Everybody Knows Slavery is Evil

Hershey, Mars, Nestle, and Cadbury exploit child slavery in the chocolate trade.

Child.  Slavery.

I will make every effort to avoid buying their bloody products.  I hope you do too.

The issue of American use of slaves abroad is still largely under the radar.  The sex slave trade is booming in Asia, but that only involves a relatively small number of rich American perves who can go there to exploit it.  Big Chocolate, however, is a huge American industry and sooner or later, somebody is going to make a TV show, or a film, or tell some story that will turn child slaves from statistics into people and there will be an outcry.  And when that happens, history suggests that American culture will split again into normal, decent people who oppose slavery and corporate shills and “conservatives” who will call normal, decent people “liberal do gooders” and start with the lies about how Big Chocolate is “providing thousands of jobs” and “teaching a solid work ethic” etc.

When that argument starts, I wonder how long it will be before somebody notes that the Magisterium only definitively condemned slavery as intrinsically and gravely immoral at Vatican II and then writes a Catholic defense of slavery in which we appeal to earlier magisterial discussions and scripture passages that allowed for slavery in order to rebut Vatican II and get “prudential” appeals to a return to slavery?

It’s not like it’s a new pattern.  Good Catholic “prolife” conservatives attempted exactly the same thing in painfully twisted rationales for torture when the “prolife” President Bush was torturing people in the War on Terror ten years ago.  Likewise, in the largest prison state on the planet, American conservative Catholics are laboring, not to attack the prison state (which now dwarfs Stalin’s Gulag), but to attack the Church’s teaching on the death penalty on precisely the same “We used to endorse it, so we can ignore the recent calls of the Church to abolish it” reasoning.

If the for-profit prison system and its effective use of slaves becomes precious enough to the Party of Trump and its wall project, or our slave system of Big Chocolate capitalism in third world countries become important enough for Americans to notice and argue over, I won’t be surprised to see the  same arguments for turning back the clock on slavery be made just like Catholic defenses of the death penalty are being made now and Catholic defenses of torture were made recently.

All this is driven, not by disinterested curiosity about an abstract theological question, but by the need to keep the conservative Catholic on the reservation as a good servant to the demands of American Conservative political and economic dogmas.  When conservatives want to torture, kill, or enslave, they look for a ways to say “God blesses this” and they do not hestitate for a second to defy the Church’s clear teaching to achieve that goal.

You know, like Catholics for a Free Choice does to rationalize abortion.