Somewhere outside of Berlin in 1870.

That's a reference to the Kulturkampf, when German Catholics really had to choose between being German or being Catholic.

Here is Archbishop Chaput's observation about that perennial choice:

"Catholics have been historically part of the Democratic party in great numbers and I think could have really stopped that development and movement if they had tried. But they didn’t,” Philadelphia archbishop Charles J. Chaput says in a new interview with the Catholic News Service, speaking about the Democrats’ “embrace” of abortion.

The issue of abortion, Archbishop Chaput says, “really is a big issue today.” And the issue “requires of Catholics” a “loyalty to the Church prior to their political party,” he says.

“We are Catholics before we are Democrat, we are Catholics before we are Republican, we are even Catholics before we are Americans,” Archbishop Chaput emphasizes, “because we know that God has a demand on us prior to any government demand on us.”

“This,” he adds, “has been the story of the martyrs through the centuries.”

I love my country, but "when we've been here ten thousand years," no one is going to remember that I was a Democrat or a Republican.

Religious liberty for everyone except the stupid, superstitious and wrong.

Juicy Ecumenism points out the the apparent irony of the liberal United Methodist Church supporting an illiberal restriction of liberty:

Many prominent evangelicals who approve of contraceptives still understand the assault on religious liberty by COMPELLING Roman Catholic institutions to fund them under Obamacare. Some evangelical schools have joined in litigation against the contraceptive/abortifacient mandate, understanding it poses a threat to all.

Sadly, the chief of the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society enthusiastically endorses this attack on the First Amendment.

“Why is it that the liberty of those who are denied basic health-care services is not at issue?” asked Jim Winkler in his recent weekly email. “Contraception benefits society. It reduces the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, reduces the need for abortions, and assists families to plan the number and spacing of their children.”

Winkler argues for contraception, but he doesn’t really admit the debate is not about contraception but about the federal government FORCING religious institutions to violate their own beliefs. What other religious freedoms is Winkler willing to forego in favor of advancing the coercive federal Welfare & Entitlement State?

In typical fashion for many liberal Protestant elites, he claims that modernity makes traditional Roman Catholics and other believers morally irrelevant. “There were those who argued that racial segregation was biblically mandated, that keeping women out of church leadership was sanctioned by God, and that destruction of the environment is approved by God,” he recalls. “All of these notions were and are wrong.”

To me, what is interesting is the historical continuity of liberal intolerance between the Kulturkampf and today.  In the 1870's it was German liberals who promoted the German state's oppression of Catholics precisely on the ground that Catholics were superstitious, stood in the way of modernity, and ignorant. In my review of Michael B. Gross' s "The War against Catholicism," I observed:

As Gross documents in the writings of liberal politicians and liberal newspapers, liberals viewed the liquidation of Catholicism as a duty imposed on liberals in order to advance the health of German society by removing what liberals believed to be a retarding, regressive force for superstition and ignorance. Because liberals viewed Catholics as being superstitious and ignorant, and Catholicism as being an institution that fostered superstition and ignorance, liberals justified the persecution of Catholics on the grounds that Catholics were not entitled to the benefits of tolerance. Dr. Gross quotes the liberal leader Eduard Windthorst (who was the nephew of the Catholic faction leader, Ludwig Windthorst) that "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." (id. at p. 259.)
 

The interesting thing, from a historical perspective, is how the liberal argument hasn't changed: it's as if "the intolerance of intolerance" meme is bred into liberalism's genetic source material.

Vote Zentre Party in 2012!

The German Catholic Center Party emerged out of the attempt by liberals and the state to crush Catholicism during the Kulturkampf. In the face of the unrelenting hostility of the German elite - and an active campaign to strip away Catholic hospitals, property, charitable activity, etc. - German Catholics formed the Center Party as a way of protecting the institutional interests of the Church and of Catholics. Thereafter, the Center Party - typically siding with the Social Democrats - often played a key role in forming coalitions that controlled the government

The Nazis hated the Center party, with a hate that often lumped "Jesuits" and Catholic politicians together with Jews and Communists. A significant portion of Nazi venom was directed against "political Catholicism," and to the proposition that Catholic political action should be limited to worship. That's why the poster to the right shows a Catholic priest being crushed along with a Socialist. Likewise, people forget that one of the first victims of the Nazis was Erich Klausener, the head of Catholic Action, who was murdered by the Nazis in their putsch against their own SA faction: the Nazis would not tolerate a rival who made claims on the loyalty of Germans through social action.

The American Catholic is making an argument for a kind of Center Party approach to Election 2012 in the face of what appears to be a renewed Kulturkampf:

The reason why is obvious. Put aside the academic policy debates for a moment. Put aside the debate over whether or not concern for the poor necessitates a confiscatory welfare regime, whether water-boarding is an intrinsic evil, whether being pro-life means being pro-subsidized single motherhood, or any of the other heated policy debates that politically-minded Catholics like to have. The reality is that the fate of the Church in the United States, which is not historically Catholic or majority Catholic, will necessarily be determined through a struggle of powers greater than itself.

On one side of the struggle is a coalition that respects the right of the Church to exist, even if it does not fully embrace all of her positions. On the other side of the struggle is a coalition that can barely conceal its violent hostility for the Church and is pursuing policies and programs that will have the practical effect of driving her out of public life. It isn’t my intention to make the hard case for that here, but most of us understand what the far-reaching implications of the HHS mandate will be. We understand that the kind of people who would propose and implement such a thing can be counted upon to press even further, especially when they no longer have an election to win. We are well within reason to label these people enemies.

As a matter of self-defense, then, we must work for the defeat of Obama this fall. There are other prudent reasons to do so as well. Obama’s vision of fairness and justice is irrational and warped. His recent statements on the HHS mandate are proof enough of this. In the view of Democratic Party, it is not simply our obligation to cough up as much as they determine they need to pump into another social program whose practical results are dubious; our refusal to do so is tantamount to actually taking control of someone else’s life and limiting their freedom. If I don’t want to pay for someone else’s birth control, this means I want to “control the decisions they make about their health” or something along these lines. This insane rationale can be extended to just about anything that can itemized by an apparatchik. There is no limit to what this regime believes it can demand of you in the name of its grand social vision, a vision which is sharply at odds, moreover, with the Catholic faith. As Pope Leo XIII wrote:

If, then, by anyone in authority, something be sanctioned out of conformity with the principles of right reason, and consequently hurtful to the commonwealth, such an enactment can have no binding force of law, as being no rule of justice, but certain to lead men away from that good which is the very end of civil society. — Libertas, 10

There is no doubt in my mind that this is a perfect description of the HHS mandate and its underlying principles.

The Liberal's greatest fear is...

...that someone, somewhere might be praying in an untaxed building.

[Note - "liberalism" meaning the intellectual tradition forming the political philosophy of modernity, which therefore encompasses Republicans as well as Democrats.]

Signature collection begins for initiative that would eliminate tax examption for religious property.

If a Jo Shaffer, who apparently lives in the hamlet of Cobb near Clear Lake, can find at least 807,615 like-minded California souls, her proposal to eliminate the property tax exemption for religious organizations could get on the ballot.

She was given the go-ahead Thursday to begin gathering the 807,615 signatures that will be needed. Under state law, those signatures have to be submitted to the Secretary of State’s office by Nov. 2.

The proposal eliminates property tax exemptions based on a property’s use for religious worship or other religious purposes, starting Jan. 1, 2013.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst and the governor’s Director of Finance say that if approved, the constitutional change could mean a windfall for state and local government. They estimate that if religious groups had to pay property taxes, local government revenue would jump by roughly $225 million a year. The state General Fund savings in most years would be about $100 million from increased local property tax revenues for school and community college districts, they say.

This is an example of liberal mindset in action. According to Steven D. Smith, traditionally the relationship of Church and State was a matter of jurisdiction; the state had no jurisdiction over the church. This meant that the state could not tax core church property, such as houses of worship. It also meant that the state could not dictate that the church act in ways that would violate its core beliefs.

Over time, as in, in recent years, the liberal impulse to treat all aspects of society as falling within the competence and scope of the liberal state has meant that the state no longer recognizes the jurisdictional claims of the church. The church is simply another constituency within society that the state has to consider in allocating rights and claim as against rights and claims of other constituencies.

Thus, rather than being a matter of jurisdiction, "justice" - specifically, the liberal conception of justice - becomes the rule for the relationship between church and state.

One problem with this change is that "liberalism" is not value-neutral. As pointed out by D.C. Schindler, liberalism comes with a pre-commitment to particular values and goals, not the least of which is the proposition that religious rights are entitled to be accorded to any special status vis a vis any other right:

16In the liberal understanding, there exists no such thing as the idea of the human person as homo religiosus, that is, as a naturally religious being in the sense affirmed by thinkers in the patristic and scholastic periods, and indeed in a significant sense by all great religious thinkers (see, for example, St. Augustine’s claim that God is
more interior to me than I am to myself). To be sure, this idea of man as homo religiosus does not attenuate the need and intrinsic importance of free acts for religion rightly conceived! I merely wish to point out that the idea—fundamental for Locke, for example—that religion is an essentially voluntary society stands at the root of the tendency no longer to grant special status to the right to religious freedom, that is, as distinct from the right to freedom in other contexts and senses. Given liberalism’s formal freedom, in other words, relation to God becomes eo ipso a matter of choice: something that is so far first enacted by me, as distinct from being originally given to me as integral to my nature and reaching to the core of my being as a creature. But a God relation to whom is first elected by me, as distinct from being naturally-originally given to me, becomes by definition an arbitrary (because voluntaristic) addition to my natural secular reality. Even if I wish to make God the center of my life, doing so can now be properly only a fabrication (from fabricor, to make, forge); logically, God remains one among many of my equally-metaphysically arbitrary choices. In short, the special status accorded the right to religious freedom finds a reasonable basis finally only in a God who
reaches to the inner meaning and depths of my secular nature as such, and thus makes a difference to everything I am and do; and this reasonable basis requires a relation to God that is first naturally-given as distinct from chosen. Given liberalism’s idea of religion as essentially a voluntary matter, therefore, the Obama administration is so far not inconsistent in denying the special status of the right to religious freedom.

If that's too deep, consider the fact that the taxes raised by the state will be used for abortion, contraception, war, blood transfusions, pork production, cattle production, or any of a myriad of other activities that particular religious traditions view as being contrary to their belief systems.

As things now exist, these religious traditions can maintain a jurisdictional modus vivendi with the state that advances what they see as anathemas.

Liberal rhetoric often involves a claim that some religious group is trying to force their views on non-believers. When religions are forced to subsidize the state, then that argument loses whatever force it has; religious traditions will have no choice but to play the game of politics as any other political group, endorsing particular candidates, putting up a slate of politicians to protect its interests, as occurred with the Catholic Center Party in pre-Nazi Germany.

If liberals think that religion has too much involvement in politics now, imagine what the future will hold.

Divided Loyalties.

This is another piece of the division of loyalties that people of faith - actually, everyone at some point or another - face and a model of how to handle that conundrum.

High School Junior Margeaux Graham was invited to the American Legion's Florida "Girls' State." The problem for her was that Girls' State overlapped on a Sunday and she takes her Sunday Mass obligation very seriously. She asked for the accommodation of missing the "non-offensive," non-denominational service in order to attend Mass across the street. Her request was denied. She wrote a nice letter explaining that she wouldn't be attending because her conscience took priority.

Unfortunately, a Catholic flack for Girls' State decided to offer Margeaux some advice, consisting mostly of "get with the program."

Read about it here.

Loyalties, Kulturkampf and the Liberal Wedge Strategy.

Mathew N. Schmaltz at the Washington Post writes:

When the HHS mandate was first announced, especially surprising to some was how negative reactions were expressed by Catholics who were doubtless uncomfortable with church teaching on contraception, not to mention with the current state of affairs in American Catholicism.

The original HHS mandate was seen as potentially encroaching on Catholic spaces by a different order of magnitude than similar state laws. Those Catholic spaces include not just churches, but hospitals and educational institutions-- spaces that were created out of the dreams Catholics had both as Catholics and as Americans.

Looking back on my “Patriot Catholic” dream now, I realize that it was about where I could be safe during a particularly uncertain time in my life. Today we are far removed from vituperations about “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” But every Catholic can point to experiences in which she or he has been considered strange or suspect. So, while the rhetoric surrounding American Catholicism has changed, the dream of having a safe space as a Catholic can still become quite powerful indeed. However that dream plays out for individual Catholics, the bishops’ letter reminds us that it is properly connected to a larger dream that is not about seeking refuge, but about seeking to be fully American and fully Catholic. The crucial issue is how this larger dream can continue to find expression in waking life.

The Left's Anti-Catholic Wedge Strategy.

As I observed yesterday, it seems that Catholics in most countries have been from time to time faced with moments when it seems that they have to choose between their Catholic identity and their national identity. Thus, after the creation of the German Reich in 1870, the liberal-controlled German parliament embarked on the Kulturkampf with the express purpose of destroying the Catholic Church as an institution in Germany. We can understand the motivations for this movement on gross political grounds - Germany's enemies had been - and still were - Catholic nations - France and Austria - and we might appreciate that nationalist Germans in a new German Reich could view Catholics as an incipient Fifth Column (a term from a later anti-Catholic period.)

Obviously, to the German Protestant-liberal-nationalists there was an obvious tension in being a good German and being a good Catholic, particularly insofar as Catholics seemed to owe some kind of loyalty to that Italian over the mountains.

Catholics felt this tension, and a few Catholics attempted to find release from the cognitive dissonance of wanting to be a nationalist in a religion that is international by leaving Catholicism for the nationalist "Old Catholic" church. Not surprisingly, the "Old Catholic" Church - which severed ties with Rome was promoted by Bismark and other German nationalists. Bismark's approach was the stick of repression and the carrot of being permitted to being permitted to join the national community without stigma.

During the Nazi years, the cognitive dissonance was particularly intense. Nazism was totally about German nationalism. Insofar as Catholics took direction from non-German authorities they could not "totalize" their Germanness, but rather had to remain partially outside of the German national community. For committed Nazis, the lack of total commitment was impossible; unlike Protestant Nazis, all of the famous Catholic Nazis were apostate Catholics.

One strategy that states have employed to "square the circle" of making Catholic allegiance to the Catholic Church consistent with Catholic allegiance to the state is by creating a "state Catholic Church." Communists are particularly inclined to try this approach - Russia had, and China has, an officially sanctioned "Catholic" church, which was, and is, not recognized by the Pope, thereby making the Catholic name an oxymoron. France during the Revolutionary era tried the same thing, and, of course, there was the German "Old Catholic" Church.

One thing that all these efforts have in common is an attempt by the state to split the Catholic laity from the Catholic hiearchy in the name of ideology, whether that be Communism, revolutionary ardor or nationalism.

Interestingly, we are seeing a similar phenomenon in America today.

I don't think that we've ever seen an effort by so many from a particular ideology make such a concerted effort to tell Catholics to either leave the Catholic church or to disobey the Catholic hiearchy in exactly those terms. Typically, playing in the internal "politics" of a community to which one does not belong is just not done. It's viewed as a kind of "outsider agitation" and will cause the community to close ranks. Imagine, for example, what would happen if Exxon told the Sierra Club members that they should vote against their current leadership.

But with respect to Catholicism, we've seen the New York Times run an unprecedented - literally unprecedented - advertisement by atheists telling liberal Catholics it was time for them to leave the Catholic Church.

This advertisement was timed to coincide with the "contraception kerfuffle" which is obviously a "wedge strategy" intended to depict the Catholic Church as out of touch with its membership, as if the Catholic Church were just another secular political group. We are entitled to feel that there is more to this than simple coincidence in light of the way that the contraception issue was raised out of the blue in a debate by George Stephanopolous shortly before it became the meme of the moment. Given what we know of political coordination in the media, and of the media and the Obama White House, our deduction is based on some evidence of "habit" or "custom and practice."

Another bit of evidence that the Left has decided to embarked on the classic Anti-Catholic "wedge strategy" comes from Stephen Prothero's amazing call for American Catholics to engage in an insurrection against its bishops. Prothero entitles his essay "Catholic bishops against the common good."

The initial part of his essay is a broadside against the claim that any issue of religious freedom was implicated in Obama's HHS rules. Prothero writes:

But what freedoms are these clerics being denied? The freedom to say Mass? To pray the Rosary? No and no. The U.S. government is not forcing celibate priests to have sex, or to condone condoms. The freedom these clerics are being denied is the freedom to ignore the laws of the land in which they live.

Interestingly, the Nazis made precisely this argument in their attempts to marginalize the Catholic Church. The Nazis claimed that they were quite willing to recognize Catholic freedom of religion so long as the Catholic Church stayed out of "political matters," including euthanasia, racism and matters of social justice. Prothero is simply recreating the Nazi position, presumably without knowing it.

Of course, insofar as the Catholic Church adhered to its main mission of ministering to Catholic religious needs, it has come under fire by secular liberals like Prothero for not speaking out against the Holocaust (which of course it did.)

Here's another bit of unintentional, we hope, imitation of Nazi polemics:

The civil rights movement succeeded because its cause was just, and because its leaders were able to mobilize millions of Americans to bring an end to the injustice of segregation. The effort by male Roman Catholic leaders to deny contraception coverage to female employees who want it does not bear even a passing resemblance to that cause. And even the bishops behind this so-called "movement" must admit that it is failing to mobilize even American Catholics themselves.

If you don't recognize the resonance with Dr. Goebbel's fine prose, replace "male" with "Jew" and "female" with "Aryan." Note, I'm not talking about Goebbel's invectives against the Jews; I'm talking about his invective against Catholics who refused to follow the Nazi's laws that purported to require the segregation of Christians of Jewish ancestry from the Christians of Aryan ancestry. The Catholic Church - unlike a majority of Protestant churches - refused to follow these laws - exempting themselves from a law of general application on religious grounds - and were upbraided by the Nazis for being "Jewish."

In light of that, consider this bit of prose from Prothero:

The bishops refer repeatedly in their statement to “civil society.” But think for a moment of the sort of "civil society" we would have if religious people were exempt from any law they deemed “unjust” for religious reasons.

That couldn't have been said any better than if it had been written by the brownest Nazi or the reddist Marxist.

Obviously, one answer to Prothero is "we would have a free society."

Another answer is that I'm kind of proud that German Catholics refused to comply with the Nazi's law requiring racial segregation simply because they deemed those laws to be un-Christian and unjust.

Prothero concludes with the following:

I will admit that the HHS contraception rule does ask these Catholic clerics to sacrifice something. But what is this sacrifice? Simply to allow the women who work for their organizations to be offered contraceptive coverage by their insurers. To refuse this sacrifice is not to uphold civil society. It is to refuse to participate in it.

Toward the end of their statement, the 15 bishops who signed this statement called on every U.S. Catholic to join in a “great national campaign” on behalf of religious liberty. More specifically, they called for a “Fortnight for Freedom” concluding with the Fourth of July when U.S. dioceses can celebrate both religious liberty and martyrs who have died for the Catholic cause.

As Independence Day approaches, I have a prediction. I predict that rank-and-file American Catholics will ignore this call. They will see that the issue at hand has more to do with women’s health than with religious liberty. And in the spirit of Vatican II, which referred to the church as the “People of God,” they will refuse to allow these 15 men to speak for them. Whatever moral capital U.S. bishops have in the wake of the sex abuse scandal that rocked the nation for decades will be insufficient to win over lay Catholics to what has been for at least a half a century a lost cause.

These 15 clerics write that American Catholics “must have the courage not to obey” unjust laws. I think the courage called for today is something else—the courage not to obey those who no longer speak for them.

And we end with the classic temptation of totalitarians to meddle in other people's religions. It would be so much better if the messiness of dissent were eliminated. Hey, why not set up a rival church? If only we - insert French/German/Russian/Chinese, etc. - could get Catholics to ignore the successors of the apostles and accept the apostles of liberalism/communism/Nazism, etc.

It's an old game plan.

Is there concern here? I think there may be. These ideas don't emerge in a vacuum. Moreover, we cannot say that the power of the State is not being held by someone who is unsympathetic to these ideas. We can say that the power is actually held by someone who is entirely sympathetic to the idea that creating divisions is good if it advances his ideology; hence, the appeal to the rhetoric of class warfare.

Prothero's argument fits the "problem of loyalty" paradgm I outlined at the beginning of this discussion. The problem of loyalty is that Catholics aren't loyal to his ideology because they are loyal to something that transcends his ideology. Prothero may not think of himself as a nationalist, and I doubt that he is a nationalist, but he is a represenatative of a something that is neither Catholic or catholic, in the sense of "universal." Prothero finds the "good" in some parochial partial good, whether it is held by all the best people in the world, or just those in New York. His loyalty is to that good.

Insofar as they are first and foremost "catholic," Catholics can't be loyal to that good because their loyalty is to more than any particular time or place.

That is what creates the "problem of loyalty" and gives rise to the "Catholic wedge" which forces Catholics who are primarily loyal to the "here and now" - whether it be nation, party or ideology - to separate from Catholics who are primarily loyal to the transcendent truths that were true two-thousand years ago and will be true two-thousand years from now.

Rendering unto Caesar - the Kulturkampf Returns.

During at least the period of 1870 to 1945 in Germany, an attentive reader of history can see in stark detail a tension - and then split - in the loyalties of the German Catholic community. With the establishment of the German empire in 1870, Catholics were presented with the question of whether there primary loyalty lay with the Reich or with the Church, and, particularly, its Italian leader "over the mountains."

Catholics who found that their primary loyalty lay with the church were identified as "ultramontane."

Those who found that their primary loyalty lay in their German identity tended toward a departure from the Catholic church. The first way that this departure expressed itself in the wake of Vatican I was the foundation of the "Old Catholic Church," which rejected the dogma of papal infallibility. We shouldn't lose sight of the political dimension of this event. The creation of a German national "Catholic" church played into the contemporary issues of German nationalism which had achieved a particular resonance at the time: both Vatican I's declaration of papal infallibility and the establishment of the German Reich happened in 1870.

The creation of the German Reich in 1870 also inaugurated the anti-clerical, anti-Catholic Kulturkampf. The Kulturkampf was a liberal project. German liberals throught that their philosophy required them to inveigh against Catholicism as superstition and alien. A thread that ran through liberal Kulturkampf arguments were attacks on multi-national Catholic institutions such as monastaries and the Jesuits.

The same conflict between ultramontane Catholicism and German national identity existed in the Nazi movement. Although the late Christopher Hitchens like to sneer that "Fascism was right wing Catholicism," in German the opposite was true. Nazis who had once been Catholic were invariably - virtually always - apostate Catholic, but, moreover, arch-anti-Catholics. Himmler echoed the Kulturkampf in his fear of Jesuits and his anti-clerical plan to dismantle the Catholic Church. Both Hitler and Goebbels demonstrated in their conduct their apostasy by their marriage of divorced Protestants; the key to seeing their apostasy - strategically ignored by Hitchens - was not that the women were Protestant, but that they were divorced. Anyone with a dime-store knowledge of Catholicism has some inkling of the problems that Catholics have in marrying divorcees without an anullment.

Protestant Nazis, in contrast, were able to remain Protestants in good standing because German Protestantism didn't present the choice between loyalty to a German identity and loyalty to a transnational identity. Goring remained a church-going Lutheran - and in fact the head of the Prussian Lutheran Church - duing his time in state leadership. Hitler was recorded as saying that only a good Protestant could be a good German and vice versa, and that he felt more akin to Protestantism than to Catholicism, albeit he never formally apostasized.

We see the same dynamics in America today. The recent contraception kerfuffle, for example, was clearly a "wedge issue," but a wedger for whom? One thing that the issue was intended to "wedge" was Catholics and non-Catholics, but, probably, the more important target was liberal and Democrat Catholics from "ultramontane" or "conservative" Catholics. Another thing the issue was intended to "wedge" or promote was anti-clericalism.

There has been a conflict of loyalties in the liberal Catholic community for years because particular Catholic teachings conflict with liberal "dogma," such as teachings on bioethics, sexuality and abortion. Democrat Catholics have been "apostasizing" in fact if not in name insofar as they have been required to make a choice as to where their primary loyalty lies.

The following story from Reuters points out that things are probably going to get worse as the Catholic Church may start forcing the issue of "primary loyalty" as much as "liberalism" has through pressure to conform to its particularist and jealous ideology.

Vatican officials seldom single out political leaders who differ with the Church on issues like abortion rights or embryonic stem cell research. But now that the Vatican’s highest court is led by an American, the former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke, we can expect things to get more explicit in Vatican City — at least when when it comes to U.S. politics.

Burke, who was named prefect of the Vatican’s Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature in June, told the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire that the U.S. Democratic Party risked “transforming itself definitively into a party of death for its decisions on bioethical issues.” He then attacked two of the party’s most high profile Catholics — vice presidential candidate Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — for misrepresenting Church teaching on abortion.

He said Biden and Pelosi, “while presenting themselves as good Catholics, have presented Church doctrine on abortion in a false and tendentious way.”

Pelosi drew U.S. bishops’ scorn for saying in a television interview last month that the Church itself had long debated when human life begins. Biden is a practicing Catholic who also supports abortion rights and analysts have said he could help woo wavering Catholics into Obama’s fold. Both argue that they cannot impose their religious views on others.

Burke said pro-life Democrats were “rare” and that it saddened him that the party that helped “our immigrant parents and grandparents” prosper in America had changed so much over the years.

Burke made headlines as archbishop of St. Louis for his public attacks on public figures who strayed from Catholic teaching. He suggested during the 2004 presidential campaign that Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a Catholic, should be denied communion because of his views on abortion. Several bishops said at the time they would not give him communion and the media staked out churches where he attended Mass to see if he received it.

“Lately, I’ve noticed that other bishops are coming to this position,” Burke told Avvenire, which is owned by the Italian bishops’ conference.

Hitler's Pope.

Here's a bit of Nazi propaganda from 1932.

This site explains:

From the July 1932 Reichstag election. The poster shows a Nazi pile driver hitting the party’s opponents. The gentlemen in black represents the Catholic Center Party, the one to the right the Marxist parties. The poster suggests the two are tied together in an unholy alliance against National Socialism. Courtesy of Dr. Robert D. Brooks.

There is also this one:

Which is explained as:

I think this dates to 1927, when Hitler was prohibited from speaking in most of Germany. The text translates:

“Who is Adolf Hitler? The man from the people, for the people! The German front soldier who risked his life in 48 battles for Germany! What does Adolf Hitler want? Freedom and food for every decent working German! The gallows for profiteers, black marketeers and exploiters, regardless of religious faith or race! Why is Adolf Hitler not allowed to speak? Because he is ruthless in uncovering the rulers of the German economy, the international bank Jews and their lackeys, the Democrats, Marxists, Jesuits, and Free Masons! Because he wants to free the workers from the domination of big money! Working Germans! Demand the lifting of the illegal ban on his speaking!

Courtesy of Dr. Robert D. Brooks.

The Nazis often grouped Jews, Marxist and Catholics, particularly Jesuits, together as objects of conspiratorial hate.

Nazi anti-catholicism was part of a long-standing tradition in German politics, going back to the Kulturkampf. Any number of reputable history books will provide significant descriptions on that history. I found these posters interesting as contemporary, mass-media, visual evidence of that tradition.

"Bonhoeffer" Author Compares Obama's HHS Mandate to Nazi Germany ...

...on MSNBC, which must have caused leftist brains to melt around the leftist universe.

Creative Minority Reports writes:

Whoa. MSNBC must have lost its mind today when author/guest compared President Obama's encroachment of religious liberty to the first steps taken by the Nazis in Germany.

Something tells me that this is the last time "Bonhoeffer" author Eric Metaxas gets on the air on MSNBC. Especially because the truth hurts.

Breitbart reports:

“I met the president. I gave him a copy of my book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which he said he’s going to read,” Metaxas said during the interview. “In that book, you read about what happened to an amazingly great country called Germany…”

“In the beginning, it always starts really, really small. We need to understand as Americans — if we do not see this as a bright line in the sand — if you’re not a Catholic, if you use contraception — doesn’t matter. Because eventually, this kind of government overreach will affect you.”

Check out the vid. Poor Chris Jansing was so shocked that I believe it melted her brain because she doesn't really react in shock.

But what does she ask about when she's told the Obama administration is following the example of Nazis? She asks how Democrats acting like Nazis may hand Republicans a political issue. Because that's the important question.

Here is the video:



Check it out.

Really, check it out.

Slouching toward the New Kulturkampf - Part II.

The Obama administration is cracking down on Catholic institutions through the bureaucracy:

The simple fact of the matter is that the Obama administration is threatening the religious liberty of even the most faithful of Catholic institutions. These threats come from not only from HHS; they come from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which claims Belmont Abbey College violated federal nondiscrimination laws by refusing insurance coverage for contraception. They come from the National Labor Relations Board, which has claimed jurisdiction over Catholic colleges’ union negotiations. They come through the Education Department, which issued new regulations forcing states to be more proactive in chartering colleges, thereby tying student aid to a potentially political process that threatens overtly religious colleges. And there is increasing state discrimination against religious institutions with regard to same-sex marriage and contraception.


Catholics nationwide need to stand up and demand that the Obama Administration repeal the new health-care regulations that blatantly violate our religious freedom. The bishops have made it simple at their website here.

Slouching toward the new Kulturkampf.

James V. Schall speculates about the future:

Catholics have little legal future in this country except as a narrow, strictly defined sect. Catholic law schools, lawyers, and politicians have proved mostly ineffective or indeed abettors in the process by which “human rights” are used, step by seemingly logical step, to eliminate Catholics from the public order. Much has already occurred. The “Catholics” who are the prime target are those who hold and live the central teachings of reason and faith. Those who do not, matter little.

Addressing a new Health and Human Services mandate concerning availability of abortions, contraceptives, and other such items, the Auxiliary Bishop of Washington, Barry Knestout, wrote:

In implementing the new health care reform law, HHS issued a rule that would require private health care plans nationwide to cover contraception and sterilization as “preventive services” for women. The mandate includes abortifacients, which have the capacity to terminate a pregnancy in early weeks. Never before has the federal government required private health plans to include such coverage.

The District of Columbia Human Rights Commission has interfered in the Catholic University of America’s policy of same-sex dorms for college students. This policy is “sex discrimination,” not permitted in the District. These and other governmental initiatives are only the beginning.

Almost everything is now in place for a full-scale legal persecution of the Church, all concocted under the aegis of government protection of “human rights.” The meaning of “rights” the government itself defines in the name of “freedom” and “equality.” It is noble-sounding, but as Plato said: “Entreaties of sovereigns are mixed with compulsion.” This admonition includes democratic sovereigns.

World News Daily (September 17) reports that PayPal investigates Christian Internet sources said to be involved in “hate language” because of their criticism of certain gay activities. Addressing this issue is not affirmation of a “right to speak,” but a subject of state investigation. Certain central teachings of Christianity will be legally prohibited as threats to “human rights.”

A situation analogous to that in China can be foreseen: an “official” break-away church that follows government decrees and an underground church that still maintains the central truths of reason and faith. One suspects that the degree of hatred for the Church is more widespread and deeper than we like to admit. The situation, however, is not so different from what Scripture would have us expect.

Things change almost too rapidly for us to appreciate their scope. With legalized same-sex “marriages,” as they are equivocally called, in which children are adopted, we will have mandates to educate them in Catholic schools as if no problem exists. The children, legally deprived of a mother or a father, will be presented as from “normal” families. Several writers have suggested that parents teaching children that problems exist with homosexual life or adoption will be investigated for “child abuse.”

The child-abuse cases themselves have shown how to undermine the financial stability of the Church. In addition to properly investigating malefactors, legal procedures have permitted lawyers to make enormous wealth from Church funds. Ironically, since most of these abuses were rooted in homosexuality, not pedophilia, the corporate Church on the one side is required to pay for the abuses and on the other is forbidden to say that anything is wrong with this form of life.

Court tosses San Francisco circumcision ban...

...as an illegal attempt by a city to regulate medicine.

Liberal Intolerance.

You. Must. Approve:

In 2008, Dr. Turek was hired by Cisco to design and conduct a leadership and teambuilding program for about fifty managers with your Remote Operations Services team. The program took about a year to conduct, during which he also conducted similar sessions for another business unit within Cisco. That training earned such high marks that in 2010 he was asked to design a similar program for about 200 managers within Global Technical Services. Ten separate eight-hour sessions were scheduled.


The morning after completing the seventh session earlier this year, a manager in that session —who was one of the better students in that class—phoned in a complaint. It had nothing to do with content of the course or how it was conducted. In fact, the manager commented that the course was “excellent” as did most who participated. His complaint regarded Dr. Turek’s political and religious views that were never mentioned during class, but that the manager learned by “googling” Dr. Turek after class.

The manager identified himself as gay and was upset that Dr. Turek had written this book providing evidence that maintaining our current marriage laws would be best for the country. Although the manager didn’t read the book, he said that the author’s view was inconsistent with “Cisco values” and could not be tolerated. (Dr. Turek is aware of this because he was in the room when his call came in.) The manager then contacted an experienced HR professional at Cisco who had Dr. Turek fired that day without ever speaking to him. The HR professional also commended the manager for “outing” Dr. Turek.

This firing had nothing to do with course content—the program earned very high marks from participants. It had nothing to do with budget constraints—the original contract was paid in full recently. A man was fired simply because of his personal political and religious beliefs—beliefs that are undoubtedly shared by thousands of your very large and diverse workforce.

I assume the intent of Cisco’s value of “inclusion and diversity” is to ensure that people in that diverse workforce will work together cordially and professionally even when they inevitably disagree on certain political, moral or religious questions. Please note that Dr. Turek agrees with that value and was demonstrating it. The manager and HR professional were not. Dr. Turek was being inclusive working with them. They were being exclusive by refusing to work with him, even though his viewpoint was never discussed during his work at Cisco. (Ironically, the people who say they are fighting for “tolerance” are often the most intolerant!).

This is story that demontrates Windthorst's "organizing principle of liberalism" - "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance"...."unfreedom" and "intolerance' being defined as "people who disagree with us."

Book Review: A distant mirror - Liberals versus Catholics in 19th Century Germany

The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)

Go here and vote for my review.

I read The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)as part of my project to explore the relationship of Adolf Hitler and Nazism to Catholicism and Christianity. The project has resulted in me going deeper into German religious history.


My reading started with The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 by Richard Steigman-Gall, which discussed the Nazis attempt to draw German Protestantism into the Nazi system. The Nazis originally had a great deal of hope that this effort would work in that Protestantism and German Nationalism were not inherently at odds with each other. It was the Nazi view that to be a good German meant being a good Protestant, and vice versa. In order to accomplish this, the Nazis made efforts to remake Protestant Christianity in the image of Nazi anti-semitism by removing the Old Testament and reconstructing the image of Jesus as the original anti-semite. In their efforts, the Nazis were amazingly successful in that a majority of Protestant German churches joined the German Christian movement and agreed to Nazi theological concepts such as removing the Old Testament from the Christian canon and segregating Christians of Jewish ancestry from Christians of non-Jewish ancestry. [See also The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.] On the other hand, a minority of Christians were motivated by this fundamental betrayal of Christian tradition into opposing the Nazi's German Christian movement by forming the Confessing Church. At this time - in the mid-to-late 1930s - Hitler's religious attitudes were not Christian in any sense of the word in that his theology ripped the Jewish context out of Christianity. Further, as it became apparent that a large number of Christians were opposing the Nazi reconstruction of Christianity, Hitler soured on his belief that Protestantism and German Nationalism were complementary elements of the German identity. Steigman-Gall leaves no doubt that during this period, when the Nazis were in power, National Socialism was antithetical to Catholicism and that Nazi leaders and members who had come from a Catholic background were apostates and often bitterly opposed to Catholicism. By the time that the Nazis were in power, it was clear to them that institutional Catholicism was opposed to the National Socialism and that being a loyal Catholic meant being loyal to a power that was not German. This attitude contrasted with Nazis from a Protestant background who often remained members in good standing of their church.

Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism by Derek Hastings was the next in order. Hastings covered an earlier period of Nazi history, the brief moment before National Socialism became a truly national moment. During that short period of time - approximately 1919 to 1923 - National Socialism was a Catholic political party that had its origin in Catholic Bavaria. However, although it was a Catholic political party, it was not the Catholic political party. Bavarian Catholicism divided between Catholics who were "ultramontane," or whose self-identity involved an allegiance to the papacy, and non-ultramontane, or anti-ultramontane, Catholics, whose self-identity involved emphasizing their loyalty to Germany at the expense of the papacy. The source of National Socialism in its earl stage was not with the ultramontanes, but with those Catholics who were looking for a way to accommodate their Catholic identity with their German identity. National Socialism promised such an accommodation until Hitler decided to take his movement nation-wide in an alliance with the virulent Anti-Catholic former general Ludendorff.

The problem that bedeviled German politics for Hitler was how to negotiate around the fact that Germany was split between a majority Protestant population and a minority Catholic population that had a long history of antagonism. Hitler's attempted answer to that was the establishment of "Positive Christianity" - an initially vague notion that promised a way that Catholics and Protestants could cooperate in the reconstruction of German identity.

To anyone acquainted with the current moment, it seems pretty apparent that the Christian opponents of National Socialism would be what we today call "conservative," in their institutional allegiance to the papacy, in the case of Catholics, or to the traditional understanding of Jesus and the canon of the Bible, in the case of Protestants. On the other hand, the Christian supporters of Hitler were those who were willing to resist the papacy in favor of `local control' or radically reconstruct Christian theology in favor of a currently popular academic theory. In short, one can't help but notice that the Protestant and Catholic supporters of Hitler were those who came out of a liberal tradition of Christianity, which will surely come a surprise to those who take Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell, with its fable that it was the "conservative" Pius XII who was responsible for Hitler's rise to power, as gospel truth.

Gross' The War against Catholicism is the next installment in this archeological approach to the issues presented by the history of the 1920s and 1930s. Gross' book is an analysis of the Kulturkampf, a period immediately after the formation of the German Empire in 1870 when the German state attempted to liquidate Catholicism. Gross' thesis is that the Kulturkampf was a project of German liberalism and represented a principled application of liberal principles as understood by mid-Nineteenth Century German liberals, rather than, as often asserted, a betrayal of those principles.

The Kulturkampf is a period that is often unjustly neglected by people who approach the issues of German religious identity under the Nazis. One might speculate that this fact is evidence of Gross' thesis concerning the antipathy of liberalism for religion in general and Catholicism in particular, in that most scholars view themselves as liberals, and don't seem to have much sympathy for Catholicism, and, therefore, haven't much interest in a period when Catholics were persecuted by liberals. The persecution was very real and included a number of moves that were typical of anti-clerical efforts before and after the Kulturkampf, including prohibiting Catholic religious orders from teaching, depriving the Catholic Church of title to its property, exiling foreign Catholic priests and brothers, and requiring the Catholic church to submit to state control with respect to the appointment of priests and bishops. By the end of the Kulturkampf vast sections of Germany had been deprived of Catholic priests, large numbers of Catholics had been arrested and virtually every bishop in Protestant areas of Germany had been forced into exile. Given that the Kulturkampf was something experienced by the parents and grandparents of Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s, one might think that the Catholic reaction to National Socialism, which raised the specter of a new Kulturkampf, might be of some interest to historians.

Gross points out that the Kulturkampf resulted from a coming together of a variety of cultural development during the Nineteenth Century. One of the important influences was the revival of Catholic culture and its re-orientation in an ultramontane direction by an energetic campaign of preaching and revivals, which began after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848, and which were led by various religious orders including the Jesuits. The revival of Catholicism, particularly a papally oriented Catholicism, stirred a Protestant anti-Catholic backlash, which traded in conventional tropes about Catholic superstition and ignorance. The backlash also promoted the idea of the Jesuits as a conspiring threat to Germany. Often times in reading liberal descriptions of the Jesuits, I was put in mind of Hitler's descriptions of the Jews. [Gross points out that while the Nineteenth Century represented a zenith of anti-Catholic agitation and persecution in Germany, Jews were being freed from the traditional restrictions on their civil rights.] Interestingly, this anti-Jesuit attitude was rampant in America during essentially the same period. This was not entirely an accident when one considers that the famous Anti-Catholic picture of the "American Ganges" was drawn by the Protestant German-immigrant, Thomas Nast, who used tropes and images that would have been familiar to readers of German liberal magazines and newspapers.

Gross also argues that another cultural phenomenon that inspired the Kulturkampf was the involvement of Catholic women in public affairs. Gross spends a chapter discussing the issue of the "Women's Question." In Nineteenth Century Germany, the women's question was answered by liberals with the response that "a woman's place was in the home." Women - and men - were expected to respect the distinction between the public and the private. However, Catholic religious orders and lay movement gave women a prominent place in public, which upset liberal Germans. Further, liberal Germans identified Catholicism, and Catholic priests in particular, with "womanly traits," which further played into liberal Anti-Catholic propaganda.

As Gross documents in the writings of liberal politicians and liberal newspapers, liberals viewed the liquidation of Catholicism as a duty imposed on liberals in order to advance the health of German society by removing what liberals believed to be a retarding, regressive force for superstition and ignorance. Because liberals viewed Catholics as being superstitious and ignorant, and Catholicism as being an institution that fostered superstition and ignorance, liberals justified the persecution of Catholics on the grounds that Catholics were not entitled to the benefits of tolerance. Dr. Gross quotes the liberal leader Eduard Windthorst (who was the nephew of the Catholic faction leader, Ludwig Windthorst) that "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." (id. at p. 259.)

The result of the Kulturkampf was to energize ultramontane Catholics to support the Catholic political party, which became the Catholic Center Party. For the next 50 years, until it disbanded itself under pressure from Hitler, the Catholic Center Party would invariably be one of the larger parties in the German parliament. It would outlast the liberal parties who had persecuted the Catholic Church. The existence of the Center Party confronted Catholics with a fundamental question as to whether they were primarily Catholic or primarily German. As Hastings points out, Hitler would run an effective campaign against "political Catholicism" and argue for the retirement of the Catholic Church from German politics. This was a theme that appealed to many Catholics who felt torn between their Catholic and German identities. Ultimately, the Concordat between Germany and the Vatican, so condemned by John Cornwell, was an effort to achieve this "liberal" goal.

I am glad that I came at Gross' book in the order I did. As with many academic books of this sort, including the books by Steigman-Gall and Hastings, there are a lot of unfamiliar names to keep track of. Gross' writing is clear and his thesis is engaging and well-supported. One of the interesting take-aways for me was the origin of the "Old Catholic Church." I knew that it had formed in opposition to Vatican I's definition of papal infallibility, but I did not understand why such an apparently "conservative" church should be so liberal in its modern form. The answer is that it was formed as a "liberal" reaction to the conservative or ultramontane direction that Catholicism took in the 19th Century.

This book is well worth the price and time spent in reading it for that kind of insight. Too often, we read the past through our modern lenses. This is the reason that people like John Cornwell and his readers can so misunderstand the history of National Socialism and the Catholic Church and draw the wrong lesson from their misunderstanding. John Cornwell would have been well served if he had had - and attempted to understand - the history set forth in this very worthwhile book.

From the "Liberal Intolerance" File

Russell Crowe describes the Jewish practice of circumcision as "barbaric."

Russell Crowe is learning that Twitter is not the best place to joke with a friend about religious practices.


It all started with a tweet Crowe sent Thursday about his feelings on circumcision, saying the act “is barbaric and stupid. Who are you to correct nature? Is it real that GOD requires a donation of foreskin? Babies are perfect.” He followed this up with a tweet to director Eli Roth saying, “many jewish friends, I love my Jewish friends, I love the apples and the honey and the funny little hats but stop cutting yr babies @eliroth.”

Roth sent a slightly inappropriate joke back to Crowe on Twitter, who finished the conversation with, “last of it, if u feel it is yr right 2 cut things off yr babies please unfollow and [bleep] off, I'll take attentive parenting over barbarism.”

Well, the tweets were picked up by a number of outlets, including the Hollywood Reporter, who reported the tweets as an “anti-circumcision tirade.” Crowe deleted the tweets and issued an apology, saying, “My personal beliefs aside I realize that some will interpret this debate as me mocking the rituals and traditions of others. I am very sorry.”

Roth seems to think some media outlets should be the ones apologizing for coverage of the Twitter conversation, saying in a statement that it “was clearly a joking exchange between friends, never to be taken seriously.”

“I am deeply, deeply disturbed at the media’s portrayal of Russell Crowe as an anti semite for making a joke to me on twitter,” Roth said in a statement. “Russell and I are great friends, and often tease each other publicly, as you can see from my response. ... Not one person from any media outlet contacted me to ask if it was a joke or not before running their vicious stories, which is indicative of a much more serious problem.”

The debate over circumcision is waging in areas outside the celebrity Twitter-verse, prompted in part by proposed a legal ban on the practice in San Francisco.

It's a curious coincidence that Crowe's joke looks a lot like the anti-semitic rants of San Francisco's anti-circumcision crusaders.  Here is a Big Hollywood post that indicates that Crowe's attitude is not a matter of "humor."

The Continuing Kulturkampf - Remember the Self-Liquidating Cardinal Rule of Liberalism: "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." - Eduard Windthorst

Mark Shea links to this video of a couple of attacks on people protesting in favor of traditional marriage. What gets me is the casualness of the attacks as if the attackers were operating within the cognitive dissonance of Windthorst's dicta.




This video is useful for playing the "spot the idiot" game.



Clearly, the pro-homosexual side is more interested in intimidation; with the masked faces, shouts of "God is dead," flipping the bird and screaming, they sure aren't interested in convincing people that their side is the side of tolerance and reason.  Again, though, that behavior is entirely consistent with Windthorst's Self-liquidating Rule that "tolerance endures everything except intolerance."

Here is the "TFP" homepage.

"Hmmmmm. Blonde superhero. An evil rabbi before a baby, a glass and a bottle of wine."...

...A wild idea, but could there possibly be something...I don't know... anti-Semitic in San Francisco's anti-circumcision initiative?

Wesley J. Smith links to a post from the "Token Conservative" column at the S.F. Chronicle which demonstrates an exuberant usage of anti-semitic tropes that haven't been seen since the Nuremberg Trials.

For example:

                        

                                       

Wesley J. Smith observes:

This is really vile stuff, classic–and dangerous–anti Semitism. Or in the modern vernacular, it is unmitigated hate speech. Is it any wonder there were no religious exemptions allowed in the proposed law?

It is also worth noting the linking of the Foreskin Man Website from the main MGMbill Website isn’t an innocent mistake: Matthew Hess, the president of MGMbill, a non profit organization that pushes anti circumcision statutes nationwide, is also the author and prime mover behind the SF referendum, who also just happens to be the big cheese at the anti Semitic Foreskin Man site. There are other anti Semitic “trading cards” too. Awful. Just awful. This kind of advocacy has no place in a free and diverse society.

Also, as it isn't an accident as a matter of the historical dynamic of liberalism/progressivism.

In the words of German Liberal leader Eduard Windthorst, "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance."

Update:

Here are some more frames playing on clearly anti-semitic tropes.

And from Pajama Media:

A Post-Modern Kulturkampf.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstain considers the recent attempts to curb circumcision as an attack on religion generally, as opposed to a more restricted attack on Judaism. 

Why circumcision, and why now?


Circumcision was never challenged in 200 years of American history, including times when anti-Semitism was widespread. The proponents of the ban are not anti-Semites, and include many Jews.

What has changed is the antipathy of some people to religion. While the United States is still one of the most religious and religion-friendly countries on earth, people opposed to it are growing more contemptuous and more militant. To them, circumcision can be nothing more than an ancient pagan rite preserved by the superstition of religions that should have died centuries ago. Circumcision is abhorrent because it demonstrates how people can accept and defend what the critics believe to be the darkest nonsense.

People, they feel, ought to be enlightened enough to understand that the Bible may be decent literature, but as a guide to practice, it is a dismal failure. Enlightened people do not believe in G-d, and certainly not the one of the Bible. Those who know better ought to do whatever we can to slowly rid civilization of the evil of religion. (This is reminiscent of the similar campaign of communism to wipe out religion by force. Religious life was banned for the seventy years that Russia suffered under communist rule, but it could not be snuffed out. Today, Russian Orthodoxy and Judaism are blossoming in Russia. In 1958, Chairman Mao reported that China was religion-free. Today, more Chinese attend church on Sunday than are members of the Communist Party.)

In all likelihood, the measures will fail by large margins. If they would pass, Jewish parents would simply drive out of the city limits to fulfill the mandate of the Jewish faith. Passage of the measure, however, would be a blow to the standing and position of faith in those communities. It would declare that extreme anti-religious "enlightenment" must assert itself over and against the repressive forces of worthless religion.

What will suffer is the Judeo-Christian heritage that made this country strong.

Although Rabbi Adlerstein hasn't made the connection, his comment that "passage of the measure...would be a blow to the standing and position of faith in those communities" and that "it would declare that extreme anti-religious "enlightenment" must assert itself over and against the repressive forces of worthless religion" resonates with San Francisco's similar resolution defining Catholicism as an "alien" religion, which was upheld by the judicial system.

Is it "ironic" that liberal San Francisco should be so "illiberal" in its treatment of its citizens who hold to a religious faith?  Or is there, perhaps, something in the "genes" of liberalism that makes it "illiberal" when it comes to religious faith?

From a historical perspective it appears that the latter is probably the case. In "The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)", Dr. Michael Gross investigates the circumstances that led the German Liberal parties to make their first order of busines a broad scale attack on the Catholic Church.  According to Dr. Gross, the original Kulturkampf was not an aberration whereby liberals abandoned liberal principles, but rahter it was seen by 19th Century German liberals as a working out of the liberal principles of education and progress.  As Dr. Gross quotes the liberal leader Eduard Windthorst, "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." (id. at p. 259.) 
Another example of liberal "illiberalism" in action can be seen from the following passage of Pius XI's encyclical Dilectissima Nobis - written in the wake of the Spanish Republic's nationalization of all Church property.  Pius points out the contradiction of an ideology supposedly committed to equal treatment singling out one group for special restrictions:

8. The new Spanish legislators, indifferent to these lessons of history, wanted a form of separation hostile to the Faith professed by the great majority of citizens, - a separation so much more painful and unjust especially since it was advanced in the name of that liberty promised and assured to all without distinction. Thus they wished to subject the Church and her ministers to measures by which they sought to put her at the mercy of the civil power. In fact, while under the Constitution and successive laws all opinions, even the most erroneous, have wide fields in which to manifest themselves, the Catholic Religion alone, that of almost all of the citizens, see its teaching odiously watched, its schools and other institutions, so helpful for science and Spanish culture, restrained.


9. The very exercise of Catholic worship, in its most essential and traditional manifestations, is not exempt from limitations, since religious assistance in institutes is made dependent on the State, and religious processions are placed under the necessity of obtaining special authorization granted by the Government. Special clauses and restrictions apply even to administration of the Sacraments to the dying and funerals for the dead. Even more manifest is the contradiction regarding property. The Constitution recognizes in all citizens the legitimate faculty of possession and, as is proper in all legislation of civilized countries, guarantees safeguards for the exercise of such important rights arising from nature itself. Nevertheless, even on this point, an exception was created to the detriment of the Catholic Church, depriving her, with open injustice, of all property. No regard is paid to the wishes of those making donations in wills; no account is taken of the spiritual and holy ends connected with such properties, and no respect is shown in any way to rights long ago acquired and founded on indisputable juridical titles. All buildings, episcopal residences, parish houses, seminaries and monasteries no longer are recognized as the free property of the Catholic Church, but are declared - with words that badly hide the nature of the usurpation - public and national property.

And:

12. The usurpation does not stop at property. Chattles, also, are declared public property and are catalogued so that nothing may escape, even vestments, statues, pictures, vases, gems and similar objects expressly and permanently destined to Catholic worship, to its splendor and to necessities directly connected with such worship. While the Church is denied the right to dispose freely of what is hers by reason of having been legitimately purchased or donated by the pious faithful, to the State only is given to the power of disposing, for another purpose and without any limitation, of sacred objects - even those which with special consecration have been withdrawn from every profane use - removing every duty of the State to compensate the Church for such deplorable waste.


13. Nor was all this sufficient to appease the anti-religious whims of the present legislators. Not even the churches were spared. Temples - splendors of art, rare monuments of glorious history and decorum which have been the pride of the nation throughout centuries - Houses of God and prayer over which the Catholic Church always had enjoyed the full right of ownership and which the Church by her magnificent title of particular merit had always preserved, embellished and adorned with loving care - even temples not a few of which were destroyed (and again We deplore it) by the impious mania of burning - were declared to property of the nation and placed under the control of the civil authorities who today rule the public destinies without any respect for the religious sentiments of the good people of Spain.

Rabbi Adlerstein is complaining about something with a long and deeply imbedded pedigree.

And by "tolerance" we mean "laws that prevent you from discriminating against us, but let us discriminate against you."

This is so absolutely nuts that I'm tempted to think it is one of those instant urban legends spread by e-mail, but here it is in First Things:

Apparently, Only Christians Can Be Guilty of Religious Discrimination

Friday, February 18, 2011, 12:38 PM

Joe Carter

The University of California-Davis has a peculiar new religious discrimination policy:

The UC-Davis policy defines “Religious/Spiritual Discrimination” as “the loss of power and privilege to those who do not practice the dominant culture’s religion. In the United States, this is institutionalized oppressions toward those who are not Christian.”

“Christians deserve the same protections against religious discrimination as any other students on a public university campus,” says Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) Senior Counsel David French. “It’s ridiculously absurd to single out Christians as oppressors and non-Christians as the only oppressed people on campus when the facts show that public universities are more hostile to Christians than anyone else.”

A from ADF-allied attorney Tim Swickard to UC-Davis explains, “It is patently clear that UC Davis’s definition of religious discrimination is blatantly unconstitutional under both the Federal and California State Constitutions. The policy singles out some faiths for official school protection while denying the same protection to others solely on the basis of their particular religious views…Moreover, the UC-Davis policy is simply nonsensical given the environment on most University campuses where Christian students, if anything, are among the most likely to be subjected to discrimination because of their faith.”

The letter cites a recent study of more than 1,200 faculty at public universities that showed that professors admitted to having a significant bias against Christian students, particularly evangelicals. Fifty-three percent admitted to having negative feelings about evangelical students solely because of their religious beliefs.

I suspect that roughly a hundred percent of evangelical students have negative feelings about professors who have negative feelings about them solely because of their religious beliefs. Since the negative feelings of the students can lead to a loss of privilege for the professors, it’s obvious that these evangelical students are practicing religious discrimination. Hopefully, UC Davis will properly punish these believers for their thought-crimes.

The good news is that U.C. Davis - my alma mater - eventually realized that this venture into Orwellian newspeak was misguided:

The University of California at Davis has backed away from a policy that defined religious discrimination as Christians oppressing non-Christians after more than two dozen Christian students filed a formal complaint.


The definition was listed in a document called, “The Principles of Community.” It defined “Religious/Spiritual Discrimination” as “The loss of power and privilege to those who do not practice the dominant culture’s religion. In the United States, this is institutionalized oppressions toward those who are not Christian.”

“This is radical political correctness run amok,” said David French, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund.

The conservative advocacy group wrote a letter on behalf of more than 25 students who objected to the policy and wanted it revised.

He said it’s absurd to single out Christians as oppressors and non-Christians as the only oppressed people on campus.

Raheem Reed, an associate executive vice chancellor at UC-Davis, said he received the letter and removed the definition Wednesday afternoon.

“I certainly can see how a Christian student reading that definition might feel and that’s why it was immediately disabled and taken down,” Reed told Fox News Radio. “This is not how we define religious discrimination.”

However, one student said they complained to administrators last November about the policy and nothing was done. “Christians deserve the same protections against religious discrimination as any other students on a public university campus,” French told Fox News Radio. “The idea that a university would discriminate against Christians is a very old story, unfortunately, and one that we see played out every day.”

Via Designs on the Truth.