I want to be Mark Shea's war buddy

I've been accused of being too "liberal" by some traditionalist Catholics and some politically conservative Catholics. Well, I offer Mark Shea's reply to that, even though he seems to me to define and contemn "torture" with more severity than the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

So a conservative Catholic who opposes abortion, euthanasia, and gay “marriage”, hates Communism, regards Obama as a tyrant, voted for Reagan and Bush twice, supports just war, supports capitalism (within just limits), says that all that the Holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims is revealed by God, stands for monogamy and rejects artificial contraception, and thinks Benedict XVI is the bees knees? Yes, I am a “liberal” because I oppose torture and pre-emptive war and think it obscene that the strong prey on the weak in this country with increasing impunity, while middle class incomes flatline and vast amounts of wealth accumulate in fewer and fewer hands. That makes me a socialist, doncha know.

Source: National Review vs. Caelum et Terra re: Me

Pinning "liberalism" down

My title has the word 'liberalism' in scare quotes because I want to discuss the sort of liberalism that has grown scarier and scarier over the last several decades. I'm not talking about the liberalism of Locke and the American founding fathers, which stressed respect for natural rights and the consent of the governed as necessary conditions for a legitimate polity. I'm not talking about "classical" liberalism, which called for individual liberty, private property, and a free market as the best conditions for promoting the common weal. I'm not even talking about the liberalism of the early-20th-century "progressive" movement, of which New Deal liberalism was the direct heir and whose achievements, like those of prior liberalisms, have the overwhelming support of the American people. As Walter Russell Mead has argued, such liberalisms, while not reducible to each other, intersected in ways that together explain why each unfolded historically within something recognizable as an American moral consensus. That consensus was strong enough to constitute, in Robert Bellah's felicitous phrase, a kind of "civil religion." Requiring both the free exercise and the non-establishment of religion strictly speaking, the old consensus could itself be called 'liberal' in a broad and now-hoary sense. But since the 1970s, it's been unravelling along with the mainline Protestantism that had been its traditional custodian. The result is what I call The Thing that Used to Be Liberalism ('TUBL' for short; with thanks to Mark Shea, who likes referring to "The Thing that Used to Be Conservatism."). As I shall illustrate, TUBL is now out of control.

For that reason, the label 'liberalism', like 'feminism', has become a net political negative. Contemporary liberals and feminists accordingly prefer to eschew those labels in favor of 'progressive', sounding such rhetorically effective themes as "equal rights" and "fairness." And by its very nature, TUBL is hard to pin down philosophically. The main purpose of this post is to show how and explain why.

It is not news to conservatives that, on matters of domestic policy, today's "liberals" are actually authoritarian about everything except sex. On that score, they are as laissez-faire as can be. (E.g., it's become all but impossible to get them to see what's intrinsically wrong with incest and bestiality, apart from the "ick-factor" and the health risks involved. But hey, childbirth can be messy and dangerous too...) It's that discrepancy that's got out of control, and it's not so much liberal as hedonistic. Today's "liberals" want Nanny State to regulate every aspect of life except what goes on in our bedrooms, so that life is safe for the pursuit of a "happiness" understood as maximizing one's preferences consistently with others' maximizing theirs.

In such a scheme, complete sexual autonomy (within the bounds of a vaguely defined "mutual consent") is so important that marriage and family themselves are to be defined simply as what enough people want them to be. They can no longer be seen as having a form or nature prior to what civil law, as the expression of popular will, specifies. And now that all means of birth prevention are available to everybody, nobody should be expected to incur the natural consequence of ordinary intercourse or even cover the full cost of preventing it--unless, of course, one brings a child into the world anyhow, in which case one should be made to pay dearly, especially if one is the father, who might otherwise get off scot-free. But really, there's no reason why things should reach such a pass; if you're poor, they positively should not. Contraception, sterilization, and abortion are much cheaper than children, and if you're poor you'd better have recourse to them, because there's every reason to expect that you and your children, if any, will be net burdens to society (and to yourselves, for that matter). That expectation is not the only reason why "the right to choose" abortion is central to TUBL, but it is why the Obama Administration has decided to require, in the name of "women's health," religiously-sponsored institutions who object to contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs to utilize health-insurance policies covering such things at no charge to the user. Planned Parenthood--which, needless to say, does not help people plan how they will actually parent--is the very embodiment of this mentality. In the bedroom we should all pursue our own vision of happiness, if need be at others' expense; outside the bedroom a de facto utilitarian calculus, enforced by state policy, should govern moral decision-making quite generally.

Except when it shouldn't. I'm always amused when I hear Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cite "universal values" against this-or-that foreign dictator. What makes them think that everybody ought to assign the same weight to certain values as they? The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Why is that more than a piece of paper whose appeal today is understandably weaker than when it was composed? The dignity of the human person? But where are we supposed to find a coherent and reasonable account of human dignity? In philosophy, a discipline whose practitioners cannot agree on whether it affords us knowledge of anything at all? In science, which is morally indifferent in itself? And if in religion, why should we find the deracinated, social-gospel Protestantism of Obama and Clinton more rationally cogent than other forms of religion?

Even John Rawls, whose work has dogged philosophy graduate students for several generations now, admitted late in life that his vision of the ideal polity logically depended on a "comprehensive world view" he could not justify by reason alone. Many writers have indeed argued that secular liberalism is just living off the moral capital of the Judaeo-Christian tradition it's largely repudiated. As a more honest and radical sort of liberal, the late Richard Rorty knew that and admitted it, while rejecting not only Christianity but the very notion of what he called "Truth-capital-T." All that the acolytes of TUBL seem sure of, beyond the paramount importance of sexual autonomy, is that being an accredited "victim" gives one a special moral claim on one's "oppressors," who in most narratives are white, male, and Christian--a class which, by definition, cannot be victimized, because it represents everything about the past that victims are, and the rest of us should be, rebelling against. But that stance is just self-deconstructed Judaeo-Christianity. I postpone exploration of how the sense of sexual entitlement relates to that of victim-entitlement.

In any case, lust and sentimentality are not enough to explain what's going on here. Consider the following two, rather typical examples of TUBL thought.

Last fall, when the HHS contraception mandate for health insurers was drafted, Francis Beckwith argued that President Obama had thereby abandoned the liberalism he had embraced in speeches given in 2006 and 2009. Thus:

What one finds in these speeches are prescriptions for public discourse derived from a widely held understanding of liberalism that is often and correctly attributed to the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls. What the president is saying is that if you want to restrict another’s fundamental liberty based on reasons that those coerced would be reasonable in rejecting, your coercion is unjustified, even if it is not unreasonable for you to embrace those reasons for yourself.

That sounded reasonable enough at Notre Dame, when the President accepted his honorary JD by gamely defending the "pro-choice" position in essentially Rawlsian terms. But the new mandate abandons Rawlsian liberalism by defining 'religious organization', for purposes of granting "religious exemptions" from the rule, as follows:

(1) The inculcation of religious values is the purpose of the organization.
(2) The organization primarily employs persons who share the religious tenets of the organization.
(3) The organization serves primarily persons who share the religious tenets of the organization.

So, according to the U. S. government, a Catholic hospital, university, or charitable organization that believes its purpose is to actualize the moral commandments of Christ, to love its pre- and post-natal Catholic and non-Catholic neighbors as it loves itself, and to do so by welcoming with open arms all in need of its services, has ceased to be Catholic. The absurdity of this is palpable.

But here's the kicker. Not only does that absurdity, just by being absurd, abandon Obama's earlier espousal of Rawlsian liberalism; it contradicts his own current, stated understanding of the mission of religion in society! Recounting Obama's message at the National Prayer Breakfast not ten days ago, Charles Krauthammer points out: "To flatter his faith-breakfast guests and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through [HHS Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they’re doing is not religion at all."

Is such obvious inconsistency a sign of insincerity? Many would presume as much. But I think it more likely that Obama just doesn't see the inconsistency. Why not? Because he's "in the grip of a theory": TUBL. Thus one should not impose on people what they could reasonably reject, unless what's at issue is sexual autonomy, which is not just eminently reasonable but also, on utilitarian grounds, important enough to warrant full subsidy. If the religiously retrograde don't see that, then their "conscience" is so irrational as to be unworthy of consideration, save when giving lip service to it is politically unavoidable. Those in the grip of TUBL see nothing untoward about pretending to be Rawlsian when it suits them and dropping the pretense when it no longer suits them. Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of sexual autonomy.

Among so many I could pick, another example of TUBL run amok was brought to my attention by Paul Cella.

In his new book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010, Charles Murray makes the following observation:

Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded on premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data. Try to think of any new data that would change your position on abortion, the death penalty, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage or the inheritance tax. If you cannot, you are not necessarily being unreasonable.

To be sure, Murray is not in the grip of TUBL. And by 'data', he seems to mean the results of scientific research. If so, I should think that new data could be quite relevant to the questions whether marijuana should be legalized and when the death penalty could be justified. But no amount of new data would change my mind about abortion and same-sex marriage. New data cannot affect the questions whether the fetus qualifies as a person and whether same-sex "marriage" qualifies as marriage. Both are essentially philosophical and theological questions for which the pertinent empirical data are already to hand.

But last week, a correspondent for The Economist who signs him- or herself as 'W.W.' blogged thus about the Murray passage:

I found this exceedingly odd. I can easily imagine what evidence would cause me to change my position on any of these issues....Abortion is far and away the hardest one. I favour legal abortion. I don't think embryos or fetuses are persons, and I don't think it's wrong to kill them. I also don't think infants are persons, but I do think laws that prohibit infanticide are wise. Birth is a metaphysically arbitrary line, but it's a supremely salient socio-psychological one. A general abhorrence of the taking of human life is something any healthy culture will inculcate in its members. It's easier to cultivate the appropriate moral sentiments within a society that has adopted the convention of conferring robust moral rights on infants upon birth than it would be in a society that had adopted the convention of conferring the same rights on children only after they've reached some significant developmental milestone, such as the onset of intelligible speech. The latter society, I suspect, would tend to be more generally cruel and less humane. This is just an empirical hunch, though I feel fairly confident about it. But I could be wrong. And I could be wrong in the other direction as well. If it were shown that societies which ban abortion, or which ban abortion beyond a certain point, exceed societies which don't ban abortion in cultivating a "culture of life", which pays off in terms of greater general humanity and diminished cruelty, I would seriously weigh this moral benefit against the moral cost of reducing women's control over their bodies. Also, if it were shown that abortion tended to damage women's mental and physical health more than forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, I would tend to look more favourably on restrictions on abortion, especially for minors. [Emphasis added]

Now at first I found that passage as "exceedingly odd" as WW finds Murray's. WW never tells us why he doesn't think either fetuses or infants are "persons," but there's nothing to suggest that he finds the very concept of personhood open to revision by new scientific research. Whatever his concept--and I have a fairly good suspicion as to what it is--it's a philosophical one that's "underdetermined" by the data, which only matter for helping determine which entities actually fall under the concept. (I wouldn't be surprised if WW thinks, with Peter Singer, that adult dolphins make it while human babies don't.)

But even odder than such inadvertence is how WW simply takes for granted a particular view about the nature and basis of moral obligation. He thinks, e.g., that "society" can and should have essentially utilitarian reasons for having "adopted the convention of conferring robust moral rights on infants," who cannot be thought merit such rights by nature. But on WW's own showing, such reasons could conceivably be overturned by new data suggesting, somehow, that we'd all be better off for dropping that convention. And the question what counts as "better" cannot be answered, even in principle, by citing anything we should value as distinct from what we actually do value. What's better is simply what's apt to yield what "society" wants. But there's no transcendent criterion for assessing what society--ours or any other--wants. Ultimately, moral reasoning consists in discovering and prescribing the policies likeliest to yield what we want. "Ought" is always hypothetical, never categorical. And so, as Hume put it, reason is and ought to be "the slave of the passions."

The question for the WWs of the world is this: Are there, or are there not, "data" that could determine whether that's the correct view of moral obligation? WW doesn't seem to have considered the question, but those in the grip of TUBL would reject it. It's supposed to be self-evident that freely pursuing the maximization of preferences--whatever they are--is the best we can do, and there can be no obligation higher than, or inconsistent with, the best we can do. Such is the ideal of the radical autonomy of the imperial self. The only admissible limits on such autonomy are those which are necessary in practice for collective preference-maximization. Those turn out to be considerable, of course, which is why TUBL is rather authoritarian. Except about sex.

What makes TUBL so hard to pin down is that it combines sexual libertinism, which is distinctly not Judaeo-Christian, with a statism that's supposedly required for helping the unfortunate. As deconstructed Judaeo-Christianity, the latter requires a discipline and moral earnestness that are otherwise undermined by sexual libertinism and the calculus of preference-maximization generally. Since that combination is ultimately unsustainable, both theoretically and practically, the most fervent prescription of TUBL is to help the poor and the otherwise disadvantaged get rid of themselves by every means of birth prevention. Any amount of philosophical incoherence is accepted for the sake of implementing that prescription. We're only seeing the earliest stages.

It's simple, really

Even some liberals wonder what Obama's been thinking with this HHS contraception mandate. So I'll lay it out simply.

When a church-sponsored organization provides "social services," that's good religion. When the church in question forbids abortion, contraception, and sterilization, that's bad religion. But we don't want to discriminate between types of religiosity. So we just say that church-sponsored organizations that do both good religion and bad religion aren't religious.

Simple, isn't it? But if you want to understand the contradiction thus resolved, go here.

Communion by degree, revisited

Given recent events, I thought it worthwhile to re-issue this three-year-old post and ask for opinions from thoughtful Catholics.

Everybody knows—OK, almost everybody who reads this blog—that the American bishops lack a unitary policy about giving the Eucharist to Catholics who reject and/or disobey the definitive teaching of the Church. For even better-known reasons, that fact always comes to the fore in a general election. Now that Senator Joe Biden, a Catholic who is as pro-abortion-rights as he is anti-men's-rights, has "ascended to Barack Obama's right hand," the issue has resurfaced. As always, John Allen has instructive things to say. But the recurrence of this familiar issue in the news cycle has prompted me to connect it with another, broader one that tends to interest readers of this blog even more.

Like so many other such issues, the one I have in mind is ecclesiological: just what does being "in communion" with the Catholic Church consist in? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions? How and when are they met? And how, short of juridical excommunication, does a Catholic get herself out of communion with the Church? I once thought that debating such questions was just an arcane theological exercise, the sort that occupies people who don't have to worry about mere temporalities such as earning a living or changing diapers. But in fact it is anything but. The questions that arise here affect us all on the personal, pastoral, and political levels, which are intertwined in many ways. The issue is also very much an apologetical one. Since I can't do everything in one post, I shall focus on the issue mainly from that angle.

One thing that I've consistently observed since Vatican II is that many people, Catholics as much as non-Catholics, have the impression the Church's teaching on membership in the Church is, or rather has become, incoherent. It is widely believed that the Church once taught that you had to be what we'd now call a "card-carrying Catholic" to be saved—and even for those people, the prospects were pretty dicey. Being such a Catholic entailed being "in communion with" the Church of Rome. But having been exposed to Vatican II and ecumenism, many people now believe that the Church no longer teaches that. The general impression seems to be that the Church now teaches that you can squeak into heaven, perhaps by way of purgatory, just by avoiding the grossest and blackest forms of wickedness and being vaguely contrite, in the end, about one's preferred forms of wickedness—or at least about those which one has managed to recognize as such. From this point of view it hardly matters what religion you profess, or even whether you profess any at all.

Of course the above is a caricature I've devised for expository clarity. But it is not a terribly unfair caricature of how many people see these things. It is actually a reasonable summation of what I've been hearing for decades. And how such people see these things is not only wrong but terribly unfair to the Catholic Church, whose teaching on this subject is profound, nuanced, and still developing. Explaining why will help illustrate what being "in communion" with, and thus a member of, the Church actually means—and why that is important.

It is true that the Catholic Church has taught, with her full authority, the doctrine extra ecclesiam nulla salus: "outside the Church, there is no salvation" ('EENS' for short). For people who care about such facts, I don't even need to document that. It is also true that Vatican II did not repeat the words of EENS, at least as a pastoral matter. For what the Council did say, I always urge people to read the documents, especially Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio. But for now, here are the three most pertinent statements (emphases added):

Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, [this sacred Council] teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation (LG §13).

Even in the beginnings of this one and only Church of God there arose certain rifts,(19) which the Apostle strongly condemned.(20) But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions made their appearance and quite large communities came to be separated from full communion with the Catholic Church-for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame. The children who are born into these Communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation, and the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers, with respect and affection. For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect (UR §3).

Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience (LG §16).

The key development of doctrine here is this: those who are, for whatever reason, not culpable for failing to become formally members of the Catholic Church, can still be saved by responding positively to that grace, won by and coming from Christ, which is given to humanity in and through the Church, i.e. the Catholic Church. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church's explanation of EENS helps to make that clear.) The people so described are thus in "imperfect" communion with the Church. Being "in communion with" the Catholic Church thus is, or often can be, a matter of degree—just as the journey of the "pilgrim Church" herself toward eschatological fullness is a matter of degree. And if you are objectively inculpable for that degree's not being full, then you're "in," at least to a degree that can enable your salvation.

That matters a lot for ordinary pastoral practice, evangelization, and missionary activity—for only God can really know who is culpable and who isn't. But the idea of imperfect communion remains very controversial in some quarters, probably because it is so widely misunderstood.

It is often taken to mean that EENS has been, at least from the standpoint of logic, repudiated by the Catholic Magisterium. Of course I have vigorously argued that EENS has not been thus repudiated. My first formal argument to that effect was made in a 2006 post at the now-defunct version of Pontifications, where it evoked a combox running to well over 300 entries, many of which were scholarly. That post is preserved as the first dogma-specific entry in my long essay Development and Negation. The point the naysayers couldn't (or, in some cases, wouldn't) see was itself simple: it is one thing to say that there's no salvation outside the Church; it's another to say what being inside the Church can consist in. The former claim remains the teaching of the Church, now expressed by LG's formulation that she is "necessary for salvation." But the latter claim is that being in the Church, or at least being related to her in a salvific way, is often a matter of degree. That is a real development of insight into the fixed content of the deposit of faith.

What most interests me at the moment, however, is not how non-Catholics can be in some degree of communion with the Church, but how Catholics themselves can fail to in full communion—and why that matters.

The Eucharist is, among many other things, an expression of the intimate unity between God and his people, between Christ and the Church. As such and perforce, it is also an expression of the full unity of faith and graced fellowship among those who share it. So even American Catholics are taught, rightly and in considerable detail, that if they have sinned seriously in this-or-that way, they would be profaning the Eucharist by receiving it. That is because it is held, on the basis of Scripture and Tradition, that those who have abandoned their baptismal vocation by falling into mortal sin are no longer in full communion with the Church, and thus would be lying to the Church, and well as dishonoring the Body and Blood of the Lord, by receiving it into their bodies. Those who receive "unworthily" thus receive "unto their own condemnation" (cf. 1 Cor 11: 23-30). If they are thus and culpably not in full communion with the Church, they can be saved only if they repent. So much used to be taken for granted by Catholics in general, and still is in some quarters. Most Catholics know that, if they have committed sins such as adultery or grand larceny, they need to do something to reconcile with God and the Church.

Now even Catholics who only formally cooperate with grave and intrinsic evils, such as abortion, are committing what is, objectively speaking, serious sin. Hence and in particular, Catholic politicians who support laws giving wide scope to the practice of abortion are doing grave wrong. But it does not necessarily follow that they are guilty of that sin, so that they profane the Eucharist if and when they receive it. That follows only when (a) they are aware of how the teaching of the Church applies in this case, or (b) if they are unaware, they are culpable for being unaware. And the same holds for Catholics in general about any sort of serious sin, especially that of heresy. This is where the problem of pro-abort Catholic pols really arises from.

On a whole host of issues, mainly those having to do with sexuality, marriage, and procreation, many American Catholics do not actually believe the definitive teaching of the Church. And so, of course, they feel no obligation to live by it. The Catholic politicians they help elect are, by and large, no exception. The practical question which thus arises for the Church's pastors, especially the bishops, is whether such people should be presumed culpable for that or not, and thus whether they should be denied the Eucharist or not. In most cases, bishops and priests presume that people are not culpable for their infidelity to Church teaching. They presume either that people are approaching the Eucharist in good conscience or that it is not the role of pastors to judge the consciences of communicants when they march up to receive. And in the case of many ordinary Catholics, that presumption is correct. The depth of ignorance and deception among ordinary Catholics, which reached new lows in the decade or so after Vatican II, remains so great in many instances that such Catholics cannot be presumed culpable when, out of habit and sentiment, they receive the Eucharist. And so, even when such a Catholic is objectively culpable for not being in full communion with the Church, the appearance of full communion on their part is generally kept up.

Nevertheless, that poses a serious obstacle to evangelizing both ignorant Catholics and the culture at large. If, for what seem to be sound pastoral reasons, many Catholics who neither believe nor live by the moral teaching of the Church are receiving the Eucharist with apparent impunity, then how seriously are ordinary Catholics and the world at large to take such teaching? The general impression has become that such teaching is optional: a rather dismal section of the cafeteria line that one is free to bypass and that will, sooner or later, be tossed along with all the other food nobody buys. Thus the policy of keeping up appearances for the sake of pastoral economy has the effect of entrenching, on a wide scale, the very problem that occasioned the policy in the first place. And so, the preaching of the full Gospel has been largely buried under a collective rationalization. That, I am convinced, is the basis of most of the other problems in the American Catholic Church, including the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal that peaked five years ago. I blame the bishops for the fundamental problem as much as for its most egregious manifestation.

It can be argued that, given the sorry lack of adult catechesis, there is no practical alternative to the present policy of keeping up the appearance of full communion in the case of Catholics who are objectively not in full communion. That's what many bishops do argue, and the argument is cogent. One cannot just pick out, and pick on, the ordinary Catholics who are implicated in this mess. Most of them are not morally responsible for it, nor is it their role to clean it up. But one can and ought to pick out and pick on erring Catholics who have the education to know better and the power to affect a great many lives by their actions. I mean, of course, the Nancy Pelosis and the Joe Bidens. Archbishop Chaput has had some especially trenchant things to say about such people. If they have excuses, they shouldn't be left with them. Too much is at stake.

But there is a still-more fundamental problem here. Having acknowledged and taken into account the reality of imperfect communion for many non-Catholics, Rome must do the same for many Catholics, if only for self-consistency's sake. If she does so, as she has done for decades, she only reinforces the Church's internal problem for the reason I've already stated. If she does not, she becomes pastorally inconsistent: ecumenism will apply only to those who were never formally Catholic, so that we'll end up with a much smaller, if purer, Church. The Pope seems headed, slowly, in the latter direction. How he and his successors will carry on with it remains, however, an open question. In the meantime, the American bishops continue to disagree about how to handle the Pelosis and the Bidens. Maybe that's inevitable.

Either way, they should be more concerned with the formation of ordinary Catholic adults. Almost a decade ago, the USCCB produced a bracing document which points the way. Little has been done to implement it. I'm waiting with my resumé in hand.

This time, they came first for the Catholics

Only an outrage combining religion and politics has managed to rouse me from a self-imposed silence over the past several months. I am furious. As an RPG-toting Chuck Norris announced in the closing scene of one of his classically bad movies: "It's time."

Most of my erstwhile readers know by now that the Obama Administration has issued an "interim final rule" requiring employers to cover all forms of contraception and sterilization in their health-care plans at no cost to the user. In an access of generosity, expressed by President Obama in a phone call to Archbishop Timothy Dolan, faith-based employers not classified as "religious" have been given one year to comply. Now according to the Administration's unprecedentedly narrow definition of "religious," only organizations that exclusively serve believers, and are staffed exclusively by believers, count as religious. The implications of such a definition are by far the greatest for Catholic charities, hospitals, and schools, most of which serve and/or employ many non-Catholics. Those Catholic organizations must soon pay to violate the teaching of the Church. And so, those who lead and work for such organizations will soon be forced to pay for the privilege of violating their consciences.

This naked, cynical attack on religious liberty has of course been approved by the "liberal" establishment, including the New York  Times.  Worst of all, it was announced and enthusiastically endorsed by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, a former governor of Kansas accustomed to wearing her Catholicism proudly. Such as it is. The worst enemy is the one within.

One is reminded of another power grab many decades ago. Not long after World War II, a German Lutheran pastor composed a poem about how Nazi oppression proceeded once Hitler took power:

First they came for the communists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

 Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak out because I was Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak out for me.

 Democrats who prefer to call themselves "progressive" aren't Nazis, of course, but they resemble the Nazis in one respect: now in power, they are moving from toleration to persecution of faith-based opposition. And this time they've come for the Catholics first. Why the Catholics? Because among faith-based organizations which serve people not of the pertinent faith, only Catholic ones are sponsored by a church that officially opposes contraception and sterilization. "Progressives" these days are authoritarian about everything except sexuality, in which the individual is to be accorded total autonomy within the bounds of mutual "consent." But of course, the legal protection and promotion of sexual autonomy eventually entails intolerance of those who oppose contraception and sterilization, both of which are necessary for the exercise of such autonomy. And that's what's started to happen.

Within the Church, even some "Obama Catholics" have protested the new regulation: e.g., Michael Sean Winters and E.J. Dionne. If the U.S. bishops have their way, the matter will almost certainly reach the Supreme Court in due course. And some Republicans fondly speculate that this regulation will cost Obama something called "the Catholic vote." But that's dubious at best. Catholics who care deeply about this issue aren't the sort who voted, or would vote, for Obama anyway. They're a distinct minority of self-designated Catholics to begin with. Among nominal Catholics, liberal Catholics will fall into line behind the Democrats this fall, as they always do at election time.

Our defense against the erosion of religious liberty, then, will have to count not on the bulk of Catholics but on the bishops, the clergy, and the committed minority of faithful laity. We now have the advantage of clarity where before there was ambiguity and wiggle room. To join the battle, I urge all such laity to go here, sign the petition, and keep the ball rolling. And all faithful Catholic bloggers should keep on this matter.

God's doing OK in the polls!!!

You read that right. According to William E. Carroll—a Catholic philosopher currently ensconced as a good old Fellow at Blackfriars, Oxford—a respectable organization conducted a national poll a month ago showing that

...if God exists, voters are prepared to give it good marks. Voters approve of God’s performance by a 52% to 9% margin . . . When asked to evaluate God on some of the issues it is responsible for, voters give God its best rating on creating the universe, 71% to 5%. They also approve of its handling of the animal kingdom 56% to 11%, and even its handling of natural disasters 50% to 13%. Young voters are prepared to be more critical of God on natural disasters with those between 18 and 29 rating it 59% to 26%, compared to 47% to 12% among those over 65.

If such trends continue, God would be a shoo-in to beat Barack Obama next year. At any rate, nobody's confusing the latter with the former anymore.

Now Carroll does say much of what I'd say about this sort of thing, starting with the report's use of the impersonal pronoun 'it' for God. Even on that score, though, his critique should have gone further. How, I'd ask, can an 'it' be evaluated for its performance unless it's a machine (or perhaps a lower form of life), which very few people think God is? Even pollsters need to think through questions like that before asking people about their theological beliefs. Unlike the polling company's writeup, though, Carroll does get the very project's inherent irony. Surely, if there is a personal God, then he (yes, he; but that's another debate) is worthy of worship; granted such an analytic truth, it is God who should be evaluating our performance, not we his. Withal, the mere conduct of a poll asking people their opinion of God's job performance puts us in Monty-Python territory: entertainment, not theology. Our consumerist, democratic selves are ready grist for parody. Self-parody, one supposes, would be too much to expect; I'd be pleasantly surprised if that's what the pollsters were up to.

Yet the still-greater irony here is that, among a people still describing itself in the main as Christian, neither pollsters nor polled seemed to suspect irony.

The late theologian Herbert McCabe, OP, once pointed out: "It needs a kind of cosmic megalomania to suppose that God has the job of saving my soul and is to be given bad marks if he does not do that. Whatever he does for us, like creating us in the first place, is an act of gratuitous love, not something that is demanded of him." Now it is not megalomania to suppose that God has set himself the job of preserving the innocent from ultimate harm, whether the harm be from other people's bad choices or from the forces of nature. In fact, according to Christianity, our first parents were innocent and preserved from harm before their Fall, and we, their unfortunate descendants, are all meant to be blessed forever, free of death and all other harms. But in this in-between time, there is no reliable correlation between virtue and good fortune. The minority who admit to giving God bad marks give them largely for that reason. That may not be megalomaniacal, but I believe it manifests what the psychoanalysts term "infantile narcissism" in people of an age to know better. They're like seven-year-olds complaining "It's not fair!"

Well, so what if it isn't? If it hasn't dawned on you by the age of majority that life is not fair and never will be, then you haven't outgrown your infantile narcissism. The more sensitive and thoughtful narcissists just invest it, on humanity's behalf, in a bitter cosmic complaint against the Almighty. I for one have found that to be the most common cause of atheism. But the problem manifest in the complaint is not God's problem. If you think it is, the joke is on you and the complaint is your problem.

Creation and redemption are about gratuitous love. Hence life in this vale of tears is about mercy, not fairness—even granted that, in the age to come, the two qualities will be as one. When we who are ostensibly Christian fail to recognize that, we neither see nor appreciate the real ironies of life. We just stay angry with God—even when we call ourselves atheists. So long as we think we're in a position to evaluate God's performance, we expose ourselves to that and worse ironies.

The Manhattan Declaration and Christian Principles

See my post at the First Things blog "First Thoughts."   A lot more can and should be said, but as a response to Steve Hutchens of Touchstone, I believe the post is a good conversation starter.

How "choice" devours itself

Lydia McGrew has coined a chillingly apt metaphor for the culture of death: "choice devours itself." She has applied the metaphor to the specific issues of forced abortion, euthanasia, and "organ conscription," which are quite serious enough in themselves. But I believe her metaphor can be generalized to describe the entire direction that the societies of the secularizing West, and increasingly others too, are taking. The modern, secular, Western understanding of freedom sows the seeds of its own destruction.

In The Abolition of Man (1943)—a book I am not alone in seeing as one of the most prophetic of modern times—CS Lewis argued that "man's power over Nature" really means "the power of some men over others with Nature as its instrument." He predicted that scientific and technical progress in "eugenics," "psychological conditioning," and other areas will in due course give some people the power to remake others as they please. The question will then arise: What criteria will they use to determine how to remake humanity itself? Unless "the conditioners" acknowledge a rational, objectively binding set of moral norms governing themselves and everyone else, their only criteria will be subjective: their own desires, impulses, and preferences.  There would be no norms by which to evaluate, and choose accordingly among, those desires, impulses, and preferences themselves. Such a situation would recall Hume's dictum: "Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions." The conditioned would be the slaves of the conditioners' passions, and the conditioners the slaves of their own. In that sense, might would indeed make right.

Now in one way, Lewis' scenario seems quite fanciful. There has never been a time when people, even those who profess moral relativism in principle, have acted without lip service to the belief that at least some of the moral norms they acknowledge have universal and objective binding force, irrespective of whether this or that set of people also acknowledge it.  Callow undergraduates and ugly drunks aside, hardly anybody is willing to come right out and say that might makes right, full stop. Even Hitler spoke as though the might of the Aryan race went hand-in-hand with its general moral superiority, according to a standard that obtained whether non-Aryans, or unreliable Aryans, recognized it or not.  Lenin, Stalin, and Mao held that their atrocities were justified by the direction of history: dialectical materialism assured us that everything would work out in the end for the benefit of the masses. Even the worst megalomaniacs try to rationalize their libido dominandi in objective terms. Or at least they have so far; for such is the tribute that sophistry pays to conscience, where "conscience" is understood, à la Ratzinger, as the human race's collective anamnesis of the most basic moral truths. So we might think it likely, as some of Lewis' critics have, that once scientific and technical progress give us the ability to remake ourselves, the values by which we do so will be those of most of today's scientific community: rational, liberal, humane. In other words: the values taken for granted by the faculties of secular universities. What would be so bad about that?

The problem is that what's happening along the march for ever-increasing "freedom" and "choice" virtually precludes such a result. For what secular liberalism regards as moral progress, which is indeed making its way throughout Western society, contains within itself a pair of performative self-contradictions too basic to be sustainable. That is what the slogan "choice devours itself" ultimately means.

For the secular liberal, moral progress is thought to consist in facilitating what I call "radical autonomy." From this point of view, what's most precious in the human person is the capacity for fully autonomous choice. Within the limits imposed by the laws of nature and others' "right to choose," what is chosen is considered less important for human well-being than that it be chosen autonomously. That idea has much appeal. In a now-famous opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy put it thus:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.

To most Americans, that seems unexceptionable: Who, after all, wants the State to force our adopting beliefs on such matters? But that leaves us with two questions: What should those beliefs nonetheless be, and how would we know them to be justified?

As given by secular liberalism, the answer to the first question is that we ought to believe in radical autonomy. The whole tenor of modernity virtually impels us in the West to hold that moral progress consists in expanding the effective scope of such autonomy. The more "liberty," the better. And of course, if all adults are equal in virtue of possessing such autonomy, then it is an injustice to any of them to hold that some choices in the spheres Kennedy named should not be respected by law.  From thence derives much of the support for abortion, assisted suicide, court-imposed redefinition of marriage and family, and other practices thought to protect or expand people's autonomy.

In practice, though, it doesn't quite work that way. Allowing women to kill in their wombs the human lives they've generated, on the ground that respecting women's autonomy requires that, or allowing people to enlist others in their own demise, on the ground that they should be the judge of when their lives are no longer worth living, encourages a habit of thought which makes life more precarious for everybody. And allowing marriage to be redefined so that parenthood, if chosen at all, becomes a purely legal category rather than a primarily biological category just is going to undermine both the stability and the freedom of the family. Mind you, I am not here addressing the question whether abortion, suicide, or same-sex marriage are intrinsically wrong, or only wrong for the most part, or not wrong at all. My point is just this: a habit of thought in which the value of human life is seen primarily in terms of what we can freely choose to do with it, rather than as a gift from some transcendent source uniting reason and love, is a habit of thought which will lead to more and more people becoming victims of others' "choices."

At first that will be, indeed already is, the most vulnerable: children and the elderly. But no principled line, more secure than that drawn by raw power, can be drawn between lives exempt from such a fate and lives subject to it. It's all a matter of what "we" consider valuable, where "we" are the people with the votes and/or the guns. Once the value of life, and the reality of human nature, are no longer treated as givens but as measurable by some sort of calculus among "autonomous" human agents, no other result is possible. That is why, when the "might" in "might makes right" is that of politically institutionalized "choice," choice devours itself. Such is the first "performative self-contradiction" in the ideology of radical autonomism.

The other question I posed for secular liberalism is how we are to know what basic beliefs about the "mystery" of "existence" and "human life" are the ones we ought to adopt. That question is more difficult for secular liberals than most of them realize.

One might think that a thoroughgoing radical autonomist would simply reject the question, thus insisting that there are no such beliefs we "ought" to adopt, as though there were some philosophical standard other than autonomous "choice" for adopting one set over another. But such a stance is so plainly self-defeating that few proponents of "choice" are willing to defend it openly. For if what chiefly matters is the choosing, so that it doesn't matter what we choose unless we're insanely ignoring the laws of physics or inconsistently infringing others' "right to choose," then my freely choosing to reject radical autonomism must be respected as much as other's freely embracing it. But implausible as it may seem, that seems to be the rationale behind the sort of Western "multiculturalism" which cedes more and more ground to Muslim resident aliens claiming the right to be governed by Sharia law.

In almost every major city of Western Europe, we now have a de facto situation in which domestic violence, and the oppression of women generally, is legal on one side of a street and illegal on the other. Don't think it can't happen here. If such a situation be accepted as legitimate in principle, then radical autonomism is thereby giving up its claim to be objectively and universally binding. It can only be seen, even by itself, as just one more "choice" made without prejudice to any other sort of "choice." But if that judgment applies to Muslim fundamentalism, why not to any other brand of fundamentalism, or indeed to any comprehensive belief-system whatsoever? There is no principled basis for making a distinction.

Now to their credit, a few secular liberals, such as Christopher Hitchens, have seen the problem and addressed it. They attack multi-culti cravenness as just that, urging us to buck up and defend some version of secular liberalism as a universally, objectively binding morality incompatible with "religion." But that focuses attention on the second question I raised: how, without some version of what they call "religion," would we know which morality enjoys such status?

Most secular liberals point to the progress of science and democracy as evidence of the truth of their ideology. Our lives are just better, by a host of measures, for those products of modernity. We know more, we're more comfortable and longer-lived, and accordingly we have a wider array of "choices" befitting our personal dignity than did people before the Enlightenment and its effects took hold. What's cited as evidence here is indeed the case; but what, exactly, is it evidence for, other than the fact that it gives some of us more of what most of us find ourselves wanting? What ought people to value and therefore seek, irrespective of what some or most of them actually do value and seek?

Once again, secular liberals have no principled answer to that question. For answering it requires what John Rawls called some-or-other "comprehensive world-view" which, according to him and secular liberals generally, cannot be enshrined in the public sphere without infringing people's autonomy. We are to order our lives together only by investigating which public norms enable more autonomous human agents to get more of what they want by living together than the alternatives would. It's a purely empirical question of maximizing preferences and thus "choice." Aside from that, no vision of life imposing a universal scale of values on people should be embodied in our political institutions.

Now as we've already seen, such a position is self-defeating in its radical form. But let's suppose it can be suitably qualified to avoid that result. Rawls himself admitted that he too has a "comprehensive world-view" (CWV) in terms of which "political liberalism" is to be justified. So the only question becomes: which world-view?

The problem secular liberals have with answering that question is their naturalism, which can be either methodological or, more strongly, ontological. They're always telling us that people's CWVs are shaped by "culture," which in turn is shaped by the laws of biology generally and of evolution in particular. Now granted that is true to some extent, it leaves untouched the question to what extent various CWVs are themselves true, along with the question whether we can choose our CWVs freely, as Justice Kennedy assumes. If people's CWVs are wholly shaped by factors beyond the individual's control, then as Bertrand Russell once quipped, "some of us are determined to be right; others, to be wrong." Right or wrong, we would not be adopting our several CWVs for the reason that they are true, even if we think we are; for whatever our CWVs, our holding them as true is beyond our control, and hence we do not choose to believe them simply on the ground that they are true. Rather, we believe them to be true because we are causally determined to do so. But in that case, why should our CWVs be respected as those of autonomous agents?

A secular liberalism that avoids epistemological self-cannibalism must say not only that certain propositions and norms are those we ought to adopt as part of a CWV, but also that we can know them to be universally and objectively binding, and choose freely, for that very reason, to guide ourselves by them. Assuming there are such propositions and norms, it cannot be said that they bind on the ground that we choose them. That's because, for purposes of decision-making, we can only be said to choose them for reasons inherent in them—not arbitrarily or randomly, and not because were are causally determined to choose them by factors beyond our control.  If we chose them arbitrarily or randomly, then our choices would be no more worthy of respect than any others, and hence we would have no reason to make them as opposed to others. And if we were causally determined to choose them, then we could not be choosing them because they are true, but simply because we have no choice. That's not what secular liberals claim, or seek to claim, as the basis of personal autonomy.

Hence the second performative self-contradiction. Secular liberalism stands as much in need of self-justification as its competitors. It must explain why certain propositions and norms are those we ought to adopt as part of a CWV, how we can know them to be universally and objectively binding, and therefore why we ought to choose freely, for that reason, to guide ourselves by them. But that is precisely the kind of argument it cannot produce if all CWVs are equally products of culture and biology, with none admitting a justification that transcends both. And so if it is not to seek a justification simply in terms of the might of Western secular democracies, and the cultural preferences of their self-styled "enlightened" citizens, secular liberalism must produce an argument for claiming that "choice," within the limits already specified, trumps what is chosen. As I've argued, the only kind of argument that can do that will end up positing things beyond "choice" as universally and objectively binding criteria for choice. There can be no principled objection to including those as part of a CWV that undergirds the res publica. For excluding them in the name of choice deprives choice of the justification it needs to bind. So choice devours itself, unless something higher than choice must regulate choice without crushing it.

Now if there is an argument that is of the needed sort, elicits general assent among secular liberals, and does more than invoke their own preferences, I've yet to hear it. It is taken as almost self-evident that the sort of society in which secular Princeton philosophers are both possible and comfortable is the best kind. But as I've already argued, a CWV like that cannot explain why human life is intrinsically valuable or even why the values of science and personal autonomy trump all others. It cannot supply a sustainable rationale for itself. All it can do is justify a certain sort of "might" to itself, in its own terms, without reference to any transcendent source of reason and love.

For that reason, Lewis was essentially correct. In a society driven by "choice," the people who gain enough power over human nature will have nothing to prevent them from becoming as much the slaves of their own non-rational appetites as the rest of us. "Man's final conquest will be the abolition of man." Or: choice will have devoured itself. Unless, of course, the laws of "Nature's God" are acknowledged and respected as much as "the laws of Nature" themselves.

Secular Ecclesiology

In my online career, I have found that the issues sparking the longest debates are almost invariably ecclesiological, i.e., questions concerning the identity, nature, and authority of something called "the Church." At one time, that surprised me. I do, after all, address a range of philosophical and political as well as theological topics, many of which are are objectively more basic and comprehensive than that particular branch of theology. Yet with the possible exception of abortion—where philosophy, religion, and politics all converge—it's ecclesiology that evokes the most passion around here and in that part of the blogosphere I frequent. At the end I'll say why I think that is. But at the moment I'd like to focus on the latest ecclesiological twist in the news.

At the end of its recent term, the U.S. Supreme Court "...left standing a lower court ruling that will allow an Oregon man to try to hold the Vatican financially responsible for his sexual abuse by a priest, if he can persuade the court that the priest was an employee of the Holy See." For the legal details of the case, you can start by consulting the CNA story I've quoted. Legal eagles will doubtless know where to find the actual texts of the lower-court decision. Now as a decided non-lawyer, I find my eyes glazing over when faced with most legal questions. What interests me about this case is something I've observed in other recent developments at the interface of religion and politics: the idea that it's somehow up to the State to address ecclesiological questions in order to discern and carry out what is just in the civil sphere. In the U.S. today, the organ of the State most often involved in making such decisions is the judiciary. They don't do a good job of it: the incoherence of church-state jurisprudence in America since the 1940s is widely acknowledged. But they sure keep trying.

Of course there are people who think nothing untoward is going on with the present decision. If a victim of sexual abuse is to see justice done to him, then somebody has to be held accountable for the failure of justice to be done in the past. And if this were a case of negligence on the part of some corporation, NGO, or governmental body below the national level, there would be no question who would be liable. Under civil law, officers of such bodies can be held liable for negligence in their oversight and discipline of their "employees." The only exceptions are heads of state. Now in this case the negligence, if it that's what it was, was exhibited by clerical officials of the Catholic Church. Prima facie, the question seems simple: whether the relationship between a local American priest-and-religious and the Holy See is enough like that of employee-employer to justify treating the Pope like, say, the CEO of a multinational corporation rather than a head of state and his government, who are ordinarily immune from prosecution. Even the Obama Administration has taken the side of the Vatican in this one, arguing in a brief that the case does not call for making an exception to the usual rule of immunity for heads of state.

You won't find me disagreeing with that. Yet given that the Supreme Court has allowed the present suit and decision to stand, it is now up to a U.S. District Court to determine whether the priestly perp was in fact an "employee" of the Vatican in the sense necessary to establish civil liability. And that's what troubles me. In general, the relationship between a priest and/or religious and their ecclesiastical superiors is not the same as that of employee to employer. The relationship between such parties is not really that of contracting with each other to exchange labor for material compensation, though that occasionally happens within the context of a larger and more fundamental relationship. But such an occasion does not seem to have arisen in this case. The plaintiff's attorney argues that merely functioning as a priest or religious makes one an "employee" of the Vatican in the legally applicable sense of that term. If that argument is allowed to succeed, then a secular government will be deciding, to a hitherto unprecedented extent, on the hierarchical nature of the universal Church. In effect, Erastianism will have become American law. King Henry VIII would be delighted.

Some would think I'm exaggerating. To such folk, all that's at issue here is whether being a church leader exempts one from the ordinary legal requirement to turn suspected criminals under their authority over to the civil authorities. The pope, the bishops, and religious superiors were in authority over the priestly perp in question; ergo, they should be held legally accountable for their failure to do what they could and should have under the law. Now that actually holds at the local level. That is why many dioceses have had to make huge payouts to abuse victims for civil damages. But in this case, the argument assumes that the kind of authority that the Vatican has over priests and religious everywhere is enough like that of a multinational corporation over its employees to create a due presumption that the former should be treated like the latter. For without that presumption, the papacy cannot be held liable for failure to reign in the perp. So, if allowed to prevail, the plaintiff's argument would commit the United States to treating the pope as the CEO of Catholic Church, Inc.

What's disturbing here isn't just the falsity of such a belief. Even more disturbing is the appearance of such a belief within the wider context of belief among the Church's many critics. For most purposes, they don't want the pope to function as the CEO of Catholic Church, Inc. They don't want the Vatican to muzzle or dismiss priests and religious for expressing heretical views. They don't want the Vatican telling laity who procure or support abortion that they're excommunicated. They don't want priests refusing absolution to couples who contracept. Many, like the kings and nobles of old, want the very selection of bishops taken largely out of the papacy's hands. For most purposes, they don't want the Church to retain an exclusive right to decide which members to elevate, discipline, or expel. But when it comes to protecting kids, the Church has to be treated like any multinational that can fire or prosecute its people at will. And the scariest thing of all is that they see nothing inconsistent about that stance. They want the Church to have less authority than she claims, except when she doesn't claim it and they think she should have it.

That's what I call 'secular ecclesiology'. It's an important aspect of what the present pope meant by the memorable phrase, delivered to the 2005 conclave, "a dictatorship of relativism." What the loyal citizens of that dictatorship want is for the Church to stop telling people what she thinks is right and wrong and instead conform herself to their ideas of right and wrong. At bottom, it's a question of authority: specifically, who gets to to settle disputes about the identity, nature, and above all the authority of the Church herself?

That is the secular parallel to the formal divisions that have rent the Church since the beginning, but especially in the fifth, eleventh, and sixteenth centuries. The underlying ecclesiological question when dealing with "heresy" and "schism" is always who has the authority to decide, in a definitive manner binding the whole Church, what's orthodox and, as part of that, where the fullness of the Body of Christ resides. The main reason I'm Catholic, as distinct from Protestant or Orthodox, is that I believe only the Catholic Church, as she understands herself, has that sort of authority. Christians who are not Catholics, of course, deny that she does—or they would become Catholics with all deliberate speed. But I suspect that the present-day depredations of secular ecclesiology are facilitated, in large part, by the collective failure of Christians themselves to resolve their ecclesiological divisions. If we can't agree on where to locate the divinely given authority of the Church, or even on who is "the" Church, then we're practically inviting the State to subordinate institutional churches to itself. That has always been a problem for the Catholic Church to some extent. It's been even more of a problem for Orthodox and mainline Protestant churches.

This is not just a difficulty about how to relate religion and politics to each other. It's not even mere fodder for ecumenists. I believe that ecclesiology has the importance for Christians today that the great christological debates of the first millennium had for Christians then.

The disputes then were about who and what Jesus Christ is. The disputes now are about who and what the Church is. In one sense, the Church is the pilgrim People of God; the Church Militant is not yet what she is called to be. But in another sense, the Church is Jesus Christ himself; for as his Bride, she is one Body with him in a mystical marriage to be fully consummated only when the Bridegroom returns. Both disputes, the christological and the ecclesiological, are about how God becomes visible in the world. It's about how the Word is made flesh.

Whatever the answer to that question, it cannot be treated as a matter of opinion without being rendered merely political, and therefore idle. That is why Newman said: "No revelation is given, unless there be some authority to decide what is given." By that he did not mean that the Church, whoever and whatever that is, gets to decide for herself what the revelation from God in Christ is. He meant that, if we are to distinguish divine revelation from human opinion about what the "sources" thereof mean, then some visible and divinely established authority has to be able to settle doctrinal disputes in a definitive and binding manner.

Whoever that is, it's not the State. But not for nothing did Chesterton call the U.S. "a nation with the soul of a church." It is here that the question will come to a head.

Israel Confronts the Gaza Freedom Flotilla

NOTE: Cross-posted to Catholic Friends of Israel & The American Catholic -- this roundup will be continuously updated with further information.

This past Memorial Day weekend, "Israel boarded a Gaza-bound 'Freedom Flotilla' and killed an indeterminate number of innocent bystanders as they attempted to take control international waters."

Well, at least that's the take of Henry Karlson of Vox Nova -- who appears to be taking his talking points from Egyptian passenger Hazem Farouq:

"It was hell on the sea. I saw Israeli soldiers killing activists in cold blood and then walking on their bodies ... The Israeli soldiers sprayed bullets as if they were a mafia in an American film."

Unfortunately, as with such accounts of Israel's actions, the facts tend to get in the way. Let's examine the various claims of this Catholic blog regarding what happened this weekend ...

Tantamount to Piracy?

[Henry Karlson @ Vox Nova] Israel is claiming the massacre is justified because their soldiers were attacked. They fail to point out they were attacked when they were boarding a vessel they had no lawful authority to board, acting like pirates who think they control the seas.

For what it's worth, the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs provides a page explaining the legal background behind the Gaza flotilla and the maritime blockade of Gaza:

A maritime blockade is in effect off the coast of Gaza. Such blockade has been imposed, as Israel is currently in a state of armed conflict with the Hamas regime that controls Gaza, which has repeatedly bombed civilian targets in Israel with weapons that have been smuggled into Gaza via the sea. [...]

[I]t should be noted that Israel publicized the existence of the blockade and the precise coordinates of such by means of the accepted international professional maritime channels. Israel also provided appropriate notification to the affected governments and to the organizers of the Gaza protest flotilla. Moreover, in real time, the ships participating in the protest flotilla were warned repeatedly that a maritime blockade is in effect. [...]

Given the protesters explicit intention to violate the naval blockade, Israel exercised its right under international law to enforce the blockade. It should be noted that prior to undertaking enforcement measures, explicit warnings were relayed directly to the captains of the vessels, expressing Israel's intent to exercise its right to enforce the blockade.

Not only did Israel convey explicit warnings against breaking the blockade, but the interception came after numerous appeals to governments, organizations, and flotilla organizers ahead of their departures, and also during their journeys towards the Gaza shore [to convey the humanitarian supplies by another route]:

In these appeals, it was clarified to the flotilla organizers that they would be able to anchor in the Ashdod port, unload their equipment and transfer it over to the Gaza Strip in an organized manner after it would undergo accepted security checks. When flotilla organizers made it clear that they had no intention of cooperating and accepting the invitation to the Ashdod port, it was decided to intercept the boats and to bring them to the Ashdod port.

Consequently, Israel believed it was well within its rights to enforce a declared blockade. See also Israel, the Flotilla and International Waters (discussion with Yaakov @ Newsvine.com).


Update

Ed Morgan, a professor of international law at the University of Toronto, offers a helpful primer on the "Law of the Sea", by which we can judge the flotilla incident:

A naval blockade is defined in Article 7.71 of the U.S. Naval Handbook as “a belligerent operation to prevent vessels and/or aircraft of all nations, enemy as well as neutral, from entering or exiting specified ports, airfields, or coastal areas belonging to, occupied by, or under the control of an enemy nation.” It is designed to stop ships from crossing a cordon separating the enemy’s coast from the high seas. It is therefore often enforced in what would otherwise be international waters approaching, but not necessarily inside, the territorial sea of the blockaded party. [...]

A maritime blockade is for security purposes only, and must allow humanitarian assistance to the civilian population. Since the ships sailing for Gaza were on a declared humanitarian mission, those on board had the right to expect that any humanitarian goods would ultimately find their way to their intended recipients. On the other hand, having announced its blockade, Israel had no obligation to take the ships’ crew at their word as to the nature of the cargo. The blockading party has the right to fashion the arrangements, including search at a nearby port, under which passage of humanitarian goods is permitted. San Remo specifies that this inspection should include supervision by a neutral party to prevent the unwarranted seizure of humanitarian supplies and the abuse of humanitarian assistance by the blockaded party.

Finally, the rule of proportionate force, applicable to all armed conflict, applies equally to a naval blockade. Blockading navies are obliged to arrest a ship rather than simply fire on it, and once its soldiers are on board an arrested ship their actions must be proportionate to the threat that they meet. While Israel appears to have met the other criteria eliminating a macro offence, here the facts will have to be gathered from witnesses and videos to determine what level of force was truly needed at the spot where the paintballs met the hammers.

A disproportionate or justified use of armed force?

[Henry Karlson @ Vox Nova] Probably those who attacked the soldiers were acting reflexively without thinking. Let alone the moral question, in all practicality, this was not the wisest thing to do, because the soldiers were heavily armed and could take control of the ship without difficulty.

(Elder of Ziyon notes), these would be the same "peace activists" who attacked the IDF commandoes with chains and iron rods, throwing them over railings, stabbing them, and calling for a repeat of Mohammed's massacre of Jews at Khaybar.

By contrast, the soldiers by their account were not "heavily armed" but rather were woefully unprepared -- armed with equipped with paintball rifles used to disperse minor protests, and handguns as a last resort in life-threatening situations (as reported by Yediot Ahronot).


Here's how one IDF soldier described the incident:

"We went down with our bare hands and met passengers with glass bottles and clubs," said one fighter squadron participated in the operation.

"We were lynched," testified one of the fighters in the hospital. "For every person that came down, three or four people beat him. They were all with metal batons, knives, glass bottles. At one point there was live fire."

"In fact I got there last," said a fighter squadron in an interview with Channel 2 News. "I saw the guys scattered on the deck surrounded each of them with about four people beating him."

"Trying to defend myself I probably broke my hand . All who got on board had no weapons in hand, but their bare hands," explained the soldier. "We came to work things out, but they came for war - the gun was absolutely our last resort."

According to Army Radio reporter Gal Lev-Rom, "the soldiers said they were truly not prepared to face violence of this nature":

“The activists had many things ready for an attack on the soldiers,” Lev-Rom said, “including, for instance, a box of 20-30 slingshots with metal balls; these can kill. There were also all sorts of knives and many similar things. These are what they call ‘cold’ weapons, as opposed to live fire. It was quite clear that a lynch had been prepared.”

Lev-Rom said, however, that it appears the army, “even though it prepared for many different scenarios, was not ready for this one. The army seems not to have known what type of people were there and what type of weapons they had. It was hard for Israel to conceive that the ship, sponsored by the country of Turkey, would have such weapons. Israel was prepared to deal with anarchists, and instead had to deal with terrorists – that’s the feeling here.”

A Reuters cameraman on the Israel Navy ship Kidon, sailing close to the convoy, said IDF commanders monitoring the operation were surprised by the strong resistance (Haaretz):

One of the commandos said some of the soldiers were stripped of their helmets and equipment and a several were tossed from the top deck to a lower deck, forcing them to jump into the sea to escape.

"They jumped me, hit me with clubs and bottles and stole my rifle," one of the commandos said. "I pulled out my pistol and had no choice but to shoot."

The soldiers said they were forced to open fire after the activists struck one of their comrades in the head and trampled on him. A senior IDF field commander ordered the soldiers then to respond with fire, a decision which the commandos said received full backing the military echelon.

The IDF said its rules of engagement allowed troops to open fire in what it called a "life-threatening situation".

Update!

According to Free Gaza's account of the events, "Under darkness of night, Israeli commandoes dropped from a helicopter onto the Turkish passenger ship, Mavi Marmara, and began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck. They fired directly into the crowd of civilians asleep."

However, a Turkish paper published pictures of Israeli commandos taken hostage during the initial moments of the flotilla raid, which reveals Free Gaza's claim to be a complete fabrication. The blog Elder of Ziyon comments:

The Turkish newspaper that published the pictures of the IDF soldiers today does not use the meme of ruthless IDF soldiers shooting from the helicopter and murdering civilians within seconds of landing on deck - nor do the pictures support that narrative in the least. Rather, they prove Israel's version of events completely. Yet the Turkish press, as we had seen Friday from some of the Arabic press, instead say how weak and ineffectual the IDF soldiers were, all but mocking them for not using lethal force initially.

The newspaper notes, with glee, the fear in the soldiers' faces captured in the photos. It discusses how the brave "humanitarians" fought the mighty IDF with sacks of onions. The article calls the soldiers "amateurish" and "incompetent."

To the supporters of the IHH and its partners, the IDF's reticence in using lethal force is a clear sign of weakness, not a sign of caring about human life.

"We had no choice" - "They had murder in their eyes". The Jerusalem Post gives an eyewitness account of the commando who killed six of the attackers:

The 15th and last naval commando from Flotilla 13 (the Shayetet) to rappel down onto the ship from the helicopter, S. said on Thursday that he was immediately attacked by what the IDF has called “the mob of mercenaries” aboard the vessel, just like the soldiers who had boarded just before him.

Looking to his side, he saw three of his commanders lying wounded – one with a gunshot wound to the stomach and another with a gunshot wound to the knee. A third was lying unconscious; his skull was fractured by a devastating blow with a metal bar.

As the next in the chain of command, S., who has been in the Shayetet for three and a half years, immediately took charge.

He pushed the wounded soldiers up against the wall of the upper deck and created a perimeter of soldiers around them to begin treating their wounds, he said. He then arranged his men to form a second perimeter, and pulled out his 9 mm. Glock pistol to stave off the charging attackers and to protect his wounded comrades.

The attackers had already seized two pistols from the commandos, and fired repeatedly at them. Facing more than a dozen of the mercenaries, and convinced their lives were in danger, he and his colleagues opened fire, he said. S. singlehandedly killed six men. His colleagues killed another three.

Video Footage:

• A soldier that took part in boarding the Mavi Marmara describes the violent confrontation that awaited on it's decks
  
• Video taken by IDF naval boat shows the passengers of the Mavi Marmara, one of the ships in the 'Free Gaza' Flotilla, violently attacking IDF soldiers with metal poles and chairs.
  
• IDF soldier being stabbed by Mavi Marmara "peace activist"
  
• Video of Turkish "peace activists" on Mavi Marmara ambushing and beating soldiers
  
• In footage captured on the Mavi Marmara, activists are seen attacking the soldiers with a stun grenade, a box of plates, and water hoses as the soldiers attempt to board the ship.
  

Humanitarians and "Peace activists"

Henry Karlson (Vox Nova) moves on to describe the convoy itself and it's "humanitarian mission":

"The Freedom Flotilla carries more than 10,000 tons of relief and developmental aid to Gaza, along with roughly 700 participants from more than 30 countries, among them volunteers from Canada, South Africa, Algeria, Turkey, Macedonia, Pakistan, Yemin, Kosovo, the UK and US and Kuwait – and an exiled former Archbishop of Jerusalem who currently lives in the Vatican."

Here we see the situation involves not just Muslim nations, but many of the nations of the West, such as the United States. We also see that the retired Archbishop of Jerusalem is on board the ship, indicating the active role the Church has had in this humanitarian aid.

The archbishop in question would be Father Hilarion Capucci

... the archbishop of Jerusalem during the 1960s and early 1970s, was arrested by Israeli security forces in 1974 for material support of a terrorist organization. According to Paul Merkley, a historian and author of the book Christian Attitudes Towards the State of Israel, Capucci used his official limousine and "the cover of his priestly office to personally smuggle explosives, submachine guns, and even katyusha rockets into Israel, which were then used in PLO terrorist actions accounting for the loss of many lives."

The Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement on its English language website this week, announcing the priest's participation in the flotilla and claiming that "the Israeli occupation exiled father Capucci from Palestine because of his honorable national stands."

Sentenced to fifty-seven years in an Israeli prison, the gunrunning clergyman was granted a reprieve in 1977 after direct intervention from the Vatican. The Catholic Church called for Capucci's release on the grounds that his incarceration only served to "aggravate tension."

The Church promised Israeli authorities that Capucci would cease all involvement in political issues regarding the state of Israel. Since that time Capucci has positioned himself as a prominent anti-Zionist activist. In 2009 he was arrested and transferred to Syria by Israeli security forces after attempting to illegally enter Gaza by sea. The former terrorist is also active in promoting the right of return for those Arabs who fled during the 1948 invasion of the newly declared state of Israel.

According to the former archbishop, the founder of his religion was "the first Fedayeen" and he was merely "following his example."

So much for the "Church's involvement" -- what about the rest of the occupants?

As Jonathan Schanzer (Weekly Standard) points out, the convoy of ships allegedly trying to bring aid to the Gaza Strip was organized by a group belonging to an officially designated terrorist organization:

The Turkish IHH (Islan Haklary Ve Hurriyetleri Vakfi in Turkish) was founded in 1992, and reportedly popped up on the CIA's radar in 1996 for its radical Islamist leanings. Like many other Islamist charities, the IHH has a record of providing relief to areas where disaster has struck in the Muslim world.

However, the organization is not a force for good. The Turkish nonprofit belongs to a Saudi-based umbrella organization known to finance terrorism called the Union of Good (Ittilaf al-Kheir in Arabic). Notably, the Union is chaired by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who is known best for his religious ruling that encourages suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. According to one report, Qardawi personally transferred millions of dollars to the Union in an effort to provide financial support to Hamas.

In 2008, the Israelis banned IHH, along with 35 other Islamist charities worldwide, for its ties to the Union of Good. This was a follow-on designation; Israelis first blocked the Union of Good from operating in the West Bank and Gaza in 2002. [Read the rest]

See also: IHH's support and finance of radical Islamic terror networks - a report by The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, according to which it's pretty clear that the activists aboard the Flotilla were hoping to provoke a confrontation with Israel:

On April 7, 2010, IHH head Bülent Yildirim told a press conference in Istanbul that the flotilla would be a “test” for Israel. He said that should Israel oppose the flotilla it would be considered “a declaration of war” on the countries whose activists arrived on board the ships (IHH website, April 7, 2010). In a fiery speech given at the launching of the Mavi Marmaris on May 23, he said to Israel, “Handle this crisis well. If you prevent [the flotilla from reaching the Gaza Strip] you will remain isolated in the world and harm yourselves” (IHH website in Turkish, May 23, 2010). On May 21 Muhammad Kaya, head of IHH’s branch office in the Gaza Strip, said there was a plan to send flotillas to the Gaza Strip every month (Al-Jazeera-Info website, arabianawareness.com, May 21, 2010).

Violence and possibly "martyrdom" against Israel was not only anticipated, but sought after according to Dr. Abd Al-Fatah Shayyeq Naaman, lecturer in Shari'ah law at a university in Yemen:

"The [Gaza] flotilla commander said yesterday: 'We will not allow the Zionists to get near us and we will use resistance against them.'

How will they wage resistance? They will resist with their fingernails. They are people who seek Martyrdom for Allah, as much as they want to reach Gaza, but the first [Martyrdom] is more desirable."

[Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), May 30, 2010]

Update!

The International Muslim Brotherhood had a heavy hand in orchestrating the flotilla, reports Thomas Jocelyn (Weekly Standard June 3, 2010):

[T]he flotilla was organized in large part by a radical Turkish Islamist organization named IHH (Islan Haklary Ve Hurriyetleri Vakfi). The IHH, in turn, is part of a Saudi-based umbrella group called the Union of Good, which was created by Hamas. [...]

The Union of Good’s leaders include Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a top Muslim Brotherhood cleric, and Sheikh Abd al Majid al Zindani, who heads Yemen’s Islah party. Zindani and the Islah party have deep Brotherhood roots.

In other words, the IHH is an offshoot of the Union of Good, which is in turn an offshoot of the Brotherhood -- as is Hamas.

Jocelyn goes on to investigate various flotilla passengers' connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. See also MEMRI's extensive investigation and profile of the flotilla passengers: "Writing Wills, Preparing for Martyrdom, Determined to Reach Gaza or Die".

Not without reason does Israeli ambassador Michael B. Oren describe the flotilla as "An Assault, Cloaked in Peace" (New York Times June 3, 2010):

What the videos don’t show, however, are several curious aspects Israeli authorities are now investigating. First, about 100 of those detained from the boats were carrying immense sums in their pockets — nearly a million euros in total. Second, Israel discovered spent bullet cartridges on the Mavi Marmara that are of a caliber not used by the Israeli commandos, some of whom suffered gunshot wounds. Also found on the boat were propaganda clips showing passengers “injured” by Israeli forces; these videos, however, were filmed during daylight, hours before the nighttime operation occurred.

The investigations of all this evidence will be transparent, in accordance with Israel’s security needs.

And The Washington Post now charges the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan with responsibility for the flotilla fiasco:

Turkey's ambassador to the United States makes the argument that Israel had no cause to clash with the "European lawmakers, journalists, business leaders and an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor" who were aboard the flotilla. But there was no fighting with those people, or with five of the six boats in the fleet. All of the violence occurred aboard the Turkish ferry Mavi Marmara, and all of those who were killed were members or volunteers for the Islamic "charity" that owned the ship, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH).

The relationship between Mr. Erdogan's government and the IHH ought to be one focus of any international investigation into the incident. The foundation is a member of the "Union of Good," a coalition that was formed to provide material support to Hamas and that was named as a terrorist entity by the United States in 2008.

Against the Distribution of Humanitarian Aid?

What of the humanitarian supplies that Israel was dead-set against giving to the Gazans? (Jerusalem Post June 4, 2010):

Twenty-four hours after the last ship of the Gaza aid flotilla entered the Ashdod Port under the watchful eye of the Israeli Navy, all of the equipment on board was examined Tuesday and the majority of it was loaded onto trucks headed to the Kerem Shalom border crossing. The flotilla’s flagship, the Marmara - where the clash between Israeli commandoes and the passengers took place and which held the participant’s personal belongings - had yet to be fully inspected.

In a statement to reporters at the port on Tuesday, Colonel Moshe Levi, commander of the IDF’s Gaza Strip Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), said that none ofthe equipment found on board the three cargo ships was in shortage in Gaza.

In fact, on the topic of humanitarian aid to Gaza, see this report: Behind the Headlines: The Israeli humanitarian lifeline to Gaza (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs):

Large quantities of essential food items like baby formula, wheat, meat, dairy products and other perishables are transferred daily and weekly to Gaza. Fertilizers that cannot be used to make explosives are shipped into the Strip regularly, as are potato seeds, eggs for reproduction, bees, and equipment for the flower industry.

In 2009 alone, more than 738,000 tons of food and supplies entered Gaza. Pictures in local newspapers show local markets aplenty with fruit, vegetables, cheese, spices, bread and meat to feed 1.4 million Gazans.

In the first quarter of 2010 (January-March), 94,500 tons of supplies were transferred in 3,676 trucks to the Strip: 48,000 tons of food products; 40,000 tons of wheat; 2,760 tons of rice; 1,987 tons of clothes and footwear; 553 tons of milk powder and baby food.

In a typical week the IDF coordinates the transfer of hundreds of trucks containing about 15,000 tons of supplies. During the week of May 18, 2010 there were more than 100 truckloads of animal food, 65 trucks of fruit and vegetables; 22 truckloads of sugar, some 27 truckloads of meat, poultry and fish; and 40 trucks of dairy products. At holiday times, Israel increases transfers. During the Muslim holy days of Ramadhan and Eid al-Adha, Israel shipped some 11,000 heads of cattle into the Strip.

Update!

Israel's attempts to deliver the humanitarian aid were thwarted by Hamas, who refused to accept the cargo (CNN June 2, 2010):

Palestinian sources confirmed that trucks that arrived from Israel at the Rafah terminal at the Israel-Gaza border were barred from delivering the aid.

Ra'ed Fatooh, in charge of the crossings, and Jamal Khudari, head of a committee against the Gaza blockade, said Israel must release all flotilla detainees and that it will be accepted in the territory only by the Free Gaza Movement people who organized the flotilla.

Israel said it had 20 trucks of aid found on the ships, such as expired medications, clothing, blankets, some medical equipment and toys.

Israel has released all foreign flotilla detainees by Wednesday, but four Israeli Arabs remain in custody.

Who really cares about Gazans? -- Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and even Syria are cooperating with Israel to distribute humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Hamas' refusal of aid to the Gazans is to be expected. As Der Spiegel reports, "International donations are not always welcome in Gaza" (June 4, 2010):

"People who are not in with Hamas don't see any of the relief goods or the gifts of money," Khadar says. On the sand dune where his house once perched, there is now an emergency shelter. The shelter is made of concrete blocks that Khadar dug from the rubble, and the roof is the canvas of a tent that provided the family with shelter for the first summer after the war. "Hamas supporters get prefabricated housing, furnishings and paid work. We get nothing," Khadar complains.

The reason his family receives nothing: Like many of his neighbors, Khadar is a die-hard supporter of the Fatah party, the sworn political enemy of the more radical Islamists in Hamas. [...]

"We knew Hamas would take the goods for themselves and distribute them at their own discretion. For us, and for many of our friends, it doesn't make any difference whether the world is trying to help us. Our situation will only improve if the blockade is lifted," Khadar explains.

On Saturday (May 5, 2010), IDF forces piloted the Rachel Corrie to the port of Ashdod after boarding the ship. The Jerusalem Post reports:

None were harmed in the military operation as the international activists on the ship cooperated with the boarding party. The activists went as far as lowering a ladder to the soldiers patrol boat to allow them to board, army sources have revealed.

The military said its forces boarded the 1,200-ton cargo ship from the sea, not helicopters. Army spokeswoman Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich said Saturday's takeover took only a few minutes and that the vessel was being taken to Ashdod port.

Prior to the takeover, three navy ships tailed the aid boat for several hours throughout the morning, a few dozen kilometers from the blockaded Strip. The army said it had contacted the boat four times and urged its passengers to divert to Ashdod, but the activists had repeatedly refused.

Curiously, despite Gaza's need for assistance, The Free Gaza organization refused Israel's offers to facilitate the further distribution of aid from additional ships - Elder of Ziyon posts the radio exchanges btw/ ships and reports:

The flotilla team repeatedly had said that the reason the refuse to go to Ashdod is because Israel would not allow some of their cargo to go to Gaza. Here. we hear that Israel not only offered to transfer the cement that would have been brought on the ship to Gaza, but also that it would allow a third party NGO to bring it into Gaza.

Although their final response is not on this audio recording, Free Gaza evidently refused, although they were quite polite about it. They even helped the IDF soldiers get onto the ship.

* * *

I believe Israel has the right to protect its citizens from harm by way of a blockade of arms to Gaza (the controlling authority of which is Hamas, after all, an organization complicit in many terrorist acts against Israel's citizens and wholly committed to the eradication of Israel).

However, this is not to say that Israel didn't act badly in this situation and make some grievous errors in judgement resulting in the needless deaths of Palestinians as well as its own troops. Let's admit it -- those who organized the Flotilla got what they wanted: to force the hand of Israel and achieve a major propaganda win for her enemies.

Yaacov Lozowick (author of Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars -- worth reading), has some pertinent thoughts on this matter. I agree with his conclusion: "It may have been justified, but it wasn't wise."

Israel will not disappear, not now, not later. It is one of the most vital places on earth, bursting with creativity and hugely committed to success; this is also one of the better moments in 3000 years of Jewish history – a rather glum statement, that, but true. Yet Israel is not being wise, as the case of the flotilla shows.

We all know that the threat from Hezbollah is greater than from Hamas, yet we don't blockade Lebanon. The price would be too high, so we grimly prepare for the next war in the hope that being prepared well enough will postpone it for a while, and in the meantime it's not an international detriment; on the contrary, perhaps we gain a measure of goodwill that we'll cash in on eventually. So why blockade Gaza? Is the blockade essential? Six months from now, or six years, we'll lift it, and Gaza will still be full of people who fervently wish for our destruction, just like in Lebanon: nu? At that point the defunct blockade will no longer be essential?

Some military actions will always be unavoidable. Do we do our very best to ensure that when we apply force, we're doing so in the most brilliant way possible? Have we thought out every scenario, and formulated a response to every counter move our enemies will make? Couldn't we could have silently jammed the propellers of those ships, leaving them dead in the water and begging us to save them from the blistering heat? Instead of heroic victims they'd be the world's laughing stock. I'm a mere blogger, not a decision maker, so perhaps there were reasons not to go that way: but were all options considered? Was the fiasco we ended up with the sole alternative? We handed our enemies an epic propaganda victory on a silver platter: that can't have been the best option?

See also:

• Israel was Right Israeli commandos mishandled the situation but Israel was right to storm a ship bound for Gaza. Leslie H. Gelb argues why.
  
• LiveBlogging the "Free Gaza" Media War (BackSpin)
  
• Flotillas and Falsehoods Monica Charen (National Review wonders, "don’t members of the press ever resent being so used?"
  
• Turkey Slouches Toward Iran, by Seth Cropsey (Weekly Standard): "The flotilla incident is less about Israeli-Palestinian issues than it is about Turkey."
  
• Those troublesome Jews, by Charles Krauthammer. Washington Post June 4, 2010.