Moar political ballyhooing

This will be a close race, and an interesting one. The drama leading up to november is picking up with one major event after another. Both parties are split--the dems by Hillary, the reps by McCain's moderation on certain issues. Both parties have charismatic and likable personalities at their helms (unlike 2004, which had two candidates I would pay money not to share a drink with). And there is a lot at stake.

I just read an article titled, 5 things McCain needs to succeed. It listed some pretty commonsense stuff.

Here's my take: The Democrats' biggest weakness is that they're liberals, and, well, people don't like liberals. I know that sounds like a dumb thing to say, but have you looked at footage from the democratic national convention? Look, I agree with the dems on most of their issues, but I never saw such a collection of bitter, snide, self-important old people whose jokes were universally unfunny. Really, the dems all seem "old" to me, older than McCain, because McCain can make me laugh, and they cannot. But worst of all, the Democrats still imagine that their only constituency, and the only people they need to address, are pure, secularist liberals. Conservatives and republicans have never made that mistake.

So here are 5 things Obama needs to succeed:

1. SHOW people are smart he actually is--and stop insulting our intelligence--by talking directly to the issues instead of just giving "inspirational" speeches empty of content. Forgive me, but youth and glowing white teeth do nothing for me. Talk about your platform. Don't tell me everything's going to change. Say what will change, and for pete's sake don't cloak it in stump-speech. Be the anti-politician for once; give me some straight-talk express. Because right now, the dems are trying to write straight in crooked lines. There's only one guy I know who can do that, and it isn't Obama.

2. Reach out to conservatives in the party. I hate to break it to Obama but the United States is a conservative country. OK, so you're not going to criminalize abortion. Fine, nobody expected you to. Are you going to do anything to decrease the number of abortions? 'Cuz dems do not have a good record of this. Or maybe you think abortion is just the greatest thing since HotPockets? And other issues, too. Stop acting as if all Democrats were pure democrats. And by extension, silencing, disenfranchising, and punishing your loyal dissidents. Biden was a step in the right direction. Now let's see some more.

3. Don't be so gay. I remember back in 2000, candidates were asked about the homosexual marriage debate, and Gore fumbled on the answer. He would not flat-out say that he favored gay marriage. You know what? You should learn something from him. Don't assume that just because the media is blaring YAY GAY MARRIAGE that American culture has changed substantially on this issue since 2000. Go ahead and allow it, fine, that's your platform. But the gay marriage issue is similar to the abortion issue: the more visible it is, the more you will alienate voters.

4. Don't be so STIFF. I mean seriously, the greatest irony of modern politics is that the party of gay marriage, abortion on demand, pacifists, feminists, and pot smokers is so bloody boring and rigid. Yeah I've seen Roy Zimmerman's videos. He's funny. But he's also really uncomfortable in a rigid, desperate kind of way. All of your lines are meticulously scripted and planned. STOP THAT. All right, so maybe you have a candidate who doesn't look like a Mr. Ed or speak like Charlie Brown's teacher. If Obama is a Bently an McCain is a beat up old Jeep, I'll take McCain every time. Don't be fooled into thinking that this is only about image. Your image betrays you. The party of "let me do what I want" needs to stop acting like the party of "do as we tell you or else".

5. Finally, when all of that is done, remind people of how bad Bush is. Don't tell us, show us. Give us substance; don't just assume that we all remember how much we hate Bush. Because you know what? If you rest on your laurels and let McCain have his way, he will successfully make American forget how bad Bush was. You cannot ride the wave of anti-Bush sentiment, you have to create that wave. Don't forget that prior to 2007 Bush presided over a pretty good economy--but that Clinton presided over a better one. We don't much remember how good things were with Clinton--that's your job, and I haven't seen enough of it.

Technological concupiscence returns!

So, ever since I built my sub-$500 "gaming rig"--which has been simply awesome, by the way--my Asus Eee 701 "netbook" has been collecting dust in my bedroom for months. Some reasons for this:

1. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the SSD, but the Eee seems to be having issues with file permissions in Ubuntu.
2. A display issue with my Westinghouse HDTV prevents it from correctly displaying 1080p resolutions from VGA cables. DVI works fine, but there is no DVI port on the Eee.
3. With high resolution external monitors, the Eee's display is pretty choppy. But I've been too spoiled by a 1080 display to settle for its dinky 800x480 native resolution, which can't even display a modern website without horizontal scrolling.
   
4. I used to do a lot of Web surfing and lightweight gaming in my bed, but I haven't done so in a long time. In fact, I haven't been doing much PC gaming at all; I've been getting my fix from my dusty old PS2.
5. I also used like going to the local coffeebar and hanging out there, which I also haven't done lately.

But that doesn't mean that my interest in portable computing has completely faded. I'll probably do a clean install on my Eee and see if I can't get it running nicely. But I'm beginning to hone in on a possible December purchase. Here's my top candidate so far: the Gigabyte M912V. I've spent literally years thinking of how much fun I could have with one of Fujitsu-Seimens's P1600 series mini tablets, but they have never cost less than $1500. This new model will be less than half that price. Some other neat things about it:

• The screen is big enough to be useful.
  
• It has an ExpressCard slot, which I hope would become home to this Asus "XG Station" gadget. That would solve my external monitor issues quite nicely.
• With a wireless access point in my classroom, I could take attendance without going back to my desk; I could also remote into GIMP on the desktop there and write onto an projected screen.
  

Obama and abortion

Two links of note:

This article from the Washington Post,

and this article from Politico.

I'll give him this. He doesn't tick me off as much as liberal Catholic politicians like Guliani and Kerry, even though he's more extreme than both of them. At least he's consistant. This is a man who regards protectable life to begin, not only at birth, but sometime after biological birth. Pragmatic to the end, Obama regards the State accountable only to individuals who have been born, and perhaps driven home from the hospital.

A line from his political review is chilling: "Expanded access to prenatal education and heath care facilities will far more likely serve the very real state interest in preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair."

To this pro-lifer, the words "preventing increasing numbers of children from being born" stands out in stark relief. And I am not relieved.

Catholic Morality and Gay Sex

The Catholic Church's position—one with ties both to revelation and moral reason—is that same-sex sexual activity is an intrinsic moral evil.

Of course, the Church recognizes that where there is compulsion, there is not sin. This moral doctrine is prior to all considerations of guilt or culpability. An active homosexual may be said to be totally innocent of "mortal sin" or even "venial sin" given certain circumstances.

Whether an individual is guilty of sins committed is something we cannot know--God alone is fully aware of the drama of grace and freedom inside a soul. Thus to judge is to sin. But whether an action (in the abstract) is a sin, and thus whether it ought to be avoided, tolerated or prevented--this can be known.

Towards that end, I quote a former professor of mine, Fr. Ed Oakes, S.J.:

Among secularists, gay activists, liberal politicians, and the like, it is taken for granted that homosexual urgings are “natural,” in the sense of being innate (the word nature comes from the Latin natus, “to be born” as, in fact, does the word innate); and since the urges are natural in that sense (or so goes the claim), what’s wrong with satisfying them? For the Catholic Church, however, nature always carries a teleological implication, and since the sex organs are also called reproductive organs, it represents an abuse of their function to make use of them in ways that violate their reproductive purposes.

To go a little deeper, here is a paraphrase of the argument presented by Persona Humana (1975), and in the case of the last bullet, the "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons" (1985):

• The right treatment of human beings depends on knowing correctly what human beings are (and their dignity), how they work and the purpose of their life.
• Certain things about human beings never change; thus reason can show that certain right treatment of human beings also never changes.
• Sexual morality is one of those kinds of right treatment that doesn't change, because it is based in the natural order of sex.
• To treat sex right, make sure your choices do justice to sex's natural end.
• A direct quote is appropriate: "To choose someone of the same sex for one's sexual activity is to annul the rich symbolism and meaning, not to mention the goals, of the Creator's sexual design. Homosexual activity is not a complementary union, able to transmit life; and so it thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living. This does not mean that homosexual persons are not often generous and giving of themselves; but when they engage in homosexual activity they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent."
  

Catholicism is confident that the only scripture necessary to teach and learn about sexual morality is the verse written into the human body itself. Although appeal to Natural Law always implies a certain appeal to the sacredness of "creation" (in turn, implying a creator), appeals to human rights are no different. Both stem ultimately from the belief in an objective natural order that prescribes proper treatment of human beings. Throw out natural law and you throw out the idea of natural rights with it.

Yet in the case of sexual morality, there is more at stake than doing something simply because “Mother Nature said so.”

For Catholic morality, there is an inherent bond between sex and what sex produces: human beings, and family. After all, the latter two did not spring magically into being without the former. Their dignity is fundamentally shaped—and at times defaced—by the manner in which sex is treated. Sex has a telos, an appointed destiny, which when sabotaged robs the act of its original (originating) meaning. Within sex resides a power that is as awesome as it is terrifying: the power to make a person. The dignity of a thing is rooted in its origin; and so we abuse, pervert, or cheapen sex at our own peril.

Nor are families invulnerable; consider the adage, “blood is thicker than water”. The very power of family, its binding force, resides in the honor of shared, real blood. Yes, the bonds of friendship, adoptee, step-brother and step-sister can be de facto stronger than those of physical blood ties. But blood and sex remain the definitive origin of family’s powerful meaning, a meaning that it retains when applied to permanent bonds outside blood. If family is redefined so as to erase or diminish its biological origin, all that is left of “family” is any association of semi-permanent cohabitators--which is to say, nothing at all. That is the logical consequence now present in states that legalize gay marriage or mandate adoption to same-sex couples. Blood is no longer thicker than water; blood is not recognized at all; our relationships are all water.

Thus, for me, no system of morality, besides that of the Catholic Church, appears to do justice to the ineffable mysteries of life's beginning.

Perhaps I should pose a challenge to thoughtful opponents. If you seek to persuade, get to the heart of the issue. Is the Church wrong to believe that sex has a telos, an original aim that issues from its very nature? Does nothing have an original, natural aim? Is natural law illegitimate? Is the Church wrong to believe that sex has an inherent connection to life's most important realities--to life and to family--and that its mistreatment decays the value of those things? Is the Church wrong to link sexual licentiousness with a decay of civilization? Is the Church wrong to seek to do something about that?

"But Mr. Zimmerman," I hear students saying, "morality is subjective." This is the nuclear missile of value disputes. However, the one who utters it never actually believes it. Nothing is as offensive to these folks as when the Church tries to stand in the way of the wish-fulfillment of well-meaning homosexual couples. The implication is that there is something objectively immoral about the Church's behavior. So why do we get to be absolutists on one issue but we must be relativists on another? That looks like a double-standard.

Ultimately, the old "subjective" chestnut is accurately translated: "your morality is subjective". Claims made in favor of public sexual morality are locked away in the closet of dubious and disputable ideas. People disagree with them, therefore they are disagreeable. The very fact that some reject sexual morality becomes itself evidence against sexual morality.

Am I the only one who smells the zeitgeist in this line of reasoning? All that I ask is that contenders in the coliseum of culture be willing to clash swords with the Church instead of darting into holes and trap doors. Do not respond to a duel by playing hide-and-go-seek. Catholic morality throws its hat into the ring. Are you going to connect a punch, or swing at shadows and declare victory?

Catholic Morality and Adoption by Same-Sex Couples

To begin: I have zero knowledge of how poorly, or how well, adopted children fare when their adopters are a homosexual couple. Therefore, I do not assume one way or the other.

I mention this because someone dear to me cited an authoritative source implying that children raised by same-sex parents fare better in school, on average, than their peers. All told, that would not surprise me. However, it speaks little to the debate.

If the Vatican opposes adopting children to homosexual couples, it can hardly be for a pragmatic cause, and for two reasons. First, Catholic "oughts" are rarely based on mere pragmatism—whatever accomplishes the happiest end. Such sands are always shifting, and Catholic ethicists generally favor steadier ground. Second, controversies based on statistics risk being mere tests of who can gather and spin more data. I do not dismiss the value of good studies. But the trustworthiness of data interpretation is inversely proportional to the heat of the issue. The homosexuality debate is perhaps hotter in this country than even abortion.

People who actually read the Catholic position on adoption of children to homosexual couples will find little consequentialism. Nowhere does the Church suggest that such an arrangement will necessarily or even probably lead to unhealthy, perverted, or otherwise damaged children. No doubt conservative Catholics, in and out of the press, will often make such claims. Consider the following argument from Jeff Mirus (PhD, Intellectual History from Princeton):

Make no mistake about it, the placement of children with gay parents is a serious instance of violence against children. Confusion about one’s sexual identity is extremely painful, inclinations to homosexual attraction are disordered, and constant exposure to sexual affection between homosexuals places a child in an intolerable position with respect to his own sexual, moral, psychological and social development. Not only does such placement leave the child without either an adoptive mother or an adoptive father, but it substitutes a distortion for the missing adoptive parent and for the nature of marriage and family in their entirety. Placement of children with gay couples is quite simply a brutality.

Dr. Mirus' argument implies consequences, no doubt. Same as a child in a single-parent home, children adopted to same-sex couples will lack a parent of the other gender. In the latter case, the child will also be routinely exposed to same-sex kissing and hugging. By Dr. Milus' reckoning, this will lead to "confusion about one's sexual identity," detriment the child's "sexual, moral, psychological and social development," and provide for the child a distorted picture of "marriage and family in their entirety".

I think that Mirus overstates the case with the first two of those claims. But he does represent Catholic teaching with the third. The Catholic Church's position—one with ties both to revelation and moral reason—is that same-sex sexual activity is an intrinsic moral evil. As to why, see the companion article, "Catholic Morality and Gay Sex."

Thus, the Church does not make any statements about the healthy development, or lack thereof, of the child adopted to same-sex couples. She doesn't need to. Her argument is a priori—it would retain validity even if those children were universally proven to become good-looking multibillionaire philanthropic geniuses. A child raised by active homosexuals will be raised to believe that the goodness of the sexual act is neutral with regard to how it is treated and who has it with whom (given consent, of course). That is the position, the doctrine, of the gay rights movement.

The Church sees this doctrine and its logical consequences as destructive, not only to a peculiarly Christian way of life, but to human dignity and civilization as such (again, for exactly why, see the companion article).

The reply will come: isn't the Church is imposing its religion upon public life? Indeed, the Church does campaign for the integration of a morality into public life. Yet there is nothing peculiarly religious about this morality. It hardly requires belief in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. It scarcely demands any kind of belief in a God. It only requires that one not be a total anarchist as regards the natural constitution of the human species.

Thus I argue here only that it is legitimate for the Catholic Church to lobby against the adoption of children by same-sex couples. It is part of an equally legitimate campaign to stem the tide of sexual libertinism and show the western world its own scars left by five decades of "free love". If she can argue that there is an inherent sabotaging, a diverting, a cheapening present in every act of gay sex, then she should be permitted to argue that we should not allow its ideology to spread through adopted children.

It has nothing to do with whether the child's development will be negatively impacted--that is a question for the sociologists. It has everything to do with a culture struggle, and neutrality is a logical impossibility.

Catholic worship and the death of the subjunctive.

"Subjunctive, \səb-ˈjən(k)-tiv\ : of, relating to, or constituting a verb form or set of verb forms that represents a denoted act or state not as fact but as contingent or possible or viewed emotionally (as with doubt or desire) " (Merriam-Webster).

The observation I make is both a curious point of grammar and the linchpin of the modern paradigm shift in western Catholicism.

Catholic prayer written after a certain date--a date that, perhaps, could be pinpointed to a day, just as one can find the first gray class photo in which someone cracked a smile--ceased almost entirely to make use of the subjective mood. "We may be" became "We are;" "That the Lord may" became "The Lord will"; and "The Lord be with you" on occasion became a resounding indicative, "The Lord Is With You".

If the subjective mood connotes contigency, possiblity, doubt, or desire, then perhaps it is not difficult to speculate as to the cause of its death. We are a resurrection people, after all. The Gospels contain no small amount of reassurances for the distressed and uneasy. Fear, anxiety, and despair arising from uncertainty--from a "subjunctive" way of looking at the world--rightfully dissipate before the hot white light of a triumphant Lord. Christ showed no ambivalence about the right of his flock to rest easy in certitude and trust. Do not worry! Do not fear! Do not fret about your material needs! The Father knows you need them. Do not preoccupy yourself with what you will say before your interlocutors! The Holy Spirit will instruct you. Make no mistake: God has already won the battle. The Kingdom is already here. The gates to Heaven have already been broken open, like a great beautiful golden pile of Berlin rubble.

The Gospels are chicken soup for the anxious soul. Christianity is the great answer to the one who cries out in pain and fear, who long ago abandoned hope for joy, who is starved for a smile. And far be it from me to challenge that message, or to rob those souls of their great consolation.

Yet I cannot help but inquire: whence the change? If we were a dreary bunch of uncertain doubters before, what caused us to

Sacraments Unit 1 revision

Today I have to pick up the pieces from some bad ideas last week.

First off, I'm revising two essential questions, formerly:

• Why is a Church necessary? What are the alternatives? Why didn't Jesus simply stay on Earth?
• What is the best way to represet ("re-present") the person, love, and saving power of Jesus of Nazareth in an accessible way to people today?

to:

• How is the Church an instrument of God's love?
• How does the Church make the Paschal Mystery accessible to the world?

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

The performance tasks and evidence will remain the same. However, I will need to pay more attention to the WHERETO criteria.

• Where are we going? Why? What is expected? - The unit really is about love, but the point of the unit is to unveil the amorous basis of the Church, and by extension, the seven sacraments. If we didn't understand this point, we might be tempted to think of the sacraments as "just another religious ritual", with all of the attendant prejudices against superstition and public devotion. This unit will help students see the personalistic and human roots of the seven sacraments so they will be less tempted to think of them--and other ritual expressions--in superstitious and externalistic ways. This requires some very basic catechesis on the Paschal Mystery.
• How will we hook and hold student interest? Hook: The great theological riddle: In the first century, the Roman government of a small Palestinian region executes a Jew to appease local authorities in occupied territory. As a result, one billion Catholics and billion other Christians today believe that their immortal souls have been saved from eternal torment by an infinitely loving and merciful God. How do we get from point A to point B?

More to-do lists

1. Sort mountains of stuff into piles.
2. Record grades.
3. Set up Edline.
4. Set up Sub binder.
5. Set up SADD binder.
6. Tweak Junior lesson plan to reflect slow couple of days.
7. Plan next week of Freshman Theology based on UbD (low priority).
8. Get paper for printer.
9. E-mail SADD members to get them coordinating effort for Club Rush.

Morning lesson planning.

I have an hour. What can I do in an hour?

Priorities:

• Write quiz for summer reading discussion today
• Record grades for Freshmen homework
• Compress remaining goals into abbreviated lessons for today(46 minutes) and tomorrow (37 minutes)

For the Juniors I have a little more time (46 minute prep before period C; lunch and lab monitoring for the remaining three periods).

• Give general credit to C-period juniors who turned anything in (theirs was the period that bombed yesterday).
• Generate Paschal Mystery research worksheet for use with all Junior periods.
• Introduce central concepts of the Incarnation in a rote way.
• Introduce the Catechism and how to use it with more depth.
• Have the class complete same exercise as other periods, with the Paschal Mystery instead of the Incarnation.

For the Junior classes that had a successful day yesterday:

• Open the class by having a recorder generate a sheet of notes based on student answers to yesterday's research questions.
• Repeat exercise with the Paschal Mystery research worksheet.

Morning thoughts

Wow, this thing is almost becoming a twitter with the frequency of updates.

First, personal thoughts. Two issues have been occupying my mind.

• Cognitive dissonance.

If it was one thing I prided myself on during my seminary years, it was my unyielding attachment to sheer consistency of belief, thought, and action. Now, that does not imply that my thoughts were always based on sound judgement, nor that my actions were never subject to human weakness. But nevertheless, I relished the notion that my Catholic faith was like a hot iron, pressing out the wrinkles of intellectual obscurity. I still hold on to the conviction that real faith is the archimedian point for the life of the mind. But one effect of my living as a layman is that much of my anxiety about personal failings has decoupled and slowly fallen away. The failings are there; the sense of urgency and guilt about them is not. The iron is not has hot as it used to be. Is this a sign that I am allowing cognitive dissonance into my own framework? This was always the most irritating thing I observed in liberal Catholic authorities and pundits. Or is the ability to accept failure a sign of growing maturity?

• Contraposition of belief vs. neurology as motivators.

The MSN website ran a couple of cheesy articles on how differences between the male and female brain can affect behaviors and explain certain habits. I'm not at all opposed to the idea that we are substantially moved by biology. But the articles highlighted for me the wonder that the human organism is governed by such a thing as "belief" at all. That a mammal should have access to rational thought, and through the science of logic gain entry into being (at all! let alone well), is to me the most fascinating and wonderful thing. Perhaps it is a red herring, in the "homo sapiens are special" debate, to look for essential differences between humans and animals on the natural plane. Still, it bears reflecting: an ape can learn sign language. Can an ape worry about whether he is allowing cognitive dissonance into his motivations?