NOT ANTI-CATHOLIC, ANTI-FAITH

Bigotry makes a rebirth (Christopher Pearson, The Australian, February 11, 2006)

One thing at least has become clear during the course of the debate on RU486, the so-called abortion pill. Sectarian bigotry, which seemed almost to have vanished from Australian politics, is still with us, as dim and rancorous as ever. "Get your rosaries off our ovaries" is its latest mantra.

Tony Abbott belled the cat on Monday, arguing that he should be judged on his actions as a minister rather than "on other people's prejudices". What grounds, he asked, has senator Lyn Allison "for thinking that I am less capable than she is of distinguishing between what's rightly rendered to God or Caesar?" [...]

The Greens Senator Kerry Nettle said: "Mr Abbott has made several anti-choice statements, including one on the front page of The Catholic Weekly, urging people to campaign for changes to abortion law - an incredibly inappropriate thing for a federal minister to be doing. Mr Abbott needs to understand that his comments have no place in 21st century Australia."

Returning to the theme four months later, Nettle said: "But it's not just Mr Abbott's philosophical views that are hard to unpack. The scientific basis for his claims about safety are just as hard to understand. Abbott is playing a dangerous game with the lives and well-being of half of Australia's population."

Sarah Maddison, from the Women's Electoral Lobby, decided that ranting was in order: "Mr Abbott comes up with some medieval views on morality that should make most Australians shudder at the thought of his ever assuming the Liberal leadership. Mr Abbott views abortion through the cloudy, moralistic lens of his own conservative Catholicism. While he is quite entitled to his views he is not entitled to dress them up as fact, nor to air them in such a way as to be seen as Government policy. To do so is not only irresponsible but also immeasurably damaging and offensive to Australian women."

Elspeth Probyn, a professor of gender studies at the University of Sydney, reckons she knows an ex-seminarian rugger bugger when she sees one. Reflecting on Abbott's James McAuley lecture, she indulges in a little psychobiography: "He departs from general Christian principles to further his own muscular Christianity, which sometimes seems more indebted to the rugby field than to the Catholic Church. For Abbott [our federal Health Minister, let's remember], sex is the source of evil and seemingly the only reason for religion. In his speech, he dwelt on the Virgin birth.

"Apparently we can accept the irrationality of the biological claim if we accept that Christ's conception was free from sexual intercourse. From immaculate conception, he quickly moved to the evils of teenage sex and abomination of abortion as 'the easy way out'. Sex as the original sin makes Abbott deeply fearful: of gays and lesbians, teenage girls, single mothers - a terrifying group. His fear will be stemmed by legislation, not by consulting his conscience or allowing others to do the same."

As a series of arguments, these are barely worth the bother of rebutting. They do, however, serve as a kind of catalogue aria - a feminist version of the vulgar misconceptions, tribal hostilities and strains of anti-Catholic bigotry that did so much to poison Australian politics for most of the last century.

Mr. Pearson has missed the point. Elites will be elites and can always be counted on to dream up creative ways to discredit or ignore or even disenfranchise the masses beneath, especially in the face of rumblings of revolt To classical European aristocrats, it was a self-evident truth that nobility of birth and “gentility” bestowed a range of exclusive qualifications to rule. When the middle classes got into the act, the bare acquisition of property was said by many to confer a special virtue and sobriety that entitled landowners to govern the excitable, selfish landless. Today, the bare profession of faith–-any faith–-is seen more and more as a challenge to the civic good that calls into question any right to be respected or even heard on public issues. While the great Age of Democracy (1848-1960) saw plenty of sectarian conflict, piety was viewed widely as a virtue. To more and more of today’s beautiful people, it is indistinguishable from voodoo and a sign of being in the grip of, at best, a scampish, childlike naivity to be monitored closely and checked by adults or, at worse, irrational and psychologically warped impulses that oppose science, freedom and progress and are hellbent on finding the fastest route back to the Dark Ages.

This thinking is by no means restricted to the hard, politicized left. Daniel Dennett’s defiantly secular “brights” presumably stand in contrast to folks that by definition extend from the “not-so-brights” to the egregiously stupid. In Canada, stunned urban liberals a-plenty can be found nervously scanning the horizon for a religious right they have never encountered but which they just know is out there somewhere in alarming numbers plotting to destroy something called “Canadian values”. Even the soft mainstream media is losing any capacity to see faith as other than a complete surrender of one’s critical faculties, as this delightful piece from Fr. Richard John Neuhaus illustrates:

Elizabeth Bumiller, in the February 6 issue of the New York Times, reports on a speech made by President Bush. We are told that he “declared once again that his foreign policy was in part based on an ‘Almighty’ whose gift to the world was freedom.” It is the indefinite article that intrigues. Among the Almighties, Bush appears to have a favorite whom he conceives of as a power with a personal disposition toward humanity. Ms. Bumiller’s tone is that of someone fascinated by the odd way this president thinks and talks. Her choice of language is similar to the way in which one might describe Jimmy Stewart’s taking counsel from a “Harvey.” It is curious and somewhat amusing, but also frightening in the case of a president who allows his belief in an “Almighty” to influence his policies. As with Elwood P. Dowd, something has to be done about this fellow.

One amusing aspect of this far-from-amusing development is the lengths modern secularists will go to peg all religious people as slaves to unquestioned scriptural literalism and their distress and confusion when faced with evidence that this is not so, if it ever was. As the plinth upon which their beloved rationalism rests starts to crack, they are more and more determined to paint their opponents as standing foursquare for brute irrationalism. Even on this site, our resident secularists, far from being reassured by the notion that thousands of years of history, scholarship and piety have left Judaism and Christianity well-grounded in modern reality and standing for freedom, tolerance and progress, are quick to insist that such a view is actually either heresy or conclusive evidence that their adherents don’t really believe what they say they believe. One need not be a professional psychologist to see that such an argument is a desperate attempt to intellectually disenfranchise the religious and remove them from the realm of serious public discourse.