A readere writes:

Thank you for posting my link about the Iowa marriage amendment on your website. I agree that this marriage issue is only one symptom of the overall moral relativism dominating our society. If people really do think that “consent is the sole criterion of the good”, how should we argue against that notion?

First, by learning Catholic social teaching and how to think in the terms the Church does. So, for instance, instead of allowing talk radio or NPR or FoxNews or the punditocracy of Left or Right to fill our heads with a bunch of half-baked jargon about liberal/conservative, individualism/socialism, black v. white jargon that is designed to prevent thought and spur on mindless tribalism, we should begin a serious attempt to think with the Church and learn what she has to say about subsidiarity and solidarity, about our duty to the poor, about the dignity of the person (and his or her work), etc. This would involve the difficult work of understanding the Church’s Compendium of Social Teaching, as well as the choice to actually use it as a guiding text for *all* our thinking about political, economic and cultural matters and not simply as a grab bag to be ransacked for proof texts to support our party’s favorite little ideological talking points.

The second thing we must do is find ways in which to put the Church’s teaching into contact with minds that are still stuck in the tiny ideological boxes of left v. right, etc.

When it comes, for instance, to getting past the trap of “consent as the sole criterion of the good” I would pay attention to the incoherent stirrings in our culture toward a sense of community responsibility. Dumb and dangerous as it is, the impulse to make a video in which lefties are pledging to be “better people” through various community service projects and (shudder) “being a servant to our President” demonstrates that even a generation as selfish as ours has some dim sense that a nation of atomized individuals with no regard for the common good is a Bad Thing. Very well, start with that dim insight and ask the obvious question: *You’re right that it’s a Bad Thing. But *why* is it a bad thing and how can we pursue the good without completely submerging our individuality in the service of the collective?” Voila! You have a golden opportunity to talk about the Catholic concepts of subsidiarity and solidarity (using that actual language) and to get people thinking with the Church, without having their thoughts mediated by ignorant and rabble-rousing palaver from either Chris Mathews or Sean Hannity.

At present, the response from the pinheads who are scrabbling for ratings dominance in the circle of Talk Radio/FoxNews demagogues is simply to shout down any discussion of the common good as “socialism” and run images of Nuremburg rallies. Normal people respond to this like normal people and turn the channel. Unstable people actually listen to this deranged stuff. What *Catholics* need to be doing is grabbing the life preserver of Catholic sanity and making it available to a culture that *is* in very serious trouble, but which needs neither happy face platitude, nor wingnut hysteria, to find a way forward.

This is our hour, if we are smart enough to listen to our shepherds and not to the wolves in sheeps clothing who urge either Obama worship or Obama panic as the solution to our troubles.