Priorities

If you've ever stopped to help a homeless or needy person—and I mean truly help them by providing food, clothing, or shelter—you may have found yourself in the awkward and paradoxical position of being rejected by someone desperately in need of your help. While this has never happened to me, I have heard more than enough anecdotal evidence that this type of thing can happen. I don't mean to condemn all homeless people, or urge against offering charity to those in need, but merely to illustrate that sometimes, people will act contrary to their best interests, and attack those with their best interests in mind.

The drunk who curses at the helpful soul who offers food or a job instead of a handout is, of course, addicted to his vice. He cannot, through strength of will, alone, overcome his temptation and has become so dependent on it that he refuses the basic help he needs. Another way of stating this is that his appetites are not subject to his reason, and he cannot freely choose what is good for him, but is instead enslaved to the dictates of his passions.

With me so far?

Now, to shift gears and approach my thesis from another direction: an argument made by the Other Side during the whole Komen/Planned Parenthood debacle, was that sure, Planned Parenthood might have its flaws, but can't we put that aside for the sake of helping women with cancer? One of the slogans I saw along these lines was, "Instead of having my cancer detected by an organization under government investigation, now my cancer won't be detected at all!" It, of course, ignores the reason that Komen halted some funding for Planned Parenthood, namely, that Planned Parenthood wasn't very good at detecting cancer in the first place, but at least it's a step in the right direction. Rather than screaming ad hominem arguments or beating down straw men, it is an actual attempt to engage in rational debate. Credit where it's due.

So I can understand that argument. Put petty squabbles (where "petty" involves the extermination of 300,000 human beings a year) aside in the interest of some greater cause.

But that argument should apply both ways, shouldn't it?

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Miscellany

(Source)

In light of the whole Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood PR fiasco.

It's hard to say exactly what is going on here. News headlines boiled down to "Komen to defund Planned Parenthood" and "Komen reverses decision", but neither is strictly true, from what I can tell. As the founder of the Susan G. Komen foundation said in an interview, they never defunded PP, and PP still has several grants from them. Of course, the pro-choice crowd immediately launched in hysterics, claiming that the Komen foundation must hate women, hacking the SGK website, etc. etc. Not one of them appears to be at all interested in what or why SGK is doing what it's doing: they simply changed their grant policy to try and give money to direct providers of cancer screenings, rather than referrers. Since Planned Parenthood does not do mammograms, or really any cancer screening aside from what you can do at home by yourself, SGK simply decided there was better use of its money.

To put that in words that even liberals can understand, SGK "defunded" (for certain values of defunded) PP because PP is not very good at providing cancer screenings.

Komen's "reversal" appears to be a rephrasing of their original policy shift. At this point, it is unclear what exactly is going on, other than PP is trying to bully SGK in some sort of mafia shakedown ("Nice charity, you got there. Would be a shame of somethin' were to happen to it"). Canonist Ed Peters (how do I get a title like that? I mean, aside from studying Canon Law) summed up what was going on pretty well. Of course, they have the media to assist them on the shakedown, and Get Religion has an excellent piece on the atrocious reporting of the story.

Perhaps the most humorous example of the media folly was MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell who, in an interview with SGK founder Nancy Brinker asked how a bipartisan organization such as SGK could deign to hire a pro-life Republican. 

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On Martyrdom.

Years ago, back when I went to the YMI day retreats, one of my group leaders asked us if we knew what it meant to be a martyr. Me, always the over-achiever, raised my arm high and proclaimed that it was someone who died for their faith. The missionaries laughed at me. "Not in America!" they proclaimed.

And I think they are right. The idea of feeding Catholics to lions, or burning them to death as was the fate of the Ugandan martyrs, seems highly unlikely. The American character is too averse to such open persecution, and the evil too blatant, to really grab hold in this country. So what does martyrdom look like in America?

(And you are fooling yourself if you think there aren't American martyrs. The world cannot simultaneously hate the Church and tolerate Her presence. A sinner hates nothing more than the guilt of his sin, and cannot help but harbor a grudge against those who reinforce that guilt by denouncing the sin.)

About once a year, a priest from Vladivostok, Russia, makes the tour of Orange County, preaching at parishes, and asking for support for the missionary work in Russia, undoing the evils of the Communists. He tells the story of what happened to the Church in Vladivostok at the beginning of the Revolution. Most of the city's inhabitants were Orthodox—too many to openly persecute—so the Soviets simply bombed the churches. One Easter Sunday, in front of all the faithful, they simply closed the Orthodox churches, save one, and blew them up, to be rebuilt for The Party's use. The Catholics were not so lucky. They were a small minority, and the Communists saw no reason to try and tolerate them. Catholics were simply rounded up and executed, and the city didn't notice much difference.

So there is strength in numbers. It's hard to imagine a relatively peaceful country killing off a fifth of its inhabitants (or even a twentieth, if we only count those who meet the bare minimum requirement of weekly Mass attendance). 60 million (or 15 million) is a lot of graves to fill. But the tactics of the Soviets may lend an insight. If there are too many to round up, simply keep them out of their churches.

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Required Reading:

Stem Cells: A Political History.

Some interesting stuff that I did not know in that article. For instance, did you know that President Bush was the first president to allow the use of federal funds for embryonic stem cell research? I knew he had allowed non-destructive ESCR, but did not realize that Clinton had not acted on that front.

It also makes President Obama look so much more the fool for diverting money from induced pluripotent stem cells—which are akin to embryonic stem cells but derived from adult stem cells—and adult stem cell (which both show tremendous promise) to embryonic stem cells (which have so far produced no cures or treatments).

So the relevant question here is: if you can produce iPSCs in two ways, one of which destroys a unique human life and poses ethical problems, and one of which has no such hindrance and as such poses no such ethical issue, why, Mr. President, do you chose the former?

The only options I can think of are: you are ignorant of the issue because it is "above your pay grade"; you are bowing to pressure from lobbyists; you are intentionally trying to devalue human life.