A car bomb exploded near a church as worshippers left Sunday Mass, killing at least four civilians and injuring 18 in one of several attacks on Iraq’s beleaguered Christian minority.

A total collapse of religious freedom for Christians in Iraq is not what we need and if the Iraqi government doesn’t step up and take care of this, I’m not entirely sure if this country will ever be capable of self-governance and self-defense. It is how a society treats its weakest and its minorities by which it is judged and Christians in Iraq are definitely that—small in size and marginalized in power. I don’t want to go back to the strong man, but churches weren’t getting bombed in Hussein’s time and Christians enjoyed a substantial freedom of worship. Acts like this remind me that this country is no where NEAR being able to govern itself.

Orwell’s 1984 provides a vivid example of this principle. Religion in Oceania has been wholly abolished, the people live in government-induced squalor, and the state routinely comes between children and their parents, and is working on preventing marriage altogether.

But there are ample historical examples as well.

Consider China: Not much in the way of freedom there. But also for the bulk of the people, there is a lifestyle of crushing poverty, far greater than anything that would be tolerated anywhere in the U.S. Too, religious leaders and foreign missionaries are forced to carry out their work in secret, lest discovery by the state should lead to their incarceration. And the culture of death there has been carried to the extent that the government has imposed a “One Child Policy,” under which couples must be licensed to have more than one child. State-mandated abortions and sterilizations are alarmingly commonplace, and executed criminals, including political prisoners, routinely have their bodies broken up for transplant parts without their consent.

Try to imagine if any one of those factors were to change. If China allowed its religious leaders freedom to preach their various faiths, how long would the dictatorship last? Not long.

If free markets were allowed to flourish and bring prosperity to the masses, how long would the political oppression continue? Not long.

And if the people were allowed to raise their families as they saw fit, and if their culture acknowledged the inherent dignity and right to life of the human being, does anyone imagine that the state could maintain their grip in other areas?

In China, widespread poverty, religious oppression, and the culture of death are the mainstays of the communist system.

An even more extreme example: in the antebellum south, slaves were kept in miserable living conditions. In most states, it was illegal for them even to learn to read the bible; there was little or no organized religious ministry to them. And their marriages were not acknowledged by either the state or their owners. Couples could be — and often were — sold apart, and children could be taken from their parents. Economic depression, religious oppression, and disregard for the dignity of human life were all key to this system.

Now let’s consider a counterexample: Following the French and Indian War, the British government adopted a policy of increased taxation on their American colonies in an effort to make the colonies pay for the cost of the war Britain had fought to defend them.

But the American colonists had a thriving free-market economy. Many of the colonists had become rich, or at least very comfortable (by contemporary standards), and most of the rest had high hopes of doing likewise. The nation was founded on religious freedom, and religious observance was (and remains today) at a greater level than virtually anywhere in the civilized world. There was a rich variety of religious expression, and even religious minorities enjoyed freedom and tolerance unheard of anywhere else. And with only three million people to populate such a vast land area, large families were the rule, not the exception (Benjamin Franklin, for example, was the fifteenth of his father’s seventeen children).

There was never a possibility that such a people would tolerate anything that might approach oppression. Under the circumstances, the American Revolution was inevitable.

Now let us consider the situation in the United States today. Increasing public debt and public budget deficits, and increased taxes, together with the government’s proposals for increased services such as universal healthcare, are causing reasonable people great alarm as they contemplate the future of the American economy, and their prospects for economic liberty.

At the same time, with the current economic downturn, increasing numbers are looking to the government for assistance in difficult times, which tends to exacerbate the underlying problem.

Too, abortion is deemed a “right” in the U.S., unlike virtually anywhere else in the world, and the current administration seems determined to defend that “right” at home, and extend it abroad. Euthanasia is a quietly growing trend, and the government is now adopting a policy to fund research on cells derived from the destruction of human embryos. There is, effectively, no right to life for the unborn, the infirm, the elderly, or the disabled, beyond what their immediate families are prepared to defend.

And the drive towards gay “marriage” has already led to efforts to muzzle the church, such as the recent efforts in Connecticut to pass laws regulating the management of Catholic parishes, and requiring the Church to register as a lobbying organization, lawsuits against religious organizations and individuals who preferred not to provide support to gay “marriage” services, and the anti-Catholic resolutions passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors a fews years ago.

For conservatives today, it is not enough to stand for lower taxes and a strong national defense, laudable as these positions may be.

Wherever tyranny is found, it is accompanied by religious oppression, economic depression, and a culture of death. And wherever these elements are waxing, political freedom will be waning.

The Republican Party must be unwavering in its commitment not only to strong defense and free markets, but also to religious freedom, and to fostering a culture of life. America must have a culture of life, a culture of liberty, and a culture of prosperity. And none of these will survive without both of the others.

(Cross-posted from Thoughts of a Regular Guy)

(photo courtesy of my sister)

For Obama, a valuable Council does nothing but offer advice to the administration. The Bush Council was actually given the additional mandate of public education, of developing a national dialogue on controversial bioethical issues. It’s with that Socratic second mandate in mind that President Bush chose for his first chairman a man trained in medicine, natural science, and the wisdom about being human embodied in the Great Books from Plato through Shakespeare to Genesis–Leon Kass. For Obama, it would appear, there’s no need for such moral and political discussion or such “humanistic” guidance because the experts know the nonideological and objective answer to the key questions that face us in our high-tech and increasingly biotech world. Personal opinion is trumped by what the “studies show,” and public opinion should be guided toward a consensus based on those studies.

Obama plans to reconstitute the council with specialists in a forum directed toward “practical policy options” rather than philosophically informed debate.  The drive for ‘consensus,’ here as elsewhere in this administration, really means squelching dissent.  Over half of Bush’s council opposed his position on embryonic stem-cell research, for instance; I imagine the odds will be rather long on finding even two dissenters on such a question when the new council convenes.

Colleen Carroll Campbell assesses the move succinctly:

Obama’s desire to see his policies backed by expert “consensus” more likely will be realized with a new commission composed of like-minded political liberals steeped in utilitarianism than with the brainy, diverse and unpredictable crew that populated the now-defunct council. Ensuring uniformity of thought among one’s ethical advisers may make the president’s job easier, but it will do little to benefit the diverse nation that he serves.

The President is perfectly within his rights to reshape the council, of course, but we have lost something rare and precious in Washington:  a forum for thoughtful, sustained engagement with the most pressing issues of our day bringing together figures from across the political spectrum.

(Originally posted on Return To Rome blog)

“Obama told the pope of his commitment to reduce the number of abortions and of his attention and respect for the positions of the Catholic Church”

…

“The pope gave Obama… a copy of a recent Vatican document on bio-ethics in which the Holy See explains its opposition to such practices. “Dignitas Personae” (dignity of a person) condemns artificial fertilization and other techniques used by many couples and also says human cloning, ‘designer babies’ and embryonic stem-cell research are immoral. The document defends life from conception to natural death.”

Although mainstream media outlets have already spun this encyclical as one that focuses on the global economic crisis—and it most certainly does address that—that is clearly not the pope’s point of departure. For those who have eyes to see, the animating principle of this encyclical is virtually on every page of it: theological anthropology is the only proper starting pointing from which we can come to know the common good….

The categories that dominate our public discourse in the United States—left, right, liberal, conservative, etc.—play no role in illuminating the Church’s social doctrines or the message of Caritas in Veritate. This is why it is a fool’s errand to attempt to artificially divide Catholic social teachings into its left and right wings….

Benedict does argue in this encyclical that free markets and the ownership of property are the best way people can produce the wealth that is necessary for a just regime. But free markets will not result in integral human development if they are bereft of sound ethical constraints and not directed toward the common good. This is why in Catholic social teaching the state has an obligation to protect, nurture, and help sustain the natural development and proper ends of certain governmental and private institutions. These include the family, civic and political associations (such as labor unions), organizations of social welfare (administered privately and/or by the state), and schools. According to Benedict, such institutions make morally sound markets possible because they provide the social infrastructure for the achieving of integral human development. So the Sermon on the Mount cannot be separated from “Honor thy Father and Mother,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not steal.” Thus, the “justice” in social justice refers to a rightly ordered community, not to the ideologies of a Ludwig Von Mises or a Karl Marx. In Christian theology, you can gain the whole world and lose your own soul (Luke 9:25). To paraphrase St. Paul, that’s a stumbling block to the Austrians and foolishness to the Marxists.

You can read the whole thing here.
(Originally posted on First Thoughts)

Now (2009):

… at least it appears that Obama didn’t bow this time