George Will never got the memo…

May 3, 2012 By 26 Comments

that his son Jon was a Life Unworthy of Life. Unlike the Freakish Enemies of the Normal who hate Trig Palin with visceral hatred for his unforgivable crime of being alive.

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  • John

    Mark.

    I e-mailed you some thoughts the other day regarding the role of women in our society from suffrage to women in the workplace, and a general overview of how this simple change has led us to a place where much has changed. Sometimes, I believe it is difficult to wrap our heads around the difficulties many have with navigating extremely difficult decisions, in a time when so much more is demanded of us, or our families. The role of women in our society has changed from home nurturers to working mothers, and it has left “the family unit” unprotected in a sense. I am not saying that I don’t believe in the progress of women in society, but I am saying that in our society where half of all women are working, we have a more difficult time keeping our families in tact. Throw in a divorce, and things become much, much more difficult.

    People, responding to progress and how it affects them and their families, are using the technologies available to “manage” their lives as they see fit. 2012 isn’t the time of Ozzy and Harriet anymore, and I feel badly for people who grew up in that generation, and seeing them try to adapt to this new era. But the reality is, our society – our families – have changed. Whether it is birth control to delay the start of the family, or modern medical technology to help start the family later in life. This includes, what you discuss here, abortion. Something which you and I are in agreement about.

    I just got done reading another piece on the Catholic Channel by Elizabeth Duffy, “Apprenticeship in Empathy”. http://www.patheos.com/Catholic/Apprenticeship-in-Empathy-Elizabeth-Duffy-05-03-2012.html. It is a very heartfelt piece about listening to others, and sometimes how difficult it can be to put our self-interest to the side. I hope more people would make the decision that George Will made 40 years ago. I would like to believe that I would do that, but understand the incredible challenge that comes with that decision. It is a decision I thank God everyday that I don’t have to make.

    John

    • http://davidgriffey.blogspot.com/ Dave G.

      I actually clicked each link. My jaw dropped at what was written.

      • http://davidgriffey.blogspot.com/ Dave G.

        Oops. This was addressing the links in Mark’s post, not the link in John’s comment. Must have hit something wrong there.

  • Kevin

    John, has objective good and evil ever changed?

  • John

    Kevin. Objective good and evil is what it is. The end result is wrong. There is no argument from me here. But, we didn’t get to that point in one fell swoop. My point is, that we got there over time…with a decision, or decisions, to bring women into the workplace. So, here’s my question for you…does the end result that occurs on occasion make the decision to allow women more freedom, and greater opportunity for work, make it morally wrong? Because, to address objective good and evil, and it’s end result in sin, you have to go back and invalidate ALL of the steps that got us there.

    • Ted Seeber

      “Despite the Administration’s efforts to respond to concerns registered by the religious community in their February notice, some folks — including Members of Congress — have called for additional modifications. During the Senate’s recent consideration of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, S. 21, Senator Blunt offered an amendment that would have not only allowed religiously affiliated organizations to deny contraceptive coverage but also allowed an employer to arbitrarily choose to deny coverage of other preventive services such as cancer screenings or flu shots for men and women. I voted against bringing this amendment up for a vote because it would have set sweeping new precedent regarding an employer’s ability to choose what is or isn’t included in their employees’ health coverage regardless of religious affiliation. . ”

      The means isn’t justified by the end, and the end is not justified by the means.

      Having said that, perhaps this is a teaching moment- if women are abandoning their traditional, some would say Ordained Role (by either God or DNA- I just saw a Life is Worth Living rerun from 1953 discussing the UNIQUE roles women can play in the family, the business community, and the Catholic Church- Fulton Sheen is a genius) then maybe we need FATHERS to step up and fulfill their role as family’s protector.

    • Beadgirl

      I don’t think I follow, John. To address objective good and evil, we don’t have to trace back through every step, because women and men have free will, and at every step of the way they must make the choice to do or not do evil.

      If you are actually suggesting (I really hope you are not) that we should reconsider whether it was right to give women more freedom because it eventually led to some men and women making evil choices, such as to abort a child, then I am flabbergasted. Not only is that suggestion extremely offensive to me, a woman and feminist, but it also fails logically. For one thing, people were perfectly capable of committing evil (including the evil of abortion) long before women were given more freedom. For another, more freedom has led to a decrease in other kinds of evil, stemming from the way women were treated. Then, as I stated above, there is the issue of free will. If one argues that women should not have gotten more freedom because it ultimately led to the evil of abortion, then why not take that argument ALL the way back, and say humans should not have gotten the freedom of free will in the first place, because that led to all sin, all evil?

      • John

        Beadgirl,

        I am not suggesting that women go back in the home at all. What I am saying is that there are outcomes associated with those decisions – some immediate, some long term. In essence, I was answering an earlier comment from Kevin about objective good and evil. According to the church, a morally good act requires the goodness of its object, of its end, and of its circumstances together.

        My question is how far back do you take it?

        Thanks.

        • Noah D

          My question is how far back do you take it?

          How about to ‘not killing people because they’re inconvenient’?

        • Beadgirl

          Maybe I’m looking at this simplistically, but it seems to me that it really is about personal responsibility in large part. I think the issue of “giving more freedom to women” is too large and amorphous, and full of countless good actions and outcomes to ever be able to state definitively “it was a bad idea that led to more evil.” I don’t think I am expressing myself well, but I feel that looking that far back to place the blame of abortion on it is a mistake. Especially because other aspects of society that have nothing to do with feminism are also part of the causation of abortion — such as the attitude that certain men have always had that they can sleep around and father children and never take responsibility for them, or the outgrowth of scientific endeavor (which is a good thing) that can encourage some people to think that if we can do something medically then there is nothing wrong with it, and the American streak of individualism that leads some people to think they have no obligation to help others in need.

          Which is not to say we should not be examining and critiquing those social trends and large-scale effects that do encourage abortion, or at least cause some women to think it is their only option.

          • Hezekiah Garrett

            You keep saying ‘giving women more freedom’. I understand Man’s freedom to come from God, a result of the Imago Dei. So who is giving women more freedom?

            And I’ll say it forthrightly: the entrance of woman into ‘the workforce’ may be among the most brutal a horrendous of Modernity’s changes.

            Its at least as bad as the entrance of men into ‘the workforce’.

  • Beadgirl

    What George Will has written about his son is quite touching, but I feel I must address a point that always comes up with Down Syndrome, namely whether it is actually wrong to get an amnio or some other pre-natal testing. While Will is right that there is no “cure” for D.S. (although there are some super promising results coming from the administration of medication normally used to treat Alzheimer’s), D.S. can cause a number of medical problems that may need to be addressed at birth or even in utero. I know this for a fact — if I had not had an amnio telling me Beadboy1 had D.S., he would not have survived birth.

    It is not knowledge that is evil, but how we use it.

    • http://moss-place.stblogs.org Peony Moss

      Beadgirl, just out of curiosity, did the amnio give you information that wouldn’t have shown up, or would have come too late to be useful, at the routine 20-week ultrasound?

      • Ted Seeber

        Comments need a discard button. Thank you Penny for leading me to this abstract:
        http://www.wdxcyber.com/npreg06.htm
        Which indicates there has been a change in the resolution of ultrasounds since I looked into this back in 2003 for my son.

        It is entirely possible that when Beadboy1 was born, however, that this tech had not been developed yet.

      • Beadgirl

        Well, he was born in 2004, so technically it was possible, but I don’t remember if it was available for me. All I knew was that the blood test came back indicating a higher likelihood of D.S. than normal, and that given my personality, there was no way I could go through the next few months agonizing but not knowing. (And despite conventional wisdom, amnios are not as risky as people think.) It allowed us to come to terms with the diagnosis and to let our family members adjust to the news, it allowed us to educate ourselves about the condition and the benefits available in our city, and it caused us to monitor the pregnancy much more than we otherwise would have, which led to us realizing there was a life-threatening problem at the end.

        • http://moss-place.stblogs.org Peony Moss

          Thanks, I was just curious. When I was pg in 2000 and the time came in week 16 for the triple screen, I discussed it with my OB: since I would be having an ultrasound in a few more weeks, would there be any advantage to the baby in knowing about any abnormalities at week 16 instead of week 20? She said no, so I didn’t bother to have the triple screen or amnio.

  • Marion (Mael Muire)

    Other commenters have spoken about women having the freedom to leave the home and take jobs elsewhere. Poor and working-class women, including mothers of families, have been doing just that for generations, leaving their families to work in factories and plants, and as domestic workers in other peoples’ homes throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In many cases, much chaos in their homes and families ensued because of their absence. With the father out working and the mother out working, the children are left to fend for themselves as best they can. Often doesn’t end well.

    It wasn’t until the 1960s that the neo-Bolshevist Left on the East Coast began pressuring the majority of middle and upper-middle-class women to leave their homes and enter the workplace. By 1980 their project had largely succeeded. So that the chaos that lower and working class families suffered could be brought to middle class homes as well. (When I say “neo-Bolshevist” I mean that quite literally: did you know that in the former Soviet Union everybody *had* to take outside jobs – men, women, everybody. No exceptions. Not only was it illegal to be a stay-at-home Mom in the former USSR, but even to express a desire to stay at home and care for her family could get a female comrade imprisoned or even shot as a “reactionary”, as a “counterrevolutionary,” as “an enemy of the People.” The Socialist State is not about your damned family, your damned private life; it is about productivity!)

    So guess where the DNA derives from in our contemporary neo-Bolshevist feminist notion that women who don’t work outside the home are “missing out”, “not contributing”, “not living up to their full potential,” “stunting their children”, “taking society backwards” ? Marx, Stalin, and Lenin, that’s where from, like much of the feminist rubbish that’s flung around out there. And, yes, I have read feminist authors and studied feminism, having had a near-lethal dose of it in college. Luckily, I happened to be studying sociology, was also reading Marx and the Trotskyites, and made the connection between Marxist thought (ca. 1918 thru the 1930s) and its clear intellectual heir, feminist thought (ca. 1980s).

    I think the increasing absence of mothers in the home, along with the dissolution of the family (no-fault divorce was another brainchild of the Bolshevik Revolution – 1918, along with legalized abortion, and the open acceptance of relationships based on homosexual practices – sound familiar?) is to blame for much of the failure in our schools during the last 50 years, along with the spread of drug abuse and STDs among our young people, the increase in other forms of delinquency, of psychiatric illness, and of suicide among children and teens, and general poor outcomes and bad outlooks for many, many of our young people with us today. Other factors have contributed to putting our young people at risk, of course, but the real downhill slide got underway when many, many mothers left home to go to work. I remember. I was there.

    When Moms were at home, Moms ruled the neighborhoods. That was actually important work, although it went unacknowledged at the time: we kids were free to roam the streets and live it up every day after school, because if anything bad happened, a Mom who at least was acquainted with who your Mom was, was no more than a door or two away. Do you know that the biggest infractions we had in our public schools were kids chewing gum, and once a kid in my class got into trouble for bringing a frog to school. Now we have kids bringing guns to school, families filing assault charges against students on school busses, girls having multiple abortions . . .

    Look, if a family can’t make ends meet, and both adults must work to earn needed cash, then that’s the reality: you gotta do what you gotta do to keep a roof over the heads and food on the table. However, if the family can possibly pare down, double up, move to a fixer-upper in a cheaper area, take the bus, wear hand-me-downs, and, yes, buy mayonnaise at Costco in order that Mom can stay home with the kids – or at least be at home from work when they arrive home, then that would be a good thing. A superb thing. And, Moms, don’t let anybody tell you different.

    It makes me sick at heart to think of what we have lost in this country – in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our communities – due to the pressure on women to work outside the home. I would give anything for a Time Machine that would allow me to travel back to the early ’60s, and to say to all the women and girls I met, “When they tell you to leave home, don’t listen; they’re lying; they’ll ruin everything.”

  • http://321force.blogspot.com Barbara

    Our sweet DS daughter is 2 mos. now. These people are sad examples of what happens when your pleasure becomes your god. I’m sorry these people can’t experience the joy of loving one of these sweet lambs. It is there loss, and a big one!

  • Peggy R

    I gotta stop in the middle of the links here…The link behind “unforgivable” is to a Baptist Christian church? The Baptists are calling the actress to participated in the offensive “Family Guy” episode a “retard”? Who’s side are these Baptists on?

    • Mark Shea

      Landover baptist is a satire site, not a real Baptist church.

      • Peggy R

        Ok. That can be the only explanation. Very nasty people…

  • Rhinestone Suderman

    Very nasty people, indeed.

    They (or those like them) used to come and spew on a website for parents of autistic kids I used to read, leaving such delightful nuggets as, “Kill all autistic kids before they spread more autism!”

    As I said—deeeee-lightful. /Sarc.

    Knowing how much “Progressives” actually hate the mentally defective is what finally turned me, for good and for all, against the left

    And it’s all a foretaste of things to come. Many, in our society today, aren’t real crazy about normal children, either—or their parents, whom they now refer to as “Breeders”. As the Leonard Cohen song says, “We don’t like chidlren anyhow.”

    It also says “I have seen the future, Baby! It is murder!”

    We need to pray.

  • Rhinestone Suderman

    And, freedom is a relative thing. Let’s be honest; most women aren’t “fulfilling” themselves becoming the board of directors of mega-corporations, or heading huge and influential companies. They’re working in service jobs (which, we were told, was the wave of the future, unlike those nasty old capitalistic manufacturing jobs), or as waitresses, hair dressers, in day care centers or senior center, as “paralegals” (you do the work, the lawyer gets the credit), as “Nurse practitioners” (you do the work, the doctor gets the respect, and the big paycheck) or as fry cooks, or anything they can get. Service jobs dont’ pay that well, for either men or women, and women have to compete with men, and illegal immigrants, to get them.

    Am I glad women can work, and earn their own paychecks? Yes. It gives women a sense of independence, and can help them escape unpleasant family situations. Do I think work, all work, is somehow more fulfilling than raising a family, and is automatically liberating? Heck no! If you’ve ever worked as a drone in some gigantic corporate hive, pushing papers or try to sell something to the public, you’ll know what I mean.

  • Marion (Mael Muire)

    Women should be by law as free as men to take any job they wish, and to climb as high up the ladder as any man. Men, women, and families, however, should place the optimal well-being of any children and families they may have as THEIR paramount priority. And the children should have the benefit of experiencing their mother relaxing with them, snuggling dreamily with them, quietly listening to their troubles, playing in a carefree way with them. . . not “I’m busy, we’ll do this later!” “Does this have to be now?” “Mommy has 10 minutes, so hurry up with that.” . . . each time! This loving leisure time is the time in which the child learns what it means genuinely to love and to be loved, to give of oneself, to belong to another, in short . . . to be a fully alive human being.

    And plenty of wealthy, successful persons were never given the opportunity to become that – fully alive human beings, capable of truly giving of themselves, capable of real love. I have known and worked with some of them. They have $800 suits and drive imported sports cars, and are on their fourth marriage. It’s very sad.

    • Hezekiah Garrett

      If it makes it any easier for people to side with Marion, guys like me are what happens when you grow up with your mother completely absent. Do you really want to see how much time you can spend away from them before they get this damaged?

      • Marion (Mael Muire)

        God bless you, Mr. Garrett, and may Mother Mary, the sweet Mother of us all, be with you.