[After the manner of Cardinal Bernardin-din]
Kmiec: Obama ‘promotes social justice as if he were a Catholic’
CWN – October 31, 2012
Douglas Kmiec, the former law professor and pro-life theorist whose support for Barack Obama in 2008 shocked many of his fellow Catholics, lauded the president in a recent Los Angeles Times interview, saying that he “promotes social justice as if he were a Catholic.”
Kmiec, who resigned from his post as ambassador to Malta following a critical State Department report on his activities, said:
There are a few places where we had disagreements, [but] when you see someone who’s devoted completely to people who have less than himself, who worries about our tax system and society and economic opportunities, how can you not be for those ideas and the person standing behind those ideas? So it’s a no-brainer for me …
There is a tradition we trace back to Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, of the seamless garment — all life issues are interrelated: abortion, capital punishment, war, a family wage, the environment. You can’t take these things apart. More and more Catholics understand that, but some very important Catholics are resistant.
“Everybody wants to solve [same-sex marriage] with law,” Kmiec added as he discussed same-sex marriage. “I don’t need the state to define marriage for me. I need the state to treat citizens equally, to give everyone the benefit of the rule of law and not shape it to favor one side or the other. At the same time, give individual churches the opportunity to define marriage as they read their religious practices.”
Additional sources for this story: Douglas Kmiec on keeping the faith (Los Angeles Times) www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-1024-morrison-kmiec-20121024,0,6393730,full.column
It seems recently that it is more important to show that you care about a particular problem rather than to actually do something about it….If what you do is actually detrimental, that’s ok because you “care”.
Are you concerned about breast cancer? Don’t worry about identifying and addressing the underlying causes. Just wear a pink ribbon to show that you “care”.
Worried about American troops in foreign lands? Just “show your support” with a yellow ribbon.
Feeling bad about the poor and homeless? Keep insisting on a welfare state. It does not matter that it has been a failure, the important thing is that you “care about the issue”.
Getting back to the subject at hand, even if I accept (which I do not) that Obama is “devoted completely to people who have less than himself, who worries about our tax system and society and economic opportunities”, I find myself saying “so what?”. It can be argued that over the past four years, the policy of the Obama administration has made the problem worse.
So, to answer Kmiec’s question, I am “not be for those ideas and the person standing behind those ideas” because those ideas have been an abysmal failure.
Government control of medical care with death panels, abortion, and population control does not result in “social justice” in any ethical way that can be justified by Catholic natural law or subsidiarity, understood by Catholic teaching.
He’s wrong. Again.
There is no mandate in the Gospels for a secular socialist welfare state controlled by secular humanists and Marxist or Frankfurt School social engineers from Harvard and Columbia promoting abortion.
The Catholic teaching on charity operates through the Church and personal action and decisions.
Obama has promoted the view that religion is limited to “worship” (private prayer and scripture readings in church buildings). This is false.
Having the secular government control charity is also false and contrary to Catholic teaching.
If you want social justice provide tax benefits for charitable giving and volunteer work. Don’t tax the middle class any higher, making it harder for them to choose Catholic schools. How can you have charity without Catholic education on moral teachings??? That’s absurd.
No one who voted to deny medical care to infants born alive in botched abortions,
as Barack Hussein Obama did,
can be described as promoting the Catholic view of social justice.
Only someone suffering from dementia or a Marxist would make such a claim.
Douglas Kmiec’s Contribution to the Insanity of the Fashionable
By Dr. Jeff Mirus | October 31, 2012
www.catholicculture.org/commentary/the-city-gates.cfm?id=436
Do you see an internal contradiction between the following two paragraphs, both drawn from the Catholic ex-Ambassador Douglas Kmiec’s explanation of why he will definitely vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming American presidential election?
Paragraph 1:
…when you see someone who’s devoted completely to people who have less than himself, who worries about our tax system and society and economic opportunities, how can you not be for those ideas and the person standing behind those ideas? So it’s a no-brainer for me …
Paragraph 2:
There is a tradition we trace back to Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, of the seamless garment — all life issues are interrelated: abortion, capital punishment, war, a family wage, the environment. You can’t take these things apart. More and more Catholics understand that, but some very important Catholics are resistant.
The internal contradiction is this. Kmiec means to imply that pro-life Catholics are the ones who are “resistant” to the inseparability of the questions he enumerates. But in fact, it is Barack Obama himself who, more than any other significant politician in American history, has refused to recognize the inseparability of the life, marriage and family issues from the overall well-being of society, including economic well-being.
That Kmiec could put these two paragraphs side by side without being aware of the contradiction shows how difficult it is for those governed by fashionable ideas to see reality whole. Thus Kmiec can say that “Obama promotes social justice as if he were a Catholic”—which is even more evidence that the fashionable spend much of their time making self-contradictory statements without reference to reality at all.
As they say, “Sin makes you stupid.”
So does heresy.
Liberals, historically, have not been the most logical on the block.
For one thing, they no longer teach logic in their colleges.
Aristotle’s a dead white western male, remember,