"Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth with a lever" Archimedes
Cardinal George's powerful letter deconstructs the Obama Shell Game regarding Mandated Choice and serves notice on a culture that celebrates the end of marriage as the fulcrum that supports and hinges civilization.
Contraception means 'against fertilization.' No babies. An unfertilized civilization runs against the clock and ultimately . . .well who is left to do the counting? Nancy Pelosi? Dave Axelrod? Forced contraception is Planned Parenthood's President Obama's triumph of what Bertrand Russell called the cosmic impiety of secular thought.
Piety is recognition of obligations. Cardinal George's fine letter read to Catholics in Chicago today challenges us to those obligations.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced on January 20 that
almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception. Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those “services” in the health policies they write. And almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies.
In so ruling, the Administration has seemingly ignored the First Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. As a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics must be prepared either to violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so). The Administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.
We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made
second class citizens because of their religious beliefs. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights. All that has been built up over so many years in our Catholic institutions should not be taken away by the stroke of an administrator’s pen. This order reduces the Church to a private club, destroying her public mission in society. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same.
Francis Cardinal George has challenged not only Catholic, but Americans to stand together against the prevailing sentiment that marriage is the fulcrum of culture.
Cardinal George and Joel Kotkin, America's best societal analyst and demographer, write about the mindset that is America's Cosmic Impiety. In Russell’s chapter in his A History of Western Philosophy on the American pragmatist philosophy John Dewey, he has a long aside on what he calls “cosmic impiety” with a certain dread as to unspoken but potentially ruinous consequences:
“The attitude of man towards the non-human environment has differed profoundly at different times. The Greeks, with their dread of hubris and their belief in a Necessity or Fate superior even to Zeus, carefully avoided what would have seemed to them insolence towards the universe. The Middle Ages carried submission much further: humility towards God was a Christian’s first duty. Initiative was cramped by this attitude, and great originality was scarcely possible. The Renaissance restored human pride, but carried it to the point where it led to anarchy and disaster. Its work was largely undone by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. But modern technique, while not altogether favorable to the lordly individual of the Renaissance, has revived the sense of the collective power of human communities. Man, formerly too humble, begins to think of himself as almost a God. The Italian pragmatist Papini urges us to substitute the ‘Imitation of God’ for the ‘Imitation of Christ’.” (Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, p. 737)
Russell further goes on to say on the same page:
“In all this I feel a grave danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the way in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness… I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time…”
Nothing says Dewey like Planned Parenthood. In order to make the euthanasia and infanticide wholesome articles of modern evolved secular doctrinal bad medicine go down, the sugar of self-love and single living is poured down from every cultural outlet. Joel Kotkin hones in on this toxic sweetener by identifying where single living takes root:
The importance of singlehood and childlessness is amplified by location. The greatest bastions of non-families are found in the centers of the country’s media, cultural and intellectual life. Single households already constitute a majority in Manhattan and Washington, and they are heading in that direction in Denver, Seattle and San Francisco.
The growing self-confidence of these post-familial constituencies is evident in recent articles and books hailing not only the legitimacy but even the preference of this lifestyle option. Kate Bollick’s much celebrated and well-argued portrayal in the Atlantic of attractive matchless, and childless, 40-something females celebrates the coming of age of this new perspective on family life.
Bollick , citing the degraded condition of today’s males, openly embraces “the end of traditional marriage as an ideal.” One of her heroines, California psychologist Bella DePaulo, dismisses the traditional family unit as a kind of mental malady she labels “matrimania.” Oh well, there goes the primary basis for four thousand years of civilization.
Why would this be important, one might ask? Kotkin explains it's all about political power, Clyde!
The Atlantic piece serves as a kind manifesto for this key emerging Democratic constituency. But it’s not just single women now swarming into the Democratic Party. NYU Professor Eric Klineberg’s recent ode to singleness in the New York Times follows a similar narrative, but has room for left-leaning male singletons as well. This trend is even more pronounced in demographically disintegrating Europe, a fact that only increases its appeal to the sophisticated denizens of the single zone.
Are there any risks to Democrats — and advantages to Republicans — in this new post-familial tilt? Author and New America fellow Phil Longman argues that in the long run the “greater fertility of conservative segments of society ” could allow the palpably brain-dead GOP to inherit the country. Childless singletons may be riding high now, he writes, but as non-breeders their influence ends with their own lifespans.
To win the future, according to Democratic activists and millennial chroniclers Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, Democrats must all appeal to the next generation of families. Many of today’s childless millennials are still under 30 and plan to have kids. Reflecting their own experience with divorce as children, 50% consider being a good parent their highest priority in life. A strong plurality also see themselves ending up in the suburbs.
That means Democrats could pay a big price for disdaining homemakers, the often unaesthetic chores of child-raising and particularly suburbia, because that’s precisely the place where many of today’s urban millennials will likely end up in the next decade.
To address the future millennials, Democrats don’t need to adopt the often Medievalist views of their Republican rivals. But they will have to craft a message that appeals to a demographic that looks, at least somewhat, like the current First Family.
Marriage and the family is the fulcrum for the lever of civilization. Without marriage there is an empty planet, let alone a civilization.
Cardinal George and Joel Kotkin are taking up the warning against Dewey/Hegalian 'cosmic impiety' from 1946. We are challenged.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2012/02/10/sex-singles-and-the-presidency/2/
http://geopolicraticus.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/cosmic-hubris-or-cosmic-humility/
