Category: Human Rights

Posted on

Catholic Bishops Endanger Church Tax Exempt Status

COMMENTARY

New York Archbishop and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) president Timothy Dolan recently wrote to Barak Obama asking the president to sign the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA): “We cannot be silent, however, when federal steps harmful to marriage, the laws defending it, and religious freedom continue apace.”

Can the marriages of some really “harm” those of others? Does Dolan not recognize how much support there is among active, practicing Roman Catholics for same-sex marriage? Does he really not know that scores of LGBT Catholics on the Communion lines at his own masses at St. Patrick’s Cathedral are married? That many work in Catholic ministry? That some are raising their children in the church? Dolan’s diocesan schools are filled with families in which there are only one or two children? Can he be naïve enough to imagine that this is accomplished through Natural Family Planning (NFP) alone? (NFP is the method of birth control the Vatican recommends and which its parishes often teach.)

Like much of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, Timothy Dolan is out of touch with who we American Catholics actually are.

He has every right not to remain silent, but the bishops’ presumption (fantasy?) that a majority of active U.S. Catholics will lend support to Vatican efforts to restrict the reproductive and marriage rights of non-Catholics is alarming — especially since so many active Catholics exercise those very freedoms. Furthermore, although the pope and his bishops may truly believe a zygote is a “preborn child,” the truth is that a great number of active Catholics do not, and they vote, in great numbers, accordingly.

There’s a reason the Vatican appointed the cigar-smoking, baseball-loving, borderline-charming Dolan to serve as shepherd of the Sodom and Gomorrah that is New York City. The passing of same-sex marriage rights legislation in his state and the reproductive health aspects of the new health care mandate present New York’s top priest with fresh opportunity to make his mark as the defender of the faith in the U.S. On Sept. 30, Timothy Dolan, in his capacity of USCCB president, announced the formation of a sub-committee whose task will be to respond to the “erosion of freedom of religion in America”: “…the new subcommittee would be one of several initiatives designed to strengthen the conference’s response and bring together a broad cross-section of churches and legal scholars to oppose attacks on the First Amendment.”

Dolan is fronting this crusade, and the degree of difficulty involved makes going out on a limb with a shaky “First Amendment” argument worth the gamble. He has appointed a Connecticut Bishop, William Lori, to head up the new committee. Unfortunately the first association many Catholics have with the “Diocese of Bridgeport” is its notorious status as a locus of sexual abuse. (In 2001, the Diocese of Bridgeport settled in 23 civil sex abuse cases, and there, according to Bishop Accountability.org, Timothy Dolan’s predecessor is alleged to have allowed priests facing multiple accusations to continue in ministry.)

The USCCB is now lobbying hard to make same-sex civil marriage illegal in the U.S. and to deny (Catholic and not) employees in agencies run by the church medical coverage for contraception and sterilization. And they want Catholics in the pews to help. The bishops can count on the holy-father-knows-best Roman Catholic fringe to serve as hoplites in what the hierarchy-friendly Catholic News Service calls the “culture wars”. They’d follow the Borgia pope into hell. However, the bishops will lack critical Roman Catholic mass in these “culture wars,” and their strongest support for DOMA may come from “bring-your-gun-to-church” and “God hates fags” so-called “Christian” churches. Progressive Roman Catholics, who tend support LGBT marriage and view family planning as a moral responsibility and not a sin, are likely to think the First Amendment angle disingenuous and inane. Moderate Catholics, who might not long ago have had the USCCB’s back in a such controversies as DOMA or the health care mandate, are alienated and sickened by the pedophilia crisis. They can no longer be counted on to fall in line behind the bishops.

Were so much not at stake, I’d find Dolan’s recent foray into First Amendment advocacy amusing. Has he read the First Amendment? For he appears to miss the point. The First Amendment does not guarantee one religion the right to obtain religious liberty by stripping others of theirs.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

Many religions recognized and sanctified same-sex marriages long before same-sex marriage was legal in any state in the U.S. What (legal or moral) right has Timothy Dolan to tear lawful marriages asunder? Or to nullify covenants consecrated by Reform Jewish or Christian rites? Dolan’s campaign to (in effect) annul same-sex marriages reflects neither the spirit of ecumenism nor that of secular law as it pertains to marriage.

Same-sex couples in states in which equal-marriage legislation has passed are family now.

Furthermore, many atheists hold marriage equality (for lack of a better word, I say) “sacred.” Under the First Amendment, atheist LGBT and straight Americans enjoy the right not to be subject to religious law. DOMA wold impose religious law on everyone. This is an affront to all who take seriously the principle of separation between church and state. Though same-sex marriages are legal in the state of New York, no law compels Timothy Dolan to recognize them, and the First Amendment protects his right to refuse to marry LGBT Catholics in his church.

The consternation of the conflicted “believer” working at the marriage license bureau who finds processing marriage licenses for LGBT couples distasteful is nothing new. Many a court clerk during the Civil Rights Era no doubt endured a similar kind of anguish when required to process marriage licenses for heterosexual interracial couples. People allow moral discernment to shape their decisions about employment all the time. Marriage Bureau employees who find gay marriage distasteful must either suck it up or seek employment that better accommodates their prejudice.

Dolan is quoted in the National Catholic Register as having said the following: “If the label of “bigot” sticks to us — especially in court — because of our teaching on marriage, we’ll have church-state conflicts for years to come as a result.”

The archbishop is right to worry. The “label of bigot” will stick. The best way to defend against being called a bigot is to not be one.

Dolan is not nearly so interested in the First Amendment protections as he is in holding the Vatican’s doctrinal/political ground. The Roman Catholic hierarchy is under attack from within and without. Dolan is taking his shot. He’s hoping that cloaking bigotry the finery of constitutional protections might make him and his hierarchy appear more freedom-forward and perhaps a tad less medieval. But blurring, perforating, crossing and erasing the line of demarcation between church and state won’t win the archbishop any points with most American Catholics. And outside the church, Dolan’s First Amendment-based power play is likely to come off as the Captain Queeg-like snit of a “religious leader” who knows his ship is going down.

Dolan is playing the “good cop” role now, but “bad cops” surround him. On the matter of the health care mandate, Daniel N. DiNardo, chairman of the U.S. bishop’s pro-life committee was quick to whip out the shiv. He said this on Sept. 26, about a month after the USCCB announced its dissatsifaction with the terms of the the federal health care mandate:

“Under the new rule our institutions would be free to act in accord with Catholic teaching on life and procreation only if they were to stop hiring and serving non-Catholics. … Although this new rule gives the agency the discretion to authorize a ‘religious’ exemption, it is so narrow as to exclude most Catholic social service agencies and healthcare providers.”
The ultra hierarchy-friendly Catholic News Agency’s choice of the word “warned” says a lot. It’s code for “Give us what we want or we’ll stop healing, clothing, feeding, sheltering and offering hospice to non-Catholics.”

Another bishop, Bishop David A. Zubik of Pittsburg, weighed in with a similar kind of warning in a Sept. 15 letter to Human Health Services (HHS) secretary Kathleen Sibelius;
…Catholic Charities in his diocese alone has served over 80,000 people last year 
”without regard to the religious belief” of those they ministered to.

But “under this [health care] mandate, Catholic Charities of Pittsburgh would either be forced to cease to exist or restrict its employees and its wide ranging social services to practicing Catholics alone.”
Essentially, Bishops Zubik and DiNardo are floating ultimata. They don’t come right out and say so, but the implication in Zubik’s case is that the bishops might have little choice but to add to the suffering and hardship of 80,000 people currently under the care of Catholic Charities. Not much Christ in that.

Thank God this vicious game of chicken won’t work. The public relations fallout would be disastrous if the bishops were to make good on such threats. Even the most conservative of Catholics would be ambivalent about such tactics because even daily-mass-attending, novena-praying rosary ladies who oppose abortion know that sacrificing sick, hungry, homeless “born” children to the supposed greater good of preserving the lives of zygotes and embryos would constitute a sin as grave as any.

That any bishop thinks it acceptable to use works of mercy as leverage is troubling and indicates just how estranged from Christian ideals many of the Catholic bishops are. From a public relations standpoint, the utter lack of diplomacy in such expressions as Zubik’s reveals how out of touch the Catholic hierarchy is with what the worlds sees when it beholds the church.

Much of the world now views the Roman Catholic Church as a corrupt organization led by a there-but-for-the grace-of-extradition-agreements-go-I pontiff. Were Ratzinger not head of a sovereign state, the world might well have witnessed his perp walk by now. The damning Cloyne Report turned the most pious Catholic nation in Europe against the hierarchy. The Vatican is on Amnesty International’s list of torturers for its human rights violations/crimes against children. The Center for Constitutional Rights and SNAP (Survivors Network of Persons Abused by Priests) are filing suit against the Vatican in the International Criminal Courts. Yet, even as it faces the possibility of a trial at the Hague, the Vatican continues to show poor faith in addressing the hundreds of thousands of brutal crimes against its own children.

Catholics in the pews are repulsed by this, and have grown weary of pro forma expressions of contrition for the anguish pedophile priests inflicted and which bishops facilitated. These apologies are never more tainted than when topped off with not-so-gentle reminders that justice (i.e. damages) for each and every victim would bankrupt the church.

The Vatican may be rich, but the church has money problems.

In the Brooklyn (N.Y.) diocese, where I worship, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio has used his weekly column to urge Catholics in Brooklyn and Queens to vote against the Child Victim’s Act in the New York State Assembly. Payouts, we have been told, would bankrupt the diocese. DiMarzio has publicly threatened to close parishes whose members fail to vote his way. He recorded robocalls for a local politician. His politicking is, at least, risky behavior, and, at worst, possibly a violation of tax law. The aforementioned attempts at clerical blackmail, though unseemly, may be blessings in disguise, however, because they show the world who these “religious leaders” really are and where they stand on the church/state divide.

I take great pride in the work my church does on behalf of the aged, infirm, indigent and marginalized in the city where I live. My own experience working in social justice ministry has offered me opportunity to see closely how fervently devoted we (Catholics) are in it, yet I believe the world outside the church would indeed pick up the slack were the bishops to take their ball and go home.

Bishops play a dangerous game when they threaten to use the leverage they think they have to bring secular law in line with canon law. The church receives much financial support from the government in the form of tax exemptions. I don’t want to see my diocese or any other lose its tax exempt status, but the bishops are pushing their luck — which could soon run out, along with the money. The bishops would do well to bear in mind that they are called to be teachers and priests, not emperors. They play fast and loose with their tax-exempt status at their own peril and their recklessness in this puts needy people of all faiths — and no faith — at risk. Political power can be expensive. The religious freedom argument cuts both ways.

Full Article HERE!

Posted on

Frank Kameny, pioneering gay activist, dies at 86

Frank Kameny was out and proud before people knew what being “gay” meant.

Fired from his job as a government astronomer in 1957 for being gay, he refused to go away quietly. Instead, he got louder. He took his case to the Supreme Court in 1961 and helped stage the first gay rights march in front of the White House and Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in 1965.

Kameny died Tuesday at 86, leaving a 50-year legacy as an advocate who chipped away at countless other barriers for gay people in America. Kameny served as the initial protester, leader and legal strategist of what would become a movement, one historian said.

“Frank Kameny was the Rosa Parks and the Martin Luther King and the Thurgood Marshall of the gay rights movement,” Yale Law Professor William Eskridge told The Associated Press in May when Kameny’s papers became part of a Library of Congress exhibit on U.S. constitutional history.

“Frank never accumulated a nest egg or a retirement fund or any of that,” Eskridge said Wednesday after learning of Kameny’s death. “His full-time occupation was activism.”

In recent years, Kameny saw changes in society that he never thought possible. Gay marriage became legal in a handful of states, including his adopted city of Washington. In 2009 he stood in the Oval Office as President Barack Obama signed a directive extending benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. Most recently he celebrated the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.

“Being gay has become infinitely better than it was,” he said in May.

Kameny was proud of his work toward gaining equality for gays and lesbians. When his petition to the Supreme Court was put on display at the Library of Congress, he was clearly tickled.

“I suppose you can say at this point, I have become one of the creators of the United States,” he told the AP, echoing the exhibit title “Creating the United States.”

Gay rights groups said it was Kameny’s work that helped make life better for gay Americans and called him a pioneer and an inspiration. He had been in poor health and died on what is celebrated as National Coming Out Day, when many gay people celebrate coming out and encourage others to have the courage to do the same.

In 2009, Kameny said he wanted to be remembered most for coining the phrase “Gay is Good” in 1968 to counter an onslaught of negative language about gays and lesbians.

Franklin Edward Kameny was born May 21, 1925, in New York City. He graduated from Queens College and served in World War II before earning a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard.

He was a government astronomer for just five months when he was asked to meet with federal investigators. He had been arrested for a misdemeanor in San Francisco that tipped off the civil service that Kameny was probably gay, and was fired, Eskridge said.

Kameny didn’t back down. He contested his firing, writing letters to the U.S. Civil Service Commission, both houses of Congress and eventually the White House. He sued and lost in lower courts but pressed on with a lengthy brief in 1961 that is now regarded as the first civil rights claim based on sexual orientation to be brought to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court denied his petition.

Soon after, he co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, which advocated for equal rights for gays and lesbians.

In 1965, Kameny and 10 others became the first to stage a gay rights protest in front of the White House and later at the Pentagon and in Philadelphia.

“First class citizenship for homosexuals,” their signs read, along with “Homosexuals ask for the right to the pursuit of happiness.” They wore suits and dresses at Kameny’s insistence.

He wrote to then-president Lyndon Jonson saying gay people were second-class citizens “in a country which claims that it has no second-class citizens.”

Kameny’s sister, Edna Lavey, 83, said her brother was championing gay issues when the subject was still taboo.

“The word gay did not exist yet,” she said Wednesday from her home in New York. “Before that time homosexuality was never mentioned. It was a different world then.”

Lavey said her brother was willing to endure verbal abuse and tormenting to try to win people over.

“My brother didn’t care how unpleasantly he was treated,” she said, adding that as long as he was getting publicity for his cause, that was all he cared about. “He wanted homosexuality to be recognized as something not abnormal, just another way of living.”

Kameny’s early activism and advocacy for soldiers and federal workers who faced discrimination provided a model for the civil rights group Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union’s agenda on gay rights. He also helped persuade the American Psychiatric Association to delete homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1973.

Friends and his sister said Kameny never spoke of having a long-term boyfriend or partner.

“Frank was guarded and private,” said Bob Witeck, a Kameny friend for three decades. “Often when asked about it, he said he didn’t have time for that.”

He didn’t have a regular job for most of his life, depending on friends and family for support.

In later years, Kameny was increasingly recognized for his work as a gay rights pioneer.

A self-described “pack rat,” Kameny amassed thousands of documents related to his activism and gay rights history.

In 2006, gay rights groups had the papers appraised and bought them from Kameny for $75,000. They donated some 70,000 items from his collection – ranging from letters to buttons and picket signs – to the Library of Congress and Smithsonian.

In 2009 the U.S. Office of Personnel Management issued a formal apology to him for being fired solely based on his sexual orientation. The office is headed by John Berry, who is gay.

On Wednesday, Berry said Kameny was a hero who was feisty and combative and whose “force of will led to victory in a decades-long fight for equality.”

Berry said Kameny “showed his ability to forgive” by accepting his official apology “for the sad and discredited termination of his federal employment.”

When gay marriage became legal in the nation’s capital in 2010, Kameny attended the first weddings. That same year the District of Columbia designated a portion of 17th Street as “Frank Kameny Way.”

Planning is under way for a memorial service in November.

Full Article HERE!

Posted on

Gay theologian speaks out

Fr. James Alison, one of only a “handful” of gay Catholic theologians, spoke Monday about the prevailing sense of homophobia in the Catholic church and how the issue can be combated today, in an event sponsored by Campus Ministry, the Triangle Club and OMA.

“Fr. Alison was able to speak across our isolated areas of life and is an example of what we hope for students,” said Nicholas Coffman, chapel coordinator and campus minister. “The purpose of the event was to build community and welcome students.”

The British-born Alison, a member of the clergy since age 18, began by addressing the history of homosexuality in Europe and how it was viewed in the church, then moved into a discussion of contemporary debate on the issue. He noted that, before the 16th century, many groups in Europe were divided along gendered lines, with the two groups barely interacting with one another.

“When the idea of heterosexuality began emerging, this was mega-weird in the West,” said Alison.

He continues that it wasn’t until the beginning of the 16th century that homosexuality began to be viewed as “odd,” a type of “othering” that would continue to grow into the 19th century.

He cites Evelyn Hooker’s 1957 study “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual” as one of the turning points in this type of thinking. Her study demonstrated that, according to Alison, “there is no link between screwed-up-ness and sexuality and that we are all as screwed up as each other.”

This type of post-World War II trend has continued, establishing the belief that homosexuality is not a social problem that can be solved, but simply a “non-pathological variant within the human condition, like left-handedness.”

Alison made clear distinctions between the views of the laity and the views of the Catholic hierarchy post-World War II, and points to the fact that while issues like gay marriage have been openly adopted in heavily Catholic countries, church officials have been slow to bring about open dialogues in addressing the issue.
“It puts the church in the rather difficult position of living 50 years out of date,” Alison said. “In the last 50 to 60 years we’ve had a collapse of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy in lay society, but not the church hierarchy.”

To help combat this prevailing sense of homophobia in Catholic hierarchy, Alison is quick to point out the church’s own teachings which can be utilized to help fight this attitude. He looks to the Catholic idea that “Grace Perfects Nature,” or the idea that followers of the faith can flourish where they are in life. However, for this to happen, church authorities must go beyond a negative view of homosexuality to accept the idea that homosexuality is not a defect in social behavior before “flourishing” can happen.

Alison points to the fact that many lay Catholics today have already embraced this idea, shown in the legalizing of gay marriage in places like Brazil, Mexico and even New York.
“They understand the idea that ‘If that’s what they are, they must be the best of what they are,’ and can see the reality of what that means,” Alison said.
Alison also challenges future generations to better understand what same-sex marriage means in a Catholic setting, and what the “shape of God’s blessing,” means in that setting.

While Alison acknowledges that change will only come about at a slow pace to the hierarchy, he notes the “marked change of the past 15 years” and hopes that the conversation is able to develop in creative ways.”

Coffman echoes Alison’s sentiments, hoping that people, especially in the United States, will continue to engage in a discussion that recognizes the openness of the Catholic faith, and that it emphasizes a gospel of love.

“It’s a matter of time before the church recognizes that we have a responsibility to be in partnership with our homosexual brothers and sisters and be bound up in their own flourishing, because their flourishing is bound up in ours. We are no longer the us and them, we are now we.”

Due to time constraints, representatives of Campus Ministry could not be reached for comment.

Full Article HERE!

Posted on

Pentagon Gives Chaplains OK on Same-Sex Weddings

After months of legal review, the Department of Defense announced Friday that military chaplains may officiate in same-sex wedding ceremonies of service members in states where gay marriage is legal. Such ceremonies can be performed on military bases, officials wrote in a Friday memorandum.

In connection with repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Clifford L. Stanley wrote in the DoD memo:

“A military chaplain may participate in or officiate any private ceremony, whether on or off a military installation, provided that the ceremony is not prohibited by applicable state and local law. Further, a chaplain is not required to participate in or officiate a private ceremony if doing so would be in variance with the tenets of his or her religion or personal beliefs. Finally, a military chaplain’s participation does not constitute an endorsement of the ceremony by DoD.”(A PDF of the memo is available HERE.)

Also released by the Pentagon Friday is a Sept. 21 facilities memo signed by DoD general counsel Jeh Johnson, who wrote that “military facilities for private functions, including religious and other ceremonies, should be made on a ‘sexual-orientation neutral’ basis, provided such use is not prohibited by applicable state and local laws.”

The guidance concurs with a previous decision by Navy Chief of Chaplains Rear Adm. Mark L. Tidd, who in April clarified upon the advice of legal counsel that individual chaplains would therefore be permitted — and expressly not obligated — to officiate weddings for gay and lesbian service members at base facilities in states that allow marriage for same-sex couples, Tidd wrote.

However, Tidd suspended his own guidance pending Pentagon legal review; social conservative groups and a group of 63 House Republicans had blasted his guidance, claiming it violated Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act.

The Pentagon guidance comes on the same day as the retirement of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, whose personal support for ending “don’t ask, don’t tell” gave a crucial boost to the repeal movement. Appearing before a Senate committee hearing in February 2010, Mullen testified that he was troubled by a policy that “forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”

Appearing in his final news conference last week with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Mullen said of completed “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal, “Today is really about every man and woman who serves this country, every man and woman in uniform, regardless of how they define themselves. And tomorrow, they’ll all get up, they’ll all go to work, and they’ll all be able to do that work honestly. And their fellow citizens will be safe from harm. And that’s all that really matters.”

Reaction from LGBT advocacy groups:

Aubrey Sarvis, executive director, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network:

“We are pleased the Department of Defense has made it clear that a military Chaplain is allowed to perform any lawful ceremony that is consistent with his or her beliefs and is not required to perform a ceremony that is inconsistent with those beliefs. We are also pleased that access to military facilities will be granted on a sexual-orientation-neutral basis. The guidance issued today strikes the right balance between respecting the faith traditions of chaplains and affording all service members the same rights under current law. This is another logical step in the direction of full equality for gay and lesbian service members, and we hope the Department will continue to move down that path.”

Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese:

“I applaud the Department of Defense for protecting the religious freedoms of all military chaplains. As we move into a new era of open service, today’s decision by the Department of Defense ensures that all military families, including lesbian and gay military families, have equal access to military facilities.”

Alex Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United:

“Now that ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is gone, there is nothing prohibiting chaplains whose denominations do not discriminate from treating same-sex couples equally in accordance with state and local laws. There are many chaplains in the military who simply do not believe that gay and lesbian servicemembers are second-class citizens, and those chaplains should have the freeom to practice their religion as they see fit, including officiating at ceremonies that their denominations recognize.”

Full Article HERE!

Posted on

Cooperation in Evil

MAYBE it’s the Mario Lanza in him. But Nino Scalia relishes being operatically imprudent.

The Supreme Court justice’s latest supreme lapse of judgment involves poking his nose in a local legal wrangle about the place where I slept for four years: the Catholic University dorms.

In a speech last weekend at Duquesne University Law School, a Catholic institution in Pittsburgh, Justice Scalia defended religion in public life.

“Our educational establishment these days, while so tolerant of and even insistent on diversity in all other aspects of life, seems bent on eliminating the diversity of moral judgment, particularly moral judgment based on religious views,” the devout Catholic said.

As an example, he cited the lawsuit filed by the “notoriously litigious” George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf against Catholic U.’s new ban on coed dorms.

In June, the president of Catholic U., John Garvey, wrote an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal explaining why, as a father of five, he felt the need to resort to a “countercultural” and “slightly old-fashioned remedy,” ending 25 years of coed dorms. He said he believed single-sex dorms would “improve the practice of virtue,” reducing binge drinking and “the culture of hooking up.”

Using a formula that’s the inverse of “Sex and the City,” Garvey wrote: “Rates of depression reach 20 percent for young women who have had two or more sexual partners in the last year, almost double the rate for women who have had none. Sexually active young men do more poorly than abstainers in their academic work.”

He made note of the sad slide from proud feminism to proud sluttiness. “I would have thought that young women would have a civilizing influence on young men,” he wrote. “Yet the causal arrow seems to run the other way.”

Banzhaf, who calls Garvey’s arguments “totally secular,” pronounced himself “astonished that a justice of the nation’s highest court would single out and prejudge a legal proceeding which could set an important precedent, and could one day even come before the U.S. Supreme Court.”

As the Supreme Court gets ready to go into session on Monday, its six Catholic justices were set to merge church and state by attending the traditional first-Sunday-in-October Red Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. (It’s hard to believe there’s no Protestant on the Supreme Court.) Through the years, the presiding clergy have aimed their homilies against abortion, gay marriage and “humanism.” Justices of other faiths have attended; but as Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate, “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stopped attending the Red Mass altogether after hearing her very first homily, which she has described as ‘outrageously anti-abortion.’ ”

In 2007, there was a kerfuffle about Catholic dominance on the court because the five justices who pushed to uphold the ban on “partial-birth abortion” were all Catholic men appointed by conservative presidents.

The church has aggressively meddled in politics on abortion, trying to defeat candidates who support abortion rights and prevent some liberal politicians from receiving Communion. But American bishops have been inconsistent in preaching their values.

They do not try to bring down politicians who supported the Iraq war, even though Pope John Paul II spoke out against it and sent a Vatican cardinal to warn W. that the war would be a “disaster” that would “destroy human life.” They do not express outrage at Republican audiences that cheer for executions, or target pols who brag on the death penalty, even though John Paul issued an encyclical against “the culture of death,” saying modern states have so many ways to protect citizens that the necessity for executions is “very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”

Scalia, confident in his own infallibility, dissented. As he wrote in a religious journal in 2002, he does not find the death penalty immoral, and he believes that as the “minister of God,” government has powers to get “revenge” and “execute wrath.” He’s clearly more an Old Testament guy than New, or he would know that some prisoners get falsely accused and nailed to the cross (Matthew 26:59-66).

Now Scalia has dissented from the opinion of a second pope on the issue. Pope Benedict sent Georgia state officials a letter last month asking for clemency for Troy Davis, but the very Catholic Supreme Court denied a last-minute stay of execution.

In his Duquesne speech, Scalia said: “If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign. I could not be a part of a system that imposes it.”

My family priest, Father Kevin O’Neil, teaches about “cooperation in evil” in Catholic moral theology. If you facilitate something that has been deemed wrong, like taking a human life, are you cooperating in evil?

Maybe the Supreme Court should ask itself that question. Are you “cooperating in evil,” Justice Scalia?

Full Article HERE!