LA Times Raises an Eyebrow at Ann Romney’s Horse?

May 22, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

It is, of course, the usual mainstream media free-assist that should probably be considered a kind of campaign contribution: the LA Times, read by Hollywood folk who air-condition their garages while telling the little people to make sure they hang their laundry out to dry, today tries to help the Obama campaign’s class warfare efforts by talking about Ann Romney’s equestrian hobby, which both the headline and the very first paragraph of the Times’ story points out, is “pricey.”

This is an article, I am sure, that will be of interest to Bruce Spiingsteen, whose daughter demonstrates her own equestrian skills every summer in the Hamptons.

We still do not know much about Barack Obama’s past, or his wife’s — we know only what they want us to, and the incurious media remains…incurious — but we know about Mitt Romney’s misguided hijinks from 50 years ago, his church’s misbegotten “militia” from 150 years ago, and now Ann Romney — who by the way has “never worked a day in her life” — gets an examination of past litigation (from which she was eventually dropped) examined, with a lengthy look at her love of equestrian dressage.

Really, this is a nothingburger of a story, but the examination of past litigation was really just an excuse for the paper to deliver a subliminal message: Oooooo…this wealthy person has a “pricey” hobby, while you’re eating a bologna sandwich and realizing you can’t even afford a “staycation.”

You know what else is a really “pricey” hobby?


Ted Kennedy, sailing the New England coast, his view of Nantucket unobstructed by ocean wind farms


John Kerry’s sailing yacht

Someone really needs to tell the press — and the Democrats they serve — that every time they want to play class-warfare by illustrating the offensiveness of the rich and “pricey” lifestyle of Mitt Romney, they will have to deal with illustrations of rich Kennedys on “pricey” sailboats; rich John Kerry’s “pricey” sailboats; rich Nancy Pelosi boarding a “pricey” private jet; rich Charlie Rangel napping at his “pricey” Costa Rican villa; rich Jon Corzine — somehow not in jail or even under investigation — hanging at his “pricey” summer house by the water, not far from rich Katie Couric’s “pricey” new digs; rich Michelle Obama vacationing somewhere exclusive and “pricey” and elite.

Really, the class warfare thing is very ill-considered, small-spirited and ultimately self-defeating. Most people do not begrudge the rich their “pricey” playthings, and many, many of the people seeking to sow these seeds of resentment are themselves the rich men and women of the media (who were not always considered the social equals of the elites, by the way) living lives quite out-of-touch with the lives most of us lead. When very rich people sneer at other very rich people — who just happen to belong to a different tribe — for the offense of being rich, it’s just a weird and self-indicting cognitive dissonance.

Wouldn’t it be better if we talked about creating jobs so more people can pursue their own potentialities and find their own pleasant hobbies?

John Nolte angrily notes:

The Los Angeles Times refuses to disclose the contents of a video tape in its possession that reportedly shows Barack Obama lavishing praise on his friend Rashid Khalidi, a close associate of Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat, at a 2003 Chicago dinner party sponsored by the Arab American Action Network and attended by Bill Ayers. The Times does, however, have all kinds of time to vet Ann Romney, going so far as to dig into a lawsuit she was part of involving a horse . . . At over the 1300 words — which is 1300 more than The Times has given the explosive allegation that the Obama campaign bribed Reverend Wright in 2008 — the piece purports to be a profile of a woman suffering from MS who finds what the headline calls, the “pricey private world” of dressage, therapeutic. But the language of the article is pure sneering smear and an obvious attempt to aid and abet the Obama campaign’s crusade to define the Romneys as out of touch elitists who can’t possibly understand the problems of the average American — you know, like a community organizer turned failed president can.

Silly Nolte; doesn’t he know that the only way to get the press to do their jobs is to put Republicans in office?

Filed Under: The Fourth Estate, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Breaking: OSV, Notre Dame, Others File Lawsuit -UPDATED

May 21, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

Our Sunday Visitor announced this minutes ago:

At 11 a.m. Eastern time today, 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations — including Our Sunday Visitor and the University of Notre Dame — filed religious liberty lawsuits against the federal government in a dozen different jurisdictions around the country.

At issue are regulations that require Catholic organizations, employers and insurers to provide or facilitate abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception — in violation of their consciences.

Equally troubling is the extreme narrowness of the government’s new test for determining which religious organizations are exempt from this mandate — which would appear to exclude Catholic schools, health care facilities, charities and others like Our Sunday Visitor.

Their strong editorial:

It seems to us hardly a coincidence that this suit is taking place in our centennial year. Founded 100 years ago by then-Father John Noll, Our Sunday Visitor from its beginning sought to inform Catholics about the issues of the day, form them in the Faith, and defend that Faith from attack. It was Father John Noll who stood up to those who attacked Catholic immigrants as un-American and seditious. It was Father John Noll who faced down false preachers who spread slanders about the Church. It was Father John Noll who resisted the power of the Ku Klux Klan when it was such a powerful political force. And it is in his courageous spirit that we invoke as we engage in this great struggle today.

We know that many Americans — and even many Catholics — are confused about this debate. Politicians and elements of the news media have sought to make it a war against women or contraception, and they have portrayed the Church as seeking to impose its values on others or as being covertly political.

We also acknowledge that many Catholics do not understand the reasons for the Church’s moral opposition to contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs. This lack of understanding points to a significant catechetical need that the Church should address internally.

We reiterate, however, that this is not about the legality of such practices in society, nor is it about how many Catholics understand the Church’s position. It is about the Church’s right to practice what it preaches.

You can find a pdf of the filing, and more, here

CNS report here

UPDATE: Over at the USCCB, Cardinal Dolan applauds

Bad Catholic: has fun with it

YIM Catholic has comments on the lawsuit from the President of Univ. of Notre Dame

Wow: Ed Morrissy has a very fast and very good roundup of reactions and related stories! Well done, Ed! He notes we didn’t go looking for this battle, and:

The institutions filing lawsuits don’t just comprise a few ultraconservative institutions, either. The University of Notre Dame hosted a speech by President Barack Obama in 2009, but today insists that Obama and his administration are attacking religious freedom in their complaint

MORE…

At dotcommonweal Grant Gallicho doesn’t understand why some schools and diocese who have been (or, will be — it’s promised!) “accommodated” and are thus “exempt” are participating in this lawsuit. Me, I think its because they understand that, “exempt” or not, “accommodated” or not, the government is fundamentally overstepping its bounds with this mandate which, as noted in the filing, contains no limiting principle to the government’s interference with religious freedom if the mandate stands.

That matters. A whole lot.

A breakdown of who is filing what, and where

Kathryn Lopez is particularly delighted with Notre Dame’s inclusion in action.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

What An Extraordinary Talent

May 21, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

The repaint on this Holly Golightly doll is most impressive to me — it went from a standard-looking doll’s face to a clear and beautiful representation of Audrey Hepburn. Arwen is pretty remarkable, too — but they’re all really terrific. What a gift; what a fun way to make a living! Check it out!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Pelosi’s failure leads Dowd to Cuomo, again

May 21, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

Got an email from someone asking me to respond to this rant by Maureen Dowd, about the horrible, rotten, no-good, very bad, “un-catholic” Church.

Dowd has demonstrated that she really doesn’t understand much about Catholicism and its unending, beautifully nuanced and constant move toward God’s ever-present “Yes” — a fundamentally sophisticated and paradoxical means toward true freedom. As with many other issues, she has completely bought into the arrested-adolescent perspective, which can only perceive the church as a numbing “no.” Since Dowd is unwilling to plumb the depths of the church in order to seek out its richness, there are absolutely no surprises in the piece, and I was ready to push it aside until she hauled out Mario Cuomo, as she is wont to do from time-to-time.

Just as Nancy Pelosi recently (and badly) tried to give talking points to Catholics who support gay marriage, nearly 30 years ago Cuomo helped give Catholic politicians and pundits cover and talking points to assist in their dissent on abortion. Now, Dowd was turning to Cuomo again, looking for something cleverer and less ham-handed than Pelosi’s try. Cuomo served up this:

“If the church were my religion, I would have given it up a long time ago,” he said. “All the mad and crazy popes we’ve had through history, decapitating the husbands of women they’d taken. All the terrible things the church has done. Christ is my religion, the church is not.

Oh, heavens, Mario, when did you start channeling Anne Rice? You’re running on the cheap and inefficient fuel of emotionalism, here! There is not a church man or church woman alive — including, I would wager, Pope Benedict XVI — who would not agree that if the institutional church were not surviving by the grace of the Holy Spirit it would have long-sinced ceased to be, because its human administrators have always been faulty, sinful, broken but redeemed people. But to say “Christ is my religion, the church is not,” is both ignorant and laughably self-serving. As then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan has recently and ably demonstrated Jesus and the Church are One:

Saul, the raging persecutor of the followers of Jesus, literally “knocked off his high horse” by the radiance of Jesus, the “light of the world,” transformed into a passionate apostle of Christ and His new Church, whom we now venerate as St. Paul.

And what question does Jesus bellow out to the shocked Saul? “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

Parse that very carefully. Saul, of course, has been harassing the Church, killing the followers of Jesus.

Yet, note well: Jesus does not inquire, “Why are you persecuting my Church” or “my people” or “my followers.” No! The Lord asks, “Why are you persecuting me?”

Get it? The Lord is saying, “You hurt my Church, you hurt me. The Church and I are one.”

Dowd, emboldened by her chat with Cuomo, tries for her own smackdown, and to read it is to laugh until one’s sides hurt:

Absolute intolerance is always a sign of uncertainty and panic. Why do you have to hunt down everyone unless you’re weak? The church doesn’t seem to care if its members’ beliefs are based on faith or fear, conviction or coercion. But what is the quality of a belief that exists simply because it’s enforced?

The last part is simply banal sophistry — of course the church cares that its members beliefs are based on faith, but in a faith that is understood in its fullness; whether the church succeeds in teaching its fullness is a very valid question — if Dowd is an example, the answer must be “no” — but on the other hand, in order to be taught anything in its fullness, one must be willing to actually hear a lesson, and absorb it enough to repeat it back with some accuracy; that cannot be done if one is inclined to a kneejerk “la-la-la, I can’t year you” over its often subtle points. But it’s the first part of that quote that killed me: “Absolute intolerance is always a sign of uncertainty and panic. Why do you have to hunt down everyone, unless you’re weak?”

Gosh, Maureen, I agree with you! that intolerance is sign of weakness, and that hunting down part — that’s a question I’ve wondered myself. Since you’re so well connected, perhaps you could ask it for me? Ask Ms. Steinem and Ms. Fonda, please, why free speech should not be tolerated by some; ask some college groups why a free expression of opinion is so unendurable to them that they will steal newspapers rather than allow others to read it; ask this teacher why her students are not allowed to criticize “this” president.; ask Bev Perdue why “some” elections should be suspended; ask Eric Holder why governments should force churches to give up their right to define ministers or ministry; ask President Obama why churches should be coerced into betraying their own consciences; ask why churches must conform to the lights of mere men or face consequences. Ask the people who know everything how come they can’t “tolerate” hearing someone refer to their spouse as a “husband” or a “wife”.

Dowd throws one more quote into her mix:

“To be narrowing the discussion and instilling fear in people seems to be exactly the opposite of what’s called for these days,” says the noted religion writer Kenneth Briggs. “All this foot-stomping just diminishes the church’s credibility even more.”

It’s just too funny, that’s all. The church forces no one into her pews and dares to claim the right to be who she is and to practice her faith and her mission, as guaranteed her under the Constitution, and this “diminishes her credibility.”

Yes, she’d be much more credible if she recanted her teachings of the past 2000 years, if she said, “hey, all that stuff we’ve always taught about chastity, divorce, abortion, and all that? Yeah, none of that really matters.” She’d be more credible if only she conformed to the deconstructionists who would have her teach the passing times to the faith, rather than teach the eternal faith to the times.

Dowd concludes by giving her imprimatur on the coming formation of the Catholic Church of America:

This is America. We don’t hunt heresies here. We welcome them.

Well….apparently Mo Dowd and her folk don’t welcome political heresy,…but the Catholic kind? They love it.

Walker Percy could not have written it more precisely.

Related

Re the Pauline Kael-ish “Here comes nobody”: Well, Not quite

Filed Under: Dowd Tagged With:

Mother, 21, Beats Cancer after refusing to Abort! Yay! Marriage? Meh. UPDATED

May 17, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia


Photocredit: Caters News Agency

This is one of those stories that tells you something wonderful about young people and the faith, and also something not so wonderful:

The wonderful: This 21 year-old mother was advised to abort her second child in order to begin chemotherapy for cancer; she refused and got the “win-win” – a healthy baby and full recovery:

When Daniella Jackson was diagnosed with cancer at five months pregnant her doctors quickly advised her to have an abortion . . But the 21-year-old, who is a devout Roman Catholic, refused, saying she felt too close to her unborn child. A year on, she is the proud mother of Rennae – her second child – and has been told that she is free of cancer . . . Aborting her child was never an option because of her strong faith, Miss Jackson insisted.

Heroic and inspirational. God bless Daniella and her babies, and her partner of 5 years, Andrew. They made a tough decision — one many people would not understand or support, and called it a no-brainer, to boot. It takes guts and trust; it often takes guts to trust.

But did you note the part about her “partner of 5 years?”

Yeah, that’s the thing to not feel great about, as a church. Andrew and Daniella are clearly committed to each other and are raising two children together. Daniella says her religion informed her thinking:

Abortion is not part of my belief as a Catholic. Religion was part of my decision. I wanted to fight for my baby.’

Again, that’s so heartening. And yet religion has not, apparently, informed her decision as to marriage, and one has to ask why that is? Clearly, young people Europe and in America are moving away from marriage. In the U.S., Catholic marriages have dropped from 415,487 in 1972 to only 179,000 in 2010. That same year fewer than 8,500 Catholic marriages were performed in all of England and Wales, compared to 44,931 in 1968.

Why do young Catholics feel no need to marry? I agree with Emily Stimpson, here, when she writes that part of it is rooted in our culture of no-fault divorce, and that part of it is a failure on the part of the church to teach the sacramental nature of marriage, or why marriage matters at all.

Writes Stimpson:

When it comes to showing the culture how marriage is supposed to work—the beauty, the glory, and the meaning of it all—we kind of stink . . . Roughly 25 percent of Catholic marriages end in divorce. Most Catholic couples married in the last decade cohabitated before marriage. Few unmarried Catholics remain chaste. And more than 5.5 million Catholics have divorced and remarried without an annulment.

She gives a worthy exhortation to her fellow Catholics:

Priests can speak out more on the nature of marriage from the pulpit and challenge parishioners personally when we’re not at least striving to live what the Church believes. They can offer marriages in crisis help, not a wink, a nod, and directions to the nearest tribunal. And they can give young couples preparing for marriage a heck of a lot more than a weekend retreat and an indulgent attitude towards their pre-marital living arrangements.

Us lay folks can do the same, chipping in to help build better Pre-Cana and marriage support programs in our parishes and dioceses. More importantly, we can take a serious look at our marriages, dating relationships, and sex lives and bring them back into line with the Church.

All true; also true is that if every Catholic couple suddenly pulled into line with the church, it would still take decades to effect a change in attitude and understand as to the nature and import of marriage. I don’t know if we can wait that long, or even if we need to. Must it take decades to teach? We can’t simply say it’s “commitment” or its “covenant.” Or even, “it’s an Office.”

At its heart, marriage is a mystery — it is a constant encounter with otherness and a reliance upon grace. People like a mystery, but how do we teach that? Why was it so understandable before, but not now?

“The mystery of the Incarnation, in which God draws near to us, also shows us the incomparable dignity of every human life. In his loving plan, from the beginning of creation, God has entrusted to the family founded on matrimony the most lofty mission of being the fundamental cell of society and an authentic domestic church. With this certainty, you, dear husbands and wives, are called to be, especially for your children, a real and visible sign of the love of Christ for the Church.”
— Pope Benedict XVI, Homily in Santiago de Cuba during Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Journey to Mexico and Cuba (March 26, 2012)

They’re very old, now, the young people who met-and-married in a matter of weeks or months during World War II or the Korean War. They barely knew each other, and often they “didn’t have a pot to p*ss in or a window to throw it out of” and yet their marriages endured.

My in-laws were poor as church mice when they married; they’ve been together for 55 years and both of their siblings have been married even longer; they’ve raised five boys, lost one a few years ago, which broke their hearts. They’ve worked hard, cried together, fought, loved. They still walk to Mass together every Sunday — every day, during Lent — getting their early to light candles and say a prayer or two, and to pat a friend hello as they pass in the pew. Theirs has been a great example of a mighty marriage — I don’t know two people who more profoundly embody the idea of service toward each other — and yet only three of their sons managed to marry successfully.

Yeah, marriage is a mystery. Perhaps marriages worked 50-60 years ago because that was a different generation, a more obedient, less stiff-necked generation. But I am not sure about that. There’s Daniella holding her baby, and she and Andrew appear to have “the right stuff” to forge a marriage that can endure all of that mystery, all of the challenges. One suspects she might be bothering with marriage if someone was just bothering to tell her why it’s any different from just living together with a partner.

The Incarnate Word did not have to come to us as a baby, raised within a family unit, with a mother and a father. He could have materialized fully-grown; or he could have come to Mary, alone — or, for that matter, to Joseph, alone. It matters that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us in a commonality we recognize; not as a lofty king, but as a boy in a family, with a mom and a dad. Would he have bothered, if it didn’t matter?

It’s worth pondering.

::::UPDATE:::: After reading this piece at The Catholic Thing I realize that I have no idea whether or not this couple is married. Apparently in the UK and Ireland, to use the term “husband” or “wife” has become a rudeness. Unreal.

Related: Dwelling in the possibilities of a “win-win”

Filed Under: Marriage Tagged With: , , , ,

Acknowledging Our Faithful Gay Priests Might be a Start – UPDATE

May 17, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

Over at First Things, Joshua Gonnerman brings a provocative title: Dan Savage was Right.

Relax. He doesn’t argue that Savage was right to call the bible “bullshit”, but Gonnerman does write:

Savage is of course wrong to refer to the Bible as bullshit. It is the prime document of the Christian faith, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and treasured by the churches throughout the ages. Only in Scripture can we encounter Christ and through him reach towards divinization, and the Scripture in which I was raised continues to provide the backbone to my own life of faith.

He is no less wrong to dismiss traditional sexual morality. On this point, Scripture and tradition always have spoken with one voice, and the churches cannot, in good conscience, reject that voice. The traditional sexual ethic is the only possible antidote to the rampant commodification of human persons in contemporary culture. As a Christian who is committed to chastity and who is also gay, I acknowledge and I accept the high claims that ethic makes on my life.

But recall Savage’s original point. It was not “the Bible is wrong;” his incendiary remarks were meant to build up the over-arching concern of Christian non-response to the gay community. He recounts a hypothetical Christian who claims, “I’m sorry, we can’t do anything about bullying, because it says right there in Leviticus, in Timothy, in Romans that being gay is wrong.” Christians have appealed far too quickly to their traditional moral views to avoid offering support to gay people. Here, if nowhere else, Dan Savage has a point.

Do read the whole thing. Gonnerman is making a point that the churches have something to say to our gay brothers and sisters, but it has to be something more contructive in the saying, and more sincerely inclusive — as in the way a true family manages to include and love all of its members, no matter what — if good fruit may be brought forth:

If Christians have any interest in reaching out to the gay community, if we have any hope to speak a message which can touch their hearts as well, we absolutely must be willing to live as their family. Behind his blundering obscenity, behind his facile attempts to explain Scripture away, behind the blatant hypocrisy of his behavior toward those who disagree with him, what Dan Savage means to tell us is, “The church has far too often, and for the most wrong-headed reasons, failed to be family to gay people.”

I completely agree. And I really believe that the way to begin to do that is for our bishops and the curia to stop turning a blind eye to a simple truth, that numbered among our priests are faithful, celibate, joyful priests who are homosexual. As I wrote here:

I wonder if [the Church's] bishops and religious leaders will, for example, have to acknowledge with loving support the numerous celibate homosexual priests who, throughout history and still today, serve her faithfully, courageously, and with great joy. Such an acknowledgment could go a long way repairing that disconnect that keeps everyone talking about tolerance while walking away from it.

It would speak to the value of the human person as he is created; it would reinforce the church’s own teaching that the homosexual inclination is not in-and-of-itself sinful; in a sex-saturated culture where “gay” has become in some minds synonymous with “promiscuous” and both heterosexual and homosexual couples see no particular value in chastity, it would present the radical counter-narrative.

Most importantly, such an acknowledgment would be call of olly-olly-oxen free for the church herself. Battered by the revelations of the past decade, poorly served by past psychological studies suggesting that child abusers could be “cured” and therefore distrustful of more recent findings that homosexuals are no more inclined to pedophilia than heterosexuals, the church has reflexively pulled the curtains over a number of her priests, and in doing so, she has hidden the idea of “acceptable otherness” from a flock that is sorely in need to see some of it.

I love our priests, and honor them, but it’s hard to argue that an unfaithful straight priest is better than a faithful gay one. I would rather see a homosexually-inclined happy, celibate priest be able to live in honesty about who he is, than learn about a hetero priest living a lie. A faithful priest is a faithful priest. A happy, joy-filled priest serves the body of Christ in a powerful way.

Allow me to anticipate the argument that the priesthood cannot be open to people the Eastern religions call “imbalanced” and our church calls “disordered.” Find me a priest who doesn’t have some sort of disorder, whether it’s an eating disorder, or an attention-seeking disorder, or a disorder of social ineptness, a hearing disorder, or even a learning disorder. Our priests are human, imperfect, faulty and sometimes broken, just like the rest of us. I think as a church we do ourselves and our dear priests a disservice by pretending that one particular disorder is not represented among them — and we do our gay brothers and sisters a disservice, too, by rendering them only partly visible.

UPDATE: I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t know a single Catholic or Christian who wants this to be the way the church is understood:

When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers.

Read it all

Related: “Homophobic” preaching in Spain

Filed Under: Here and Queer Tagged With:

Quick Reminder:

May 16, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

I am essentially offline and working on another project (or trying to… ). Although I am occasionally posting, comments will remain closed until June, as I have no time to moderate.

I would appreciate any spare prayers you having going unused…

Filed Under: Uncategorized
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »