Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Stormy Weather

(Reprinted from the issue of September 8, 2005)

“I get all the news I need on the weather report,” Simon and Garfunkel sang to my generation. These have become words to live by as I crawl graveward.

In late summer every year, the weather report is about all the news we get anyway. The southeast gets spectacular hurricanes every year, but this year it has outdone itself. I usually try to ignore it, but Hurricane Katrina has commanded my attention this week, interrupting progress on my new Shakespeare book (he was the Earl of Oxford, by the way). Even President Bush has had to shorten his vacation, so you know it’s serious.

New Orleans is under water, the levees having broken, and the situation is so desperate that the mayor has urged everyone to pray, in defiant violation of the separation of church and state.

You might think weather is an apolitical topic, but I’m here to tell you it isn’t. Lousy weather doth make socialists of us all, as the Earl of Oxford might put it. And when your house is bobbing under water, you’ve got a pretty clear case of lousy weather. People are suddenly learning whether their cows can swim. The dogs may do all right, but heaven help the cats!

As always, political morals are being drawn, starting with that old perennial: “The government must do something!” It would be heartless at this moment to suggest that people who choose to live on the Gulf Coast or the San Andreas Fault should expect trouble sooner or later, because it’s a modern dogma that whenever disaster, however predictable, overtakes you, somebody else should pick up the tab. That’s one of the things “government” means nowadays.

I keep thinking of Chesterton’s remark, in his genial attack on Bernard Shaw, that socialism is the principle that government should treat all of society as a perpetual emergency. But that’s not just confined to socialism anymore; it’s also “compassionate conservatism,” or so it’s called.

George Will, ever the fancy phrase-maker, calls it “an ethic of common provision,” which he credits to Franklin Roosevelt, who wisely saw that America had outgrown the old ethic of taking responsibility for yourself.

But once you adopt this way of thinking, there’s no end to it. There can’t be. If you’re not careful, you’ll wind up like Professor John Banzhaf, who started out fighting secondhand smoke but now wants to ban the word “Redskins” from the airwaves and demands that the government recognize obesity as a “national” problem and take appropriate action. Banzhaf obviously doesn’t worry about the prospect of too much government or too many laws. The very concept of “too much” or “too many” never occurs to him.

I guess his philosophy of government boils down to “use it or lose it,” and he doesn’t stop to consider the possible upside of losing it.

If he were in New Orleans this week, he’d probably be scolding people there for eating junk food.
 
Seamlessness

My recent remarks on the “seamless garment” have moved one thoughtful reader, Andrew Sumereau, to observe that what we really need is to recognize a “seamless morality.” Abortion is just one of the many evils that result from the attempt to isolate sexual morality from the rest of natural law.

But it’s hard to imagine liberal Catholics — especially liberal Catholic politicians — embracing the idea that the moral law is an integrated whole, whose parts can’t be violated without tearing the entire fabric. Try to picture Mario Cuomo or Ted Kennedy warning that sexual license may produce widespread social problems, or that contraception can weaken the family.

Is there any way to estimate the damage done to America by Catholics who refuse to think, talk, and act like Catholics? Could the coarsening of American culture have occurred without them?

After all, “fraternal correction” is a duty, not an option. Silence about sin is a failure of charity as well as courage.

Once upon a time, the Church in America was a powerful focal point of resistance to moral corruption. Hollywood trembled when the Legion of Decency, as it was unashamedly called, condemned a film. Moviemakers don’t have to worry about that anymore.
 
Liberal Fundamentalism

It’s an article of faith among some liberals that religious people, especially Christians, are nuts.

Take Harold Meyerson, a columnist for the faith-free Washington Post. In a piece titled “Dark Ages Primary,” he describes believers in intelligent design as “folks who, by totaling up the biblical begats, believe that the universe was created in 4004 BC.” He fears that these anti-scientific numbskulls will drive the Republican Party “both rightward and dumbward” during the 2008 presidential primaries.

Meyerson doesn’t even know he’s confused. For one thing, he mixes up belief in intelligent design with belief in the literal accuracy of Genesis, which, as Frank Morriss has recently explained in these pages, are quite distinct things. You may find evidence of intelligent design in the universe without even believing in divine Revelation.

But who needs nuance when you’re dealing with religious loonies? (Such as Aristotle?)

The liberal account of history, taken literally, holds that the Dark Ages were a time, long long ago, when ignorant religious nuts ruled the world and you couldn’t even find a decent abortionist — oops, abortion provider — when you needed one.

Real historians discarded this caricature long long ago. The so-called “dark” ages were the centuries when the Christian faith converted Europe and either abolished or discredited such savage atavisms as infanticide, polygamy, slavery, and, yes, abortion.

Modern liberalism seems to regard the reintroduction of such evils as evidence of “progress.” I suppose it depends on how you define terms like “dark” and “enlightenment.” What liberals call “rights,” some of us still call sins.

If termites could talk, I always say, they’d call what they’re doing to the house “progress,” and when the house finally collapsed on them they’d ask how the heck that happened. I defy anyone to make a dent in liberal complacency.


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Joseph Sobran