to top Chesterton’s colorful fable of how today’s “conservative Evangelicals” treat the Church which gave them the Bible they misuse to abuse the Church.

“To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant.”

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Has the Sexual Revolution been good for women?

Sometimes I write to see what I think. I’m pretty sure I know what I think – or at least what my gut tells me – on the subject at hand (Has the Sexual Revolution been good for women?), but four pieces in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal provide a convenient way to revisit the issue. I apologize if there’s a paywall in front of the pieces I discuss, but it’s not to late to run off to Starbuck or Barnes & Noble (nice local businesses, eh?) to score a dead tree version. Continue reading “Has the Sexual Revolution been good for women?” →

The Real HHS Issues: A Personal Account

I’m quite frustrated at the public discussion of the HHS mandate: that all employers, with a few narrow exceptions, if they offer health insurance to employees at all, provide coverage for abortifacients Plan B and Ella (and, yes, contraceptives and sterilization), with no deductible or copay.

I’m frustrated in part because of the avoidance not only of what I consider the “real issue,” but of anything close to the real issue. Today’s newspaper, for crying out loud, was full of reactions to Rush Limbaugh’s latest, and possible most-odious-ever, remarks. What does that have to do with anything? We’re distracting ourselves to death.

I’m frustrated, too, because the simple facts of the mandate are so little covered that I can only hope that my understanding, described above, is accurate. (Yes, you might want to put “contraception” first, but I acknowledge that it’s there.)

So I’m going to take a shot at discussing the real issues. I don’t claim this is comprehensive. An integrated law that revolutionizes one-sixth of the national economy is much bigger than this blogger.

1. Abortion

First, the top issue, for me as an employer, is the coverage of abortifacients without deductible or copay. I’d never qualify for any likely religious exemption. So I’m going to find myself, soon, in a position where I must drop employee health insurance or prepay quite directly for something that I strongly object to – not as a violation of cultic spiritual taboos by employees who aren’t part of the cultus, but as public policy for the common good. (There’s a glimmer of hope, though, for me as an employer: “The requirements to cover recommended preventive services without any cost-sharing do not apply to grandfathered health plans.” I’m not sure if our plan qualifies as “grandfathered,” and what tweaks might end that qualification.)

Group insurance plans without that coverage will not be available (save possibly through some guerilla “insurers” running scams through church bulletins).

I don’t even think I’d balk so much if all FDA-approved prescriptions were covered subject to a deductible. We have provided a high-deductible plan to our employees, and they can fund Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) for a tax-deductible pot from which to pay routine medical expenses. I’m a couple of steps removed from approval of abortifacients under this plan. But that’s coming to an end.

This is a very big deal for me. In Catholic Social Thought (by which I am consciously informed although I’m not Roman Catholic), HHS seems to be requiring “material cooperation” from me in an intrinsic evil. I’m still working through the moral ramifications, with help from essays like this.

2. Restricting “Religion”

Second, I’m sympathetic to the argument that any law that requires a religious exemption for political viability is too intrusive almost by definition. Obviously, from what precedes, I’m feeling that intrusion.

But putting that aside, what reliable meaning does “religious freedom” have, for purposes of a religious exemption, if the government arbitrarily decides what qualifies as “religious”?

[F]or purposes of this policy, a religious employer is one that:

(1) Has the inculcation of religious values as its purpose;
(2) primarily employs persons who share its religious tenets;
(3) primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets; and
(4) is a non-profit organization under section 6033(a)(1) and section 6033(a)(3)(A)(i) or (iii) of the Code.

Section 6033(a)(3)(A)(i) and (iii) refer to churches, their integrated auxiliaries, and conventions or associations of churches, as well as to the exclusively religious activities of any religious order.

So much for Catholic Charities, which

(1) Has service to the poor as its purpose;
(2) employs people who share its purpose, regardless of their religious tenets;
(3) serves anyone who’s poor and probably serves anyone plausibly pretending to be poor.

The Catholic Church, though, is merely the most prominent. Many other Churches have a similar capacious view of their mission.

In a regime of strict separation of Church and state, or anything close to it, Church gets smaller as state gets bigger, all else being equal. HHS’s stingy definition of religion could serve as Exhibit A.

On the mandate’s application to Catholic Charities and similar entities, I think the Obama administration is going to get another 9-0 Supreme Court smackdown, just as it did in its statist position in the Hosanna Tabor case.

Even if they don’t get smacked down, it’s hard for me to avoid the feeling that the Administration consciously set out to bring religious individuals and institutions to heel, as part of an odious statist scheme. I think Obama may consciously be playing a “long game,” driving the result toward single payer/socialized medicine/national health insurance.

I have the precedents of Eleazar and St. Polycarp to inspire not coming to heel.

3. The Mandate Isn’t About Insurance

I alluded to the high-deductible plan my employees get. It took the extreme inflation in health insurance costs to wake us up that we had in effect been providing not insurance, but prepayment of routine expenses subject to a pretty nominal deductible – maybe $500 per year (a figure sensible people routinely exceed for preventive maintenance of the human body). We got out close to the cutting edge of health care reform by putting our employees back in touch with the costs of both their insurance and the routine care they get.

John H. Cochrane in The Real Problem With The Birth-Control Mandate spells out many of the levels on which the mandate is perverse as a supposed part of an Affordable Care Act, since it will fuel inflation in health costs.

I put “insurance” in quotes for a reason. Insurance is supposed to mean a contract, by which a company pays for large, unanticipated expenses in return for a premium: expenses like your house burning down, your car getting stolen or a big medical bill.
Insurance is a bad idea for small, regular and predictable expenses. There are good reasons that your car insurance company doesn’t add $100 per year to your premium and then cover oil changes, and that your health insurance doesn’t charge $50 more per year and cover toothpaste. You’d have to fill out mountains of paperwork, the oil-change and toothpaste markets would become much less competitive, and you’d end up spending more.

It’s well worth reading if you’d like to start thinking outside the box of employer-provided health insurance.

But we lost that battle politically. HHS didn’t invent no-deductible, no copay preventive care. That’s in the law.

Section 2713 of the PHS Act, as added by the Affordable Care Act and incorporated under section 715(a)(1) of ERISA and section 9815(a)(1) of the Code, specifies that a group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage provide benefits for and prohibit the imposition of cost-sharing with respect to:

Evidence-based items or services that have in effect arating of A or B in the current recommendations of the United States Preventive Services Task Force (Task Force) with respect to the individual involved.

…

With respect to women, preventive care and screening provided for in comprehensive guidelines supported by HRSA (not otherwise addressed by the recommendations of the Task Force), which will be commonly known as HRSA’s Women’s Preventive Services: Required Health Plan Coverage Guidelines.

4. Gratuitous Coverage of Controversial Items

What Obama’s team seems to have added to the law, though, is a stacked-deck process to ensure inclusion of contraception, early chemical abortions and self-mutilating sterilization as “preventive health services.”

The law obviously left some details up to a “task force” and to “HRSA” (Health Resources and Services Administration). And those entities, presumably with the connivance of the Administration, were arguably quite biased.

So what? Elections have consequences, right? Councils and Task Forces and bureaucracies under Republicans aren’t straight up the middle either, right?

Yeah, but much of the controversy over the Affordable Care Act involved “life issues” (remember the “Death Panel” même?), and Obama essentially promised us that the ACA wasn’t going to push an abortion or euthanasia agenda.

HHS could have passed on inclusion of “contraceptives” whose operation prevents, or disrupts, implantation of a nascent human life.

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On Items 2 and 4 especially, I have to fault the Obama Administration, toward which I have been pretty restrained in my criticisms over the past 3 years. But as in the Hosanna Tabor case, Obama has shown himself to be a statist, glad to let the state try to usher in the eschaton and to shove the Church aside in the process. He may be a Christian of sorts – of that I have no real doubt – but he’s a Caesaropapist. That is an automatic disqualifier for me. It is hard to imagine a field of opponents to Obama whose shortcomings would be worse that that, and so, once again, I can’t imagine voting for re-election of our historic first “African-American” President.

On Item 3, I can only say it’s obvious that we’re not yet serious about actual reform that will contain costs, as we’re deeply unserious about almost every other aspect of our unnatural and doomed economy.

And on that happy note, I’m through.

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