Are sinners allowed to adopt?

1. The Catholic Church has long decried homosexual acts as sinful, and neither acknowledges nor condones homosexual marriages. 
2. They also oppose legal marriage rights for gay couples and seem particularly vehement in their opposition to adoption. 

I just feel the need to point out that 2 by no means follows from 1.

Making claims about what is and is not sinful is standard issue; the Church has been at that for a long time, and wont be stopping any time soon.  Furthermore, it seems clear to me that it is within the rights of the Church to refuse the sacrament of marriage, or any sacrament for that matter, to anyone for failing to meet certain theologically determined criteria.  I don't find the Church's position on the sinfulness of homosexuality terribly compelling, but I'm willing to let the ongoing deliberation and prayer of the Church to sort out which of us is in the right.

However, 2 has no bearing on any of those things.  Legal rights are inherently secular, and to the extent that they are above and beyond the protections espoused by the church, seem to me to be beyond reproach.  This is especially true given the Church's theological commitment to freedom of religion: there are faiths that permit or even laud gay marriage.  If the church is committed to true religious freedom, it is imperative that other faiths be permitted to operate with the same legal capacities and protections as the Catholic Church.

All of that, however, is sideshow stuff compared to the Church's scandalous position on adoption by gays.  The Church has no massive public campaign objecting to adoption by remarried couples; to my knowledge it has no animosity at all to such adoptions.  But, from a Catholic theology perspective, such people are also publicly engaged in mortal sin.  For reasons that escape me, the Church has decided that it is more important to punish and restrict a particular class of sinners than it is to provide loving homes to orphans. I find myself disgusted by my Mother Church's insistence that it prefers keeping children in foster care and orphanages to permitting them to be loved, raised, and cared for by a sinning couple.  If any fellow Catholics have a thoughtful dissent to this sentiment, I'd love to hear it.

I am sad now

Dear Politicians,

It has come to my attention that you are more or less incapable of doing anything in America at the moment.  Please quit mucking about and do something useful.  A couple basic guidelines:

1. Evidence - please use it, and please present it in context.  Large numbers are scary, but large numbers when compared to other historical or projected large numbers are much less so.
2. Consistency - I know it is bad politics to hold logically consistent beliefs, but I think that maybe if you don't someone should call you on it, and in a public easy to understand way, not in the clever but not terribly accessible way my favorite bloggers do.

Point 1 is for the pragmatists.  If you care about the impact of your legislation, and not terribly much on the abstract values behind the way it works, then you should be a slave to Evidence.  For those of you who are primarily interested in a legislative enactment of some value-system, you should be checking to make sure your enactment doesn't undermine your values by its effects.

Point 2 is for values-politicians.  If you're holding a core set of beliefs and want to enshrine them in law, then you should at the very least make sure that they don't contradict each other.  For pragmatists, this might not matter as much in your implementation, but you should be watching the aggregate effects to make sure they still do what you hope they will.

I know this is a hopeless and empty plea, but I'm burnt out on real world politics and needed to get that off my chest.  Expect more bounds on taxation and other abstract policy discussions in the near future.

Love,
Rory

In Defense of Anarchism

So, that's the title of a book I've just been reading.  It basically consists of a formal evaluation of Democracy's claim to increased inherent goodness over other forms of government.  Its initial premise is that every person is morally autonomous, and its conclusion is that there is no morally valid form of government, and that Democracy  is no better than anything else in this regard.  Here are some interesting highlights:

1. Direct Unanimous Democracy is the only way to reconcile moral autonomy with state authority.  In other words, the only morally valid state is one which only has laws agreed upon by every single one of its citizens.

2. There is no extant democracy which is even internally consistent.  In other words, majority voting systems can produce results that are internally inconsistent.  This is related to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem which is a super interesting result demonstrating the impossibility of generating reasonable voting systems.  Direct Unanimous Democracy is not subject to these challenges because, well, it only does something if every single person agrees.

The basic argument of the book is that we are all obliged to carefully consider what is right and wrong and act accordingly, and that acknowledging the authority of another is tantamount to abandoning that responsibility.  In other words, if you say someone is an authority, you are saying that you should do what they say because they are the ones saying it, not because you agree with them or whatever.  If you grant that an entity has authority, then you are saying that, within the scope of their authority, their moral judgement supersedes your own.  Therefore, authority is fundamentally at odds with moral autonomy.  The only way to get around this problem is to ensure that the authority in question is in fact only enforcing your own moral judgments upon you.  The only way to guarantee this situation is for the authority to only enforce laws upon you to which you have explicitly agreed.  That way, if you step out you're doing so against your considered moral judgement, and it is right and just that the state place you back on your proper path.  It basically makes the state a giant shared conscience.  Of course, direct unanimous democracy is tantamount to anarchy.  


Wolff argues that this means that no practical and morally valid government can ever be constructed.  Before I read the book, I agreed with him.  I think that he provides a way out of his contradiction, Which I'll discuss in my next post.