Shortly after I left the Paulist Fathers they launched an initiative geared toward Young Adult Catholics called Busted Halo. They have published a guide to Catholic voting that is worth a look.
Remember, the election is a week from today.
Yesterday we got the sad news that Senator George McGovern died at 90 years old. His was a voice of my generation: though he lost badly, he ran for President against Richard Nixon and his wisdom persists.
He was an unabashed liberal in an era where it was often considered a dirty word. He was a gentleman who served in the House of Representatives from 1956 to 1960 and the Senate from 1962 to 1980. He ran for President in large part because he wanted an end to the war in Vietnam. He knew the dangers of war as he served in the USAAF during World War II. On December 15, 1944 while flying a mission over Austria he was struck by shrapnel and nearly killed. He was later awarded the Air Medal.
He came home and devoted himself to public service. He was an example of the best of the Greatest Generation. He opposed the war in Vietnam because, as he said, “I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”
OK, here’s my favorite:
Every program that ever helped working people — from rural electrification to Medicare — was enacted by liberals over the opposition of conservatives. When people tell me they don’t like liberals, I ask, ‘Do you like Social Security? If so, then shut up!
On that quotation: my thanks to John Sheirer. He writes a blog on Real American Liberal. I needed to make sure the quotation was real and he responded in a matter of hours.
With all the attention given to the Presidential campaign, an important story isn’t getting as much publicity as it should. On October 18, 2012 the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit handed down a ruling in the case of Windsor v. US that the Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA is unconstitutional.
In 1996 the Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, DOMA. Among other things DOMA prohibits the Internal Revenue Service from recognizing same sex marriages, even if the couple were legally married.
I’m taking the facts of the case from the opinion itself. Edith (Edie) Windsor and Thea Spyer were legally married in Canada in 2007 (though they had been a couple for 44 years). Thea died in 2009 in New York, and had they been a heterosexual couple, Edie would have been classified as the surviving spouse for tax purposes. Because of DOMA their marriage wasn’t recognized by the IRS and Edie owed $363,053 in taxes to inherit Thea’s estate. Under federal tax law, a spouse who dies can leave assets, including the family home, to the other spouse without incurring estate taxes, but because of DOMA Edie was not considered Thea’s spouse and is responsible for those taxes. Edie sued in federal court to return the $363,053, arguing that she was Thea’s spouse; in 2011 New York began allowing same sex marriages and the state recognized their union.
There are many nuances to this case, but essentially the court found that DOMA is “an unprecedented intrusion into an area of traditional state regulation” as the states grant marriage licenses.
Clearly the issue of gay marriage is going to the Supreme Court in either this session or the next. But I have to confess a chuckle over this case as it’s decided on the basis of federal intrusion while the Republican Party consistently reminds us that they are the party to “get government off our backs.” I’m guessing they don’t want government off our backs on this one.
Personal note: DOMA claims to protect traditional marriage. As a heterosexual married man, can anyone tell me how gay marriage threatens my marriage? If so, I’m happy to support DOMA. In the meantime I’m on the side of opposing homophobia.
On this date in 1980 I had an eventful day: I entered the seminary of the Stigmatine Fathers and Brothers. I moved from my home in Woodbridge, Va. to Watertown, MA; actually the Stigmatine House of Studies at 229 Watertown St. in Watertown. I transferred from George Mason University to Boston College and changed my major from Government to Philosophy. It was quite a change.
I write this because as I look over the grand sweep of my life (so far) this is a pretty big day. Previous to this I had visions of graduating from George Mason, going to University of Virginia Law School and spending my career as an attorney. By my sophomore year at George Mason I began to understand that this wasn’t going to fulfill me. The idea of switching to becoming a Catholic priest seemed unbelievable, but somehow attractive. I entered the Stigmatine seminary that day convinced that God would take care of me and prevent anything bad from happening.
He did (take care of me) and didn’t (prevent anything bad from happening). But from that day I’ve never seriously thought about becoming a lawyer, and I’ve never thought about a career away from being a public person of faith. Since that day I’ve been a seminarian (with both the Stigmatines and the Paulist Fathers), a priest with the Paulists, a Director of Religious Education (running a CCD or Sunday School program), a Youth Minister (working with teens), a resident manager in a home for teen mothers, and (finally) a hospice chaplain.
When I look back on the person I was 32 years ago I barely recognize myself. On the other hand I recognize I would not be the middle aged man I am today if my younger self hadn’t taken that step on that day, in that place.
I’m also grateful for all the brave men and women who have crossed my path. Not all of them would predict I’d be where I am now, but all of them had a part in who I am now. My thanks.
Yesterday we learned that Governor Mitt Romney has chosen Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate. There is lots to talk about, and I’ll be doing more talking in the next few months. Right now I want to focus on Paul Ryan’s views on the role of government.
When he was in college Paul read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1905-1982) and was immediately taken by it. Much of his political philosophy comes from her views: what she calls “Objectivism.” She holds that:
Religion composes the only true difference in their beliefs: Paul is Catholic and Ayn was a strong atheist. In an interview in 1964 she was asked: “Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?” This is her answer:
Qua religion, no—in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy.
Paul wishes us to believe that you can be a follower of Ayn Rand and a Christian, but can we? How do we square an entire philosophy based exclusively on self interest when Jesus gave his life to save all humanity? How does the pursuit of one’s own self interest find any common ground with a faith that demands that we be our brother’s keeper?
This is not just academic discussion. Paul has proposed a federal budget that is very much in agreement with Objectivist views. He calls it The Path to Prosperity and you can download a copy here. It is clearly a path to prosperity if you are already rich. It makes horrific cuts to programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of other programs that provide basic services to the poor while providing generous tax cuts to the richest among us.
If this budget plan aligns with Objectivist values, what does Christianity say? In 1986 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a document called Economic Justice for All: A Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy. This is their opening paragraph:
We are believers called to follow Our Lord Jesus Christ and proclaim his Gospel in the midst of a complex and powerful economy. This reality poses both opportunities and responsibilities for Catholics in the United States. Our faith calls us to measure this economy, not only by what it produces, but also by how it touches human life and whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person. Economic decisions have human consequences and moral content; they help or hurt people, strengthen or weaken family life, advance or diminish the quality of justice in our land.
In paragraph 8 they state: “As a community of believers, we know that our faith is tested by the quality of justice among us, that we can best measure our life together by how the poor and the vulnerable are treated.”
The election is 84 days from now and we have a clear choice to make. More later.
Today marks the 45th anniversary of the day the Supreme Court unanimously struck down Virginia’s law prohibiting interracial marriage.
Virginia, like many of the southern states, prohibited people of different races from marrying. In 1958, Richard Loving (who was white) wished to marry Mildred Jeter (who was black). They lived in Richmond and couldn’t marry there; they traveled to Washington D.C. and married. They then went back to their home in Caroline County. They were arrested in October, plead guilty, and were sentenced to 1 year in jail. Section 258 of the Virginia code stated this:
If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in § 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage.
The judge suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia for a period of 25 years and said this:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
The couple moved to Washington D.C. and Mr. Loving filed suit (ironically making this the case of Loving v. Virginia). The case was argued before the Supreme Court on April 10, 1967 and the Court unanimously struck down the Virginia law 45 years ago.
I can’t resist, but the hot marriage issue of this decade is gay marriage. Opponents of gay marriage argue that marriage has always been heterosexual (much like it used to be between people of the same race), it is the will of God, and that the federal government has no right to determine how states decide marriage. Loving v. Virginia shows that the classic definition is always under review.
Happy Loving Day everyone!
Last month Loetta Johnson died and her funeral was scheduled for February 25th at St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She had been a lifelong faithful Catholic and her funeral mass went as expected until her daughter Barbara went to receive Communion. The priest, Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, put his hand over the communion plate and told her (and everyone else) that he was denying her Communion because she is a lesbian and the Catholic Church does not support her lifestyle.
Like many Catholics this story enraged me and I’m completely supportive of the decision of the Archdiocese of Washington to remove Fr. Guarnizo from his post.
Here are the facts of the case (most of the information here is from the Washington Post article this morning): Before the mass, Fr. Guarnizo met with Ms. Johnson and her partner. He asked Ms. Johnson who the other woman was, and Ms. Johnson identified her as her partner (in Fr. Guarnizo’s account Ms. Johnson made unsolicited announcement that the other woman was her partner, or lover, depending on the account). When Ms. Johnson came for Communion, Fr. Guarnizo refused. He also did not preside at the graveside service; Fr. Guarnizo claims he was suffering from a migrane.
In fairness, after being refused Communion, another Eucharistic Minister (who is not a priest) gave her Communion, and another priest stepped forward and presided at the graveside service. I’m grateful for that.
Longterm readers of this blog know that I was a seminarian with the Stigmatine Fathers and Brothers from 1980 to 1985, a seminarian with the Paulist Fathers from 1989 to 1994 and a Paulist Priest from 1994 to 1997. All Eucharistic Ministers (priests, deacons, and laypersons) know that there may be a point where you have to make a split second choice. The person in front of you may be married outside the church, a thief, scoundrel, pedophile, or (God forbid) a non Catholic. In that situation most of us choose to not make a public spectacle and hope that God will sort it out.
That’s what happened to me. I was ordained at St. Paul’s in New York on May 14, 1994. Minutes after I was ordained I was giving Communion and I was presented with the mother of my sister’s husband. I knew she wasn’t Catholic and technically shouldn’t be able to receive Communion. I decided to be generous with the Sacrament and let God sweat the details.
Fr. Guanizo should have done the same. I don’t know if Barbara Johnson thinks of herself as Catholic or was in church only for her mother’s funeral. But then again, I don’t know that she and her partner are sexually active (and are therefore living a lifestyle Fr. Guarnizo finds offensive). I don’t know where she is in her faith journey. I’m grateful that she has found someone to share her life with (and I pray she is as happy in her relationship as I am in my marriage).
I also know that whatever the circumstances, if Fr. Guanzino had given her Communion, it would have given her a generous view of the Catholic Church. I always believed that weddings and funerals were opportunities to present ourselves to people of other faiths, or people who had left us, in our best light. He presented us in our worst light.
I also believe that someday I may need to account to God for my actions. On that day I would rather explain that I was too generous with Communion than too stingy.
Ms. Johnson, please do not let this one priest give you your only face of the Catholic Church. We have many other faces.
As I write this my father is in Fairfax Hospital and I’m asking for prayers from everyone who reads this.
He’s been feeling badly for the last few weeks; he’s been diagnosed with COPD. This isn’t much of a surprise as he smoked a pack and half of cigarettes for about 40 years and the cough he developed earlier this month was thought to be a common cold.
Having a cough is more an irritant than anything else but he also developed swelling (edema) in his abdomen and left leg. The good news is that a doppler test (developed by my friend Lori’s father George Leopold) ruled out a blot clot.
The bad news is that he was having a hard time speaking and we didn’t know why. The hospital called at 3AM and told him to go to the Emergency Room. His sodium level was low (111) and we think it’s a bad combination of his hypertension medication Linisopril and Hydrochlorothiazide. That explained why he was so sluggish. The Lisinopril is a good idea but having Hydrochlorothiazide wasn’t. It’s a diuretic which is normally a good idea for hypertension but it lowers both potassium and sodium which messes with heartbeat. The doctors have changed the medication to stop the diuretic and we all hope it’s the beginning of good news.
I pray it is. My father is a good man, but he doesn’t enjoy being a patient; it’s hard for him to ask for help or be the center of attention. It will be good news for everyone when he gets to go home and I pray and hope he comes home soon to my mother (who he has been married to for nearly 54 years). They belong together.
I love them more than I can say.
Like Pearl Harbor and President Kennedy’s assassination, my generation will ask: “Where were you on 9/11?” I’ve been thinking about that day, and the last 10 years, for some time now.
The morning of the attack Nancy and I were getting ready for work. My parents were visiting from Virginia, and they were staying with us at the house we had purchased 5 months earlier. They were scheduled to fly home on September 12th. Needless to say they didn’t get home until that following Sunday.
I was still working for Vitas Hospice and that Tuesday morning I had to go into the office for a meeting. During the meeting (on the 9th floor of a building in Mission Valley) I noticed that one of my co workers kept steeling glances out the window. I guess we were all wondering if the attacks were really over.
I found many of my patients wanted to talk about Pearl Harbor because they were feeling many of the same things: what does this mean? What will happen next? What do we do now? In both cases we knew that this was the beginning of a long conflict, but in 1941 we at least knew who we were fighting against. When Franklin Roosevelt spoke to Congress the next day, it was clear: we were attacked by the nation of Japan and President Roosevelt asked for (and received) a declaration of war, in accordance of Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.
On 9/11 we knew pretty quickly that we were attacked not by a nation but by a terrorist organization (Al Qaeda) under the leadership of one person (Osama bin Laden). We were also learning that Al Qaeda was located primarily in Afghanistan under the protection of a group called the Taliban. Afghanistan was in the middle of a civil war, but the Taliban controlled most of the country by 2001. We had known about all these groups going back to the Clinton administration. The Taliban were known as an Islamic organization that read the Qu’ran (Koran) in such a way as to subjugate and virtually enslave women. Worldwide human rights organizations had been publicizing these events for a while, but while they were committing these crimes in Afghanistan, they posed no immediate harm to the United States.
The Bush administration had a fundamental choice to make: do we treat this as an act of war and ask for a declaration of war against Afghanistan, or do we treat this like a crime and seek out and arrest those individuals responsible for this act. At the time I believed there was a good case to be made for a declaration of war. Our government demanded that the nation of Afghanistan immediate hand over Osama bin Laden and anyone else associated with the attacks, and they refused. I believed then, and believe now, that we could have reasonably declared war on Afghanistan.
But I also believed (and believe more strongly now) that this was better pursued as a criminal case. This is grist for another day, but our intelligence services had mounds of information on Al Qaeda and bin Laden, but they didn’t share this information with each other and there was nobody to put together the pieces to have prevented this. As a matter of fact, the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing predicted the attacks.
Given the intelligence we already had, I believe we could have found and prosecuted bin Laden within the next few months. But I believe the Bush administration committed a series of errors that historians of the next generations will find hard to imagine.
First, to the question of which direction, they choose neither. A declaration of war meant that anyone captured had to be classified as a prisoner of war and have the protections of the Geneva Convention. A criminal case meant that anyone arrested would have the protection of civil law.
Clearly the Bush administration did not want to be constrained by either and so they invented their own path. This allowed them to come up with terms such as “enemy combatant” and “extraordinary rendition.” It also allowed us to arrest anyone, anywhere in the world, take him to Guantanamo, Cuba and hold him there indefinitely with no access to justice. At least at the beginning they were held with no access to council, their own government, or any idea what would happen to them. Many of them are still there.
Unlike President Bush, I have enough faith in our justice system to believe that we could have brought them to trial here. My best example of this is the case of Timothy McVeigh. I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that he didn’t have a spirited defense, or that justice was not served.
Now, 10 years later, I will give credit: Al Qaeda is greatly reduced and isn’t the threat it was. Osama bin Laden is dead, and most of its leadership is captured and unable to cause any more terror.
But we are still at war in two different countries: Iraq and Afghanistan. Again this is grist for another article, but I believe another mistake of the Bush administration is to focus not on Afghanistan, but on Iraq. Nobody seriously believes that Saddam Huessin had anything to do with 9/11, yet we invaded his country in 2003, dismantled the government, destroyed much of the infrastructure, killed thousands of civilians, and are still trying to get out.
And perhaps most troubling to me is the damage done to our reputation, and to our Constitution. President Bush claimed that they attacked us because we love freedom (they actually attacked us because of the presence of our troops in Arab countries and our support of Israel, but let’s not quibble). But what does this say about freedom when we hold people indefinitely and make up terms like “enemy combatant” for the express purpose of not having to deal reasonably with them?
I’m not sure if I’ll write on the 20th anniversary, but I hope we’ve restored much of what we’ve lost.
Steve Lopez is a columnist with the Los Angeles Times and I often find his columns thought provoking. This past Sunday he wrote a column on his father who is in declining health. I strongly encourage you to read it.
Steve speaks in strong and stirring words about how his 83 year old father has been a man of great strength and pride, and now at 83 years old is reduced to a man who fell one night on his way to the bathroom. Neither he nor his wife were able to get him back on his feet and the result was they spent the night on the floor before they got medical help. Steve wonders if our current health care system will care for his father in a way that honors the man that he is.
I’m afraid it won’t. We have Medicare (for the elderly) and Medicaid (for the poor) that is frankly, the socialized medicine we have been warned about. Health care in our sunset years is good at keeping our hearts beating and our lungs inflating, but not good at asking the larger questions. Questions like: “When it is enough? When it is time to recognize that nobody lives forever and we need to change the equation to recognize this.” Questions like: “When are we done keeping you alive at all costs and should instead start thinking about giving you a good death?”
In my experience we’re a long way from that. While we all know in our heads that we will die one day, many of us live as if we were going to be healthy forever and have a right to whatever health care will provide that. At the end of our lives we are the primary drivers of what we want. Assuming we have health insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance), we can instruct our health care providers to do whatever we want, even to the point of keeping us alive on a respirator/ventilator. This is a machine that will keep pumping air into our lungs even when every other organ in our bodies has stopped. Most of us won’t choose this if given proper information, but if we can’t communicate and there is nobody to legally advocate for us, most health care providers will assume we want it all, and will keep us alive at any cost.
What’s wrong here? Well, several things. First, I believe that we need to stop thinking of ourselves as immortal. That means that when we are young and healthy we need to start talking with our family members about what we want at the end of our life. If we don’t want to be kept alive on a respirator, or a feeding tube, or by having a paramedic restart our heart, we need to say so and write it down. There are many ways to do this; my favorite is a POLST form. If nothing else, talking with your loved ones about what you want is a good place to start. If things go south in our lives in a hurry, our next of kin is our best ally if we can’t speak for ourselves.
Second, we need to have a national dialogue about how we allocate health care resources. Again, some scream that this will “ration” health care. Let’s face facts: we already ration health care, only we do it now by health care coverage. If you’re 95 years old on Medicare with pancreatic cancer you can get all the chemo, surgery, and radiation that’s available. On the other hand, if you’re 25 years old and work for an employer who doesn’t offer health care, and you have early onset breast cancer, you’re out of luck. It doesn’t matter that your early onset breast cancer is way more curable than pancreatic cancer. It also doesn’t matter that a 25 year old with curable cancer has a much better long term prognosis than a 95 year old with incurable cancer. It only matters on who will pay for this.
To be fair there are doctors and other heath care providers who are heroically telling elderly and terminal patients that they aren’t candidates for aggressive treatments. For their efforts they are sometimes screamed at and threatened by well meaning patients and families who accuse them of being uncaring or greedy when the opposite is true. When President Obama attempted to make this easier by reimbursing doctors for these meetings, Sarah Palin and others called these “death panels.”
As my fellow Baby Boomers are beginning to age into the Medicare problem our numbers are straining the system and at some point we will need to reform it. My prayer is that we come to an understanding of what health care can and cannot do. Providing someone with a good death, free of pain, with the people we love around us, is the last best thing our medical community can do for us.