Reactions have generally been negative to the December 5, 2023, appearance of three prestigious university presidents before the House Education and the Workforce Committee to address antisemitism on American college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel. As I write this, UPenn’s Liz Magill has resigned. There was pressure for Harvard’s Claudine Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth to follow in her steps, but both have received support from the powers that be.
As much as I would applaud that, it’s naïve to assume that such an outcome would change anything. It will merely remove the controversial face of the moment. But the intellectual rot responsible for what those three presidents have and for what is happening on their campus will remain—and that’s the problem that has to be excised. Radically.
Except, I am not sure we are ready for that.
Ever since Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel October 7, hands have been wringing over how students on American college campuses—and especially its first tier ones—have rallied behind the terrorists. Within days, University of Pennsylvania’s Ezekiel Emanuel, who teaches bioethics, penned an op-ed in The New York Times, recognizing that there was something profoundly wrong with what has happening on those campuses. He spoke of the “moral deficiencies” of “liberal arts education” and proposed to remedy it by infusion of more ethics into the curriculum. Specifically, he wanted required classes in general ethics and professional ethics (bioethics, business ethics, etc.) for all graduates, as well as a concerted faculty effort to insert ethical issues across the curriculum.
I argued against Emanuel’s proposal (here and here), not because I don’t think students need systematic exposure to ethics but because, riffing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s title, I asked, “Whose ethics? Whose morality?” Given what I suspect will be taught in “ethics,” the result at best will be the status quo.
In my essays, I maintained that the vast majority of mainstream approaches to ethics in the Anglo-American world are actually responsible for what those students are doing because those systems are relativistic. The three presidents’ mantra—whether something is and can be disciplined as antisemitic is “context-dependent”—is at one with that intellectual worldview.
That the average American who watched those presidents keep retreating to the “context-dependent” excuse making was not just legalese, fine-tuned by the lawyers at WilmerHale in their rehearsals of those presidents. That would suggest that the problem was primarily legal, the presidents parsing their answers to avoid setting legal precedents or incurring legal liability.
But what many viewers viscerally recognized (to which our three very educated presidents were stone blind) was that the question they faced was first and foremost an ethical one, not a legal one. Is it wrong to use chants whose meaning points to genocide? Yes or no? The presidents’ answers were, “it depends.”
That’s the part that went viral. NY Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY23) kept pressing for a “yes or no” answer; the presidents kept deflecting. Finally, Stefanik summed it up: “It does not ‘depend on context.’ The answer is ‘yes,’ and this is why you should resign.”
The presidents wanted to split legal hairs. The question was moral. The Board of Trustees at Penn (and the other boards, should those presidents leave, too) needs to make its first interview question of prospective presidents: “If somebody asks ‘is it okay to advocate genocide at Penn?’ the answer is ‘no.’”
The dictatorship of relativism
So, how have we gotten to the situation where the heads of Ivy League colleges hedge about condemning speech that promotes genocide? The answer was given 18 years ago by a former professor, Joseph Ratzinger. It’s “the dictatorship of relativism.”
And it’s why Emanuel’s “make them learn ethics” solution won’t work.
Emanuel is a bioethicist. Bioethics is a field confused about itself. “Bios” means “life.” Bioethics refers to the “ethics of life.” But the vast majority of mainstream secular bioethics in the United States does not defend life. It usually looks for excuses on how to take life, either by redefining life according to non-scientific criteria (Cartesian consciousness, Sartrean primacy of “choice”) or feigning agnosticism about when life begins (a bizarre stance for a field that is supposed to be about life), then devising procedures whereby we can check the box that the appropriate ethical handwringing has occurred before a life is taken.
It’s arguable that one reason the whole secular bioethics enterprise arose, at least at the hands of Daniel Callahan, was because the Catholic medical moral tradition (which was bioethics by another name) had answers—answers the Callahans did not want to hear. So, we got a secular bioethics that is “context-dependent.”
In my previous essays, I argued that the same flaws infect the other mainstream views of what passes for “ethics” in this country. Consider your choices:
• Utilitarianism/consequentialism – the “greatest good for the greatest number with the least adverse consequences for the fewest.” This system, which is essentially morality by calculation, is inherently relativistic because (a) it denies there are intrinsic moral values and (b) engages in weighing apples and oranges to arrive at a moral sum. But what factors get counted, and at what weight, in the calculation? Those decisions are, most charitably, “context-driven.” In truth, they are escape hatches for utilitarians creative enough to recognize that how you stack the deck determines how the cards shake out. So, maybe a little genocide is needed for a “national liberation” movement.
• Proceduralism – the primary American competitor to utilitarianism. Proceduralists don’t want to get involved in the messy work of discerning the intrinsic values of what’s at stake, since one might say they don’t believe there are any, or at least any controlling enough to decide the moral question. No, let’s leave everybody to decide those “values” questions for himself. Who’s a leading light in this field? John Rawls who spent his professional life at … MIT, then Harvard.
The ethicist’s job is merely to establish a set of rules whereby those value judgments enter (or, rather, are excluded from) the public square. Check the boxes whereby one gets a hearing and we’re “ethical,” even if what we then hear is “kill the Jews!” Of course, the savvy don’t make it that plain, but when one argues that “free speech” lets you say what you will without consequences (“as long as it does not cross into ‘conduct,’” as the presidents intoned), the result is really the same.
• Emotivism – “good” means “I like X,” “evil” means “I don’t like X.” Morality is a matter of feelings, nothing more or deeper. Jews in Cambridge and Philadelphia don’t like being the objects of genocide, so it’s “evil.” Hamas in Gaza City and Islamists in Tehran like Jews being the objects of genocide, so it’s “good.” Americans, of course, recoil when it’s stated that bluntly. They prefer to hear emotivism couched as “I am personally opposed, but …” or “you have your truth and I have mine.” Po-ta-to, po-tah-to, de gustibus non disputandum.
• Pragmatism – the American fallback: this is all too complicated and deep and my head hurts, so let’s just do “what will work” for the moment and kick the can down the street. We want to keep relativism but the Magill-Gay-Kornbluth performance didn’t look too good so maybe we fire them, wait for the controversy to let up, hope the Mideast quiets down, and … we keep on doing what we’re doing.
What Joseph Ratzinger made clear in attacking the dictatorship of relativism was that all these systems are inherently “context-dependent.” They all deny that there is such a thing as intrinsically evil acts, acts that cannot be done ever, irrespective of intentions, motives, or circumstances. That teaching, distinctive to Catholic morality, was long recognized as a staple of Judaeo-Christian ethics, and is the object of attack within the Church (the outside world having largely already abandoned it).
In order to have perennially shape-shifting “values” rather than intrinsic good and evil one must, of course, also previously jettison metaphysics, i.e., being bound to a real world of real good and real values that exists out there in the world independently of my mind and will. The secular world is well along on that path of abandonment.
True ethics vs. fraudulent ethics
Now, the only way you are going to get to the answer Congresswoman Stefanik wanted–“yes or no”–is by adopting the thick, substantive ethic and metaphysic that Catholic thought continues to hold. That system is going to be able to say: “Supporting the killing of innocents—by thought, word, or deed—is always wrong.” Period. Full stop.
So, if supporting the killing of innocents, in my words or in my actions, is always wrong, it kicks out the legs under proceduralism. It’s not just a matter of “free speech.” Pace David French, the solution is not “Let them grow up and engage with even the most vile of ideas. The answer to campus hypocrisy isn’t more censorship. It’s true liberty.” Advocating for barbarism is not “true liberty” and should entail consequences. You support genocide? Not as a member of our academic community.
The dominance of proceduralism will be evident in the likely retort, “You want to do what the woke are doing?” No. The woke have created a “moral” code that is merely their political agenda dressed up as principles, buttressed by feelings of “harassment.” Our relativist culture conflates that pseudo-morality with a morality rooted in rationally defensible principles (that are also the subjects of revelation), e.g., “do not harm innocents, in thought, word, or deed.”
If supporting the killing of innocents in word or action is always wrong, it eviscerates a consequentialism that tries to decide its wrongness based on desirable outcomes, e.g., a “Palestinian state by whatever means.” If supporting the killing of innocents in word or action is always wrong, it makes clear the intellectual shallowness of emotivism and “feelings” morality.
To reach this kind of ethical depth, however, would require recognizing these other “ethical systems” for the deficient frauds they are.
Somehow, however, I cannot imagine the ethics Prof. Emanuel wants to intensify at Penn as leading here. I suspect, rather, that the typical course would be a survey of possible ethical answers, e.g., “the proceduralists say X, the emotivists might think Y, the traditional Catholics might even think Z, and you’re all ‘critical thinkers’ so make up your minds.” In other words, here’s the ethical smorgasbord, pick your entrees and come up with some defense of them. In the end, however, you will be right back where you started: with those who have chosen to defend attacks on the innocent as a “necessary means” to some other goal and an ethical Babel trying to square the circle.
Now, adopting the kind of thicker, substantive ethic that the Catholic moral tradition espouses poses problems. Americans instinctively recognized there was something really wrong when students could defend terrorists. They felt that the intellectual sources that led to that kind of thinking must be poisoned wells.
But, abandoning them in favor of the intrinsic morality found in the Catholic ethical tradition is not an “off again, on again” proposition. You can’t adopt it to condemn advocacy of genocide and then not think about all the ramifications of the principle, “it is wrong to attack innocent lives.” But pursuing that principle to its logical ends could be uncomfortable. It would raise questions, for example, about medical negligence allowing handicapped newborns to die (or even actively killing them, like Baby Indi Gregory). And heaven forbid the principle of the sanctity of innocent lives jumps the birth line, calling into question what 57% of Ohio voters just last month said they were quite fine with. Not only that, it would even gore the sacred ox of “democracy defenders,” who would have to admit that certain things (like the lives of innocent persons) are never matters for majority decision.
I have no doubt that liberals recognize what’s at stake and, therefore, why they would rather decapitate a president than an intellectual system. (It’s why, in a particular tasteless parody of the Congressional hearing, Saturday Night Live had Congresswoman Stefanik remarking, “This is personal for me. While I am not Jewish—I am Roman Catholic—some of my closest friends are … also Roman Catholic”). But I also have no doubt that those in the ambiguous middle who are distressed by what they are seeing may not be ready for the logical implications of what they instinctually recognize is necessary to fix it. Faced with that truth, I have no doubt many would rather equivocate.
Which is why we endured the presidents’ equivocations between ethics and law. While there might have been legal reasons for what they said, the truth is that while the Left has insisted on drawing bright lines between “law” and “morality,” the two interpenetrate each other. Their failure to see that was “context-driven,” wanting on the one hand to limit potential legal exposure while, on the other, pretending to be “robust defenders of free speech” (except when they—usually–aren’t).
This controversy is one of those occasions where the ugly side of the dictatorship of relativism becomes obvious at some level to most people. It helps when it manifests its consequences in an area that most people don’t have personal vested interests, like sex. It also demonstrates many people still have some traditional moral fumes on which they are coasting.
Finally, has the Church seized this “teaching moment?” Have Church leaders spoken clearly to the moral issues at stake, most preeminently around the inviolability of innocents from attack, in thought, word, or deed?
Or, has the Church chosen instead to say something to everybody (“this is bad, but so is that”) coupled with a greater confidence in diplomacy and politics than in correcting the wrong ideas that underlie the phenomenon? Because, as Richard Weaver observed, “ideas have consequences,” and the Church has a bigger role to play in forming ideas than in engaging in political balancing acts. The corrosive ideas that undergird words or deeds that attacking innocents might sometimes be at least tolerable deforms a lot more thinking about a lot more issues than Hamas protestors. It is an “anti-” sign of our times, to which the Church is supposed to be reading and speaking. And, if the Church actually focused on addressing the “teaching moment” in addressing the ethical ideas implicated in these controversies, it might find that it faces a task more challenging and demanding to overcome those mindsets than Israel in eradicating Hamas.
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I’m surprised that cognitive dissonance didn’t make their heads explode during their testimony.
Many thanks, Mr. Grondelski.
Last paragraph especially.
I’m pretty sure if the issue of genocide had been directed at other ethnic groups the university administrators would have answered differently. Some persecuted minorities can be thrown under the bus, others not so much.
When did truth become relative? The first codes of ethics apart from the Judaic reach back to the Sumerian codes of Mesopotamia, Ur Nammu; the most referenced is the code of Hammurabi. Roman Law and the Twelve Tables were the compilation of Roman custom and rules of justice, ius civile approx 500 BC, later compiled with Christian codes of justice under Emperor Justinian Eastern Empire Constantinople [as well as the Western] approx 500 AD.
Law accumulated through the centuries from various sources speak to the universal standards of justice identified through reason and common practice that is predominantly the inherent Natural Law. Aside from the Judaic God inspired laws of justice, civil law then developed in the West merged with Christian Judaic Law under Justinian. These laws that were commonly professed as justice are the origins of our understanding of truth.
Where and when did truth become relative? The sources are multiple beginning with the Renaissance and reversion back to Greek thought centered on beauty, the arts, and the individual as discoverer of meaning apart from Christ’s revelation. Petrarch’s humanism drawn from Cicero, Boccaccio also humanist, interested in Gk culture both Catholic, both humanist, both identified with the Renaissance. Both the forerunner of the modern Catholic humanism which is dominating traditional Catholicism.
Then there’s the inevitable Renee Descartes mentioned by Grondelski. A genius who established the first principle of modern science, the Methodical Doubt. And with that the concept of critical thinking that transformed adherence to rules and laws of justice transferring all to the individual conscience. Grondelski gives us the details of our contemporary dilemma. What is urgent is a return to the original revelation of Christ to the world, a spiritual rebirth as it were parallel to Christ’s birth.
Laws are formulated to maintain order within a society, taking account of cultural idiosyncrasies to insure the rights of others are not infringed. Liberty disguised as freedom reduces laws in favor of presumed individual rights, rights of class, religion [Islam in particular], minorities, those whose disordered behavior demand legal protections that impose on others [my rights are deemed exceptional relative to yours]. In effect the breakdown of order in lieu of freedom results in disorder. Leading to all the violent behavior and encroachment of the rights of others.
Liberty disguised as freedom refers to the pejorative definition of liberty made by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood E PA v Casey, which gives a false sense of unprincipled freedom.
“Finally, has the Church seized this “teaching moment?” Have Church leaders spoken clearly to the moral issues at stake, most preeminently around the inviolability of innocents from attack, in thought, word, or deed?”
Not that I have seen.
According to GPT-R, relying on “America” magazine (1) and vaticannews.va (2):
“Pope Francis has been vocal about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. In a recent statement, he described the situation in Israel and Palestine as “a wound that continues to bleed.”(1) He has appealed for peace and restraint in the region, [sic] and has called for a new ceasefire. (1,2) The Pope has also expressed his concern for the innocent victims of the war, [sic] and has urged both parties to exercise restraint in hopes of reaching a solution. (2)”
Abstracting from all that, your question is answered: NO. Church leaders have not spoken clearly to the moral issues at stake, most preeminently around the inviolability of innocents from attack.
Why should we expect any different? Francis has not reproved the die-hard positions of Biden or Pelosi in support of abortion. Francis has undermined Church teaching on abortion. Francis has undermined liturgical aspects of millenial Catholic tradition. From the petrine sign of unity in the RCC, we have learned to expect nothing but confusion, ambiguity, undermining and subverting of the faith of the Roman Church of Christ. Therein lies the rub and source of our distress, leading us to cry to the Lord of Salvation.
vaticannews.va
Yes, the Church has clearly spoken on the Israel-Palestinian war.
If I might put it so bluntly, the way I understand it: Both sides are terrorists.
You cannot condemn the Palestinian’s cry of “From the River to the Sea” as a call for genocide of Israelis without looking closely at Netanyahu’s cry of “Remember what Amalek did to you.”
As the Jewish social philosopher Normal Finkelstein says, “When you say your enemy is Amalek, you are calling for the destruction, the killing, of every man, woman, and child. The issue of human shielding is totally beside the point because it doesn’t even come into play in this situation. The orders from the get-go, denying food, water, electricity, and fuel to the entire civilian population, the order from the get-go to turn Gaza into a place that is not able to sustain human life.”
The Catholic Church, Popes from Pius X all the way down to Francis has urged both sides to stop the killing. Nakba is just as condemnable as the Holocaust. The Church cannot participate in the politics of it all, except to plead that Christian holy places be protected from destruction.
Two-word explanation: Affirmative Action.
A part of the problem, but wildly insufficient. Large swathes of society have been rejecting obvious truths by the dozen for decades. The natural result of this is for society to become irrational, stupid, and lacking in the capacity for moral reasoning.
And if the adults don’t start getting rational, the next generation will be raised irrational. And so on, until some generation does become rational, or society collapses.
Grondelski asks: “Finally, has the Church seized this ‘teaching moment’?”
Not quite, and to which, St. John Paul II responds:
“A separation, or even an opposition [!], is thus established in some cases between the teaching of the precept, which is valid and general, and the norm of the individual conscience, which would in fact make the final decision [no longer a ‘moral judgment’!] about what is good and what is evil. On this basis, an attempt is made to legitimize so-called ‘pastoral’ solutions [!] contrary to the teaching of the Magisterium, and to justify a ‘creative’ hermeneutic according to which the moral conscience is in no way obliged, in every case, by a particular negative precept [‘thou shalt not…!’]” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 56).
And, finally appearing before a judge for a felony sentencing, a young pre-millennial, or whatever, was asked: “Didn’t anyone ever teach you right from wrong?” His wide-eyed answer: “NO.” So, there we have it, sometimes even a morally castrated relativist still knows the meaning of “yes” and “no”!
Citation from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (“Warning to the West, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, p. 79), from his address delivered AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY!!!
In the ocean of major university presidents appearing in the media of late, there has not been seen a single male. In fact, in every facet of society – social, economic, governmental and especially educational, every person in a position of power is now female. More specifically, these women possess innately, a very aggressive, take-no-prisoners type of mentality in all of them.
What i am leading to is the fact that all of these “women” are only biologically female. In every other sense of the word they are very masculine, assertive men.
If these new age “self-made men”, having fought tooth and nail, to the point of not giving a second thought to slaughtering their own unborn children to advance their careers, they aren’t going to blink at sacrificing anything else or allow anything or anyone to keep them from attaining their perceived objective. Society, unfortunately, rolled over and played dead, allowing these self-made ubermenschen to storm through every facet of that society, with very destructive and some very plausibly irreparable consequences.
To suggest that these university elites are suffering any form of cognitive dissonance, is to assume they have had, during some point in their lives, a rightly formed conscience and morality in the first place. There is insufficient evidence to give them the benefit of the doubt in that specific instance.
We are living through the nightmare that Carrie Gress describes in her book, “Anti-Mary Exposed”. I highly recommend this book to every faithful Catholic.
Only God can fix this. But, for the time being, He is allowing these things to happen in order to manifestly demonstrate just how sick, twisted and perverse things can become for people living in a world that has both rejected Him and denied His very existence.
Deacon E. Peitler,
Affirmative Action in and of itself may not prevent certain people from being removed from their undeserved jobs, but it will do so when it is boosted by the woke steroid “Equity” as the woke define it.
If morality and truth is objective who gets to determine and thus execute its truth? Who should be given this authority? Islam? Judaism? Catholicism? The Abrahamic faiths have given us a beautiful blueprint for relativism. The primacy of the individual conscious within a nurturing tradition that informs that conscious. If killing an innocent life is always wrong in every situation we as Catholics must be absolute pacifist. Remember all the innocent civilians that were killed at the end of WWII by American bombers? We flattened Dresden. What about the innocent children in Gaza? Most students who are protesting Israel are not pro Hamas nor anti Semitic but pro Palestinian and anti Zionist. . A significant distinction.
Couple quick points:
1) ‘Innocent’ life differs from non-innocent life. Only Jesus and His mother are innocent of original sin. The unborn and children under the age of reason are innocent of personal sin. Otherwise, innocence is a relative concept. The ‘innocent’ civilians killed at the end of WWII (I presume you refer to those who experienced the effects of the atomic bomb…) were not entirely innocent as they were citizens of a country which bombed and tortured and took prisoners those who did not deserve such treatment. Did the U.S. bomb Japan prior to Pearl Harbor??
Re students who are “pro Palestinian and anti Zionist” who are protesting? What gives protestors the right to stop traffic on a LA freeway? What did the drivers on the freeway do to deserve that? Relatively speaking, what were the drivers doing wrong??Since when was trying to get to work, to school, or pursuing other interests deserving of prohibition?
Why do Palestinians deserve more protest than Israelis? Are not all members of humanity? Indeed, in terms of religion, the Christian faith has more in common with the Jewish faith than with Islam. Christians and Jews are more closely related in belief than Christians and Jews or Jews and Muslims.
We Catholics need to weigh our judgments and our virtue-signaling of justice with great care and consideration. Where is the Magisterial teaching on “Catholics must be absolute pacifist”?
Christians and Jews are more closely related in belief than Christians and Jews [SIC] or Jews and Muslims.
“Christians and Jews” [SIC] should read “Christians and Muslims”
In response to the innocent LA drivers, are not the Japanese, Palestinian, and Israeli citizens also innocent? Do each of these ordinary folks want to go to war and kill others? Thou shall not kill. Is this relative or an absolute moral commandment? What about “love your enemies and do good to those who persecute you?” Is this an absolute moral commandment to be followed in every situation we find ourselves?
A few corrections.
1. There is no such thing as an innocent German civilian during WWII. People who actively and unapologetically supported Hitler are not innocent.
2. There is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.
3. To be anti-zionist is to be antisemitic, as is any support for Hamas.
All or none? Broad statements, for sure.
1. “There is no such thing as an innocent German civilian during WWII”.
Not ALL German civilian supported Hitler.
2. What is Palestinian innocences? Their babies?
3. ALL Palestinian are not anti-Zionists.
Not well thought out.
Gary,
“anti Zionism ” is just a woke substitution for anti Semitism.
Christians have the choice to choose pacifism as an heroic witness but we do not have the right to require that of others. Self defense is a legitimate right per Church teaching.
Wars and conflicts are terrible things and almost always entail the destruction of innocent lives through collateral damage. There’s a great difference between terrorism which directly targets civilians and legitimate efforts to dismantle terrorist cartels. The United States would never tolerate Hamas on our border but we expect it of Israel.
The Abrahamic Faiths both believe in Go’s self revelation to Moses, in which He said that His essence is existance itself, ipsum esse essens. That is why God Almighty, in His inspired Scripture, lists things He cannot do. He cannot deny Himself. In the Roman Missal, He can neither deceive nor be deceived. St. Thomas Aquinas resolves this by saying that God can do everything except the logically impossible. He cannot contradict Himself, nor can He create contradiction.
This is a trumpet blast of a declaration that relativism is hogwash.
To say that killing an innocent human being is wrong is simply to make a distinction between killing for the sake of self defense or just punishment, individually determined, and killing because one feels that the other person is bad.
When it comes to deaths in war, moral theology has distinguished, literally for millennia, between those innocent people who were killed accidentally, and those who were targeted by the invading army. Israel tries very hard to avoid civilian casualties, to an extent not followed by any Western nation. Hamas deliberately increases Palistinian deaths to use as a PR stunt, and deliberately targets Israeli civilians.
“From the River to the Sea” is not a statement of wishing the Israelis would stop occupying Gaza, which they haven’t done in years. It’s wishing Israelis would stop occupying Israel, by dying. College students who yell that are either idiots or anti-Semites.
“If killing an innocent life is always wrong in every situation we as Catholics must be absolute pacifist.”
The operative qualifier here is that the INTENTIONAL killing of an innocent life is always wrong. The (im)permissibility of unintentional killing of an innocent life is subject to the principle of double effect.
“Most students who are protesting Israel are not pro Hamas nor anti Semitic but pro Palestinian and anti Zionist.”
How, exactly, do you know this? Three in four Palestinians in a PCPSR survey stated that the October 7 attacks were “correct”. The same survey showed support for Hamas rising in Gaza and nearly tripling among Palestinians in the West Bank. The difference inherent in distinctions between being pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas has clearly diminished. Whether such protesting students are aware of, or even care about, such distinctions in the first place is far from clear.
Interesting comments from Deacon Peltier and Paul Rasavage.
Anglican Unscripted #833 recently discussed this issue in context of Pope Francis’ call for demasculinization of the Church.
(A side issue to Mr. Grondelski’s thesis, I believe).
Claudine Gay:
If someone calls for the genocide of the black community, does that also “depend on context” before you will say that it is wrong?”
My thoughts too, James. Imagine hanging a noose on a tree at Harvard & saying it’s only wrong depending upon the context? Anti Semitic chants & symbols of lynching send pretty obvious messages & don’t require contextualization.
Interesting books regarding this topic are:
“The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge”
“The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality”
The latter book traces start of the transformation to at least the 1870s.
Any person who identifies as a Catholic should know the answer to the question: “Which institution is infallible with regards to faith and morality?”
The answer is : the Catholic Church.
Just last week a bill which suffered no opposing witnesses in committee and that passed the Ohio House with only one dissent by a Baptist (i.e. Protestant) was introduced into the Ohio Senate.
It will purport to remove all exceptions with regards to spouses from the criminal law concerning rape. This is analogous to the legislature approving of defining “marriage” as between two males. Marriage is that which makes “THE MARITAL ACT” lawful between lawful spouses.
It would seem to me that the best definition of marriage would be a natural contract of adhesion that, if valid, authorizes a man and a woman the exclusive acquired right to each other’s body to perform the act which naturally tends towards the creation of children and to mutual support until one of the spouses is dead.
Its understanding as a contract has given evil people the rationalization to “regulate” it like any “normal” contract.
Between baptized persons marriage is a sacrament regulated by the Catholic Church.
An immoral law is an oxymoron. So is the phrase “unjust law.” Justice must be present in a law for it to BE law.
I had a chat with a lawyer from a help website. He said “I am afraid that Justice and the law are rarely related.” This statement ought to result in him losing his law license.
Imagine a math professor who “taught” that 2 plus 2 rarely equals 4. It is doubtful that he would retain his position.
If lawyers don’t believe that law must be just, then they have, hopefully materially, embraced error. It has been a dear desire of mine to sue two organizations – and the conspirators that likely control them – which likely are (largely) behind this corruption : the American Bar Association (ABA) (accredits laws schools) and the American Law Institute (ALI). However, the universal corruption makes me regard it as nothing more than a valiant gesture.
“Catholic moral tradition.”
By resigning the Ministerial Office, but retaining the Office Of The MUNUS, The “Forever” Office, Grounded In The Deposit Of Faith, that Christ Has Entrusted To His Church Through Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and The Teaching Of The Magisterium, which includes the teaching of every validly elected Pope, in communion with Christ and His One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, outside of which there is no Salvation, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), who can deny that it has become crystal clear that as “The Two Catholic Religions In The Same Church Face Off In The Raging Global Revolution”, the schismatic church, which is composed of those bishops who refuse to affirm The Sanctity of human life from the moment of conception, and the Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament Of Holy Matrimony, and thus deny The Divinity Of The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, and their schismatic relativist bishop” , are trying to subsist within The One Body Of Christ, even though they have ipso facto separated themselves from Christ and His Church. The fact that relativist notion that we no longer need to call sin sin, or evil, evil, has become prevalent in Christ’s Church is evidence enough that a Council must be called for to blasphemy The Holy Ghost, is to deny Salvational Love, God’s Gift Of Grace And Mercy.
Call for a Council, even if there is only a remnant that remains; “They will know we are Christian by our Love.”
“At the heart of Liberty Is Christ, “4For it is impossible for those who were once illuminated, have tasted also the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5Have moreover tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come…”, to not believe that Christ’s Sacrifice On The Cross will lead us to Salvation, but we must desire forgiveness for our sins, and accept Salvational Love, God’s Gift Of Grace And Mercy; believe in The Power And The Glory Of Salvation Love, and rejoice in the fact that No Greater Love Is There Than This, To Desire Salvation For One’s Beloved.
“Hail The Cross, Our Only Hope.”
“Blessed are they who are Called to The Marriage Supper Of The Lamb.”
“For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”