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Post by hibernicus on Dec 4, 2008 17:44:53 GMT
Developments in America tend to have a lot of influence on our position here, both because of America's role in the world and because much/most of the apologetic material available to us comes from America and is written for an American audience whose concerns sometimes need decoding. One example of this is that during the 1983 referendum a lot of the pro-life literature given out was written in America and referred extensively to Planned Parenthood, the family planning organisation which runs many abortion clinics in America and lobbies extensively to keep abortion legal. Since Planned Parenthood does not operate under that name in Ireland (though the Irish Family Planning Association was then and is now affiliated to Planned Parenthood International) this was seized on by the other side to argue that this literature referred to a situation whcih didn't exist in Ireland.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 4, 2008 18:03:16 GMT
My first post is a piece of background in relation to Hazelireland's "Secular America" thread, whcih she started to welcome the election of Barack Obama and which is now located in the "Open Forum" section. I would encourage you to coment on that thread as well if you feel you have anything to say about it, but there as everywhere else upon this board you should always be civil and rational and treat our atheist guests with the fairness we should expect ourselves. There are reasonable Catholic responses to the questions atheists raise, they have the use of reason and stand in the same need of grace as we do. Wild accusations that all atheists are immoral and irrational, or wicked conspirators, will achieve nothing except to antagonise them and make the accuser feel unjustifiably proud of himself.
America was not founded as a Christian nation; the Founding Fathers were mostly Christians of a rather lukewarm type or Deists (i.e. people who believe that God created the world and established th elaws by which it functions but thereafter left it to its own devices). The most straightforwardly orthodox of them was a Presbyterian minister called Witherspoon, ancestor of the actress Reese Witherspoon and a descendant of John Knox (I wonder what Knox would think of such progeny!) In the early nineteenth century America established a large-scale religious revival both among elites and people; however, quite a lot of the Presidents in the first half of the nineteenth century were not formal members of any church. Abraham Lincoln, for example, who was brought up a Calvinistic Baptist, was an atheist for much of his adult life (this is often a natural development from the Calvinist belief in predestination) and though he appears to have become somewhat more sympathetic to Christianity as President (to a great extent because he found some bleak consolation in regarding the sufferings of the Civil War as God's punishment of America's sins and in hope that they would turn out well through some mysterious working of Providence) and attended a Presbyterian Church, he never became a formal member and died apparently without having come to a final commitment to Christianity. There was a strong nineteenth-century tendency to see America as a Christian nation, and argue that the Constitution should be amended to make this clear. The nearest this came to realisation was the Supreme Court decision outlawing Mormon polygamy, in which some of the judges based their arguments on the view that America was a Christian nation or at least rested on Christian assumptions. This, by the way, is why antipolygamy laws are rarely enforced except against the most marginal and obnoxious of the Mormon fundamentalist splinter groups which kept up the practice when the main Mormon Church abandoned it; the Supreme Court and to a lesser extent the American political establishment have so thoroughly discarded the assumptions on which those earlier judges based their decision, that the authorities are afraid a reasonably sympathetic defendant with good legal representation might have a reasonable chance of establishing a constitutional right to polygamy between consenting adults.
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Post by guillaume on Dec 6, 2008 12:57:56 GMT
Abortion in Ireland is identical to abortion in America. The names of the guilty are not the same but the guilt is identical in those who abort. The proportionate numbers are equal in almost all parts of the world, abortions is spreading into a worldwide epidemic. Ireland is threatened proportionately as much as America. The problem is only bigger in America because it is a bigger country with more people. I always been amazed of your lack of knowledge regarding Ireland.... ;D Last time you thought Ireland was one country, and we have to explain to you that the Island of Ireland was divide in two parts : the Republic and the North, belonging to the UK. Now, you compare abortion in the US and in Ireland as "identical". Well, there is a little detail. Abortion is illegal in Ireland and Northern Ireland..... The Irish girls who make the unfortunate decision to have an abortion have to go to England or elsewhere, as Abortion is not practised in Ireland at all. The right to live since the conception is in the Irish Constitution. So if we compare to the USA... In retreat, we learn that to love somebody, we must know somebody. Seriously, you should read a bit more about this country, in order to love it properly a little more.
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Post by guillaume on Dec 7, 2008 14:35:09 GMT
I always been amazed of your lack of knowledge regarding Ireland.... ;D Last time you thought Ireland was one country, and we have to explain to you that the Island of Ireland was divide in two parts : the Republic and the North, belonging to the UK. Now, you compare abortion in the US and in Ireland as "identical". Well, there is a little detail. Abortion is illegal in Ireland and Northern Ireland..... The Irish girls who make the unfortunate decision to have an abortion have to go to England or elsewhere, as Abortion is not practised in Ireland at all. The right to live since the conception is in the Irish Constitution. So if we compare to the USA... In retreat, we learn that to love somebody, we must know somebody. Seriously, you should read a bit more about this country, in order to love it properly a little more. Guilluame, I have a great deal of knowledge concerning Ireland. I already know that the reasons for abortion are identical. I also know that the Catholic position on abortion is identical in American as well as Ireland. I also know that the same forces that are proposing legislation to legalize abortion in Ireland are identical to the forces that are proposing legislation to legalize abortion in America. You see the devil has the same face no matter where he lives. Abortion in Ireland has had a controversial history and remains a disputed subject today. Abortion is effectively illegal in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, except whenever the mother is in danger from continuing the pregnancy. While the 'Pro-Life Amendment' established the principle of the right to life of the unborn, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother in Irish constitutional law, practical problems subsequently arose with its meaning. In 1992, a major controversy erupted over the issue of whether a suicidal minor who was a statutory rape victim, and who became pregnant, could leave Ireland for an abortion that is lawful in another country (Attorney General v. X, known as the 'X Case'). The Supreme Court interpreted the Pro-Life Amendment as giving a right to abortion in certain limited circumstances, in a judgment which came to be known as the 'X Case,' including when the woman's life was in danger. Court injunctions issued in 1988 and 1990 under the 1983 amendment barred family planning groups and student groups from offering abortion counseling, information and aid in travelling to Britain to procure abortions. These injunctions grew increasingly unpopular, particularly after the 'X case.' Questions were also raised as to whether the bans on access to information violated provisions in the Maastricht Treaty. Two constitutional amendments were subsequently added in 1993 that guaranteed the 'right to travel' and the 'right to information' (a third amendment that would have defined when abortions could be considered legal was defeated). Due to questions about the constitutionality of the amendments, the changes did not come into force until 1995. The issue of what form of constitutional prohibition on abortion Ireland should have (if any) has been revisited in a number of referendums, but no clear result or consensus has emerged. In theory, abortion is legal in Ireland if there is a risk to the life of the woman. A provision exists in the Irish constitution to allow Dáil Éireann to legislate on this, however no political party has risked it, and in the meantime, while it is legal in theory, the body that holds medical licences in Ireland considers it malpractice for any doctor to perform an abortion. The Irish Medical Council stated "The deliberate and intentional destruction of the unborn child is professional misconduct. Should a child in utero lose its life as a side-effect of standard medical treatment of the mother, then this is not unethical. Refusal by a doctor to treat a woman with a serious illness because she is pregnant would be grounds for complaint and could be considered to be professional misconduct." Estimates to the number of Irish women seeking abortions in Britain vary, in the 1990s it is alleged that between 1,500 and 10,000 women who stated in hospital records that they were 'Irish' travel annually. The official figure is 45,000 since 1967. In May 2007, a pregnant 17 year old woman, known only as Miss D, who was pregnant with a foetus suffering from anencephaly was prevented from travelling to Britain by the Health Service Executive. The High Court ruled on May 9th 2007 that she could not be prevented from travelling. [1] It has never been illegal in Ireland to provide standard medical care to a pregnant woman which may result in an indirect abortion. That is, where the abortion is not the desired outcome of the act, but a side effect of the treatment. The crime under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 occurs when the intention is the deliberate and direct abortion of the child. As with any criminal offence Mens rea must be proved as well as Actus reus * A 1997 Irish Times/MRBI poll found that 18% believe that abortion should never be permitted, 77% believed that it should be allowed in certain circumstances (this was broken down into: 35% that one should be allowed in the event that the woman's life is threatened; 14% if her health is at risk; 28% that "an abortion should be provided to those who need it") and 5% were undecided.[2] * A September 2005 Irish Examiner/Lansdowne poll found that 36% believe abortion should be legalized while 47% do not. [3] * A June 2007 TNS/MRBI poll found that 43% supported legal abortion if a woman believed it was in her best interest while 51% remained opposed. 82% favoured legalization for cases when the woman's life is in danger, 75% when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb, and 73% when the pregnancy has resulted from sexual abuse.[4] Abortion is largely illegal in Northern Ireland, where only seventy to eighty abortions take place legally each year.[5] Abortion is opposed by most of the major Northern Irish parties, both unionist and nationalist. Sinn Féin does, however, support a limited liberalisation of current abortion laws. However Sinn Féin have stated consistently that they are opposed to the 1967 Abortion Act, which applies to the rest of the UK, being introduced. On the 22 October 2007 there was a motion before the Northern Ireland Assembly tabled by Jeffrey Donaldson MLA MP and Iris Robinson MLA MP which stated, “That this Assembly opposes the introduction of the proposed guidelines on the termination of pregnancy in Northern Ireland; believes that the guidelines are flawed; and calls on the Minister of Health, Social Services and Public Safelty to abandon any attempt to make abortion more widely available in Northern Ireland.” The motion was passed by a large majority. The DUP and the SDLP were always in favour of the motion. On the morning of the debate the Unionist Party tabled an amendment to the motion which was defeated. Sinn Féin voted for the motion. The Health Minister is Mr Michael McGimpsey MLA (UUP). On the morning of the debate 120,000 petitions against abortion were presented to Mr Donaldson and Mrs Robinson on the steps of Stormont. These petitions were taken into the Chamber so that they could be inspected by the Members of the Legislative Assembly who were due to vote on the matter. The vote in favour of the motion was hailed as a victory by Pro Life groups. [edit] Very good, but no need to copy an article of Wiki to answer. A simple link is enough.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 8, 2008 10:24:06 GMT
May I point out to Gabriel that I never said or implied that abortion in Ireland was less of a sin than in America, nor did I suggest that we need not be concerned about abortion in America (or elsewhere) so long as it remains illegal in Ireland. In fact my point in starting this thread is precisely the opposite - that because America is the world's most powerful nation (and has a very strong pro-life movement which has been able to keep the issue alive and exert more influence than pro-lifers have in, say, Britain or Continental Europe) developments there inevitably influence Ireland (and the rest of the world). For example, a significant portion of the international human rights establishment wish to define abortion as a human right in order to exert pressure on countries where it is still illegal and to marginalise pro-lifers in other countries. Don't think it can happen? Pro-abortionists in America often equate ROE VS. WADE, the US Supreme Court decision which struck down state laws against abortion, with the Civil Rights decisions beginning in the lAte 1950s with BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has taken a different and more worrying stance; she argues that the problem with ROE (which in terms of legal reasoning is widely regarded as a pretty shoddy judgement even by many of those who agree with the ruling) is that it was based on the right to privacy rather than the right to equal citizenship in the Fourteenth Amendment (which was passed after the American Civil War to confirm that black ex-slaves were American citizens and to offer safeguards for their civic rights - which for decades were shamefully set aside because of the South's political power). In other words, her argument is that there shoud be a constitutional right to unrestricted abortion based on the principle that women cannot really be equal with men if they are liable to become pregnant at a time when it doesn't suit them and have no means of ridding themselves of the pregnancy in question. This view implies that there should be no place for pro-life views in American public discourse outside the lunatic fringe and that we are the exact equivalent of the diehard racial segregationists who resisted the Civil RIghts cause. When Janet Reno was Bill Clinton's Attorney-General she tried - fortunately with very little success - to get her department to investigate the whole American pro-life movement for complicity in the clinic bombings and murders of abortionists carried out by extremist fringe groups; this idea is based on the way that during the Civil Rights era "mainstream" segregationists and racist law enforcement officials tacitly or not so tacitly co-operated with and provided cover for violent racist attacks aimed at keeping blacks from exercising their rights. If you really believe, as Reno and many like her do, that abortion is an inalienable civil right in the same way that the right to vote is, you can see the logic of this. I therefore thought it would be a good idea to set up a thread which would supply background information on the American situation and where we could discuss the implications of American developments.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 8, 2008 10:46:26 GMT
May I also take up Guiilaume's claim that because the two candidates in the recent American presidential election were both in favour of legalised abortion under certain circumstances, there was nothing to choose between them on that issue. John McCain believes abortion should be legal under restricted circumstances (rape, incest &c) and he is in favour of embryonic stem-cell research. Certainly he is wrong on that. But he also has generally voted in favour of restrictions on abortion and supported other pro-life measures in Congress, and his platform called for Roe V. Wade to be overturned. His running-mate, Governor Sarah Palin, is quite outspokenly pro-life and lived up to her principles by not having an abortion when she knew her youngest child would be born with Down's Syndrome. President-Elect Barack Obama as a member of the Illinois State Senate opposed any restrictions on Partial Birth Abortion, a procedure which even many generally pro-abortion politicians agreed should be outlawed. He also opposed proposed legislation providing that infants who survived an attempted abortion and were born alive (like Gianna Jessen, if you've heard of her) should be given medical care. He declared that he would not appoint any judges who opposed Roe v. Wade (a decision which, as I pointed out earlier, has been severely criticised on legal grounds even by some pro-abortion jurists). During the campaign he declared that if elected he would sign the Freedom of Choice Bill into law; this bill would enact the right to have an abortion into federal law and strike down all restrictions passed by state legislatures. It has even been interpreted (though this is disputed) as invalidating conscience clauses in state laws which allow medical personnel to refuse to perform abortions on conscientious grounds. Although Obama utters a great deal of flannel about how he respects people of differing views, he appears to believe in the equation of legalised abortion with civil rights which I discussed in my previous post. His Vice-President Elect, Joe Biden, has supported some restrictions on abortion in the past but has regularly proclaimed himself to support the central principle of legalised abortion. He used to take a more pro-life view in his earlier career, but flipped. (There is a minority of pro-life Democrat politicians, mainly at state level; there are about 25 congressmen but only 1-2 senators, depending on how you count Senator Casey of Pennsylvania, and I wouldn't count on him for much. There is a much larger minority of openly pro-abortion Republicans, and a lot of nominal pro-lifers in that party use the issue cynically without ever wanting to do anything concrete about it.) Does Guillaume really think there is so little difference between the positions of the two candidates that it should be a matter of indifference to pro-lifers which position is upheld and advanced by the American administration? (There are other issues which I haven't touched on.) We will now have a chance to see how the difference operates in practice over the next four years, and in my opinion the results will not be pretty. Below I link to two articles by James Hitchcock criticising the advocacy by certain Catholic traditionalists of views similar to Guillaume's. (This is part of a wider row between tendencies loosely called "palaeoconservative" and "neoconservative" within Catholic traditionalism/conservatism and within American conservatism as a whole. The terms neoconservative and palaeoconservative are used in a variety of different senses; I will post soon on them.) findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3798/is_200704/ai_n19511243/printfindarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3798/is_200801/ai_n27899656/print?tag=artBody;col1 Does Guiilaume reall ythink that there is no difference between these two positions, or that it makes no difference which of them is upheld by the Administration in power?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 8, 2008 17:51:49 GMT
And your point is?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 9, 2008 11:15:10 GMT
Gabriel, With all due respect, if you think Obama has changed his views you are being extremely naive. He always uses this rhetoric about "understanding other people's views" then goes ahead and does what he does what he intends to do anyway. It seems to me that you are elevating wishful thinking to the status of the highest virtue. Furthermore, you talk as if nobody on this board had any interest in opposing abortion or had the idea of getting politically involved in order to restrict it before you did. We are trying to discuss HOW best to do this, and you are cluttering up the board with platitudes. When you were in high school, did you complain that your English and maths lessons were no good because they didn't include in every lesson, at every level, in every year, the information that 2+2=4 and C-A-T spells cat?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 10, 2008 13:32:31 GMT
A world without abortions is never going to happen, alas - the point is that abortion should be recognised as the evil it is, as much should be done to restrict it as possible, and it should be denied the sanction of law. De facto slavery didn't end with the 14th Amendment, but nonetheless slavery was refused the sanction of law and the principle that it was wrong was established. Jibril - you have only given us one way to do this, which is that we should all abandon reason and logic and follow you blindly in whatever whimsy comes into your head. The devil can disguise himself as an angel of light, and in your case the disguise is wearing pretty thin.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 11, 2008 11:26:47 GMT
Normal service is now resumed. I began by trying to outline the history of religious influence on political life in America, but before resuming this I will give you a couple of posts explaing the terms "neoconservative" and "Palaeoconservative". Although this is not a specifically religious issue I include it here because it often spills over into the religious sphere; both factions include people who see themselves as Catholics and claim to be inspired by Catholicism (e.g RJ Neuhaus, Michael Novak, George Weigel among neoconservatives; Pat Buchanan, Thomas Fleming E. Michael Jones among palaeos), and the more radical wing of Catholic traditionalism often uses "neoconservative" as a term of reproach for more moderate conservatives, implying either that they are mere stooges of political neoconservatism or that those who do not think Vatican II and the policies of the current Vatican are seriously misguided are "neo-Catholics" - implying that they are conscious or unconscious frauds and suckers-up to power. My next three posts will briefly outline the history of twentieth-century American intellectual conservatism, of neoconservatism and of palaeoconservatism.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 11, 2008 12:04:02 GMT
It has been questioned whether conservative politics in the European sense are possible in America at all, because the US never had a landed aristocracy in the European sense nor an established church [some states did have established churches at the time of independence, but all had been disestablished by the 1830s]. There is a SOuthern intellectual tradition of agrarian conservatism which presents the traditional landed class there as paternalist aristocraats; this is vitiated to a considerable extent by its use to defend/glamourise slavery and racism (on the grounds that blacks were childlike beings who needed a master to look after them) and by its dishnesty about the extent to which the South was always driven by market forces (what more so than chattel slavery?) There has also been a tendency for the WASP governing class to see themselves as benevolent aristocrats, imitating the lifestyle of their European counterparts - this has now mostly modified into the bureaucratic paternalism of present-day American liberalism. [This term, as used by Americans, corresponds to a considerable extent with what we call social democracy in Europe.] In the early twentieth century the Republicans were the party of the WASP business elite and professional middle-classes and small-town and rural Protestants in the North and West; they were associated with reform and pro-business policies. The Democrats were the party of the South and of Catholic ethnic groups, often concentrated in big cities and associated with machine politics; they were seen as more populist and also attracted support from Western rural regions who felt themselves to be victimised by Eastern financial interests. This is a very crude division; there were Republican urban machines, Republican reformers who believed in state intervention to regulate business, and WASP aristocratic Democrat reformers like Franklin D Roosevelt; not all Catholics were Democrat and ethnic politics involved complex and shifting ethnic coalitions. As a result of the Depression and the New Deal state intervention in the economy increased greatly; the perceived responsibility of the Republicans for the depression and the increased perception of the Democrats as the party of the common man enabled them to construct a new and much broader base of support - the "New Deal coalition" which made the Democrats the dominant party for a generation (indeed, to some extent to the present day). The Republicans were pulled towards the left and consensus politics. The modern American conservative movement arose in response to this. It consisted of a varietyof strands; Burkean conservatives like Russell Kirk (later a Catholic convert), libertarian minimal-staters (a type of politician which for a variety of reasons has no counterpart in Europe), pro-business free-enterprise types, and national-security hawks who believed liberals were too soft on communism. It also attracted some conservative Catholics who believed the liberal state tended to undermine shared values and that only Catholicism could provide the basis for a social synthesis strong enough to oppose communism. (We are talking about the 1950s.) Its principal outlet was the magazine founded by William Buckley, NATIONAL REVIEW. Buckley, who died recently, was an interesting character with a great deal of talent and a great deal of humbug. His father was a very devout millionaire who made his money in South American oil concessions, generally acquired by deals with unsavoury dictators. Buckley was a very clever man but rather whimsical and had the mindset of a certain type of European Catholic aristocrat - a genuine attachment to Catholicism combined with a tendency to ignore awkward bits of doctrine. It is characteristic of him that having gone to Yale (where he was the first Catholic member of the Skull and Bones fraternity, whosemembers are required to lie in an open coffin and recite their sexual history for the amusement of their fellows) immediately after graduating he published a book called GOD AND MAN AT YALE, complaining that Yale was Christian only in name and failed to supply adequate religious influence. This was in my opinion a monumental piece of hypocrisy. If he was so concerned about religious formation he could have attended one of the better Catholic universities - it's not as if he was ever going to starve. It says something about the extent to which 1950s America was still nominally Christian that the response of the Yale authorities was not (as it would have been 20 or 30 years later) to deny that their students' religious views were any of their business; instead they maintained that they were indeed a Christian institution and only a narrow bigot could say they weren't. This post is getting long so I'll send it now and resume later.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 11, 2008 13:14:03 GMT
Although this form of conservatism developed a fair bit of influence in the Republican party in the early 1960s, its influence was limited by several factors. It was associated with provincial yahoos and bigots of various descriptions and with the tendency (widely described as McCarthyism but stretching far beyond the Senator) to denounce all forms of big-government liberalism, advocacy of secularism, modern(ist) tendencies in culture, dovish foreign policy under the vague term "communism" (the fact that there were real communist spies and that many of these tendencies were open to legitimate criticism does not disprove the point that a good deal of this scapegoating was unjust); laissez-faire capitalism was regarded as having been permanently discredited by the Depression, with the postwar economic recovery attributed to govenment intervention in the economy, and commentators like JK Galbraith arguing that the best way to guarantee the future was to have yet wider intervention by an enlightened progressive elite. Above all, it was seen as tainted by racism. It is impossible to overstate the historic significance of the racial question in America - slavery and segregation have always been the major contradiction of the promises of the Founding and Exhibit A for anyone (from Dr. Johnson attacking George Washington, to the Soviets in the Cold War) who wished to discredit the America claim to stand for liberty. From the 1950s and the BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION decision, the federal government at the behest of the courts increasingly intervened in response to the Civil Rights protests to dismantle the apparatus of legal segregation in the Southern states. Much of the conservative movement was on the wrong side in this struggle, from racial prejudice, political expediency, or a general feeling that the expansion of government powers involved in anti-discrimination law was contrary to small-government conservatism. Buckley's statements on the right of southern whites to protect their allegedly superior culture against the intrusion of supposedly less-civilised blacks were quite shameful (he later expressed regret over them.) This meant that many conservatve positions were discredited by association with racism (the fact that southern whites generally switched from the Democrats to the Republicans in the 1960s and that many advocates of pro-family causes, such as Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell, had been segregationists has been a significant liability; even though american pro-lifers, some of whom like Joe Scheidler were civil rights activists, have also claimed the heritage of the Abolitionists and compared the struggle against abortion to the earlier struggle to force acknowledgment of the personhood of blacks). I will next discuss how neo-conservatism, a movement of former conservative liberals who switched in response to the failures of liberalism in the 1960s, can be seen as responding to these accusations. Palaeoconservatism was a reaction, beginning in the late 1980s, which argued that neoconservatives had given too much ground and compromised the fundamental principles of conservatism (as palaeos saw it).
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 20, 2008 1:07:26 GMT
It is not possible to degrade your professed faith more than you have degraded it already. You present yourself as an angel of light but your denigration of God's gift of reason and your hypocritical claims to be non-judgmental, when in fact you claim to be morally superior to everyone else, shows that you are a spirit of a different sort. St. Paul said to test the spirits to see if they are from God, and that is what I am doing with you. As you are so fond of links, here's one for you: www.newadvent.org/cathen/05709a.htm
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 9, 2009 18:16:42 GMT
A servant of GOd has ended his pilgrimage. r. Richard John Neuahus is dead. I attach a discussion of his influence by the (politically) conservative Catholic columinst Ross Douthat, which links to further tributes from FIRST THINGS, the magazine Fr. Neuhaus founded. He was a veteran of the Civil Rights movement, a convert from Lutheranism, and someone who in terms of social policy was called a neoconservative. He had suffered from cancer for some years and wrote some moving meditations on the subject. He was a great exemplar of how to bring Christian thought to bear on public debate, and his most famous book, THE NAKED PUBLIC SQUARE, is a protest against the view that religious believers shoudl only be allowed to participate in public life if they leave their religion behind. HE was not perfect, but he laboured mightily. rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/01/richard_john_neuhaus_rip.php Does anyone have any further thoughts on Fr. Neuhaus?
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 9, 2009 18:18:28 GMT
I hope to post my long-promised thoughts on neoconservatives and palaeoconservatives sometime in the next week or two. I should state that Fr. Neuhaus's break with the palaeoconservative magazine CHRONICLES when he came to believe it was dabbling in anti-semitism was one of the defining moments of the split which produced the "palaeocon" tendency.
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