Janet Smith…

attempts another defense of Lying for Jesus.

Brandon Watson points out, yet again, that the Church says that lying is, by its very nature, to be condemned. Particularly interesting is Watson’s point:

Given that Smith is famously a defender of Humanae Vitae and its prohibition of contraception, it is the height of irony that almost every single argument Smith gives here has a corresponding version given by opponents of the Church’s position of contraception. And this is so extraordinarily obvious that it is simply mystifying to me that she doesn’t see it. These are all the kinds of arguments that Smith criticizes heavily when they appear in the texts of dissenting theologians on the subject of sex and procreation; it is remarkable that she leaps to them so easily on a subject like reason and truth. And the thing of it is, the arguments that speaking falsely with the intent to deceive is always wrong are massively stronger than the arguments that contraceptive sex is always wrong: Scripture says a lot more about the general subject of lying, for instance; the great theologians and Doctors of the Church discuss it at much greater length; the intrinsic connection between reason and truth as an end (not merely speech and truth) on which Aquinas builds his main philosophical argument is much harder to evade without being self-defeating; the moral debt of truthfulness admits of a much broader range of philosophical supporting arguments; and the sorts of arguments Smith gives here are much less implausible in the arena of sexual ends than they are in the arena of ends of reason as such. This is an extraordinary apparent inconsistency that needs to be explained.