The most catastrophic depression since the 1930s is no time for a family feud.
Dear Cousin Kathleen:
I was delighted to hear from you even if only by way of a response to my recent blog, "Taming the Borrowing Beast," particularly, "The last time the United States operated on balanced budgets. . . was during the Democratic Administration of President Clinton." I was puzzled, however, at your stirring into this issue the claim that the Clinton administration "did more to promote and further abortion and overturn laws protecting the most innocent of our citizens: the unborn; so he's hardly a hero to me for balancing the budget. . . ."
However, if your question, "Which is the bigger evil?" is limited to right here and now, USA 2010 with eleven million unemployed and a deeply compromised economic future, I can answer that question with confidence.
The biggest evil is clear: It is family feuding over divisive issues that are not immediately focused on weathering the worst economic crisis the United States has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. We can't afford the luxury of arguing about anything else. Our foolishly happy addiction to irresponsible credit expansion during the last forty years leaves us, in the words of a repentant Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, with no more choices between "good" and "better," but only between "bad" and "worse."
We are a marvelously diverse and contentious country of many shapes, sizes, colors, races, religions and sexual orientations. We're a nation of immigrants from every corner of the earth; a miniature United Nations of people lives on every city block and in every small town. Our family mirrors our country, every bit as diverse and very contentious. Members of our family enjoy round the world friendships, and we have married people from many distant lands. These differences make life exciting and interesting; but there are times when we have to put them aside; now is such a time.
Our family's refusal to allow strong feelings about hot button religious, political and sexual issues to sunder friendships and family ties, can be a model for taming the current ugly, divisive style of political debate. Name-calling and exaggerated metaphors, like "murder" of the unborn, have led to the real murder of a live adult—in a church; and if we are upset by stoning sinners in Muslim nations, we might take notice of the new 'Scarlet Letters" we're pinning on some already deeply troubled women.
The answer is not to avoid discussing our differences—as if this were possible for our contentious Irish elements — but in remembering the law of love that holds our disputatious family together.
Your Father, Kathleen, as you know so well, was talented in keeping religious rhetoric in bounds with humor. Other members of our clan share this talent. That's why no one, whatever their cultural roots, wants to miss one of our family parties.
l remember Aunt Martha's greeting to a prospective in-law. Opening the door to him, Aunt Martha, then in her 90s said, "I've been told not to discuss religion or politics with you, so let's talk about sex," accompanying her words with a 90-year old's bump and grind. Our soon to be relative responded with an equally welcoming break-the-ice belly-laugh!
Just to show I haven't lost my contentious edge, I'd like to try to soften some of your certainties, Kathleen. Justice Blackmun, the principal author of the Supreme Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade, tried to resolve competing recent definitions of abortion with much older understandings. English Common Law (controlling in the United States in the absence of legislation, of which there was none until the nineteenth century) did not forbid intentionally terminating a pregnancy anytime before "quickening" (when the foetus can be felt to move).
Saint Augustine held that only God knows when a foetus becomes infused with a soul (i.e. when God breaths into human "nostrils the breath of life," that makes a human a "living being," Genesis 2:7). No human can know that until the devine "breath of life" is revealed when a live child is born. I remember when Catholic priests would refuse to baptise a foetus even to console a women who suffered a miscarriage.
I don't know when or how our current crop of clerics came to know what only God knows, but while clerical advice is entitled to respect; so too is one's own conscience. It is the ultimate human arbiter even when it disagrees with an infallible pope, or resists coercion by authorities burning heretics at the stake or denying health insurance to sinners.
photo credit: flickr, Brianna Lehman
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