Fair Play for the Girl Scouts!

May 17, 2012 By Max Lindenman 7 Comments

A friend of mine, actually one of my old parish’s most accomplished busybodies, once talked her way into the hotel room of a 1950′s rock guitarist when he was performing in the Phoenix area. Her goal — her sole goal — was to get the legend’s autograph for a friend of hers.

After sizing my friend up, the man smiled. Cocking his head toward another man, who was holding a camera, he asked her, “Do you object to pictures?” When my friend looked puzzled, he asked again, “Do you object to pictures?” Finally, it dawned on her that he was really asking, “Is it okay with you if my friend here photographs us while we’re having sex?”

My friend bridled, took umbrage, flew into a state of the highest dudgeon imaginable. With finger wagging, she addressed the aging satyr: “Mister _____, I’ll have you know I was a Girl Scout. I’m no groupie! All I want is for you to put your signature on this piece of paper, for my friend, who idolizes you, though I can’t imagine why. He saw you play at _______.” She named a ballroom in Connecticut.

By this point in his career, this performer had made the transition to nostalgia act without downsizing his headliner’s ego. Even Keith Richards, who considered himself deep in the man’s artistic debt (and who had managed to get along, more or less, with Mick Jagger for over two decades) found him hard to take. He had also been convicted of a sex crime. But something about my friend’s straight-backed rebuke brought out the rake’s gallant side. Picking up her reference, he asked, “That place is closed now, right?” My friend nodded, and the two fell into a pleasant conversation. After about half an hour, he signed her paper, and she left triumphant.

Extracting the Girl Scout training from this friend of mine would have been impossible. Easier to deprogram a Moonie. In tandem with the Catholic Church, the GSUSA had poured the concrete that held her value structure together. “Always leave a place looking better than when you found it,” she’d lecture me, and had no sympathy for my argument that cigarette butts add reverse chic to picnic spots. Once, while catering a retreat — one of her chief charismata — she discovered she’d overestimated the amount of milk required by half. Me? I’d have yelled, “MILK FIGHT!” and it would have been on. This goody-goody-friend of mine insisted on hauling the overage down to Maggie’s Place, a local house of hospitality for expectant mothers.

Not only did this woman follow a neurotic compulsion to do the right thing, she insisted on doing it for the right reasons. If I rouse myself to throw someone’s discarded Coke bottle into the recycle bin, I expect to be inducted into the Orde Pour le Mérite. My friend, on the other hand, would warn, “Don’t do anything for the badges,” meaning merit badges. In her book, virtue rewarded hardly counted as virtue at all.

As grating as I often found this just-canonize-me-now attitude, I hope the bishops find generous traces of it as their Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth investigates GSUSA materials it fears are “problematic.” Exactly what sort of heterodoxy the committee expects to find is unclear; in his announcement, committee chairman Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Ft. Wayne, Indiana doesn’t say. But among culture warriors nationwide, the buzz against Girl Scouts has been building to a roar for some time.

The Huffington Post reports that a Colorado troop became a target for critics by accepting a biological boy who considered himself transgendered. Just this past February, GSUSA spokeswoman Michelle Tompkins issued a letter refuting what she says were false allegations broadcast via EWTN, in a program titled Women of Grace. According to Tompkins, GSUSA has no relationship with Planned Parenthood, and no plans for creating one. Neither did it have any hand in distributing a Planned Parenthood brochure that turned up at a United Nations event. The HuffPo identifies the brochure as “Happy, Healthy and Hot,” and says its purpose is advising HIV-positive young people “how to safely lead active sex lives.”

But for the Girl Scouts’ ciritcs, it may not be necessary that, in Girl Scout usage, the “head” in “head/shoulders/knees and toes/(knees and toes)” refer to the head of Baphomet, once venerated by Templars. The real problem may lie in a general orientation. Mary Rice Hasson, a visiting fellow in Catholic studies at the think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center, calls the GSUSA leadership “reflexively liberal.” Dismissing the generally positive review given the Girl Scouts by National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry executive director Bob McCarty as “whitewashing,” she predicts that the Girl Scouts and the Church are on a “collision course.”

I find myself hoping that this collision will not end too bloodily. It’s true, when it comes to ideology, the Girl Scouts are not the Boy Scouts. The GSUSA may not order its members to become atheists or homosexuals, but unlike the Boy Scouts, they leave room in the ranks for both types. If GSUSA has no formal relationship with Planned Parenthood, it does belong to the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, whose spokespeople have called for “an environment where [girls] can freely and openly discuss issues of sex and sexuality.” It would be very hard for a Catholic Girl Scout to avoid concluding that people who contest Church teachings are worthy objects of fellowship.

That conclusion seems like nothing more than common sense. It’s the opposite conclusion — that one rejected doctrine anathematizes an organization the way one drop of African blood was once thought to make a person black — that looks persnickety. If the Bishops’ Conference wants to cut its own ties to organizations like the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights, which supports same-sex marriage and abortion, that’s one thing. If it wants to prohibit Catholic universities from honoring public figures who buck the Church’s line, it’s at least operating within its jurisdiction. But to reach outside of its own organizational limits to make demands of institutions that include Catholics, but which never claimed to be Catholic, is to reach into strong-arm territory. If this is evangelization, it’s not a style of evangelization I see winning many converts.

Indeed, that may not even be the bishops’ goal. Implicit in their latest move seems to be a fear that no young person could remain an orthodox Catholic if exposed to any opposing point of view — roughly, “How are you’re going to keem ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree”? If I were a young Catholic, I’m sure I’d find that inference unflattering, to say the least. Lately it’s become fashionable among Catholics to claim persecution, Cardinal George’s prediction that his successor would die in jail being only the most melodramatic example. But I cannot find an instance where the GSUSA, acting in odium fidei, shunned, harrassed, or even denied preferment to a Catholic. If the barbarians won’t come to the gates, then, it seems, we’ll drag the gates out to the barbarians.

Among their merit badges, the Girl Scouts offer one called “My Promise, My Faith.” According to the GSUSA home page, “A girl earns the My Promise, My Faith pin by carefully examining the Girl Scout Law and directly tying it to tenets of her faith.” It represents a lesson on living in a pluralistic society; only though a complementary badge with a name like “You Heretic Knuckleheads Are My Cross” could that lesson be more thorough.

Cervantes — whom I’m quoting via Florence King — once defined a lady as someone so determined to be respected that she could make herself so even in an army of soldiers. Change “army of soldiers” to “horny rock has-been,” and you’ll have a fair picture of my Girl Scout friend. Throw in stewardship and (occcasionally) a sanctimoniousness that made me want to garrotte her with her own kerchief, and you’ll have your case that Catholicism and the Girl Scout Promise can go together like milk and Peanut Butter Tagalongs.

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The Bishops: Players Once More

February 17, 2012 By Max Lindenman 6 Comments

Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan denies that the bishops have become “bullies who are now trying to impose our beliefs on the rest of the country, and trying to utilize the offices of the federal bureaucracy to do that.” What he should have said is: “We bishops are no more bullies than Planned Parenthood, the National Rifle Association or the AFL-CIO.” If policymaking is a sport, the controversy over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has made the bishops into serious players.

They’ve united in a cohesive bloc. Yesterday, Thomas Peters of American Papist reported that every one of the 180 bishops in charge of American dioceses has condemned the act. Before the 2008 election, 89 bishops, or half that number, ordered voters in their dioceses to cast their vote for the pro-life candidate. The following year, over 70 bishops publicly denounced the University of Notre Dame’s decision to award an honorary degree to President Obama. Each show of force was impressive, but this late show of solidarity is unprecedented.

It’s become fashionable to compare Obama to Hitler, but to do so would overstate Obama’s popularity. Among the German bishops, Hitler could always count on a few friends.

For many bishops, this activism must come as a welcome change. Last year, Cardinal-designate (then Archbishop) Dolan couldn’t make his way through an airport without being held personally responsible for sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy. By then the scandal was mostly old news, but not entirely. The same year, a Philadelphia grand jury criticized the city’s archdiocesan review board for returning credibly accused priest to ministry. Members of that review board later denied ever having seen the greater number of the charges. In spring of 2011, it emegered that Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph had retained a priest in ministry after learning the priest had saved photographs of naked children on his laptop. This past October, Finn pleaded guilty to one count of failing to report suspected child abuse, a misdemeanor.

From cringe to war cry is not an easy or obvious transition. In First Things, George Weigel offers his version of how this animating spirit evolved. Dolan’s election to the USCCB presidency over the head of the expected winner, Tucson’s Bishop Gerald Kickanas, marked “a different mode of engagement between the Church and American public life.” The previous model, concocted by the so-called Bernardin Machine, named for Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, took its ecclesiology from “the progressive wing of the post-conciliar spectrum,” and in politics leaned “à gauche, but always with an eye toward ‘the center.’”

A schmoozer in public and a whip-cracker in private, Bernardin, says Weigel, imposed his will and vision on his fellow bishops for as long as he lived, and both survived him by many years. Under his direction, the bishops took what Weigel calls “some tentative steps into the murky worlds of radical activism” by creating the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. The CCHD, in turn, “began to support programs of community organizing modeled on or promoted by Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation.” One of these organizations was the Developing Communities Project, for which Obama served as executive director during the late 1980s. Bernardin, whom Obama recalled in his Notre Dame speech, bears chief responsibility for the president’s good impression of the Church.

But, Weigel explains, Bernardin’s Church and Dolan’s Church are two very different institutions. With help from New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor, John Paul II began re-orienting the American Church toward a more confrontational style of engagement. Inspired by John Paul’s “heroic” model of the priesthood, and of the office of bishop, the post-Bernardin bishops renounced any interest in “finding an agreeable fifty-yard line.” When Dolan said, of the Obama administration’s recent revisions to its contraception mandate, “I don’t think there’s a 50-yard line compromise here,” he really meant there could be none. If this is really the Church John Paul envisioned, then his vision’s become a reality.

Weigel’s view tends to support Dolan’s instistence that the bishops aren’t “Obama-haters.” They’ve been gearing up for this fight for the past two decades; Obama just happens to have brought it. It also gives the lie to Obama’s anti-crusade against Catholicism. Obama likes the Church just fine; it’s just that the Church he likes no longer exists.

In the national conversation that’s developed since the administration announced the revisions, it could be argued that the bishops’ voices have been the dominant ones. Philadelphia’s Arcbhishop Charles Chaput has declared himself and his brother bishops the guardians of the Founding Fathers’ vision. Bridgeport, Connecticut’s Bishop William Lori testified Thursday before Congress. As a body, the bishops have backed Missouri Senator Roy Blunt’s Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, which would allow any employer to deny employees any services “contrary to the provider’s religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

This raises the question of what will happen if the bill fails to pass, and if Obama ends up winning a second term. Will the bishops go into some kind of guerrilla mode? Weigel gently suggests that the USCCB “reexamine its habit of having a comment on virtually every contested issue in American public life” and its “reliance on domestic policy default positions” — including the call for government-mandated health care. To focus full-time on opposing the Obama administration on life issues would certainly be a labor-saver, although it would make the bishops look more partisan than ever before. In any case, it’s going be a long millennium.

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Obama’s Compromise: Something for Everyone?

February 11, 2012 By Max Lindenman 6 Comments

Here’s an old joke: Sometime in the 1930s, one Jew spots another Jew scanning an issue of Der Stürmer, the Nazi party’s official newspaper. He asks, “How come you’re reading that trash?” “Well,” says his friend, “all the Jewish papers talk about is how we’re being beaten up and oppressed. This one says we control the world. I guess I just needed a pick-me-up.”

Barely a day after the White House announced its revision of the guidelines ensuring free contraception for employees of religious institutions, both sides are looking for that pick-me-up. The New York Times credits “Catholic Democrats, liberal columnists and left-leaning religious leaders” with bending the will of the administration. According to the Times, protests from these former supporters forced a “fed-up Mr. Obama” to announce that “time was up,” and order the rules re-written. The story carries quotes from administration officials — “we were getting killed,” “all hell broke lose” — attesting to the Church’s power to induce shell shock.

This image of Obama, yielding to pressure from Planned Parenthood on one hand and time on the other, and allowing Kathleen Sebelius to roll out a political disaster, doesn’t do much to inspire confidence. In Slate, Amanda Marcotte offers an antidote in the form of a counter-narrative. “Obama,” she writes, “just pulled a fast one on Republicans.” The initial guidelines were just a feint that succeeded in provoking a “frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty.” Since the revisions “addressed their purported concerns,” Republicans “can either drop this and slink away knowing they’ve been punked, or they can double down” by condemning contraception openly.

Marcotte’s saying, in other words, that Obama won the same strategic and moral victory on birth control that he won over his birth certificate. In both cases, he spared a respectful nod for the rednecks a moment after they ran off the nearest cliff.

Both views have their merit. For better or worse, this is one of those controversies that offers something for everybody. Marcotte is correct that — as I observed Thursday — it’s given a soapbox to anti-contraception polemicists. If the Church is so dead-set against contraception that she’s willing to buck a socially just policy during an election year, her mouthpieces have to say why. But what Marcotte never figures on is how pundits are couching their arguments in terms relevant to people uninterested in the niceties of Catholic moral theology. Sick of gay marriage? Divorce? Ambiguous role expectations for the genders? Kim Kardashian? Kourtney Kardashian? There’s your culprit — the man in the latex hat! If sweeping solutions for complex problems held no appeal, our War on Terror wouldn’t be global.

Marcotte also underestimates Republicans’ ability to spin the issue exactly how they want to spin it. To a party that’s hung its hat on fears of European-style socialism — if not Stalinism or fascism — the very fact that Obama ever suggested any curtailment of religious liberty offers a large and solid hook. At the CPAC conference, Mike Huckabee said, of the president: “You have done more than any person in the entire GOP field, [than] any candidate has done, to bring this party to unity and energize this party as a result of your attack on religious liberty.” Far from a John Galt wannabe, Huckabee is the Republican Ann Coulter called “the one true Christian liberal” in America. If he says the party’s found a unifying issue, it has.

But even if the president’s initial move was a bad one, and his subsequent correction fearful, he could still realize some benefits — at least where Catholic voters are concerned. Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, no stranger to Tea Party-style rhetoric, has conceded that he revised guidelines represent “an openness to respond to some of our concerns” on the executive branch’s part. In a briefing circulated among the bishops, Dolan (along with Bps. William Lori and Stephen Blaire, and Cardinals Daniel DiNardo and Donald Wuerl) outlines problem areas in very precise language. The signatories are unhappy with the administration’s narrow definition of “religious institution,” for example. They are unconvinced that the costs of covering contraceptives will not, ultimately, fall to religious employers. This is not zealotry; this is not culture war. This is talking turkey at a dull roar.

Some of the other objections raised in the document — particularly the question of how an employer that is also an insurer can avoid offering “the objectionable coverage” — won’t be easy to overcome. Nevertheless, the brief uses the word “dialogue” for the exchanges the Obama administration expects to have with the bishops. In Catholic usage, dialogue is a non-adversarial practice — one meant, in fact, to stymie the construction of barricades.

In 2009, not long after Bishop John D’Arcy of Ft. Wayne-South Bend boycotted Notre Dame’s graduation ceremonies to protest Obama’s receipt of an honorary degree, Pope Benedict met with the president. Obama pledged to reduce the number of abortions in America; Benedict presented him with a copy of Dignitas Personae. It was at least the beginning of a dialogue, and it put a sliver of daylight between Obama and his harshest critics.

So far we’ve got energized and united Republicans, and a (perhaps grudgingly) legitimized Democrat. That leaves swing voters; what’s this business offer them? Maybe nothing. Questions of contraception and consicence aside, this upcoming contest may finally boil down to the economy, stupid.

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