His talk primarily addressed the HHS mandate but not from the usual standpoint of how it is an attack on religious liberty. He stated forthright that he did not consider the Church's existence at risk and that She had faced far greater problems in the past. She will survive this one.
What he focused on primarily was a subject also very close to my heart, which is that the government, by these types of mandates and associated laws, seeks to annihilate or at least greatly reduce, if not render obsolete, the authority legitimately claimed by subsidiary, pre-political entities such as the family.
When my child can get sterilized, receive contraception, and have an abortion without my consent, I have lost authority over my child in a very real way. Many additional examples have made it to the press recently, such as children being prevented from working on family farms and parents being prevented from circumcising their infants. These trends point to the establishment of greater and greater authority assumed by the government over purview which legitimately belongs to the family.
One comment I made was that it is reasonable to assume that transmitting a religious faith to our children may be deemed unethical and made illegal in the not-too-distant future. Given what is already able to happen without parental consent, it is almost surprising that I still have the freedom to "indoctrinate" or "brainwash" my child into a set of beliefs and practices amounting to "my notions" of religious belief, especially since they do include issues regarding sexuality.
In Germany, it is now illegal to homeschool or to circumcise one's child. Canadian homeschoolers can no longer teach their children that homosexual acts are wrong.
Fr. Sweeney emphasized that we, the laity, need to reframe the conversation in this country to remind
I hope I am summarizing his points adequately. It reminded me of an article I found very explanatory by Yuval Levin, "The Hollow Republic". In it, he considers,
The Left’s disdain for civil society is thus driven above all not by a desire to empower the state without limit, but by a deeply held concern that the mediating institutions in society — emphatically including the family, the church, and private enterprise — are instruments of prejudice, selfishness, backwardness, and resistance to change, and that in order to establish our national life on more rational grounds, the government needs to weaken and counteract them.
The Right’s high regard for civil society, meanwhile, is driven above all not by a disdain for government but by a deeply held belief in the importance of our diverse and evolved societal forms, without which we could not hope to secure our liberty. Conservatives seek mechanisms and institutions to bring implicit social knowledge to bear on our troubles, while progressives seek the authority and power to bring explicit technical knowledge to bear on them.
Yesterday afternoon, I sent my kids outside to rake the backyard. About halfway through, they began whining and complaining; they had had the day off school and spent most of it vegetating on their rear ends. I probably would have had more sympathy if they had been in school all day.
My husband opened the back door and yelled out to them to keep working and finish up the yard, his voice almost drowned out in the sea of their complaints. I actually felt my stomach churn that some well-meaning neighbor would take issue with the situation and inform the authorities that we were forcing our children to do physical labor past the point of their comfort, and this on a school night.
Maybe that sounds paranoid. What about you? How much do you worry about the state interfering in your parenting or preventing you from transmitting your culture and faith to your children? Was I being paranoid about the raking incident?
5 comments:
If you were being paranoid, I guess I should be counted as such, too.. The other week we were in a store, when our middle son (almost three) decided he'd climb up the side of the cart to get inside.. I told him to get down and looked back at the rack, which apparently was my mistake, as he climbed back on again, pulling the cart over on himself. This was made worse by the fact that our youngest (not quite one) was in the seat of the cart and got pulled over along with it.. I caught it, but not until it had made contact with the floor (and the poor baby's forehead with the tile).. So I had two yelling babies, one confused seven-year-old and people looking at up funny.. I was trying to calm them down when some lady came up insisting that the baby had a "GIANT hematoma forming" and I needed to get had immediately (from where!) We left to the car to quiet everyone down, but (besides wanting to make sure the big bump wasn't anything awful) I was most worried about leaving before someone got the bright idea to call child services. I find it kind of telling and a lot ridiculous that there thoughts are even in my mind while I really should be tending to the poor kids. This is something I appreciate about Alaska, and, believe it or not, something I've got at the back of my mind when observing world events, as in "I wonder what other country we could move to if the US goes completely off the deep end in the news little while..." I really hope it doesn't continue this way :[
looking at us* funny
get ice* immediately
that these* thoughts
in the next* little while
Bah, why do I even try on my phone!
(okay last comment -- I appreciate this about Alaska in that Alaska's removed from a lot of the nonsense, ESPECIALLY compared to, say, California -- which is where we'd lived for the five years prior to moving back here last summer, not to say that we're immune though, unfortunately)
(okay, done now)
Circumcision not medically indicated is an unnecessary surgical procedure (some would argue an act of mutilation) performed on the body of a child unable to give consent. By what logic do you deduce that preventing a parent from harming their infant son is a bad thing whereas preventing a minor access to the same standard of healthcare and confidentiality that adult women like you & I can expect is a good thing?
Good post. Agreed.
Point: One of the big myths of modern times is that politics is about "freedom" or "rights" or whatever. In truth, it is about power. Only power. Humans are a social creature, and they will inflict their will upon each other. One had better unify with others and get out in front of this reality. The brief history of the USA - a nation founded on limited government - is an anomaly, a brief ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark history. Call it the curse of Adam, or the first tenant of Buddhism: Life is hard, or whatever one wants, it is merely the reality of life. 1950's America is the exception to this rule. Families would do well to understand this, and to unify and protect themselves against the Juggernaut...
Regarding religious freedom: I do find it deliciously justice-laden that 50% of Catholics voted against their own church in this last election. Ahh, we get what we deserve. Who says we don't see justice in this life?
Post a Comment