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on the abuse of labels in the recent contraception blowup
Whatever else the recent blowup over the ACA contraception mandate might have shown, it's that Americans need a better epistemology. The news story has interested me on many levels and will probably pop up in blog posts from time to time. But one philosophical idea kept seeming to float to the forefront, at least in my mind as I read the different news stories. Namely, that the people participating in this debate seemed to be using concepts in very different ways. They weren't even consistent within the different sides.
This becomes clearer if you think about different groups. There was a lot of talk in left-leaning circles about "the 98%" – a statistic that 98% of sexually active Catholic women had used contraception at least once, and that a high number (I think in the neighborhood of 70-80%) used it regularly or were currently using it. The implication was that this meant Catholicism no longer had a major problem with birth control. I previously argued that religious institutions like the RCC don't operate like unions or PACs, where all you need for a position change is a new consensus view. The RCC, like all religious institutions represents its tradition, not the current view of all its members; and the members get to vote by agreeing to be a part of it or not.
So it's in the church's best interest to make its positions relevant to its members, through education and dialogue. I may not agree with the position (in point of fact I don't), but it's not my opinion – or any Catholic parishioner (which I'm not), or the majority opinion of those parishioners – that decides here. Here, what it means to be a Catholic is controlled by those people charged with interpreting and guarding Catholic tradition. The bishops and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy.
The liberals have it wrong here. I say this as a liberal! But on this particular point, they're off base.
Interestingly, they're also wrong on a related issue but for exactly the opposite reason. This one came up in the context of hearings on this same mandate. There was a bit of a brouhaha over the fact that there weren't any women on the first panel that appeared before the committee, and specifically that one witness who had been denied contraception by her Catholic employer that she needed for non-reproductive reasons wasn't allowed to testify. The charge of "Where were the women?" was pronounced immediately by Nancy Pelosi and soon went viral. I wasn't convinced even at first, because this particular hearing was over whether the mandate posed a challenge to religious freedom, and the woman they wanted to testify didn't have any comment on that particular issue. Do I wish the various religious groups had highlighted some of their female leaders (which do exist)? Yes, if only to drive home the point that religion is not all male-dominated, and that the lashback was tempered by an awareness of the reality women live. But the proposed witness was none of these things, and so I didn't feel excluded on those grounds.
It's what came next where things got really interesting. See, as it turns out there was a woman on the second panel that testified before the hearing (two in fact), but they didn't testify in favor of the mandate. So the idea that no women had testified was revamped a bit to say no women had testified for women. This irked me in the same way that the line that anti-abortion access laws are somehow a war against women. I don't like those laws, I find them insulting in their insinuation that women's decisions couldn't possibly be well-reasoned and I think some of them (like the recent narrow miss down in Virginia) are awful assaults on women and turn the doctor-patient relation on its head.
But I don't think attacks on them are a war on women, because lots of women do resent having reproduction labeled as an illness. Women tend to be among the most ardent pro-lifers, and they probably see abortion as an assault not only on a child but also on their way of life. I don't agree with them, but it is disenfranchising to them to suggest that unless you hold a certain view, you are not speaking for women or you're not a real women. Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann are women, and as much as I hate what they stand for on nearly every issue, they represent the viewpoints of many women.
The difference here is that "women" are not an institution like a church is. So here, you can't say you are protecting the institution of womanhood. If you were talking about a specific institution organized along gender lines (NOW, for instance) then, yes, we have a right to say that such-and-such a legislation is anti-NOW or against the interests of NOW. But the larger issue that a legislation is anti-woman? That only makes sense if you think of women as a monolithic group. We aren't that, and again the Democratic party is on the wrong end of it to suggest we are.
I've made my feelings on this mandate clear in recent posts, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize sloppy sentiments when I see them. Ironically, the left-leaning blogosphere is contradicting itself when saying on the one hand the RCC must take every member's position into account with no regard for history when determining the RCC's position, and then on the other hand that "women's issues" should only be decided by the "right" kind of women. Ironic that they get it wrong in both cases, really.
Re: I'm sorry, but no.
What I was reacting against is this argument I see made time and again by liberals dealing with this issue: to find out the "Catholic" position you should simply take a headcount of how many Catholics approve the use of birth control (measured by whether they personally chose to do it) and that determines the Catholic position on whether using birth control is immoral. That's a quite different case than the one are pointing to: that Catholic tradition is actually quite varied - as are most religions'! - and that people can fight over the tradition and shape it even if they aren't wearing the pointy hats.
I find this point offensive and troubling because I grew up in a religious tradition that went too much the other direction. I've heard some crazy things professed in the name of Christianity and the Bible by Protestants (evangelicals mainly but even there mainline brethren on occasion). For example, I have heard several Christians - though a minority - say that the melting of the polar ice caps isn't a real problem because God has promised he won't ever destroy the planet with a flood again. I find this dangerous and crazy theology, to say nothing of bad theology. But its sister view, that God will not allow the earth to become uninhabitable until history plays out, is more widespread and IMO equally wrongheaded. I would hate to think that if 51% or even 98% of Protestant Christians accepted either of those views, that would make it the authentic view of Protestantism.
None of that means you can't have a debate of a different kind. Protestants have church discipline councils, not entirely unlike the Catholic church hierarchy though not nearly as organized and influential, and I would hate to think that if the Methodist council agreed God would not allow global warming to destroy the earth, that would be the end of the story for my denomination. And I don't mind people asking what bearing Catholic dogma represents if it isn't representing the views of actual Catholics. But that's not the discussion that's happening. Every time liberals bring up the 98% statistic, they seem to be saying that the church position is determined by popular vote, which just seems wrongheaded and dangerous to me.
Re: I'm sorry, but no.
The RCC, like all religious institutions represents its tradition, not the current view of all its members; and the members get to vote by agreeing to be a part of it or not.
This is the sentence that basically pushes me to respond as I do. I'm not seeing an unclear expression, I'm seeing one that's pretty clear. It's just that I cannot see a way of interpreting that other than by saying that if I want to be RCC, I can only do that by accepting that tradition as it is currently formulated by the religious institution - specifically, by the bishops who "represent" us. The tie you made here between the bishops and the tradition was simply too strong, and the position assigned to the laity is simply too congruent with the bishopric's self- understanding of its institutional position in relation to lay Catholics.
Going on to the critique of liberals' critique of Catholicism, though, I think the problem here is that the interpretation of what is Catholic is political, and we expect it to be... not that. We can politicize the RCC one way by saying saying that the Catholic position is represented by how many Catholics violate the reproductive decrees of bishops; we can politicize it another by saying that Catholicism is determined by "the tradition," as represented by the clerical hierarchy, not a popular vote. However, unless the latter critique is attached to some kind of actionable agenda in this context, in order to make that latter position something we can actually use against the power elite of this country, and that's both significantly different from either of the major positions in the debate already, I see the critique of liberalism as defaulting us to a political non-obstacle.
That I think makes it far more useful to the forces of reaction than to the forces in favor of a more humane hermeneutic and society, and that I just can't take, given that the Church hierarchy is already committed to dragging its members down with them into a reactionary tailspin. The best defense of the plurality of the RCC as a tradition is not contesting the liberal view of the representative function of the Church hierarchy, it's spurring the many Catholics who don't accept Church teaching on birth control to find some way to act on their non-acceptance.
I say this because I think there's a reasonable case to be made that one can articulate all the decrees one wants and say they constitute the institutional identity, but what a majority of believers *are actually doing* can be as valid a way of determining what is "Catholic" (or Jewish, or Methodist, or American, or atheist, or whatever) as the self-articulated self-understanding of an institutional representative, or a minority body. There are contexts when it is appropriate to argue in that way about identity. Critique is often that appropriate context - when one tries to shake a group or a person out of complacent self-definition, or out of bad faith self-definition.
Now as I said, to the degree that secularizing democratic liberals simply appropriate that split among clerical hierarchy and a large number of lay people without urging the latter to make their failure to comply politically relevant by explaining why it is appropriate as a Catholic to disagree with the hierarchy, then yes, there's a problem; but I contend it's still the lesser sin than Catholics failing to counter in action their Church hierarchy.