Culture & Philosophy

Do the right thing, and they will follow you in zealous allegiance

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Quote of the Day for Wednesday, September 5th, 2012:

Martin Cothran, in a post from Catholic Lane on the reading habits (or lack thereof) of modern boys:

Boys, though they cannot articulate it, can usually see right through the modern psychobabble. In fact, say what you will about the Harry Potter books (and plenty has been said), they at least betray a consciousness of the old adventure ideal, and are light on the psychological reflexiveness—at least in the early books in the series, although I am told (I have not read them) that the later books portray a more effeminate Harry.

We have the mistaken impression that it was traditional children’s literature that was preachy. This is not only untrue, but it is almost the exact opposite of the truth. It is precisely the preachiness of politically correct modern literature that offends their innate sense of honesty and justice—a human instinct that we do our best to educate out of them.

Boys are not interested in getting in touch with themselves, and it is particularly off-putting when they are told that it is good for them. The minute the politically correct schoolmarms approach, they head for the woods, where they are free to pick up sticks and pretend they are swords and fight monsters and hunt frogs and swing from trees—anything but to be preached at by people whose sermons consist of high-minded meaninglessness.

Most boys are born cynics and are rightly suspicious of moralistic platitudes. They respect words only to the extent that they see them followed by actions. Tell them (in mere words) what the right thing to do is, and they will look at you suspiciously and walk away. Do the right thing—preferably at the risk of your own person or reputation, and they will follow you in zealous allegiance.

There’s much wisdom in this brief entry concerning the emasculation of boys in our smarmy, therapeutic culture – even if Cothran seems to miss what I believe is the underlying subtext of the vampire genre, which I think is a proxy and symbol for homoeroticism. Modernity seems hell-bent on sucking the boyness out of children, and it’s nice to see the boys defended. He provides a suggested reading list for boys, which parents of boys will find very useful.

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Media & Culture

The MSM has embarrassed itself to a near-fatal degree

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Quote of the Day for Friday, August 31st, 2012:

Who better than J. E. Dyer to inspire me to rekindle my moribund blog, in a blog post entitled Are the American voters idiots?, which ultimately tackles several of my favorite hobby horses:

There were so many reasons to know in advance that Obama would be a poor president.  Yet many of the voters were taken in by the media hype surrounding Obama.  The president’s associations and recorded statements were played down.  The record was there for a number of investigative authors to find, from Michelle Malkin to Stanley Kurtz and Aaron Klein.  But the mainstream media presented a very selective picture of the Democratic candidate.

The MSM, in fact, has embarrassed itself to a near-fatal degree with its remarkable coverage of the Obama administration, whether it is amplifying the cries of “racism!” that erupt whenever there is criticism of the president, or credulously reporting whatever the administration puts out, word for word, as if there is no previous record or any set of facts to be counter-checked.  (The latter pattern is especially strong when it comes to reporting about defense and national security.  Reporters have regularly retailed administration talking points about the unprecedented “shows of strength” the Obama administration is making, when a little research would reveal that the US had already been doing whatever the “unprecedented” thing is, for 5, 20, or even – in the case of North and South Korea – 60 years.)

There has been a tremendous growth in vague, elliptical, and/or tendentious narration of what’s going on in the nation and the world.  The people can be pardoned for being tired and confused.

But the inability to distinguish fantasy-news and talking points from reality is a product of the US education system.  That system has taken millions of people with plenty of native smarts and indoctrinated them with a set of ideological trigger-concepts, all while declining to teach them to think critically.  Developing judgment through critical thinking is one of the hallmarks of adulthood, and the US education system has been making that harder for Americans, rather than fostering their abilities.

I have this lingering sense, which I honestly suspect is nothing but delusion, that the producers of mainstream “news” product really are making themselves progressively (!) more and more irrelevant by alienating their audiences with increasingly transparent cultivated stupidity, and un-reflexive progressive bias and partisanship. I hope it’s not just the projection of wishful thinking on my part. And although I agree with her assessment of the typical results of the US education system, I think the actual contributions of the schools to those results might entail a smaller and more collaborative role than Dyer seems to be suggesting. The entertainment industry plays no small part, independently of the schools, as does the overall entitlement ethic of society.

Dyer’s article gets to that in its own way later on, where she speaks critically of “the modern American pathology-network” of dependencies, addictions, disorders, and despair. She remains confident in the redeeming value of the free exchange of ideas in the public square, though the history of progressives and other leftists in power does not fill me with the same confidence that the square will remain open for dissent indefinitely.

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Learning

Mathematics is used as a hoop, a badge, a totem

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Quote of the Day for Sunday, July 29th, 2012:

Andrew Hacker, in today’s New York Times, asks: Is Algebra Necessary?

Peter Braunfeld of the University of Illinois tells his students, “Our civilization would collapse without mathematics.” He’s absolutely right.

Algebraic algorithms underpin animated movies, investment strategies and airline ticket prices. And we need people to understand how those things work and to advance our frontiers.

Quantitative literacy clearly is useful in weighing all manner of public policies, from the Affordable Care Act, to the costs and benefits of environmental regulation, to the impact of climate change. Being able to detect and identify ideology at work behind the numbers is of obvious use. Ours is fast becoming a statistical age, which raises the bar for informed citizenship. What is needed is not textbook formulas but greater understanding of where various numbers come from, and what they actually convey.

What of the claim that mathematics sharpens our minds and makes us more intellectually adept as individuals and a citizen body? It’s true that mathematics requires mental exertion. But there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x² + y²)² = (x² – y²)² + (2xy)² leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis.

Many of those who struggled through a traditional math regimen feel that doing so annealed their character. This may or may not speak to the fact that institutions and occupations often install prerequisites just to look rigorous — hardly a rational justification for maintaining so many mathematics mandates. Certification programs for veterinary technicians require algebra, although none of the graduates I’ve met have ever used it in diagnosing or treating their patients. Medical schools like Harvard and Johns Hopkins demand calculus of all their applicants, even if it doesn’t figure in the clinical curriculum, let alone in subsequent practice. Mathematics is used as a hoop, a badge, a totem to impress outsiders and elevate a profession’s status.

It’s not hard to understand why Caltech and M.I.T. want everyone to be proficient in mathematics. But it’s not easy to see why potential poets and philosophers face a lofty mathematics bar. Demanding algebra across the board actually skews a student body, not necessarily for the better.

math1Interesting essay, and at first blush I’m inclined to agree with the author that advanced math requirements in schools sets an artificial barrier to success that ultimately does more harm than good, because of the effects on otherwise-skilled learners who end up being alienating from success in the broader educational enterprise – though I wouldn’t call basic algebra and geometry advanced math. I also agree that advanced math skills are of little to no use in most career vocations, including most professional vocations (though I doubt many philosophers, unlike poets, would see such skills as extrinsic to their craft). math2In fact, I’m inclined to think that the modern emphasis on math and science in education is a large part of the problem with contemporary education, and not part of its solution. And Hacker gets the difference between education and training, sees that advanced math skills acquisition is really more the latter than the former, and laments the lack of truly educational components in the typical math curriculum.

But Hacker’s view is too utilitarian for me; too focused on the value of advanced mathematical training for job performance or for the works of citizenry. I think there is more intrinsic value in the exercise of intellectual rigor than he seems to want to allow. It seems to me that the real problem is that our approach to credentialing (not our approach to education, per se) creates this albatross, which would be avoidable in a system with a more finely organized and meaningful process for tracking and articulating the abilities and accomplishments of students, whether at secondary or post-secondary levels. A degree system that could identify, on an on-going and not a static basis, student accomplishment levels across a range of potential subject areas would not only be much more useful both personally and socially, but would also allow institutions to establish much more meaningful minimal accomplishment requirements in various disciplines, as well as more sensible degree requirements.

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Politics & Economics

The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched

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Movie Director (e.g. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and Czechoslovakian expatriate Milos Forman had an op-ed in the NY Times last week, using his experiences under communism as a context for criticizing the use of the term “socialist” to describe President Obama:

The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched, telling me what I could and could not do; what I was or was not allowed to say; where I was and was not allowed to go; even who I was and was not. Now, years later, I hear the word “socialist” being tossed around by the likes of Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others. President Obama, they warn, is a socialist. The critics cry, “Obamacare is socialism!” They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It offends me, and cheapens the experience of millions who lived, and continue to live, under brutal forms of socialism.

Mr. Forman relates several anecdotes that paint a picture of just how disordered life was under Soviet domination, and how foreign it was to anything westerners experience as society, and at first blush, his seems like a very reasonable complaint. But when was the last time anyone sober suggested that Obama was trying to directly implement a Soviet-style order? Forman claims that Obama’s critics are “falsely equat[ing] Western European-style socialism … with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism”, but that is an entirely false claim. I think the word “equating”, used in this sense, is one of the two or three stupidest words in modern parlance, but if Obama is being “equated” to anybody, it is to the Western European socialists whom Forman himself identifies by that very term! But he’s offended. Forman is either confused, or worse. After all, should we wait for him to criticize himself for calling the Western European-style practice “socialism”, when it clearly differs from Soviet-style communism? Does that usage also “cheapen the experience” of those who’ve lived under “brutal forms of socialism”? If we can’t call Obama a socialist without having to answer to the standard of Stalin, why don’t we have to answer to the standard of Stalin when we refer to the socialists whom Obama is actually “equated” to?

It turns out one can legitimately use the term “socialism” to refer to a whole trajectory of political thought and circumstance, some of which take on more brutal form than others. The point Obama’s critics bring to light, much to the chagrin of folks like Forman who don’t want to hear it, is that the, yes, socialist vision of Obama, and his Western comrades, differs from the brutal form of Soviet-style socialism in degree, not in kind – and that owing at least partly to method of implementation (what we could call evolution vs. revolution).

A later paragraph from Forman shows just how little he understands what’s at stake in the current struggle for America’s political soul:

I’m not sure Americans today appreciate quite how predatory socialism was. It was not — as Mr. Obama’s detractors suggest — merely a government so centralized and bloated that it hobbled private enterprise: it was a spoils system that killed off everything, all in the name of “social justice.”

Taking the ObamaCare debacle as a jumping-off point, do Forman, Obama, and the rest of the political left in America really not understand that the opposition to Obamacare is rooted not only in the valid fear of the thinly (if at all) disguised intent to hobble private enterprise through the centralization of government power, but also precisely in  disgust at the spoils system it inevitably creates, threatening to “kill off everything”, all in the name of “social justice”? Indeed, what a perfectly phrased indictment of the entire “tax and spend”, public-sector-centric, entitlements and subsidies mentality of the post-liberal left – whether American or Western Europe: a spoils system that kills off everything in the name of “social justice”. All we need now is a political movement aiming at establishing a classless society – one maybe where the “99%” decry the “inequality” represented by the “1%”, and begin the predative push to have them brought down to “our” level, and their un-equal privileges democratized… Forman, scarred by the crudeness of socialism’s full-bore frontal assault in Eastern Europe, can’t see it growing under his feet in the sophisticated West.

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Politics & Economics

Initial Thoughts on Reactions to Fast & Furious and Obamacare Developments

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Very interesting day in the political world, with the Supreme Court handing down its judgment on Obamacare, and Congress finding Attorney General Holder in contempt of Congress for his evasive shenanigans trying to cover up the background to the “Fast & Furious” program – the first sitting US Attorney General to receive such an honor. How now to prosecute him becomes quite a conundrum, since the department he runs is responsible for such prosecutions, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Neither finding is very surprising to me (the first admittedly more than the next, however). But I find the behavior around the situations fascinating – and pretty much irrational. For starters, the big topic of conversation in the news space and blogosphere has been the Obamacare decision. Now, I’m not surprised by that in the least, and there are even some very good reasons for it (such as the fact that the contempt vote happened late in the afternoon, in contrast to the SCOTUS decision, which was read shortly after 10:00 AM).

Then there are the blatantly partisan motivations to factor in. For example, The Boston Globe’s boston.com site had a Breaking News!!! alert at the top of their page as soon as the Obamacare finding was released, where the story has remained all day – now complete with “analysis” of how “Obama scores win”. Well, not so fast, but I’m getting ahead of myself again. In contrast, news of the Holder verdict took the better part of an hour to show up at all, and was presented as a small, second-rate story, which at this point late in the evening – though still amazingly on the home page – has slid down below not only about a dozen and a half Obamacare story links, but half a dozen links (plus embedded video) concerning the Boston Celtics’ draft picks, and a story about US Rep John F. Tierney’s brother-in-law calling him a liar. At least it still ranks above the MBTA reversing a commuter rail surcharge decision. It’s just hard not to picture cowardly ideological snake oil salesmen (propagandists) laying out the pages of that august publication.

But the truth is that the Holder story is a much bigger deal. Despite the incessant protestations of the professional leftists that the contempt vote was politically or even (may God heal their shriveled little souls) racially motivated, this criminally insane operation Holder is trying to hide the origins of is a very big deal. If this ends up being traced back to Obama himself, which is looking more and more likely every time the stakes are raised and Holder doesn’t buckle, it will be Obama’s Watergate – especially if any evidence surfaces that it was even partially motivated by a cynical desire to advance the left’s agenda of opposition to gun ownership by citizens. A good man is dead, and the entire republic is not stupid enough to get buried under a dump truck full of liberal smokescreens about a “botched operation” that actually went pretty much according to plan, even if the corpses were not supposed to include border patrol officers.

The self-proclaimed Most Transparent Administration Evah is going to have to release those documents they’re hiding to Congress, or risk a serious constitutional crisis. The only real question will be whether they are damaging enough to sink Obama’s presidency (and, needless to say, his reelection chances). Fast & Furious (or Gunwalker, as I first heard it called last year) might turn out to be the one thing schoolchildren know about Barack Obama 100 years from now (or more likely the only thing besides the fact that he was the first black president of the USA, a fact which will eventually be the answer to a trivia question). That would be a shame, because he has done so many other things to advance the cause of statism against the commonweal of human freedom and lawfulness, and those lessons should be learned and not forgotten.

On the contrary, the SCOTUS decision this morning, despite all the public hoopla, was really pretty much a non-event in terms of the ACA act itself. I’m not saying important decisions weren’t made, but everything remains pretty much the way it was yesterday, except that the Feds don’t have the power to punish non-conforming states by withholding Medicaid funds under Obamacare, and Commerce Clause activism has been legally circumscribed in a manner that departs significantly from the court’s trajectory over the past several decades. The first change very well might (further) doom the program fiscally, and the second establishes a much-needed, critical restraint on the cancerous spread of federal statism on the whole. Not insignificant points, either, but hardly fodder for naïve leftist victory dancing, or for anti-leftist tirades against Chief Justice Roberts for his “betrayal” of conservatism (which, of course, completely misses the point of his or SCOTUS’ role as constitutional referee). While I admit that it would have been easier if the whole law were shot down by the court, and that legislative repeal is likely to be difficult and at best partially successful, the fact is that Obama is going to have to carry this “tax” law with him as a political albatross through November, while Mitt Romney can stand on the side and say: “If you want to get rid of Obamacare, you have to get rid of Obama”. Sometimes the easiest answer is not the best.

Time permitting, I will try to take up these SCOTUS decision reactions in more detail later on, because I do find them fascinating, and almost universally wrong-headed in just about every conceivable way.

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Ruminations

On the Satisfaction of Devotion

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A friendly hand fell lightly upon my shoulder one January morning several years ago, as I was spending a few extra minutes before the tabernacle, after finishing Morning Prayer. I was running behind schedule that day, but since at least the beginning of the new school year, my old friend had apparently also been coming to the church quite a bit later than she used to, because it seemed to have been the better part of a year since we’d seen each other. I’d wondered about her now and again over the previous few months – wondering if her health was intact, even wondering if she had passed on to heavenly glory while I’d been away over the summer…

I would go into the church to pray most mornings after dropping my girls off at the neighboring parish school, and my friend used to be there almost every morning, in very early anticipation of the 9:00 daily Mass. Usually, she’d come in after me – into the side room where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved – walking with short but determined steps, to stand before the tabernacle: head bowed, right hand extended above her shoulder to gently touch the face of the ark, paying homage to her Lord. But she would never fail to stop and greet me with a friendly smile and a twinkling eye on her way by – unless she’d gotten there before me, in which case she would wave to me energetically from her pew in the middle of the nave, provided she saw me come in.

My favorite days were those times I was late, and she didn’t notice me come in. On those days, thinking she was all alone in the church, she would sometimes break out into song, lifting her shaky voice loudly to heaven in obvious gratitude for all the love, grace, and kindness she had been blessed to experience in her life.

And I’d think: if only I could pray like that… On those special mornings, I’d always be sure to catch her eye and give her a big smile on my way out.

I was taking my time that morning to read a bit from the writings of Saint Francis de Sales, whose feast day it was. In the second section of Part One of “Introduction the the Devout Life”we read:

[T]he world vilifies holy devotion as much as it can. It pictures devout persons as having discontented, gloomy, sullen faces, and claims that devotion brings on depression and unbearable moods. But just as Joshua and Caleb held both that the promised land was good and beautiful, and that its possession would be sweet and agreeable (c.f. Num 13.33-34), so too the Holy Spirit, by the mouths of all the saints, and our Lord by his own mouth (c.f. Mt 11.28-30), assure us that a devout life is a life that is sweet, happy, and lovable.

In our day, no less than in Francis’ day, the devout are popularly portrayed as somehow missing out on the fun, but the devotion of this old woman clearly reveals in her a deep satisfaction with the substance of her life – warts and all – which is nurtured in her routine, morning after morning. As she turned from the tabernacle that morning to walk back into the nave, my friend stopped to stoop down and pick up a stick match off the floor. Then she spotted another one next to where I was sitting, and she picked that up as well. She muttered some kind of guess as to how they might have ended up on the rug, then she said: “Now, we can’t have the church burning down, can we? We need it.”

I was immediately struck by just how right she was, although earlier in my life, I wouldn’t have really understood her. I recall thinking, when she said that, about the various pockets of local people occupying churches in protest against pastoral decisions to close them, and although I certainly think these folks were missing pretty much the whole point of “church” in their stubborn protestations, I think many of them were also genuinely afraid of losing something precious – not nearly as precious as the salvific fellowship of being joined as members to the Body of Christ, but precious nonetheless. It’s about more than memories. Churches are places where our faith is transformed from the lonely struggle to be personally open to God, into the victorious unity of the communion that actually is, itself, our promised glorious future, in nascent form.

Church is the place where – even more so than anywhere else – we can never be truly alone. Even when we think we’re all alone in a church, warbling at the top of our lungs, there is somebody appreciative standing before the Lord in rapt attention, with a big smile on his face, listening to us. Where else can we experience life like this, in our drive-thru world of screen names and Social Security numbers? Where else can we divest ourselves of the cloud of anonymous networked resources and information streams, to bask in the familiar, quiet strength of the great cloud of witnesses, and the musty, sensual reminders of generations that sacrificed faithfully that we might be here to remember? It’s tempting to consider ourselves too spiritual to really need church buildings, to live like spiritual nomads who can be home wherever our feet take us, but we are a cultivating people at heart, and churches are where Christian community – and a satisfaction known only to shared devotion – is cultivated.

I more or less stopped making that morning drive to the neighboring parish school a couple years ago, when school carpools and other scheduling disruptions changed the substance of the household morning routine. But as my youngest daughter was completing her last days at the school a couple weeks ago, I wanted to circle back and close the loop, so to speak, in grateful acknowledgment of the heritage of prayerful encounter I’d had the privilege to experience before that tabernacle, morning after morning, for more than seven years. And I wanted to see my sweet, happy, and lovable friend one last time, to say good-bye. So I created opportunities to attend a couple of the 9:00 Masses over there in hopes of seeing her, and I made a point to drive over on the final morning of classes to recite Lauds before the tabernacle one last time, . . . but I never saw my friend.

I don’t know where she is now, but I’m sure she’s singing, still. Her devotion was her vow to radiate joy in the world through a life of genuine gratitude for whatever it was that constituted her daily bread, and I am profoundly grateful for the satisfaction of having shared in that joy in some small way, as, each in our own way, we shared that prayer space together before the Lord, day after day.

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Music

Iona Rocks Lowell!

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My wife & I saw Iona in concert yesterday at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium, and the band was just fabulous. We were fortunate enough to have ordered tickets early enough to have landed front-row seats, and were sitting just toward the center of the stage from new piper Martin Nolan. I’ve been following this band for twelve years, and this is the first time I’ve had a chance to see them, as this is apparently the only time they’ve ever been in this area. I hope they come back soon, as the show was simply fabulous. Excepting a brief tuning problem at the beginning of Chi-Rho, they were as flawless as you’ll hear a rock band. At times the mixing was a bit improper, but it turns out the guy doing the mixing was not with the band, but was someone who had never heard them before, and so had no way to anticipate the various dynamics of this remarkably versatile outfit.

sm iona band

The set, as would be expected, was heavy on material from their newest album, Another Realm.

Apart from that, though, there was surprisingly little newer material, with almost all the other songs coming from their highly productive early period of 1990-1995. The band may have gotten a bit more than they bargained for when, after strongly encouraging the audience to dance, they ended up with more than a dozen uninhibited patrons joining them on stage for a finale of reels. It’s not uncommon to see nuts at rock concerts, but the off-the-wall element of this particular crowd seemed amusingly trapped in a spiritual vortex conflating the reckless abandon of a middle-ager’s mosh pit with a kind of quasi-charismatic Christian piety. It was sight to behold, and fortunately nobody was hurt – not even Martin Nolan, who was mildly molested by one dope.

My only regret is not stopping to speak with the band afterwards to thank them. In truth, I owe them a debt of sorts. Just before I began listening to Iona, I had reached a point where I was despairing of being able to continue listening to contemporary music. The Christian music I was aware of was – how can I put this delicately? – aesthetically challenged, saccharine perhaps, maybe even insipid. On the other hand, the music I liked from an aesthetic perspective was increasingly grating on me because of its own insipidity – that of its spiritual ethos: that ubiquitous modern ethos of self-indulgent hedonism, nihilism, and/or smug bourgeois transgressionism. You know, modernism – broadly considered.

Iona bridged that gap for me, and though I still find most contemporary music to be morally and spiritually insipid, and most contemporary Christian music to be cloyingly sentimental and musically banal, Iona has not only exposed me to a whole genre of music that is both artistically and spiritually serious, but they’ve allowed me to ground my encounter of the broader panoply of contemporary music in a context free of the despair and alienation I was experiencing as I reached my forties, which has enabled me to be somewhat more tolerant of the shortcomings of lesser artists, and better able to enjoy them as far as they might warrant it. I guess that means I’m not a complete old fuddy-duddy yet, which might be a good thing.

Ruminations

Chuck Colson: 1931-2012

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We lost a good man today. Read a few parting words from his co-workers on his recent project, The Manhattan Declaration, here – and sign the declaration if you haven’t yet, and if you care about marriage and human civilization (pardon the redundancy).

Dostoyevsky said “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” I would add that you can judge the degree of civilization in a man’s soul by observing how he treats prisoners. With all that Colson did for his God and for his neighbors over the last half of his 80+ years, in my view, his greatest legacy is Prison Fellowship.

“His master said to him, `Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master’.”(Matt 25.21, RSV)
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Culture & Philosophy

Dante Meets the Moralists

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Somehow summoning the wherewithal to ping my poor, neglected blog, and recalling in particular (if vaguely) my next-to-last entry, I implore anyone out there who is regretting not taking the time to study Dante to get on the stick before the moralists of the Order of Perpetual Outrage crush your obviously sadistic fantasies in the name of tolerance. Why?

The Guardian is reporting that the UN-related Italian “human rights” advisory group Gerush92 is calling for Italy’s school system to eliminate Dante’s Divine Comedy from its curricula, claiming that it is “offensive and discriminatory”. Among other unpardonable sins, the epic poem suggests that Islam is heretical. Oh my.

FWIW, this group’s web site ironically defines racism as the “negation of biological and cultural diversity”. Say what? Assuming that phrase is intended to be intelligible, I must ask: what does it mean? I might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it seems to me the only way to “negate biological diversity”, at least as it relates to “race” (a phony construct to begin with), would be through massive miscegenation. Do they really think that would be racist? And how exactly do you go about negating cultural diversity except by suppressing cultural expressions that differ from the spirit of the age? Oh my.

HT: FirstThoughts

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Critical Issues

Forced Abortions & Sterilizations in Massachusetts?

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Occasionally, I read or hear about something so stunning that I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience, watching from a detached vantage point as the world unfurls strangely in front of me. Yesterday afternoon, I had one of those experiences.

I was at work, pausing to check the headlines, weather and traffic, when I saw the surreal headline: “Massachusetts Appeals Court rules that judge was wrong to order mentally ill woman to have an abortion and to then be sterilized”.

Forced abortions and sterilizations in Massachusetts? Granted, the court-ordered violation of this woman – and murder of her baby – were stopped, but it still seems hard to fit these facts into the perception I have of the world I inhabit. This isn’t China, or some other totalitarian state; despite the admittedly growing monstrosity of state hegemony over too many areas of life, America’s still seems like a system worth saving through correction, not overthrowing. Judges don’t really order things like that, right?

I’m not wholly ignorant of the history of these kinds of criminal depravities in American jurisprudence; I know these kinds of judgments were not unheard of during the early heyday of Progressivism, 100 years ago or so, before the “historical marches” of fascism and communism progressed Europe into post-Christian, scientifically-ordered hell-holes, giving the eugenics and related movements a rather tarnished public image. I’m also very aware of the broad based public support for abortion, in both varnished and even unvarnished guises; for eugenics in just about every conceivable form excepting the currently unfashionable sex-selection killing of fetal girls practiced by Hindus and others; and even for sterilization of the “unfit” as part of the eugenic spirit, at least insofar as it is reflected in attitudes that some people, for the common good, just shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. even if the means of accomplishing that are not part of the reflection. Still, I wouldn’t have thought any judge in 21st century America would dare to be so craven, regardless of her own level of contempt for the human being.

A day later, there are still a few lingering things haunting my mind about this fiasco, after getting past the shocking moral depravity of the judge in the case – Norfolk (MA) Probate and Family Court Judge Christina Harms, who retired from the bench last Wednesday, less than a week after handing down this ruling, which among other indecencies, stipulated that the mother ‘could be “coaxed, bribed, or even enticed … by ruse” into a hospital where she would be sedated and an abortion would then be performed’, according to the original Boston.com story I read, as well as the few others I’ve found.

The first is the amazing lack of legs this story has (not) grown. I would have expected that a story reported on  pretty major MSM news site about a judge in America ordering this forced abortion and sterilization would have gone close to viral within 24 hours – especially during an election year. This has barely caused a blip. Am I the only one shocked by this, or is this a case of the MSM looking the other way from what could be a political hot-potato for their political sponsors? Is there another explanation? I’m lost on this.

Secondly is the realization that it was apparently only the attempted forced sterilization that brought about the judicial rebuke from Appellate Court Associate Justice Andrew R. Grainger, who noted that the ruling contradicted a 1982 (MA) Supreme Judicial Court ruling on the right to procreate. The fate of the baby appears to have been handed over to yet another lower court judge for dispositioning! The courts might yet order the baby to be killed for having a mentally ill mother! Incredible.

Lastly, I was profoundly struck by what I can only characterize as a thunderous moral tone-deafness and spiritual imbecility on the part of the alleged adults involved in this, including the reporters (with the exception of Ben Johnson writing for LifeSiteNews.com, who picked up on this). It is a tone-deafness to the cruel irony that the mental incapacitation afflicting this women (schizophrenia), which is the cudgel being used to beat her into the torture chamber, appears to have its source in a prior abortion she had committed. Court records are clear that she had a breakdown after the abortion, and has been a basket case ever since, especially around issues concerning babies.

This poor woman is tormented by the evil of her earlier abortion, and this knuckle-dragging judge wanted to trick her into having another abortion! And her own parents are advocating for killing her child! May God have pity on all of them in their deformities. This tortured soul does not need an abortionist, she needs a priest. I pray one finds her soon.

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