Well, that’s quite a headline!

My left-wing readers may have smiled at it, pleased I’ve come around, perhaps even developing a Strange New Respect for me. So let’s start this off by making sure this post makes nobody happy:

I can hardly stand my left-wing friends right now.

They want President Trump’s head on a pike—for Ukraine, for Justice Kavanaugh, for being a pillock, whatever gets an impeachment through. I sympathize! President Trump stinks! He’s leagues better than I expected, but that isn’t a high bar… and I speak as someone who agrees with a lot of Trump’s agenda.

But my left-wing friends are unable to admit, to even the tiniest degree, that Trump is the victim of a double standard. I pointed it out in my last piece, and the only response I got to that piece from anyone on the left was spin so hard a whirling dervish couldn’t keep up.

President Clinton’s perjury? “Well, that was just a blow job.” Never mind the clear-cut federal crime!

President Obama lied to the nation and abused his interpretive authority (in pretty much the same way Trump did with his “emergency powers” declaration) so that he could fork over millions of dollars in ransom money to an adversarial terrorist state. He also violated the plain text of the Constitution and stomped all over the separation of powers to satisfy—by openly tyrannical means—the policy demands of his political base. “Well, he was just doing what he thought best for the nation,” my left-wing friends reply, “His heart was in the right place!” as though good intentions (even if Obama really had them) undid one jot of the lasting damage Obama’s imperial will did to the Constitution.

How about that illegal war in Libya? “Well… but… well… Iran-Contra!” Never mind the tu quoque (which is called “whataboutism” only when the Left dislikes it), never mind the fact Reagan would’ve been impeached had his involvement been proved. Never mind that Reagan would’ve deserved it! The holy name of Saint Obama the “Scandal-Free” must be protected unsullied, so the fact that he was guilty as sin of half a dozen impeachable offenses must be explained away by whatever means are at hand.

It is one thing to say that President Trump should be impeached for obstruction of justice. It is quite another thing to say that Trump should be convicted of obstruction while simultaneously maintaining—even after all these years—that President Clinton’s impeachment for obstruction was just a partisan witch hunt. But that’s where my friends on the Left are at right now.

They’re hardly alone. I usually listen to NPR in the car, because I maintain a scrupulously left-oriented media diet. But, as of this week, I can’t do it anymore. Their blindingly intense double standard, presented as simple objective reporting, sends my blood pressure through the roof. For example, last week I was listening to 1A while they dissected the Ukraine story. They rambled about the “take care” clause for a while in discussing whether President Trump had authority to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, contending that a violation of the “take care” clause is an impeachable offense—without even acknowledging the fact that President Obama was headed to the Supreme Court for their first “take care” case in decades (the one he couldn’t escape via “standing” loophole) when Trump won the election (and mooted the case). The folks at 1A went on in this and various other veins for a while, charging Trump with various crimes without acknowledging, even with a passing dismissal, that several of the same crimes were committed by several of Trump’s predecessors.

I finally slammed the power button when the analyst offhandedly noted, “Of course, the United States Congress would never appropriate money to an adversary.” True! It wouldn’t! So that time President Obama took money from the Treasury in contravention of Congress’s clear will, lied to everyone about it, and sent it as a ransom payment to the Ayatollah? Despite that bit where the Constitution says “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law?” Straight down the memory hole.

This is true across the board. To a man, all the folks I know on the Left–including the people I really like and respect on the Left–have become the basest partisans, desperate to convince themselves that President Trump’s abuses of power are singularly deserving of impeachment while closing their eyes to the sins of their own heroes. They’ve become a thousand little Breitbarts, lying to everyone—especially themselves—with the intensity of a teenager trying to persuade his girlfriend that they won’t get pregnant if they skip the condom just this once.

When this all got started, I had hoped that impeaching and convicting President Trump might help heal the wounds of hyperpartisanship. Just as Democrats’ refusal to convict a guilty-as-sin President in 1999 drove wedges into American politics that have only gotten deeper, perhaps Republicans, if they were willing to convict, could take the first step toward pulling some of the wedges out again.

Impeachment could also, I hoped, lay the foundation for a new era of tamer, less imperial presidencies. After all, if Trump could be impeached and removed for relatively routine abuses of office, surely Democrats would be more circumspect about committing the same abuses of office next time they’re in power.

These were stupid hopes. America is long past the possibility of healing its partisan rifts through political goodwill. America is very nearly past the ability of partisans to share the same reality. The Trump impeachment process has become the latest in a line of increasingly potent scissor statements. Even I, the blue-state ex-Republican compassionate conservative who prides himself on an ability to see all sides, see my left-wing opponents as scurrilous liars and hypocrites on this one. God knows how they see it.

I’m certain of this: if we support Trump’s conviction, we will get absolutely zero credit (and no quarter) from the Left for doing so. It would not establish a new bipartisan standard for presidential misconduct. It would not bring about reconciliation in America’s cold civil war. It would not restore the slightest degree of executive restraint. The next Lois Lerner would make a clean getaway down the memory hole, just like last time. Conviction would not reverse the slow war on religion one jot. The same people screaming bloody murder over emoluments would applaud—indeed already are applauding—Beto O’Rourke’s promise to disembowel the First and Second Amendments. They don’t give a damn about the Constitution; all they want is the scalp of Donald J. Trump.

Already, we see this playing out in microcosm, thanks to Mitt Romney’s recent flirtation with a vote to convict. Romney’s choice is not being understood, on the Left, as evidence of Romney’s fundamental decency and fair-mindedness, nor to the slightest degree as evidence that maybe Romney was an earnest guy who didn’t deserve to be smeared as a racist, sexist monster when he ran against Saint Obama. Instead, it is being understood as further evidence of how bad Trump is. After all, the logic goes, if even a spineless, immoral monster like Mitt Romney is considering abandoning the President, Trump must be the devil himself! (Not that anyone on the Left believes in the devil anymore; Trump is far more hated and feared than Lucifer in progressive circles.) Of course, there is a bit of Strange New Respect, but that never lasts more than one millisecond longer than it needs to for political advantage. Just ask media darling John McCain, who was suddenly accused of “veering right” and becoming evil once his mavericky maverickness stopped being targeted at other Republicans and started getting in the way of Saint Obama’s Oval Office.

Since we cannot expect one iota of reciprocity from the Left, the case for impeaching President Trump is difficult. Impeachment is a legal process, but with a huge built-in political component. Why would a partisan official ever vote to convict a President of his own party, especially when the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” is so vague? (EDIT: Here’s a valuable history of the term and its meaning.) Traditionally, the strongest answer is fairness. You want to throw out your guy when he does crimes, so that the other side will throw out their guy when he does crimes. That isn’t going to happen here; the other side’s “standard” is that Republicans deserve impeachment and Democrats do not, and any rationalization that justifies this in particular instances is valid.

We should impeach President Trump anyway.

On the legal side, there’s a pretty decent case. Trump’s Ukraine scandal has only deepened since my last post about it. Indeed, it’s deepened significantly in the couple of days since I started writing this one! It looks more and more like President Trump’s investigation into Hunter Biden cannot be passed off, even pretextually, as an anti-corruption investigation. Instead, evidence is mounting that Trump was violating the law of the land by impounding security assistance for Ukraine… and worse, that he did it in order to extort the Ukrainian government into making damaging statements about the Bidens. It’s a very bad thing to condition aid on an investigation into a political opponent; it’s an order of magnitude worse to condition aid on that investigation being announced on CNN. (See page 12.)  I’m not sure this is “launching an unconstitutional war in Libya” bad, but it’s pretty bad. In a perfect world, we would impeach for this alone.

Meanwhile, Trump’s response to the scandal has been, itself, scandalous. Remember that time President Trump called for Rep. Adam Schiff (who is, in fairness, a massive tool) to be “questioned” and possibly charged with the capital crime of treason? (Twice?) He did that because of something Rep. Schiff said on the floor of the House. Schiff’s comments (dishonest as they were) are not only protected by the First Amendment, but also by the Speech Or Debate Clause of the Constitution. Furthermore, President Trump’s definition of “treason” diverges yugely from the Constitution’s Treason Clause. What the President called for, via an official U.S. government channel (his Twitter feed, God help us), was a flagrantly unconstitutional arrest and potentially the execution of a political opponent whose speech was doubly protected under our Constitution. It is my considered opinion that, when a President calls for the Constitution to be broken, we do not need to wait for him to actually do it to remove him from office.

The Founders would probably also take a pretty dim view of the President’s other recent tweet, wherein he misquoted Robert Jeffress in a prediction-cum-encouragement of civil war. “Fomenting revolution” is certainly protected speech for First Amendment purposes, so Trump could not be jailed for it, but it is such a disgraceful abuse of the presidential office that I’ve no doubt every Founder would agree it constitutes a “high crime and misdemeanor.”

It is no defense to say that we shouldn’t take Trump’s tweets seriously, because this is just how he is. He’s the President of the United States! We have given him truly awesome powers, and those powers come with certain responsibilities that the rest of us do not share. One of them is to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,” not openly call for it to be trampled!

On top of all that, Trump has announced a blanket refusal to turn over documents related to the investigation. This is the exact same reason a bipartisan coalition held Eric Holder in contempt of Congress… but Trump’s resistance is even more extreme. Holder should’ve been impeached. And, as Jim Geraghty reminds us, if Holder should’ve faced consequences, so should Trump.

So much the worse for him, President Trump has left himself open to impeachment on several other fronts. While I’ve been broadly supportive of his right to retain ownership over his businesses while President, the Emoluments Clause does not have a “…unless you are a billionaire” clause, and President Trump’s hinky finances and open self-dealing have reached appalling levels. The Emoluments Clause, forbidding such things, is incredibly broad.

And then there was that whole Russia thing. Of course, the Russia investigation was ludicrously overblown (by these same desperate partisans), but President Trump, through malice or ignorance, did his best to throw up obstacles to the investigation. I doubt he technically violated the federal obstruction statute, because it mostly does not apply to the president… but one big reason it doesn’t is so the House and Senate can judge for themselves what counts as presidential obstruction. It’s ludicrous to suggest the President is, uniquely among Americans, free to obstruct justice however he wants. And, while Volume I of the Mueller report (about collusion) did largely exonerate President Trump, Volume II (about obstruction) was a very bad look for the President. (It starts on page 209 here.) What we saw the President do during the Russia investigation sure feels to me like something the Founders would recognize, broadly, as obstruction of justice amounting to “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

So we have ample legal reason to impeach.

But, as I’ve argued, there’s been ample legal reason to impeach and convict plenty of recent presidents. Impeachment is both a legal and a political process–as everyone defending a scoundrel President (whether a Trump or a Clinton) will constantly remind you. The most important political reason for impeaching Trump, “holding presidents of both parties to a fair standard,” is off the table; Democrats are being wildly unfair to Trump, they were wildly unfair about the scrutiny of Obama, and, when the time comes, they will be wildly unfair about the treatment of President Ocasio-Cortez. But I think there are other sound political reasons to impeach.

First, the progressives are being base hypocrites, but conservatives don’t have to respond in kind. Indeed, there’s a lot of political value in being the party that, when the rubber hits the road, isn’t completely hypocritical. If we impeach Trump, conservatives will be able to present ourselves to the voters as the team that recognized what our guy was doing wrong and threw him out, while the progressives will forever be the movement that acquitted a perjured rapist. It’d make conservatives look good with independent voters for a long time.

Second, the conservative movement politically benefits when it is able to look itself in the mirror in the morning. Remember how we spent years taking desperate action because we said–correctly–that the government was spending way too much money and needed to cut back, even in the teeth of a recession? And then Republicans took power and… immediately started trying to spend even more money? Even though the recession was over and countercyclical policy demanded that we should cut back even more sharply? Instead, Trump and our “Tea Party” Congress broke the $4 trillion barrier for the first time. Our peacetime budget deficit is now locked on a course to break the debt record set during World War II. Until the Obama years, no peacetime budget ever approached this level of irresponsibility. And now any Republican or conservative who ever complains about big-spending Democrats, ever again, will–rightly–get openly laughed at. Conservatives betrayed their principles, on the theory that the Democrats were just as bad… and now we’ve lost not just a powerful short-term political issue, but a key policy argument with an impact that will last for decades.

Abandoning our principles about the imperial presidency would be like that, but much worse. The budget deficit, in the end, comes down to money. We can borrow, tax, cut, and perhaps even print our way out of it, albeit at tremendous cost to Millennials, Zoomers, and their children. But if Republicans ratify the Obama precedent that Presidents can pretty much do whatever the hell they want, damn the Constitution… then we will become co-authors of the Constitution’s final unraveling. I don’t think most people realize how close we already are to the brink. The Constitution in practice bears almost no resemblance to the Constitution in theory, or even to the practice of the Constitution as recently as a century ago. (No, seriously, read that Thomas H. Crown thread I just linked.)

We all act as though our system has an infinite amount of give in it, that it can tolerate excess and abuse and excess and abuse year after year, term after term, without limit… but a lot of our domestic politics right now looks like the Roman Republic in the second and first centuries B.C., as the Republic teetered toward dysfunction, civil strife, and, ultimately, the Principate. The Principate, started by Caesar Augustus, was a system in which everyone pretended that the Senate still controlled Rome, while actually allowing Augustus to rule (variously) as “consul,” “princeps senatus,” and “tribune.” The legislative branch of Roman government became essentially ornamental. Augustus went to great lengths to maintain the fiction that the Republic still existed, but, with the hindsight of history, we all recognize what he really was: the first Roman Emperor.

I’m frankly not convinced, at this point, that the American slide from Republic into Empire can be stopped. We’ve dismantled so many guardrails, both unwritten and written. But surely one of our last, best hopes is that Congress will begin to stand up to presidential abuses of power, from both parties’ presidents, using its impeachment power. While the prospects look grim from where I’m sitting–just reread the first half of this article–we won’t have a prayer if Republicans ratify the Democrats’ position that constitutional violations don’t matter if they come from your own party.

Finally, let’s zoom in on the near-term politics of the situation. There’s a presidential election next year. President Trump is pretty likely to lose it. Last time out, Trump was enormously blessed to be running against the second-least-popular person in America, Hillary Clinton. (The least popular person was President Trump, which is how he lost the popular vote.) That won’t be happening next year. Trump’s opponents are some of the most popular politicians in America.

People say, “Oh, the polls got it all wrong in 2016,” but, actually, the polls did fine. (The pundits, especially certain pundits who fancied themselves pollsters, bungled it horribly.) One year before the 2016 election, the polls were predicting a close race between Clinton and Trump, with Clinton holding a slight popular-vote edge but the electoral college a tossup. They were still predicting that on election night. They were right.

Today? Head-to-head polls show Trump losing to, uh, everyone, typically by large margins. In much-needed Minnesota, he’s losing to Biden by 12 and Warren by 11. It is certainly true that general election polls a year from the election are messy, often pretty far off from the final result. But it’s also true that these numbers are unusually bad for a president hoping to win re-election, the crosstabs reveal problems that have no obvious solutions for the President, and his approval ratings are mired in the low 40’s. They could recover (Obama’s did), but, if they don’t, Trump has very little chance at winning a presidential election.

Worse: these are Trump’s numbers in the middle of a booming economy. What happens if there’s a recession? A recession right now is pretty close to a tossup… and, as the indicators slowly flip, one by one, from green to red (which has been happening for months now), as China continues to escalate its antics and Brexit bleeds Europe’s resilience in the face of Eurozone dysfunction and a global trade war, I’m becoming more pessimistic than the consensus.

If President Trump were removed, it would give us President Mike Pence. Better: the Senate, in convicting Trump, could (and should) bar him from holding future office, thereby making it impossible for him to run again. Leave aside the fairly obvious fact that Mike Pence would be a better President than Trump (because he would do all the good things Trump does but with way less of the bad and none of the erratic insanity). Instead, notice his favorability score and compare it to Trump’s. True, Pence is not quite as popular as Joe Biden. But he’s a lot less unpopular than Donald Trump.

In a race where Republicans look set to get beat and beat pretty good, it seems like good sense, not just for the good of the country but for the good of the party, to change horses, as fast as possible. I can’t promise Pence would win, nor can I deny the impeachment dynamic introduces big risks… heck, I think there’s still a solid one-in-three chance Trump could win in 2020… but, overall, I think the odds that conservatives retain influence in the White House are considerably better with Candidate Pence than with Candidate Trump. With the next Supreme Court justice on the line, shouldn’t we do everything we can to maximize our odds… even if it means throwing the current president under the bus?

Heck, given the fact that Vice President Pence doesn’t share the President’s talent for shotgunning himself in the foot, maybe, if Pence were President, we might even get some policy through Congress before the election. How ’bout that infrastructure bill we keep hearing about?

Yes, conviction means the insufferable Bob Garfield of NPR’s On The Media and millions like him get to notch a huge win, at a discount, without a jot of introspection, and thus will learn nothing. But, given everything, I think that’s a price worth paying.

So, yeah, okay. Let’s impeach the President.

“Error has no rights.”

It’s not clear where this axiom comes from. (Some say the Inquisition. I can’t find it before Orestes Brownson, who critiqued it.)

Yet the axiom seems correct to me, and I think, at some level, most people believe it. If a child tries to walk into traffic, you don’t say, “Oh, well, that’s interesting, I don’t agree with it but I defend your right to try it.” No: you grab the child! He has erred and he needs to be corrected! And when a grown man says, “I’d like to kill your family,” the natural, normal human response is not to “answer his speech with more speech.” It’s to try to arrest, disable, or kill the man before he has a chance to do anything to your family!

Which, naturally, brings us to Nazis.

There are people in our country today who want to kill all the Jews. Or all the non-Whites. Or both. They can be found marching in the streets in some places. When they post about it online, they pretend to be “just kidding,” but you must not believe them:

The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self deprecating humor – I am a racist making fun of stereotype of racists, because I don’t take myself super-seriously. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.

-Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer style guide

This evil minority “actually does want to gas kikes.” They advocate a totalitarian state that suppresses any ideas contrary to their particular vision of their deranged “Aryan” racial ideology. Nazis have erred in an extremely dangerous way. It is imperative that they be prevented from enacting any of their horrifying agenda. And even allowing them to spread their ideas, even to privately hold these ideas, is dangerous. Why should any society protect this? Why should any Christian or humanist suffer such people to preach their hatred?

So punch ’em! That’s what a lot of people are saying these days: get violent! Attack neo-Nazis with force! You’ve probably read about the assault on prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer. You may not have seen the left-wing “blue checkmark” class openly celebrating the attack (here’s a major Obama speechwriter, for instance). You may not have seen one of America’s big-three television networks explicitly endorsing anti-Nazi violence in a direct-to-audience monologue on The Good Fight:

Is it alright to hit a Nazi unprovoked? I was always taught never to throw the first punch, never to instigate. Defend, but don’t attack. But then I saw a video of the white nationalist Richard Spencer being punched in the face during an interview. I realized Spencer was in a pressed suit, wearing a tie, being interviewed like his opinion mattered — like it should be considered part of the conversation, like neo-Nazism is just one political point of view. And then I realized there’s no better way to show some speech is not equal. Some speech requires a more visceral response. It’s like Overton’s window — that’s the term for which ideas are tolerated in public discourse. Well, Overton’s window doesn’t mean shit unless it comes with some enforcement. So yeah, this is enforcement. It’s time to punch a few Nazis.

A significant American television program, with a sizable budget, hundreds of staffers, and an estimated several hundred thousand viewers, came out and told Americans they should punch Nazis.

And, y’know, there’s something to this!

The Nazis themselves endorse terrible violence against vast numbers of people for truly absurd reasons, and they want to destroy the free-speech protections for everybody who dissents from their tyrannical aims. The threat their continued existence poses is not trivial. The last time around, Nazis took power through the ordinary political process, then promptly killed 12 million of their own people (not to mention the 50 million who died in the war they launched) and policed the rest of the population with a horrific secret-police state.

But they complain when the rest of us consider stripping their free-speech rights and performing some (relatively modest) violence against them?

If ever there was an error that earned harsh, coercive correction–even violent correction–Nazism is it.

Yet I think it is a very bad idea to go around punching Nazis. The growing support for anti-Nazi violence is cause for alarm.

Yes, I agree that, by nature, error has no rights.

But we have chosen, as a society, to give error some rights.

Consider the First Amendment. It grants all Americans a freedom of speech. Why? It’s not there to ensure citizens have the right to agree with the government and the majority. The government and the majority can already express themselves without fear of punishment, because they are the government and the majority! So the First Amendment is there to protect the speech of dissidents. Speech that opposes the government and the majority. Speech that the people in power consider erroneous.

The First Amendment also furnishes you a right to exercise your religion. Is that there to protect the popular State religion? No! It’s there to ensure that citizens are free to practice false religions. In England and Colonial America, religions like Quakerism and my own Catholicism were officially considered false and therefore gravely dangerous. They, not the Anglicans, are the real beneficiaries of the Free Exercise Clause.

The First Amendment also guarantees that you can petition the government for redress of stupid grievances, and to publish dangerous ideas and facts in the press.

We’ve given error rights. Heck, we’ve made “error has rights” the very center of system of government! We call this reverence for error “liberalism,” and it is bizarre, unnatural, and profoundly counterintuitive.

It has also been stupidly successful.

Liberalism has benefited our society in many ways, too numerous to list here. Our science, our literature, our art, our economy, our political stability, are all buttressed by liberalism, allowing our material standard of living to fly to heights undreamed of in human history. I wish to focus on just one aspect of liberalism here: the way liberalism has helped restrain ideological violence.

Throughout human history, people have slaughtered each other, even their own neighbors, by the thousands and the millions, because they believed different things. Catholics slaughtered the Cathars because they feared Cathar ideas could spread and imperil the salvation of the faithful–damnation being a fate even worse than death. Anglicans slaughtered Catholics for more or less the same reason. Communists slaughtered kulaks (and still slaughter Uyghurs): same reason. French Revolutionaries slaughtered just about everyone, including their own revolutionary heroes, for the slightest past deviation from the current party line. Even the tolerant Romans feared that people who refused to participate in pagan civic sacrifices would call down the wrath of the gods… and so they slaughtered such “atheists.” The river of history runs red with the blood of dissenters.

But not here. Not now. We don’t kill our dissenters.

Indeed, we often listen to them, because, from time to time, there’s a grain of truth in what our dissenters are saying–one we need to hear. Sometimes, our dissenters turn out to be altogether correct. Where would we be if we’d enforced our beliefs and muzzled theirs? Well, have you seen HBO’s Chernobyl? Do you remember the Mortara Affair? Have you checked out China’s new social credit system? A political system closed to radical critique does not end up good for anybody.

Even when our dissidents are completely wrong, sanctioning them would only make them stronger, thanks to the Streisand Effect. You can spend a trillion dollars on Chinese-style censorship or you can spend zero dollars and let somebody else write an effective rebuttal. This single post almost single-handedly removed Michael Anissimov and his brand of neoreaction from circulation. (He has now deleted his website and even removed its archive from the Wayback Machine, proving he was always a monster.) Counterspeech may not be natural, but it works.

Forcing bad ideas into a closet of suppressed speech, on the other hand, lends them the credibility of samizdat and makes establishment channels look like Pravda; thus, dangerous ideas are not defeated, but fester and grow. If openness means we have to put up with birthers and alternative medicine loons on Twitter? Seems like a worthwhile price to pay.

My mother, who is a college professor, told me the story of an exchange student from Liberia during the 2000 election. It’s a liberal college campus, so, naturally, after the wild events in Florida on election night (read up, kids), most everyone came to class to depressed. It was still not clear who would be elected President; I myself, at the age of 11, found the whole thing thrilling, remained glued to the screen for five weeks, and that was when I started really paying attention to politics.

But the Liberian student seemed neither glum nor excited. She seemed nervous. After class, she asked my mother when the military would be putting tanks in the streets to keep the peace. My mother, of course, was shocked by the question. The electoral college is idiosyncratic (and very good), Florida’s ballots were a mess, and there was a lot riding on the election outcome… but she knew Al Gore would have his day in court and the matter would be settled peacefully, for good or ill. My mom’s student, on the other hand, had spent her entire life in a country seized by coups, warlords, and civil war. The idea of a contentious but fair election culminating in a peaceful transfer of power to the loyal opposition was just as shocking to her.

We have an exhausting, ugly, deeply flawed Discourse in this country, full of demagoguery and online mobs and confirmation bias and outrage and plain old lies. Liberalism itself contains serious theoretical defects and practical consequences. And yet, for all that… people do not kill each other over ideas in this country. At the end of the day, that’s what liberalism has bought us. Giving error rights has given us the breathing room we need to live in peace and forge a nation E Pluribus Unum. This personal safety is so much a fixture of our national mindset that we easily forget how extraordinary it is–and how fragile.

But what does any of this have to do with Nazis? Everybody agrees Nazis are bad. Everybody agrees they don’t really deserve a right to their error. Can’t we make an exception for them? Instead of absolute liberalism, where we say, “People have a right to their errors,” couldn’t we change it to, “People have a right to their errors, except Nazis”? Then we could finally fix the Nazi problem for good, without hurting anybody else! Anyone can see the appeal.

But I promised two reasons not to punch Nazis, and here’s the first: who decides what counts as a Nazi?

It’s easy enough to say, “Yes, let’s all go punch Andrew Anglin.” He’s an avowed Nazi who, as we’ve noted, avowedly “wants to gas kikes.” Definitely a Nazi. Oughta get punched.

It’s also not too hard to want to punch Richard Spencer. Spencer personally denies that he’s a Nazi, but that’s pretty hard to believe when you read the things he says, particularly his regular, subtle, favorable invocations of Nazism. He’s totally a Nazi, just lying about it. Go punch him, too, right?

But, just this week, no less an entity than The New Yorker, the definitive American journal of letters, made an extended case that President Donald Trump is a Nazi. Uh-oh.

Trump says he isn’t a Nazi. But so does Spencer, and Spencer’s definitely a Nazi, so Trump’s denial doesn’t settle anything. We must turn to the evidence.

Does Trump want to kill all the Jews? If he does, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem was a pretty odd way of showing it. But does he want to kill a lot of Central Americans? Well… that’s under pretty intense dispute right now: there’s no question that Central American asylum-seekers are dying at ridiculous rates because of outrageous lapses in logistics and supplies. Is this because the border is overwhelmed by asylum seekers, or because President Trump wants them to suffer, even die? (Both?) If the latter, does that make him a Nazi?

I know plenty of people who say, “Yes, Trump is the same as Hitler,” without a moment’s hesitation. Now, I think that’s a pretty crazy comparison, but that’s just me. I can’t stop other people from concluding — even erroneously — that Trump = Hitler. Trust me, I’ve tried!

So now our narrow little exception to liberalism, our small allowance for errors that are so serious we should silence them with the threat of violence, has suddenly widened from “a handful of dudes on fringe Internet sites who want to gas Jews” to “fringe internet trolls… plus the current President of the United States and much of his administration.”

But we can’t stop there. We also have to deal with Trump’s supporters. If Trump is a Nazi, doesn’t that imply that his supporters are also Nazis, rank-and-file brownshirts complicit in his evil acts? Seems to follow logically. This guy on MSNBC sure thinks it does. A very dear friend of mine recently wrote on Facebook about the immigration detention camps under President Trump and noted, in conclusion, “If you… support it, you are my enemy, and I would lift a weapon against you in violence if it would do a single thing to help those people.” That presumably includes all of the 43% of the American public that currently approves of President Trump’s job performance.

It’s not just Trump, either. I’m not a Trump supporter, but I was a George W. Bush supporter, and I’m old enough to remember when Bush and all his supporters were quite routinely compared with Hitler and the brownshirts. I remember watching, of all things, a Star Trek fan film that opened with a list of great Earth dictators condemned by history: Hitler, Stalin, and George W. Bush. Labeling Republican presidents Nazis has been a hobby since Barry Goldwater ran for President, so I’m pretty sure there’s nothing special about Trump. If Marco Rubio were President, the same people would be calling him and his supporters Nazis. They always have, so why stop now?

If we all agree that it’s okay to perpetrate violence against Nazis, and if a fair number of us believe that everybody who votes for any Republican for President is a Nazi…

…uh-oh.

We poked one hole — one tiny tiny little hole — in the fabric of liberalism. All we wanted to do was make one little exception to the “right to be wrong” we’ve invented for our society. We wanted to give ourselves the ability to be intolerant of the most extreme intolerance.

Before we can even blink, we find that a big swath of us have found a way to use this to justify intolerance and violence, not toward some tiny extremist minority nobody will miss, but toward something like half the United States population! That’s not a slippery slope: it directly follows from the belief that it’s okay to punch Nazis and the surprisingly common belief that Republicans are morally equivalent to Nazis. Our “one hole” has blown half the dike!

And we’re not even done!

So far, we’ve only talked about how left-wing people might use liberalism’s hypothetical “Nazi exception” in order to legitimize ideological violence against vast swaths of the population. But, once we’ve drilled a hole in liberalism to make punching evildoers okay, do you really think the Left is the only side that’s going to start throwing as many ideological enemies into that pigeonhole as they can?

Heck no! The Right has spent generations resenting how Nazis are considered The Worst People In History but Communists (especially Stalinists) are tolerated with a wink and a nod, considered serious subjects for sympathetic academic study, and even considered a bit cool. All this despite the fact (and this is true) that Communists very likely caused more deaths with just as much grotesque horror as anything conjured in the feral pits of Adolf Hitler’s mind. John Zmirak wrote a very amusing satire of this double standard about a decade ago in Taki’s, a vile magazine that is a victim of this very double standard. If we’ve decided Nazis are so bad that they need to be fought, then surely the same goes for Communists.

Which leads to the Right starting purges of university faculties and scientific associations, getting rid of their communists and their communist sympathizers — and maybe burning a few books while they’re in the neighborhood. The Right will feel completely justified about doing this, because, after all, Communism is an extremely serious and dangerous error that kills millions of people! Such serious errors have no rights! “We can’t tolerate the intolerant!” the Breitbart columnists will agree as they toss another copy of Das Capital on the flames.

One more and I’ll let you go.

The really awful thing about Nazis is that they killed millions of innocent people in industrialized death centers, right? There’ve been plenty of unfree governments in history, but “callously butchering 12 million men, women, and children” is the thing that makes the Nazis the worst people in history, right? Even their ideas are so dangerous that we’re talking about suppressing them even before they actually do anything horrible.

Well, hi! I’m pro-life, and would you care to guess how many babies Planned Parenthood has killed? Actually killed, not just talked about it? It’s a good many more than 12 million. If it’s okay to punch Andrew Anglin because he wants to kill Jews, than Scott Roeder, who put a stop to George Tiller’s prolific career of child-murder, is a big damn hero. If anti-Nazi violence is okay because the Nazis might theoretically someday start killing racial minorities, then surely the violent destruction of every active abortion mill in America is a downright moral imperative! Right?

You think that’s a silly comparison? Well, I thought the whole “Trump is like Hitler” thing was pretty silly. But, as with the Trump is Hitler thing, millions and millions of Americans believe Planned Parenthood is Dachau. I myself am so serious about this precisely because I spent years considering the morality of anti-abortion ideological violence, and I have seen where that logic leads. Once ideological violence is normalized, what makes you think you can stop it from targeting PP?

Starting to feel a little shaky about the whole “punching Nazis” enterprise?

You should! We’ve now blown the entire dam. We began with liberalism, which says that people have a right to be wrong, even about important things, and that “error has rights.” We like liberalism because it’s given us an incredibly free and peaceful society, where ideological violence is essentially unheard of. We then tried to make an exception allowing us to enact ideological violence against one tiny and universally hated group, one which would do the same to us given half a chance. What could go wrong?

But it turns out that the boundaries of that “one tiny and universally hated group” are by no means universally agreed upon. Which means that our “one little exception” to liberalism isn’t so little after all. We end up justifying ideological violence by… pretty much anyone… against… well, pretty much everyone. In other words, we’ve blown up liberalism. Our exception has swallowed the rule. Error is once again deprived of any rights, and we’re back to killing each other like Catholics and Cathars. Of course, our culture no longer cares enough about religion to bother policing merely religious heresies; the heretics we persecute have erred about far more important things, like Halloween costumes.

It does no good to say, “Well, we’ll just have the government decide which hate speech counts as Nazi enough to be suppressed.” When the government sets up hate-speech tribunals, it inevitably does the same thing the rest of us do: it massively broadens the definition of “Nazi” to serve their interests and deplatform their enemies. In a right-wing government, you get the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In a left-wing government, it’s the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Either way, the only thing you’ve done is taken all the problems described above and added an Inquisition on top.

So that’s the first reason why we should not punch Nazis. Once you stop tolerating intolerance, society’s definition of “intolerance” rapidly broadens. We stop tolerating disagreement on any sufficiently important issue. We characterize such disagreement as “violence,” and then we respond to that “violence” with actual violence. Pretty much everybody loses. You lose, I lose, the Right loses, the Left loses, the stability of our whole society loses. You know who doesn’t lose?

The Nazis, that’s who. The Nazis want nothing more than for us to start punching them. Which brings us to Reason Number Two not to punch Nazis.

Adolf Hitler’s rise to power is a very complicated historical event. There are a lot of different narratives you can use to explain it, and most of them are true. Getting at the complete big picture takes a lot of work. But here is one true telling of the Nazi rise to power in Weimar Germany:

After World War I and the abdication of the Kaiser, a new, republican system of government formed in Germany. However, left-wing communist radicals, backed by the Soviet Union, opposed this government and violently revolted against it, attempting to impose a totalitarian Bolshevik state. After the failure of the January Revolt of 1919, left-wing paramilitary outfits continue to engage in campaigns of street violence and terror against their political opponents. The Weimar government was, on its own, too weak to suppress the communist violence. Instead, military veterans formed what were essentially street gangs called Freikorps, which answered left-wing street violence with right-wing street violence. As the violence continued to spiral throughout the 1920s, complete with a coup or two, the credibility of the moderate centrist party (the SPD) suffered. Their monopoly on violence collapsed completely. Both the communists and the anti-communists became more polarized… and more organized.

Ordinary, middle-class voters were scared of the communists, who could and did take harsh action against their “class enemies,” including the middle-class bourgeoisie. Ordinary, middle-class voters could not count on protection from the weak central government. Indeed, the head of the German communists, a violent revolutionary and honest-to-God Stalinist named Ernst Thälmann, enjoyed enough support to be considered a credible candidate for German leadership — even as Thälmann ordered his paramilitary, the “antifa” Red Front, to wage war against mainstream right-wingers and centrists for being “social fascists.” (I wasn’t joking when I said above that intolerance for fascism quickly turns into intolerance for all political opposition. This is but one example from a century full of examples.)

However, middle-class voters were not without hope. Through their organization, their numbers, and their record of accomplishments, middle-class voters knew that they could count on another force to protect them from the Communists: the Sturmabteilung, one of several spiritual successors to the disbanded Freikorps. This anti-communist organization commanded some 60,000 men, including a motorized division for rapid mustering. They had been very effective at defending right-wing speakers against communist violence, and they had inflicted quite a bit of retaliatory violence against left-wing speakers as well. And so, in large part hoping simply to protect themselves and their neighbors from the unhinged “antifa” left, enough scared German voters went to the polls in 1930 to make the SA’s leader the second-most powerful man in Germany.

That leader was Adolf Hitler. The SA was the paramilitary arm of his Nazi Party.

(The communists finished third. It is interesting to speculate whether history would have turned out better or worse had Thälmann ultimately taken power instead of Hitler.)

The Nazis came to power, then, not because liberalism was too tolerant and refused to punch Nazis. The Nazis came to power because liberalism broke down. The Nazis came to power because people started punching Nazis (and, soon enough, everybody else in the political right or center), and, as liberalism collapsed, the Nazis were the only ones who could plausibly promise to restore order and protect ordinary voters from the consequences.

Karl Popper was wrong. (And his latter-day exponents are much wronger.) Under liberalism, tolerance of other ideologies must be absolute. If their proponents commit crimes, go ahead and bring them in through ordinary due process, but the “crime” needs to be more than “this guy believes an evil ideology.” If you try to carve out exceptions where we don’t have to tolerate violent or intolerant ideologies, then liberalism destroys itself, the violent come to power, and you end up in the same place as nearly every other society in history before we invented liberalism: living under authoritarianism.

So, one reason to punch Nazis: they deserve it.

Two reasons not to: everyone ends up getting punched, and the ensuing violence only makes the Nazis stronger.

Don’t punch Nazis.

My name is Aidan Toombs, and, until last month, I was a seminarian at Pope St. John XXIII, a national seminary for late vocations near Boston, Mass. I was in my second year of Theology. But, the week before Thanksgiving, I packed up my car with all my belongings and withdrew from seminary, and formation, in the middle of the term.

Last May, I discovered that another seminarian in my class was stealing from me – using my credit card without my knowledge and electronically transferring funds out of my checking account into his credit card account.

The seminary’s response to the theft is an example of the efforts we hear of too often by Church authorities to cover up wrongdoing and focus on blaming the victim, attacking his character and credibility, rather than holding the perpetrator accountable. It’s also an example of the culture of secrecy that apparently reigns in the Church and seminaries today. And that’s why I felt it was important to submit my statement – this needs to change.

After I discovered the theft, I shared the information with my Vocation Director for his guidance as to how to proceed. On his advice, I told the Rector of the seminary what happened. When the other student learned I had told the seminary, he sent me an angry e-mail making vague threats to defame me to the Rector. I didn’t bother to respond to him – I knew I hadn’t done anything that was in any way inappropriate. In fact, I forwarded his e-mail myself to the Rector and my bishop.

I wanted to report the theft from my checking account to the police – because what he did was a crime and he needed to be held accountable. But, my bishop strongly advised that I wait for the seminary to address the issue. So I waited.

Then, just days before seminary was to start this fall, I was shocked to learn that the other student was being allowed to return to seminary. The first day back, the Rector called the student and me to a meeting with himself, the Vice Rector, and the school psychologist. No one told me why we were having the meeting (or why a psychologist needed to be there!). The psychologist questioned me at length about my past generosity to this student. I got the feeling he was looking for nefarious motives on my part, which was very odd. I had been generous with this student, but I had been (and am) generous with everybody.

The psychologist tried to push the other student to take some accountability and make some sort of apology, but he had a really hard time of it. The student was unwilling to admit to any wrongdoing. It went something like this: “Don’t you think it’s wrong to use someone’s credit card to such an extent, and without his knowledge?” “Well, I guess so. I’m sorry if there was a misunderstanding.” As to the theft from my checking account … incredibly, he simply maintained that he had no idea who had transferred the funds into his account! And the Rector and psychologist didn’t bother to challenge his ludicrous non-defense.

Then the psychologist felt compelled to share items from my psychological evaluation (which is a standard part of every student’s application to seminary, and is strictly confidential). He started by saying, “It says in your psychological evaluation that … .” Although the comments he began to share were favorable, having to do with my generous character, he had no right to share any of my evaluation with another student! I stopped him mid-sentence and reminded him that I had not given consent for the sharing of my evaluation with anyone except my diocese and the seminary administration. What this psychologist did (reading aloud from a psychological evaluation to third parties without the consent of the one evaluated) was probably illegal and certainly unethical. The whole meeting was bizarre.

By this time, I had had enough of waiting for the student to be held accountable by the seminary, and was getting the feeling that nothing would be done. I reported the theft to the police, and then gave the Rector a copy of the police report. At this point, I still naively thought the Rector, and the student’s diocese, were interested in discerning the truth. But the Rector’s only comment to me was, “Why are you giving me this?” after which he ushered me out of his office.

I was puzzled. Why wouldn’t the Rector want to know that someone had filed a criminal complaint against one of his students?! And certainly he’d want to know the contents of the police report, for the sake of the safety of his students, not to mention the people of the diocese for which the student was studying. I assumed the Rector would consider it his responsibility to thoroughly investigate any allegations of criminal behavior by his seminarians. But I was wrong.

The student was then charged with a crime by the Weston police, and a date was set for the student to appear in court. I notified the Rector that the student had been charged. And now the Rector put the pressure on. He called me in to his office and told me that the other student had said, some time ago, that I was engaging in specific sexual activity over the summer (i.e., while as a seminarian). These allegations were false, and I saw them as clearly retaliatory and related to the threatening e-mail I had received from the student last summer.

(And think about it – if I were engaging in any illicit activity last summer, and the Rector had known about it, why did it only become an issue once the student was being charged with a crime? Shouldn’t it have been an issue as soon as the Rector learned of it?!)

After dropping this bombshell on me, the Rector dismissed me from his office with the comment that I should let him know if I had any other information about this. I felt that I was now in danger of being dismissed from seminary for sexual misconduct. So I defended myself by submitting testimonials from some longtime business colleagues and old friends who attested to my character, conduct and chastity. (Imagine how embarrassing it was to ask them for this.) The Rector was not happy with the response, however. He said to me, “I didn’t ask you for this,” and, “You shouldn’t have gone public with this.” So apparently, he wanted me to give him more information … but not if it would serve as a defense against the defamatory statements.

I learned that the defamation was also shared with the faculty, because the allegations against me came up in my advising sessions. Both my Formation Advisor and my Spiritual Director at seminary expressed that they had heard the allegations in faculty meetings, and that these allegations created obstacles to my formation. I was left to wonder – who else was in these faculty meetings and heard this about me? I felt self-conscious and embarrassed.

In my next meeting with the Rector (the Vice Rector always attended these meetings as well), the Rector came down on me hard. He clearly wanted me to drop the charges. He literally said that he blamed me for the theft, because of my past generosity to the student (in other words, blaming the victim for bringing the crime upon himself); and, he questioned my credibility, saying it was possible I had completely fabricated the theft in an effort to get the student dismissed because he “had something” on me, referencing the student’s defamation.

But of course the idea that I fabricated the theft (for any reason) was preposterous … he was effectively proposing that I had stolen from myself, and reported the non-theft to the bank by signed affidavit, and abruptly closed my account (thus incurring fees, and costs in buying new checks, etc.), and disingenuously asked my Vocation Director for his opinion what I should do before reporting it to the seminary, and filed a false police report (which is itself a crime) … all as part of a grand scheme to get this guy ejected. And anyway, how could it both be true that it was my fault the student stole from me, and that the theft never happened because I had just made it up? These are mutually exclusive theories. The Rector’s “reasoning” was bereft of logic.

The Rector also said I should never have gone to law enforcement, and that by doing so I had acted in complete disobedience to my bishop and my Spiritual Director. The latter was simply not true; both men had told me they supported my going to the police to report the theft. The Rector was just making stuff up. I tried to correct him but he talked over me. He wouldn’t hear any of it.

And then the comment that was most telling – he said, angrily, “Don’t you understand that if he [the other student] admits to this, he’ll have to be dismissed?!” Now it was all clear. For whatever reason, the Rector wanted that student to remain in formation, regardless of what he had done, and regardless of what the truth was. Indeed, the Rector didn’t want to hear the student’s admission, he didn’t want to know the truth, if it would mean having to hold the student accountable.

The Rector had every reason to believe what I was telling him, and to investigate further. I had given him copies of my bank statements, the police report, e-mails, etc. But he refused to look at the evidence in front of him … and what evidence he did see, he refused to believe. He chose not to investigate allegations of criminal activity by his student, much less to report them to law enforcement.

But doesn’t the Church have a moral obligation to investigate allegations of misconduct by its men, whether priests or seminarians, and to provide to victims, as well as the parishioners and public these men serve, a complete accounting of the misconduct?

Rather than investigating the misconduct, the Rector instead chose to find reasons not to consider my (the victim’s) allegations “credible.” He used a warped version of my (the victim’s) personal life, obtained from the other student’s (the perpetrator’s) unsubstantiated defamatory comments, to discredit me, without permitting me to defend myself. This is something we hear happening again and again – instead of investigating allegations of misconduct, Church authorities attack the credibility of the victim and attack his character.

What is also troubling is that, because this is a seminary for late vocations, that other student is not just a kid out of college. He is a middle-aged man, approximately 40 years old! And here he is, a “man of the Church” in formation to become a priest, using others’ credit cards to support his lifestyle, taking money out of their checking account to pay his credit card, lying about his actions and lying about the others’ character to protect himself. He is financially irresponsible and he is dishonest. And the Rector (and the student’s diocese) knew all this.

Also troubling is that the seminary is not following the stated, “consistent” policy of the Archdiocese of Boston regarding the reporting of criminal activity to law enforcement. The statement by Cardinal Sean O’Malley on seminary review that was posted on the archdiocesan website on October 11, 2018 states: “if potential criminal activity is discovered [at any seminary in the Archdiocese of Boston], you can be assured that it will be promptly referred to law enforcement, as has been the consistent policy of the Archdiocese of Boston with any allegations of criminal issues.” Well, that sounds nice, but my allegation of criminal issues was not “promptly referred to law enforcement.” Just the opposite: I was not only chastised for referring criminal activity to law enforcement myself, but, in addition, my credibility and character were attacked, and I was pressured to drop the charges that were brought by law enforcement.

After all of this happened, it was clear to me that my life in seminary would be hell if I didn’t drop the charges. Also, as I was still a seminarian, the virtue of obedience was used to pressure me to do so. And so I dropped the charges.

I remained in continual distress, however, and could not find peace in the seminary in light of all that had happened, especially what the student had said about me. I felt that my dismissal from seminary was a constant possibility. The other student’s lies and defamation of my character had not only been given credence by the Rector, but as I mentioned, they made their way to other faculty, and also to my bishop. Thus, they damaged my credibility and my standing in the seminary, as well as my prospects in the wider Church and my advancement in the Church.

Ultimately, I felt I had no option but to leave seminary. It is a terrible waste. I really felt that I had a vocation, and it was affirmed on all sides. I had been voted the class president this year, I was a straight A student with excellent evaluations from my pastoral assignments – according to my Formation Advisor, the best he had ever seen. I could have been a good priest.

As to the Rector’s gross mishandling of the theft, the important lesson he gave that other student (who remains in formation for the priesthood at Pope St. John XXIII to this day), is that when you’re caught in wrongdoing you should just deny it, hold fast to your denial, and deflect attention from yourself with false allegations against the victim. If you do that, the Church will protect you. On the other hand, if you report misconduct, especially if you go outside the Church and to the authorities – look what happens.

I still believe in the Church, if not in the people who administer her. But I must admit that it’s difficult to participate in the Church and to practice my faith any more, and my spiritual growth has certainly come to a standstill from this.

I hope that by telling my story some good can come from this, and that perhaps some change can be effected. And I hope that this does not happen to any other seminarian.

Do you have a story, good or bad, to tell about your experience in seminary? For the good of the Church, please reach out to me. –JJH

UPDATE 28 January 2019:

Last week, I received a number of anonymous and semi-anonymous complaints about this story, alleging that Mr. Toombs had concealed, downplayed, or outright lied about important parts of this story in order to destroy the reputation of the seminarian who (allegedly) stole from him. These claims led ChurchMilitant.com (which briefly shared this piece, with Mr. Toombs’ permission) to remove it from their website. Although these claims came from no identifiable source, calumny is an extremely serious charge, so I looked into it as best I could with my concededly limited resources.

I was not able to substantiate any of the claims made against Mr. Toombs, nor were any of the critics willing to go on the record with their disputes against Mr. Toombs’ account. For his part, Mr. Toombs denied categorically all the relevant allegations against him, insisting that the criticisms I received are part and parcel of the same campaign of defamation he describes in this testament. I wish to thank him for his cooperation and candid answers over the past few days as I grilled him on a variety of topics relating to his seminary experience and his past. Since I was not able to substantiate those allegations, I will not recount them here.

Mr. Toombs also shared with me a number of documents — the police report described in this testament, various court filings, and a lengthy sworn statement signed by Mr. Toombs as part of a lawsuit.  I carefully reviewed these documents. I found the documents and this testament consistent with one another. It is my understanding that to lie in one of these statements would constitute a low-grade felony. While I am never closed to the possibility that I’ve made a mistake, at this time, I can find no reason to correct or retract Mr. Toombs’s testament.

Despite all that, I would, ordinarily, still be inclined to remove the names of all specific individuals from this piece. In this series, I am trying to get a sense for what is going on in the Church, not publicly name-and-shame individual seminarians and seminary officers, and, if facts are in dispute, there’s no need to keep their names front and center. However, there’s nothing to remove. Mr. Toombs had the same attitude in this piece, thus named no specific individuals involved. I myself did not know the name of the seminarian in question until I reviewed the police report — and, now that I know it, I plan to try very hard to forget it.

by Anonymous

Peter Stine’s testament filled in a lot of gaps for me. I knew Peter in passing back then, and I had wondered why he up and left Sacred Heart so quickly. Thanks for publishing it. My own, similar, story has been on my chest for a long while and I think now is the time to get it off. I am now a member of a corporation that will make it impossible for me to get permission to name names (even my own), but this is what happened to me:

My home diocese has high numbers of vocations and a great reputation, but it, too, had a kind of “system,” and I was pushed out of it, though maybe in a different way. The end of my seminary career came rather suddenly, although the writing had been painted on the wall for some time.

The vocations director for my diocese and his cadre of close supporters wanted extroverts with a certain knack for fundraising (like himself) as candidates for priesthood. To correct my deficiency in these areas, I was sent on a “spirituality year.” Surprise surprise, I was assigned to be the personal assistant of another diocesan priest… one who happened to be a close relative of the vocations director. I was kept busy, starting at about 3:30 am and working until 12 am the following morning. I could maybe get four hours of sleep on the weekends. Some activities were legitimate, like helping in the school and at Masses/ liturgical functions, but I’m not sure picking his drunk self up from a lake cabin on the weekends at 1 am qualifies as useful formation.

The 900 calories per day diet he put me on for 7 months wasn’t great either. I dropped 80lbs in 7 months. It was weight loss, which admittedly, was needed, but far from healthy. I would cook fancy meals for him and his guests, but was expressly forbidden from getting any myself, so as to not ” spoil my diet.”  In addition, he made me get rid of most of my belongings, including my truck, 1/2 of my guns, even my health insurance (with no diocesan back-up planned) all for “formation.” If I questioned anything, I was doubting his just authority and would be dismissed. Yet, despite everything, I did it to the best of my ability.

In the end, all it took was one vaguely worded letter of complaint that I was not a suitable candidate – from one of the vocations director’s closest friends, go figure – and I was out. I got a text from the vocations director two days before Christmas in which he indicated that all was well and that I was doing great. When he arrived, however, he had a look on his face that suggested otherwise. 9am: I was golden. 10 am: I was not good for the job and out. That was it. Merry Christmas to me, right? There was no explanation or exit strategy; the decision was made. It was nice seeing you, goodbye.

After everything, I was essentially kicked to the curb and spent the next year in a deep depression. I even went so far as considering ending it all, but didn’t want to leave a mess for my landlord. I have since bounced back, thanks be to God, and am doing quite well now. But the sudden end to it did a number on me.

Sorry that got long. Like I said, it’s been on my chest for a while. Sorry to offload.  Rant over.

While this is published anonymously, the author confirmed his own identity for me, as well as the name of the vocations director named in the story. I verified that the author was a seminarian of the diocese in question at the same time as that vocations director, and confirmed that said vocations director served alongside a close relative. The author remains a practicing Catholic.

Do you have a story, good or bad, to tell about your experience in seminary? For the good of the Church, please reach out to me. –JJH

Vere dico vobis

by Peter Stine

I am a faithful, orthodox Catholic, who only wants the best for the Church as she grapples with the latest wave of the sexual abuse crisis. Thanks to the most recent revelations, we now know this crisis spread to the seminaries decades ago and festered there for a generation. I have been in seminary recently, and many people have asked me what my experience in seminary was like. Is there still a culture of homosexuality? Is the culture of secrecy and clericalism still in place? I believe that I may be able to shed some light on these questions.

I am not a victim of the sexual attentions of any priest or prelate. However, I did witness (and experience) the abuse of clerical power.  In fact, I was drummed out of the seminary because of it.

You may say that I, therefore, have an axe to grind with the Church and so anything that I say about the current situation is tainted and should be paid no heed. I cannot pretend that I am not angry, but I shall do my best to tell you the truth, uncolored by my feelings. You will have to decide whether or not I succeed. I am going to use the actual names of the people and places involved, not because I am seeking a vendetta, but because I believe we must break the Church’s habit of cloaking serious problems in shadow and innuendo. I do not hate the Church; I love her. However, we must distinguish between the Church as infallible Divine Institution and the sinful human beings—myself included—who imperfectly serve her.

Why am I writing this now and not earlier? Part of it has to do with the fact that I believe that the hierarchy is focusing on the consequences of the abuses, rather than the environment that allowed them to flourish. They seek quick fixes when only systemic reform will help. Another reason is that to write some of this requires that I dig up parts of my past that I would rather not face, as they are extremely painful. And, yes, a lot of my hesitancy comes from the simple fear that, if I release this, I will be permanently censured and forbidden from applying to any seminary ever again. I firmly believe that priesthood is what the Lord wants for me, but I have absolutely no faith in the current, human, institutional part of the Church to act justly in this regard.

And yet…. Si Deus quoddam vult, fiet. I have avoided writing this for a very long time, but it has come back to me repeatedly. This time, when my friend James asked to tell him about my experience in seminary, I said yes. I pray that this is what the Lord wishes.

Having both qualified and discredited myself, let us proceed.

When people ask about the seminary in light of the abuse crisis, the main questions they ask are about homosexuality and clericalism. Many say that the abuse crisis was precipitated by one or the other. I believe that the truth is somewhere in the middle. There is some truth to both claims and both, to varying degrees, are currently present within the Church.

Homosexuality.

By “homosexuality,” I do not mean those who struggle with attraction to the same sex. I mean clerics who engage in homosexual intercourse or who violate Catholic teaching by promoting the homosexual lifestyle as something that is good. I did not encounter this in the seminaries that I went to. I believe others who say they have, but I personally had little exposure to it. However, since it is something so many people ask about, I will say what I have seen.

In my college seminary, St. John Vianney in St. Paul, MN, we had some talks about homosexuality, thanks to the political turmoil surrounding Minnesota’s 2012 marriage referendum, and, of course, we encountered it as an academic topic in our classes.

There were also some residual effects from a necessary course correction. A pernicious homosexual sub-culture had grown up there in the ’80s and ’90s. I wasn’t there at the time, but I heard about it and you can read about it. In the ’00s, the new regime, under Fr. Bill Baer, decided to make the men of SJV into “real men,” not the kinder, gentler, “feminized” men who were idealized when the seminary was more influenced by homosexuality. This culture shift was a very important change, and Fr. Baer and the faculty had to fight very hard for their reforms. With that said, however, there were some unfortunate consequences. There arose an idea that there was the ideal seminarian, the “Vianney man,” who exemplified all the “masculine” virtues. Every seminarian was expected to strive to perfectly emulate this mythical “Vianney man.” It got to the point where the ideal man was the “manly” man who dressed classily, smoked pipes or cigars, read and quoted Chesterton and Newman, and always had “intentional” conversations—basically, a classy, Catholic lumberjack-hipster. While I have no issues with setting ideals for everyone to work toward, the problem arises when it becomes idolized to such an extent that there is no room for variation.

This is a classic example of the “cookie-cutter” mentality, where all men who enter a program are supposed to exit being exactly the same, with the same goals, the same likes, the same views, and so forth. While there is something to be said for having a unified vision—after all, priests are all conformed to the same Person—there needs to be some flexibility built in for the extremely wide spectrum of human existence and experience. While it is true that a priest should be open to be called to minister to all men at any time, each man is born with certain skills that no other has. Those skills may be needed to reach a certain group at a certain time that others would not reach or not reach very well. To deny that is to limit the priest to skills that we deem necessary and important rather than allowing the Lord to call whomever He decides. This cookie-cutter mentality was on its way out when I was at Vianney; I like to think that I had some influence in that, as I railed against it often, but, regardless, it was starting to even out.

While others have said plenty of things against St. John Vianney, this was really the only major thing that I had issue with and I think St. John Vianney remains one of, perhaps the, best college seminary in the United States.

At my other seminary, Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, MI, there seemed to be something going on involving homosexuality, although I could not pin anything down.

An illustration: one day, there was a surprise general formation meeting, which all the theologians were required to attend, where the vice-rector, Fr. Gerard Battersby (now aux. bishop in Detroit), asked us to wear more clothing on our way to the shower, instead of just a towel, because it was a source of temptation for our brothers who had same-sex attraction. This was brought up as an “act of charity.” Which I suppose it can be, but I’m not sure that was the wisest way to approach the issue. I was entirely unaware of this situation up to this point, and I didn’t hear much more of it after this. This event was covered by some smaller Catholic news outlets, but I don’t think anything came of it.

Clericalism.

The other thing people ask me about, clericalism, is a bit harder to pin down. This, I believe, is because “clericalism” has been used as a generically negative label for things people don’t like about the Church hierarchy for so long that the meaning of the word has become a little bit muddy. I have seen three distinct species of clericalism, but only one of them seems to be at the heart of the problem.

First, there is the clericalism that assumes the priest is the ultimate authority and needs to be served by the laity. You may think this attitude is not very common outside the medieval church and (arguably) certain traditionalist Catholic communities. But this spirit sometimes manifests itself today in a belief that the priest “must” be around to lead the charge on everything in the life of his parish. In this view, the common parishioner cannot start a program or ministry without a priest being the one who champions it or comes up with the idea. I have seen this expressed by bishops, priests, and the laity, and I find it both demeaning to the laity and unreasonable for the priest—but it is not the central problem.

Second, there is the clericalism that turns all lay people into clerics. This is most common in “liberal” places where the lines between priest and lay are so blurred that you can have lay people doing many things, up to and including the Eucharistic Prayer. I don’t think this one is terribly common, at least in its extreme form.

Third, there is the clericalism that I believe poses the greatest danger: the use of clerical authority to gain some personal benefit, be that a simple lording of authority over others, telling everyone to dance to your tune or get out, or pressuring people to do what you want because you are a cleric and thus, you must have divine authority to which all must listen and obey. I have, unfortunately, experienced this directly. I suspect my experiences are a microcosm of a larger issue that pervades the Church.

I entered major seminary at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, excited and full of hope for the next four years. I had just come off of a great four years at St. John Vianney and, with the full support of Vianney and my diocese, was looking forward to the growth and learning ahead. Shortly afterward, however, things started to change. Basically, I was having difficulty adjusting to the environment at Sacred Heart. The place is built like a prison. There is a wall, security guards, and somebody was actually murdered a block over. The atmosphere among the students was not very open; it was extremely clique-ish and very difficult to break into. It was a very lonely time. That and I wasn’t really learning anything new… St. John Vianney and the University of St. Thomas’ Philosophy department did an excellent job in preparing me for Master of Divinity studies.

This may seem to you like the ordinary struggles of a new student in a new place. But after disclosing my challenges in a tearful formation meeting, I was suddenly “asked” to set up and attend counseling sessions with an outside psychologist. (As is sometimes the case in seminary, the “asking” was in the same sense, and in the same spirit, as when an Army drill sergeant “asks” you to run some laps.) Being an obedient son, I did as they instructed. But I also asked why they thought this necessary. When they declined to answer, I told them it was unreasonable not to give reasons for their requests. I think that kind of honesty is important in a truly formative relationship in part because it respects the rationality and personhood of the seminarian involved.

At the end of the year, every seminarian is given an evaluation by his formator (priest-overseer, basically) and then is interviewed by the head faculty. My formator, Fr. Stephen Burr (now vice-rector for SHMS), went over my evaluation with me a week before the interview. I had some issues with some things that he said and I pointed them out as being inaccurate. He assured me that he would edit it and that I had nothing to worry about. I found out later that not only did he not change those things, he inserted worse accusations.

Then the interview itself came around, and I was grilled with questions that had to do with my personality and whether or not they felt I could minister based on my personality “handicaps.” All the priests involved—Msgr. Todd Lajiness, Fr. Gerard Battersby, Fr. Daniel Jones, Fr. Stephen Burr, and Fr. Timothy Laboe—asked questions such as whether I knew what I didn’t know (that was Fr. Jones’ question) and whether or not I had Asperger’s syndrome (Fr. Battersby). After all of this, one of the priests (I believe, Fr. Battersby) asked if there was anyone whom I trusted. I, of course, listed some of my friends and family, but pointedly didn’t name anyone in that room as their behavior had made me extremely uncomfortable. I only mention this as there has been much talk about how the seminary needs to be a place of trust; this particular one was not. The whole exercise seemed to only be a setup for failure and there was definitely a palpable hostility in the room. I felt that I knew their decision once I left that room.

Sure enough, a few weeks later (Tuesday of Holy Week to be precise), I was called into the vice-rector’s office and informed that I would not be continuing. I asked for a reason and the vice-rector, Fr. Battersby, refused to give me one. Even when I asked what it was that they were looking for, for a description of what I lacked, or what improvement would look like, he simply said that he didn’t know. Added to that, they refused to contact the counselor whom I had been seeing for the past 6 months at their request. When I asked why they hadn’t, Fr. Battersby told me that they didn’t have a release. I told him that they simply could have asked me for it; to which he responded that I was right, they could have… and he left it at that.

So, the staff of Sacred Heart saw themselves as so fully competent in making decisions about my psychological state—a field in which none of them had a degree—that they thought it completely unnecessary to contact the professional that they put me in therapy with.

My bishop, Earl Boyea, had earlier told me that the Church needed to use and believe all the scientific tools that she had at her disposal (he used this as an excuse to postpone my entrance to seminary six years prior to this). It’s interesting how he then went along with this lack of the use of a scientific professional to get the result that he apparently wanted. Fr. Battersby also told me that their judgement was based mostly on a “gut feeling” that some faculty member had apparently had about me on my somewhat confusing arrival day. It seems that “gut feelings” are very important, as the formation priests did not seem to make any concerted effort to get to know the seminarians, unlike the priests at St. John Vianney.

I won’t drag all the sordid details out, mainly because it would take too long, but suffice it to say that no matter how many times I pointed out errors in the evaluation, inconsistencies in the reasoning, or the complete apparent lack of empathy or desire for me to improve as a person by their dogged refusal to tell me what they saw as lacking, I was ignored or told that they had heard that I had said these things to another priest. Even after I—along with my vocations director— had met with the counselor, the diocese dismissed me without any further explanation. A few months later, the vocations director, Fr. John Linden, told me that I could not re-apply because they had let me go in the way that incurred canonical censure for two years. I told him that I would wait and even attempted to show him that I was striving for self-improvement. None of this mattered, as he repeatedly told me that every conversation was the first time I had been truly honest with him. I said that I was angry and hurt that I had not been shown even a little mercy (especially as it was the year of mercy at that time), but the only response I got to that was that I needed to forgive those who had wronged me, that I needed to have mercy on them, and I needed to be a better Christian.

Later, after the two-year period had passed, I broached the subject of re-application and was told that I was “trying to jump through hoops” and was still not honest with myself or the vocations director. I was also informed that parishioners of the parish where I was currently serving had told him that I was not improving and was now a terrible candidate for the priesthood. He would not tell me who his sources were and told me that all I should do is listen. Then, he proceeded to tell me that the diocese would not have me back, insinuating a very strong “never” because I remained the problem. I did attempt to corroborate his claim of parishioners speaking ill of me; with the help of the pastor and some other trusted parishioners, I was unable to find any evidence of that occurring. In fact, the only things I uncovered were the exact opposite.

Lest you believe that I am a unique case, there are two other incidents—involving the same seminary faculty and diocesan personnel— that I will address briefly. The very next year, another young man who had moved from St. John Vianney to Sacred Heart was accused of lying about some internet usage. He showed them exactly what he had done – immediately passing by a lewd picture that had appeared as an ad – but they insisted (based on a very finicky monitoring software) that he was lying to them, so they kicked him out. He had no recourse and, despite the fact that he had never lied before (and was not lying then), they decided that he was now morally deficient and could no longer remain in the seminary.

Another man was dismissed over something that had happened in his first year of theology (he was in his third year, having done two years of philosophy before this) that he had been told wasn’t a big deal. He was even told after his second-year evaluation by Fr. Jones that he “couldn’t imagine a better evaluation.” However, after his third year, right before diaconate ordination, they brought up that one incident of anger and sent him away for a “pastoral year” at a parish. Then the pastor there (now a bishop) took a disliking to this seminarian and found a way to get this man dismissed in a way that insinuated to the entire diocese that something had been brought up that prevented him from licitly receiving orders. This meant that his dismissal followed the publishing of the diaconate ordination banns in the diocese-wide publications. After that happened, Fr. Linden again insisted (quite angrily, I might add) that the problem was not the seminary or the pastor, but the problem was the seminarian and that he should do some deep introspection to see how he had failed in the situation rather than point out the injustice of the situation. Interestingly enough, this seminarian was also asked to go for counseling and the formators, bishop, and vocations’ director once again refused to consult the counselor or ask for a release from the seminarian.

These may seem to you like mere personal disputes—trivialities in the grand scheme of the Church. And perhaps they are. Yet, as we struggle to come to grips with the abuse of clerical power for the purposes of sexual improprieties, I believe that we need to be aware that the entire institutional Church is systematically configured in a way that gives clerics absolute power and prevents them from facing any accountability for abusing it. That has consequences everywhere, both in small matters, like my struggle to live the life I believe Christ is calling me to, and in much larger ones, like the systematic abuse of thousands of children and seminarians covered up for decades by complicit priests, bishops, and cardinals. As the cliché goes: absolute power corrupts absolutely. The men who run Sacred Heart Seminary, no matter their good intentions, saw themselves as divinely appointed arbiters of God’s wisdom. They believed that anything that didn’t conform to their understanding of the Lord—even in mere matters of taste—was not only mistaken, but actually contrary to God’s Will. Because they “hear from the Holy Spirit,” they believe they have the final say on anything, even to the point where they think they can tell you what movies you should like and what kind of car you should drive. They see themselves as the good guys, so they believe it is next to impossible for there to be anything wrong with anything that they are doing. Unless they come to the realization on their own that they are human and can err, no amount of outside influence will change that view.

Ironically, these same individuals and others like them in power are those that will reference and quote people like St. Augustine, St. Ignatius of Loyola, or St. Francis of Assisi. “I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, He can work through anyone.” Yet, when it comes to trusting in the Lord that He calls whom He desires, they fall back on their own understanding of what the priesthood should be, rather than allowing for some variation. I find this terribly confusing as some of our greatest saints were those who were seen to be “outside the box” for their time. I am convinced that we have lost some very good men whom God called but who had “personality conflicts” with those in charge, and so were not just sent by the wayside and expelled… but told that it was entirely our fault. The technical term for this is “gaslighting.”

Pope Francis has been speaking along these lines recently as well, which alarms me greatly. He speaks of accusations against abusers and their protectors as works of Satan, saying that we cannot accuse anyone but ourselves. These are almost identical to the lines I heard from Fr. Linden. If we cannot accuse others because we only have the right to accuse ourselves, then there would be no justice in this world, and really no mercy, as we could not recognize that which requires either of them. Also, if one is unwilling to accuse oneself, then how does another aid that soul towards salvation? We must face our own wrongs, yes; however, helping others towards salvation is our duty through baptism. To ignore it out of a false sense of profound wretchedness is completely incongruous with what it means to be Christian. This would also remove the Church’s ability and moral imperative to chastise the sinner so that he may repent.

Does this mean that there aren’t good men in the priesthood or episcopacy—men who don’t abuse their power? No. Not all priests that I have encountered have manifested this general horridness. One priest—Fr. Joseph Krupp—one of my great friends, is a prime example of what a good priest looks like. His focus is on God’s people, he cares for them sacramentally and does not lord his authority over them. His attitude towards the parish is that it is the laity’s first; he is just a steward who is caring for it for a time. As he puts it: “This is their home, I’m just passing through.” He has others help with all of the ministries of the parish. If someone wants to start a program, they run it by him, but he does not have to be the one who invents it or put his own spin on it. When it comes to finances and other decisions, Fr. Krupp usually goes along with the decisions of the parish or financial council since he recognizes that they know more about these sorts of things than he does. There are other elements, including his very apparent love for Jesus Christ, but suffice it to say, Fr. Krupp is a pastor and a priest first and an administrator somewhere past second.

There are plenty like Fr. Krupp who are good, humble, faithful priests. So, I’m not suggesting that we need to constantly second-guess our priests’ motivations or actions, but we should be aware that priests are humans just like the rest of us who are susceptible to the same foibles. After all, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)

So, those are the problems as I see them. I won’t sugar-coat it: things are not good. That is not to say that there are not good men coming out of the seminary system, but as it stands right now, there are no structures in place to check the arbitrary use of power to remove seminarians for no apparent reason nor with the need to give a reason that is accepted by both parties involved.

What is the solution? That is a far trickier issue, but I won’t simply leave this as a condemnation without at least a suggestion of how to move forward; no one is helped by that. First, let me be clear, we don’t need more policies, policies are not the issue; people are the issue. We need bishops, cardinals, rectors, etc. who are men “above reproach” (1 Timothy 3:2) and are held accountable. Particularly that they are willing to be held accountable. So, the solution as I see it – for the leadership, at least – is to start holding each other accountable, perhaps by implementing a group of priests (not bishops) and lay Catholics who are able to ask the necessary questions when problems arise and act as some sort of system for appeal against a bishop. We can still have cases go to the Pope, as that is proper in a hierarchical system, but in the principle of subsidiarity, the local churches should try to deal with it first. In the American system, at least, there must be lay involvement as the bishops have proven themselves incapable of self-regulation.

Another thing that must be part of the solution is having our leaders spend time being pastors. They must “smell like the sheep” as Pope Francis puts it. Many bishops and faculty at seminaries (like Sacred Heart) have had no pastoral experience. Yes, they have served as associate pastors for a few years, but then they were moved on to “bigger and better” things. They believe themselves competent to teach other men how to be pastors (and judge their worthiness to do so) all the while having next to no experience in it themselves. They need that experience in order to impart the wisdom that it engenders.

As for the sexual issues… Those bishops who are guilty of those acts or complicit in their silence should make public acts of reparation and penance. Public sin requires a public penance. This was common in the early Church and should probably be brought back to aid in the “cleansing of the temple.” That must involve public apologies and concrete action. This will vary depending on the bishop and the severity of the crime. We cannot issue blanket condemnations or punishments because circumstance needs to be taken into account. But for the worst ones, I would suggest immediate resignation and retirement to a Trappist or Carthusian monastery, preferably a remote one in the mountains. This may seem extreme, but these are severe, public sins that require severe penances. The reason it needs to be a penance is that these men are not just apologizing to their victims, they are also apologizing to us, their flock, to the Church herself, their bride, and to Jesus Christ, their Lord, to whom they are conformed sacramentally and whose name and authority they have sullied by their actions. God willing, these penances will bring about true repentance and aid in the redemption of these men’s souls.

Some may clamor that we need to have mercy on these men. I agree that mercy needs to come into this situation, but as St. Thomas Aquinas said: “Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution. Justice without mercy is cruelty.” (Super Matthaeum, Cap. V, l. 2.) We need justice to be shown so that the bishops and we take the situation with the gravity it requires. That doesn’t mean that we do it impassively; we are all human and recognize that each and every one of us can fail, but sometimes, the most merciful thing to do is to punish somebody so that they can repent and reform.

There are several solutions that people are tossing about when it comes to helping priests. They include: longer assignments, having lay people – especially women – more involved in formation, living in community, more lay administration, amongst others. While I think some of these may have some merit, I would like to propose that a solution for the new priests coming up would be to have more focus on the pastoral and less on the administrative. This connects in a way with what I have been saying about clericalism. If the priest is not under the impression that he has to run everything or come in and be a CEO who is aloof from the people (especially his staff), then I think that he will function better. Most priests simply want to be with their flock, to administer the sacraments (I know that’s what attracts me to it). To trade that for finance meetings or other more mundane elements – however important they may be – is, honestly, a waste of material. The priest is ordained to serve the people of God sacramentally. So, by freeing up the priest from some of these meetings, you allow him to engage in those things that are important for the salvation of souls. It would allow for things like more times for the sacrament of reconciliation or more of an open schedule to meet with needy parishioners. This is actually what the early Church did in the book of Acts when they ordained the first deacons; their purpose was to focus on the more mundane issues so that the Apostles could focus on preaching. This doesn’t mean that the priest should cede all control to the laity, that would also be counter-productive. However, there needs to be a system of checks and balances in place. What exactly that would look like I cannot say, but there must be a way.

Regarding seminaries themselves, there are systems in place already to keep unsavory characters out of the priesthood, so I don’t think those need to change. However, I believe that there needs to be better treatment from those in authority for those who are currently studying and for those that they dismiss. I have observed (particularly in the cases that I have explicated above) that often a man is treated like a number going through a system. Not very much care is taken for the man as a person. This reflects back to the cookie-cutter mentality where men are not taken and developed to be who they are meant to be by God but are rather taken from an assumed base-line and forced to an end goal by those who “know” what the man is supposed to be. There especially needs to be better treatment for those who are dismissed. In these cases – and others – a man is dismissed with no regard for how it will affect him spiritually, emotionally, or personally. The man is often treated as a pariah for some time after his dismissal. But, we are expected to deal with it and suck it up, since, after all, we are the problem. This is potentially disastrous as this can not only ruin a man at a personal and emotional level—especially since many of these dismissals are at a personal level—but can destroy a man’s faith. I have seen this. It is a terrible thing to behold and is made that much more despicable as it is perpetrated by priests. There must be a system through which, those men who have been unjustly treated can appeal in order to have any instances of slander, libel, defamation of character, emotional or psychological trauma, but most importantly damages to faith rectified.

In conclusion, the shock that we Catholics have received over the past months has been the revelation of corruption in the very hierarchy; those whom we thought we could trust. This is a complete betrayal of the Church. But the abuse of power that is at the root of this issue goes much farther than just sexual predation. The Bishops and others in positions of authority need to give an accounting for themselves, repent, and open the seminary system so that it can be purified of this self-perpetuating system. This is especially imperative if we wish to be able to ordain larger numbers of priests as the current cohort dwindles. I leave the issue of homosexuality to those who have more experience with it than I. But as for clericalism: if there ever was a time for it to die a swift death, it is now. Regardless of the outcome, it must all be brought into the light; for as our Lord says: “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.” (Luke 12:2-3)

Fiat voluntas tua, Domine!

Peter Stine

11/30/2018

State Auditor is the single statewide office left where I’m willing to vote for candidates from either party—and, in my two auditor elections so far, I’ve done just that. I’ve voted for our current auditor of 11 years’ standing, Rebecca Otto, a Democrat. I’ve also voted, in a different election, for one of her Republican challengers.

After all, it’s not really a partisan job. The auditor’s duty is oversight, investigation, and reporting. She doesn’t set the agenda or the rules; she makes sure the letter and spirit of the law are being followed and that the taxpayer’s dollar actually goes where the taxpayers’ representatives send it.

So, when I’m looking at an Auditor candidate, I don’t ask, “So, what’s your stance on illegal immigration, gun control, and the plowing in Saint Paul?” That’s not the auditor’s job. I first ask about her qualifications. I then ask whether she’s going to run the auditor’s office fairly and impartially. (With the way the offices of Attorney General and Secretary of State have been politicized in this and other states over the years, it’s clear even the non-partisan offices are at risk and must be vigilantly protected.)

In 2018, we’re faced with an easy choice for auditor. The Republicans have nominated Pam Myhra, who is a Certified Public Accountant. The Democrats have nominated Julie Blaha, who is a math teacher.

Ms. Myhra worked in the 1980s as an international audit manager at KPMG, one of the “Big Four” global audit firms, and she recently served two terms in the state legislature. During her time in St. Paul, Myhra was a chief author on bipartisan legislation (which passed unanimously) that modestly expanded government transparency—precisely what she’d be ensuring as auditor. Ms. Blaha, for her part, has served in a variety of positions with various Minnesota unions. What experience does she have in finance? Her campaign cites her service as union treasurer and her work as a 6th-grade math teacher.

Ms. Myhra enjoys the support of Rudy Boschwitz (the notoriously moderate “Independent-Republican” senator from back in the 90s) and the political arm of the Minnesota Society of CPAs—a non-partisan organization which probably knows what it’s talking about. Ms. Blaha is endorsed by her own union and by EMILY’s List, a PAC dedicated to expanding access to abortion—although what interest an abortion-rights PAC would have in a race for a politically neutral and impartial office is not at all clear.

Except, well, even a brief glance at Ms. Blaha’s Endorsements page makes it clear she has no intention of exercising her office in a neutral and impartial way. Her supporters explicitly talk about how she intends to use the office to advance particular “values,” to be an “ally,” and to advance “social justice.” She proudly lists endorsements from several other special interest groups relating to abortion, LGBT rights, and gun violence. What Ms. Blaha means by these things may be good or bad—I’m not here to tell you how to think about the culture war—but advancing or opposing special interests (and even social justice) is emphatically not the role of the State Auditor. I’d say the same thing if I came across a state auditor candidate who vowed to be an advocate for the American flag, liberty, and the unborn while touting an endorsement from the NRA. Great, it’s a free country… but, if you want to do politics, run for a political office; don’t politicize the auditor’s.

Ms. Myhra’s website, by contrast, has only a news archive, which is full of eye-glazingly boring (even for me) blurbs about accounting controls, obscure finance court cases, and… well, audits. Her site talks about the job, and convincingly argues that she’d be good at it.

Finally, I picked up campaign lit at Blaha’s booth at the State Fair and had a nice chat with her on-duty booth person… then got a really nasty cold the following weekend. My wife didn’t get the same cold, and we were together all day, except at the political booths I visited. So it was either Julie Blaha or Doug Wardlow’s people who gave me my bad cold. Bear this in mind to the extent it deserves to be borne in mind! (i.e. not at all)

Seriously, though, folks, I’m under no illusions about the likelihood that Republicans are going to get drilled this year in Minnesota. Our state is founder and chairman of Minnesota Nice, Inc., but the GOP is in power and has embraced an element that is decidedly Not Nice. Now even the mainstream GOP will pay the piper. I’m not going to try to argue you out of that. In fact, I’m not even planning to vote to re-elect my own Republican representative to Congress, Jason Lewis. (I’ll probably write about that later.)

But, whether you’re Republican or Democrat, whether Tim Walz or Jeff Johnson is the next governor of Minnesota (and, folks, it’s gonna be Walz), I think you should vote for Pam Myhra for State Auditor. Kudos to Ms. Blaha for stepping forward as a first-time candidate—our country needs more citizens willing to run for office—but this is an office that’s about qualifications. One candidate appears to be qualified; the other far less so.

…and this apparently annoyed me enough to write an 1000-word blog post about the second-most boring elected office in Minnesota.*

P.S. The libertarian candidate is more ideologically my speed, and he has the catchiest motto in the race (“Tick Tock / Time For Dock”), but he suffers the same defects as Blaha: he’s inexperienced and ideological. The Legalize Marijuana Now Party’s candidate is nuts, as expected. So vote Myhra.

P.P.S. The state auditor’s race does not typically get a lot of coverage, so if I receive responses to this post from either campaign, I will post the response, in full, here on the blog.

*The first-most boring elected office in Minnesota, dear reader, is obviously Supervisor of the Soil & Water Conservation District, which I’m sure you hate researching even more than I do.

“Intrinsic evil,” for those who haven’t seen the phrase before, is a bit of a magic wand in voting ethics debates, especially Catholic voting ethics debates. To briefly explain:

A candidate who supports something that might cause evil (but might not) is a candidate who might, debatably, be worthy of your support. Tax plans are often used as an example of this kind of thing: people of good conscience can disagree about whether it would be best for our society if we raised taxes on the rich or cut them. People of good conscience can even disagree about really important, life-and-death matters, like whether or not a certain war is a just war.

But there are some questions which are absolutely beyond debate. If a candidate supports rounding up the Jews, putting them in slavery camps, and then gassing them, that is an intrinsic evil. It is evil not because of its causes or consequences, but in and of itself, with absolutely no room for debate. A candidate who supports this is unacceptable, and must be opposed. The only case in which a voter can ethically support a candidate who supports intrinsic evil is when all viable candidates support intrinsic evils, and the voter is thus forced to either choose the lesser of two evils or not vote at all. In that case, the voter may, in conscience, cast a vote for the candidate who seems “less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods”

(This is a bit of a simplification; a fuller treatment of Catholic voting principles can be found here.  And, honestly, while they come from the Catholic intellectual tradition, they are pretty non-controversial voting principles that are pretty applicable to all pro-life voters of good conscience.)

In practice, of course, this situation arises fairly often in American politics: the Democratic candidate nearly always supports the legalized murder of unborn children without limit, including destroying human embryos for research, resulting in nearly a million deaths per year in America alone, while the Republican candidate nearly always supports limiting the legalized murder of unborn children to just rape cases. The generic Republican position is still intrinsically evil (though we had several chances this year to finally nominate someone who is actually a decent human being for once), but, since rape cases constitute a tiny fraction of abortion cases in America, even the generic Republican candidate is clearly the least of evils, and the Catholic voter is compelled to either support the Republican, vote third-party, or not vote. (Again, I’m simplifying a bit.)

On the Democratic side, this is a pretty normal year: Hillary Clinton supports an effectively unlimited right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. One of the few true and honorable things Donald Trump has said this campaign season was his accurate description of Clinton’s support for partial-birth abortion:

If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month you can take baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby. Now, you can say that that is okay and Hillary can say that that is okay, but it’s not okay with me. Because based on what she is saying and based on where she’s going and where she’s been, you can take baby and rip the baby out of the womb. In the ninth month. On the final day. And that’s not acceptable.

Hillary Clinton also supports dramatically expanding direct taxpayer funding for abortion by repealing a forty-year old compromise called the Hyde Amendment.  And she has vowed that her Supreme Court nominees would do all in their power to defend the reckless and unconstitutional judicial decisions that have led to a national “right” to kill children. She’s proud of all this. You can read about it on her website. She is extraordinarily evil.

But Trump complicates the usual voting-ethics math enormously, because Trump has introduced brand-new intrinsic evils into our national conversation that weren’t really there before — at least, not at the presidential level.

For one, Trump claims to be pro-life, but has never renounced his support for abortion-on-demand “up to a certain point.” This is a position on abortion indistinguishable from that of Harry Reid; it is dramatically worse than anything Mitt Romney and G.W. Bush (who shamefully defended abortion in cases of rape and incest) ever even hinted at.

And, of course, his early endorsement of Marianne Barry for Supreme Court — Berry is a New Jersey judge who notoriously struck down a state ban on partial-birth abortion, and incidentally is Trump’s sister — plus his later rumblings about wanting to place the Kennedy-esque Peter Thiel on the Supreme Court in violation of his judges pledge, cast the gravest possible doubts on his judicial appointments in a time when we need every assurance on judicial appointments. This is mere doubt, not proof of support for an intrinsic evil, but enough for anyone chiefly concerned with ending legal abortion to seriously reconsider support for Trump.

For two, Trump has endorsed torture. And I don’t mean he was arguing for “enhanced interrogation” while making the argument that it isn’t really torture, as often happened during the late Bush Administration. (That’s a difficult argument, and I don’t buy it, but it’s an argument a person can make without committing to intrinsic evil.) Trump has directly endorsed “torture,” by name, said, “Torture works,” and announced plans to implement it here, which allows us to skip right past questions of whether it’s really torture — he thinks it is, he directly intends it, and it is an intrinsic evil.

For three, Trump announced plans during the primary (repeatedly) to deliberately and intentionally murder the families and children of terrorists. This is not merely a grave intrinsic moral evil — murdering children is not okay just because they’re outside the womb or they live in a different country or they’re brown — but is also a clear war crime under both U.S. and international law.

We put Nazis to death at Nuremberg for committing acts Trump openly embraces. That’s extraordinarily evil. It is imperative that he never become President.

Unfortunately, it is (perhaps) even more imperative that Trump’s principal opponent, Hillary Clinton, never become president.

Because of the grave situation in which we find ourselves, I have suggested that voters of good conscience either write in registered third-party candidate Mike Maturen (where possible), or consider “voting the slate”: vote for Republican electors, in order to block Clinton, while withholding any direct support for Trump, in hopes that he might still be barred from the White House even after an Election Day victory.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob.  This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

—G.K. Chesterton

A couple of years ago, I published a long piece for De Civitate in support of civil marriage.  The “purpose of civil marriage,” I wrote, “is to promote positive procreation, which includes bearing and raising children, insofar as possible, within their intact families, so that they become productive, responsible, adult members of society… [I]t is a wise and prudent public policy.”  I also argued against redefining civil marriage to include other loving, consensual, adult sexual relationships, on the grounds that doing so would undermine its public policy objectives while (paradoxically) opening the institution to charges of indefensible discrimination.  I concluded, “A vote to redefine civil marriage is, in the final analysis, a vote to end civil marriage.”

Having said all that, I added in a postscript: “It is not unreasonable to want to abolish civil marriage entirely, on the basis that government interference in marriage does far more harm for children and the culture than it does good.  I don’t think that’s true, but I’ve heard some good arguments (or at least starts-of-arguments) that make me suspect I could be wrong.”

In the years since I wrote that, those “starts-of-arguments” have blossomed, and I’ve come around to their position: civil marriage should cease to exist.

Admittedly, this is a little like demanding the execution of a man who is already tied to the gallows. A number of states, including my own, have indeed redefined civil marriage to embrace all conensual, adult, sexually-active couples.  There is a good chance that the Supreme Court will impose that redefinition on the rest of the country sometime in June of this year.^††  The inexorable logic of that decision is already beginning to grind up the institution of civil marriage: although marriage’s discontents are (wisely) keeping their powder (mostly) dry until the Supreme Court can confirm the redefinition of civil marriage, the Sister Wives court case moves steadily through the Courts of Appeals – destined to win a right to multiple civil marriage – and less-radical defenders of same-sex marriage have been reduced to nonsensical and self-defeating arguments as they try to explain why polygamy is “different” (N.B.: the smart ones – the real anti-marriage radicals – are just shutting up).  As I argued in 2012, once you have removed the essential procreative element from civil marriage, you have no rational basis under the Fourteenth Amendment to deny access to the institution to any adult persons, in any number or combination, whether sexually involved or not.  To attempt to do so is, ironically, unconstitutional discrimination that violates the Equal Protection clause.  One woman, three men?  A man and his sister? A convent full of nuns?  All fair game, as our courts are about to discover, hollowing out the idea of civil marriage to the point of nullifying its putative positive policy effects – indeed, altering it so radically that “civil marriage,” as hitherto understood, ceases to exist in any meaningful sense.  Justice Kennedy is on the precipice of taking this particular Ship of Theseus, sinking it, quarrying fresh limestone from a deposit on the opposite side of the world, building that stone into a two-star motel called “Jerry’s,” scribbling “Ship of Theseus” in chalk on a wall behind the third-floor ice machine, and claiming that the hotel is the very same Ship of Theseus.  Our chattering class will crown him a new Solomon for this.  Brace yourself.

On the other hand, meh.  The decay of civil marriage is nothing new.  The collapse was commenced, enthusiastically, by heterosexuals, who demeaned the institution, redefined it to make it routinely dissoluble in “no-fault” divorce, and reimagined our cultural and legal landscape to protect both deliberate sterility within civil marriage and sexual activity, even childbearing, outside it (even in adultery!).  It was hardly fair of us to sit around enjoying the early stages of the cancer that has invaded civil marrage, only to (quite suddenly) develop scruples when gays and lesbians and polyamorists said they wanted to join the sexually-liberated fun!  And so they have.  The procreative essence of civil marriage has been mortally wounded for a long time – since long before Hillary Goodridge came on the scene.

But why point fingers at all?  It’s water under the bridge, now.  Civil marriage is (depending on your jurisdiction) either not-quite-dead or quite-dead, but everyone already knew that, and it’s not why you’re reading this post.  The interesting part of my title was “(And It Deserved To Die)”.  So let’s talk about that.

Two episodes from my real life:

Two years ago – just about two months after my blog post defending the civil institution of marriage – I got married.  It was glorious.  There’s no other word for it.  My bride, resplendent, surrounded by her best friends (who had helped me orchestrate her engagement) and her loving family, joined me at the altar as, before our entire community, asking the sacramental grace of God to sanction and strengthen our union, we freely professed unbreakable, lifelong vows to love and honor each other, and to accept children into our lives.  We sang the Litany of the Saints and Panis Angelicus.  We read Scripture – “Now, Lord, you know that I take this wife of mine not for lust, but for a noble purpose!” – and, above all, we received the Holy Eucharist, that great concrete act of Christ’s love for us, of which our own marital love is only a prefigurement.  Then we threw a pretty incredible party and repaired to the St. Paul Hotel; at long last, we were prepared to physically enact the vows we had just professed before God and Man; at long last, we were united as a family, ready to do our part as the brick and mortar of human society.  (Our daughter was born 18 months later.)

Also, there was cake.  And I’m not a cake person, but even I couldn’t get enough of that cake.  Wedding cake is great.

In short, this was the most exalted day of my life, a day on which my bride and I exercised our solemn, free, and absolute right to take an unimpeded spouse of our mutual choice, and solemnly assumed all the responsibilities that accompanied those ferdful vows.

“Exalted,” however, is not the first word that comes to mind when I remember the day, one week prior, when I procured my marriage license.  This is an undignified experience by any measure: we were commanded to report to the City of Edina DMV (which handles marriage licenses), get in line for a number, explain why we’re there, get a number, sit in the shabby DMV chairs and fill out forms in triplicate (really) against the dim DMV lighting, wait for our number, and eventually spend ten minutes with a kindly bureaucrat who was very happy for us, but who also made us wait around to run Martha’s driver’s license a few times (apparently the database was having troubles).  When all was said and done, we handed over a certificate stating we’d received State-approved pre-marital education, which reduced our fee from $115 to $40.  Then we gave her the $40, and she handed over a license granting us official permission to get married.  I had expected to be proud to do my “bit” for civil marriage, but, instead, I left angry – and I didn’t understand why.

It took me some time to come to grips with that feeling, but, eventually, I think I figured it out.  It came from that old and very helpful conservative instinct which says: the State has no right to claim authority over civil institutions – even public ones – which precede it… not even when the State’s claim is rationally related to some good end. The problem with state licensure of hairdressers is not merely that it’s bad economics; even if it were good economics, it would be a tremendous infringement on the basic liberty of innocent people to start and operate innocent, harmless businesses.  The reason we all objected to the Supreme Court’s radical expansion of eminent domain in the Kelo decision is not because governments are likely to make bad choices if given the power to take private property and give it to other private developers (though they are); it’s because there is a fundamental human right to private property that pre-exists the State, and which can only be overridden for grave, fundamentally public needs.  The reason the State should not tax the Church is not merely because the Church does a lot of good for the State in the form of charitable works; it’s because the State simply has no legitimate claim on the Church, which precedes it.

So, too, with marriage: marriage existed long before the State and will continue to exist long after it, and all mankind has a right to marry, with or without a state license, with or without paying the state’s $110 marriage fee.  The state may have some say in recognizing my marriage, after the fact, but to license it?  I think not.  Because civil marriage is actively imploding under the weight of the sexual revolution, it’s difficult to see what a fantastically huge intrusion the State is making here, but consider the situation as little as twenty years ago: if you got married privately (or in the Church) without the State’s blessing, there were 16 U.S. states (including Minnesota) where you could go to jail under fornication laws.  As I will show later on, the system of marriage licensure is designed – and for most of its history has functioned – to force all citizens to submit the most important decision of their lives to the veto power of the State, whose judgment supersedes the judgment of the individuals getting married and the judgment of the Church.  Giving Gov. Mark Dayton this power, even perfunctorily, did not sit well with me.  The course of my life should be decided at the altar of God, not the Edina DMV.

There is much that is stupid in Griswold v. Connecticut – indeed, it is easily among the Top 20 Stupidest Decisions of the Supreme Court – but, like most profoundly influential things that are incredibly stupid, it is built on a kernel of truth:

We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights — older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions.

With these words, the Court ruled that the state of Connecticut lacked the power to regulate a certain aspect of marriage.  The particulars of their (otherwise silly) ruling are not relevant to this post, but, in declining to permit State intrusion on the marital union, the Court was echoing that great old Catholic conservative, Pope Leo XIII, who wrote in his encyclical Arcanum:

Marriage has God for its Author, and was from the very beginning a kind of foreshadowing of the Incarnation of His Son; and therefore there abides in it something holy and religious; not extraneous, but innate; not derived from men, but implanted by nature. …[O]ur predecessors, [therefore], affirmed not falsely nor rashly that a sacrament of marriage existed ever amongst the faithful and unbelievers. We call to witness the monuments of antiquity, as also the manners and customs of those people who, being the most civilized, had the greatest knowledge of law and equity. In the minds of all of them it was a fixed and foregone conclusion that, when marriage was thought of, it was thought of as conjoined with religion and holiness. Hence, among those, marriages were commonly celebrated with religious ceremonies, under the authority of pontiffs, and with the ministry of priests. So mighty, even in the souls ignorant of heavenly doctrine, was the force of nature, of the remembrance of their origin, and of the conscience of the human race. As, then, marriage is holy by its own power, in its own nature, and of itself, it ought not to be regulated and administered by the will of civil rulers, but by the divine authority of the Church, which alone in sacred matters professes the office of teaching.

[Moreover], through addition of the sacrament the marriages of Christians have become far the noblest of all matrimonial unions. But to decree and ordain concerning the sacrament is, by the will of Christ Himself, so much a part of the power and duty of the Church that it is plainly absurd to maintain that even the very smallest fraction of such power has been transferred to the civil ruler.

Pope Leo, it turns out, was not a fan of civil marriage.  He considers marriage a fundamentally religious institution, even among the “heathen.”   Pope Leo even takes the trouble to name and define “civil marriage” – using a definition rather similar to the one Robert George* has used in defending the institution – specifically so that the nine paragraphs of blistering invective the Pope then heaps on the idea might be more clearly understood (Arcanum 17-28).

In Pope Leo’s telling, State intrusion upon marriage is not to protect it, but to undermine it.  Marriage can protect itself fairly well, because it is a natural institution, supported by even the pagan religions, and ultimately redeemed and elevated by Jesus Christ.  The State has no legitimate role in defining marriage, despite its avowedly major impact on public welfare (Arcanum 26).  Throughout antiquity, whenever the State tried to assert even limited control over marriage, it caused corruption and harm, says the Pope:

All nations seem, more or less, to have forgotten the true notion and origin of marriage; and thus everywhere laws were enacted with reference to marriage, prompted to all appearance by State reasons, but not such as nature required. Solemn rites, invented at will of the law-givers, brought about that women should, as might be, bear either the honorable name of wife or the disgraceful name of concubine; and things came to such a pitch that permission to marry, or the refusal of the permission, depended on the will of the heads of the State, whose laws were greatly against equity or even to the highest degree unjust. Moreover, plurality of wives and husbands, as well as divorce, caused the nuptial bond to be relaxed exceedingly. Hence, too, sprang up the greatest confusion as to the mutual rights and duties of husbands and wives, inasmuch as a man assumed right of dominion over his wife, ordering her to go about her business, often without any just cause; while he was himself at liberty “to run headlong with impunity into lust, unbridled and unrestrained, in houses of ill-fame and amongst his female slaves, as if the dignity of the persons sinned with, and not the will of the sinner, made the guilt.” When the licentiousness of a husband thus showed itself, nothing could be more piteous than the wife, sunk so low as to be all but reckoned as a means for the gratification of passion, or for the production of offspring. Without any feeling of shame, marriageable girls were bought and sold, tike so much merchandise, and power was sometimes given to the father and to the husband to inflict capital punishment on the wife. Of necessity, the offspring of such marriages as these were either reckoned among the stock in trade of the common-wealth or held to be the property of the father of the family; and the law permitted him to make and unmake the marriages of his children at his mere will, and even to exercise against them the monstrous power of life and death. (Arcanum 7)

I myself have argued that, while the Church maintains final authority over the sacrament of marriage, the State must have authority over the contract of marriage, so as to ensure that children are raised in a healthy environment.  Pope Leo disagrees:

Let no one, then, be deceived by the distinction which some civil jurists have so strongly insisted upon – the distinction, namely, by virtue of which they sever the matrimonial contract from the sacrament, with intent to hand over the contract to the power and will of the rulers of the State, while reserving questions concerning the sacrament [to] the Church. A distinction, or rather severance, of this kind cannot be approved; for certain it is that in Christian marriage the contract is inseparable from the sacrament, and that, for this reason, the contract cannot be true and legitimate without being a sacrament as well. For Christ our Lord added to marriage the dignity of a sacrament; but marriage is the contract itself, whenever that contract is lawfully concluded. (Arcanum 23)

I first encountered Pope Leo’s encyclical in May of 2012, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it at the time.  I tried to reconcile it with my own position in support of civil marriage, but it posed considerable difficulties.  Some of what he said could be explained away as a defense of the prerogatives of the Church with respect to the baptized only… but much could only be seen as a direct attack on an institution I had dedicated quite a bit of time to defending. This caused me to doubt^† my position, and contributed to my growing sympathy for those who would abolish civil marriage.  But it wasn’t until I walked into the license bureau, begging, under penalty of law, for the State of Minnesota to please let me marry my girlfriend, with a stack of $10 bills to ensure the State smiled on my humble request, that Pope Leo’s words finally clicked with me.

So, within a few weeks of my wedding, I had developed reservations about the whole “civil marriage” enterprise.  But I still had grave concerns about the alternative: in a world without civil marriage, how do we ensure that children are raised by both their parents?  How could we contemplate removing one of the few legal incentives to responsible procreation in a society where procreation is plunging and irresponsibility skyrocketing?  What about all those arguments I laid out last time?  Besides, the astute reader will note that my feelings, however strong, were mostly just feelings: to this point, the only actual arguments I’ve made are by analogy and authority, which is the weakest kind of proof, as the Angelic Doctor says.

A few months after my sacramental wedding, I attended my very first civil wedding.  A distant cousin was tying the knot with her live-in boyfriend of several years. Here, again, I would have a chance to see the State’s noble administration of marriage in action.  Here, I would be reassured of my own argument that civil marriage is the keystone of secular society – despite Pope Leo’s condemnation!

It was not to be.  Quite the contrary: the civil marriage ceremony was, without exception or even serious competition, the most depressing ritual I have ever witnessed.  (And I’ve been to an atheist’s funeral!)  No part of it was particularly surprising – anyone with a Pinterest account or a TLC subscription will recognize the basic tropes of the outdoor civil wedding.  We had the mason jars.  We had the outdoor gazebo in the public park.  We had the generic State-appointed “minister” (what exactly is he ministering?), smiling big and saying nothing for a minute or two in a parody of a homily.  We had the cut-rate poetry readings (it’s been a while, but I’m fairly sure we even had “The Prophet” by Khalil Gibran), speaking of “love” in terms without content, challenge, or any thought of the  fruits of specifically sexual love.  Indeed, there was no hint of sexuality in the entire proceedings, other than the kiss at the end.  You don’t think of Catholic wedding Masses as “intensely sexual” until you attend a typical civil wedding.  It was as though marriage were just a party you threw to celebrate the fact that you found a good friend – a friend you’ve already been living with for a long while, and whom you may or may not choose to leave in the future.  (Permanence was also not a prominent subject.)

The readings were followed by “vows” written by the betrothed, which really ought to have been called “tributes” (maybe “eulogies” if you wanna get Greek), because I don’t recall any actual vowing in them.  There was, however, an awful lot of Gibran-style poetic rambling (only less skillful) and a few awkward attempts at humor.  No doubt desperate to inject some kind of meaning into what was supposed to be a “special day”, the bride and groom found a couple of unique things to do.  They did a “blending of the sands” ceremony, which was my favorite part of the wedding, both because I’d never heard of it before and because it was the only part of the ceremony that seemed to wink at the idea of “the two shall become one flesh.” Unfortunately, they prefaced it by playing the voiceover from Days of Our Lives, which was… well, it was unique, I guess.  The other “unique” thing they did was, at the end of the ceremony, (which lasted a total of 11 minutes), rather than processing out, the entire wedding party rose and did the Harlem Shake.

This, friends, is what we advocates for civil marriage have devoted decades of effort, millions of words, and tens of millions of dollars, to defending, preserving, even extending.

I bear no ill will toward the couple: this is the culture they were raised in.  This is what they understand marriage to be.  They did the very best they could with what they had, and my only feeling is sadness that they have been deprived of a deeper understanding of marriage.  When you are vowing neither faithfulness nor fruitfulness nor anything in particular except to maybe put up with your spouse’s preference for putting the toilet seat up or down, what else is left to you but the Harlem Shake?  They were a very nice couple, gracious hosts, and the wedding cupcakes were excellent.  (Really.  Top-flight.)

But we, the people on the Robert P. George side of the fence, ought to be asking ourselves: what went wrong? Civil marriage (as popularly practiced in the modern United States) bears about as much resemblance to a natural marriage (as popularly practiced among, say, common people at the height of Ancient Jewish civilization) as a Black Mass bears to a Catholic Mass.  Of course, natural marriage itself is but a shadow of sacramental marriage (Arcanum 9, 39), but this government-thing-we-call-marriage isn’t even that.  The most favorable construction you can give to civil marriage is that it’s a parody of marriage proper.  How did we miss this?  I shared my experience with a friend, who was skeptical of my shifting opinion on marriage… until the day he went to a civil wedding, which is when he texted me, “Yeah, it may be time to repeal all this.”  I have wondered ever since: how many of civil marriage’s most prominent and valued defenders (who happen to be almost unanimously Catholic)  have actually been to a civil ceremony before?

In the balance of this article, I would like to suggest that what went wrong with civil marriage is that we invented it.

Yes, invented it.

The history of marriage is a very complicated thing, full of changes and contradictions.  Just about the only thing that every culture has in common is their absolute certainty that the way they understand and practice marriage is the only way it has ever been understood, ever will be understood, or ever could be – a certainty that is absolutely incompatible with every other culture’s equal but opposite certainty about their understanding of marriage.  The more you read about it, the less you’re able to hold onto simple narratives about the civilizational meaning of marriage, which makes plenty of modern conservatives and progressives alike (the kings of “simple narratives”) look very ridiculous.

Even Pope Leo gets it wrong when he argues (Arcanum 19) that marriage has always been “conjoined with religion and holiness” among the “most civilized” examples of antiquity.  Consider marriage at the height of the Roman Republic: the vast majority of marriages were conducted sine manu – wholly private agreements between spouses.  To the extent that public marriage existed, the vast majority were coemptio marriages, which involved not a priest but an accountant (a public “scales-holder” who certified the notional “sale” of the bride to the groom).  Rarest of all was conferratio, the public religious marriage ceremony that created indissoluble marriage… rare largely because the god Jupiter did not consider someone worthy of confarreatio unless they were an aristocrat, and also born to parents who were likewise married under confarreatio.  Quite a lot of ancient marriage (sine manu included) involved the bare minimum required by natural law: mutual consent, expressed in some form, to enact a lasting sexual relationship, involving at least one man and one woman, directed toward the bearing and rearing of children.  And, where it was more complicated, it was rarely to marriage’s benefit: Leo has already recounted for us the many perversions of marriage that have arisen throughout history – often with State support, sometimes not – leading to all sorts of bizarre, exploitative, and unnatural notions about marriage that infected whole epochs of human culture.  Practically any ridiculous thing you can imagine about marriage has been fiercely believed by at least one civilization at some point in human history.

That includes us.  Our civilization’s contribution to the history of marital error is the idea of government control over marriage.  In the ancient world, the State recognized marriages, like any other contract.  Occasionally, the State would even interfere (usually unjustly) with particular marriage contracts that it didn’t like, like those between slaves and freemen.  But the State did not think that it owned or defined marriage, and did not presume to administer it.  Depending on your time and place, marriage might be under the authority of your Church, or it might be under your own private authority, but it was never a tool of the State.

In the Christian Era, marriage throughout the West was explicitly handed over to the ecclesial power for administration and regulation.  For over a thousand years, marriage was handled by churches, and the secular power’s job was to enforce the acts and proceedings of recognized churches.  Jewish?  The existence and validity of your marriage (or its dissolution) were for your religious courts to work out according to the terms of your religious kettubah.  Muslim but stuck living in Christian Sicily?  See your qādī.  The Christian story of marriage jurisdiction is a little more complicated, because the Church and the secular power were so deeply entwined with each other throughout most of the period, but the ultimate authority of the Church over marital regulation, administration, and dissolution was not seriously questioned, even after the Reformation.  The great Blackstone was still reporting on the authority of canon law over marriage in the 1760s, two hundred years after the King and Parliament became heads of the English Church.

Blackstone also reported – one can’t help noticing – that Christian marriage was indissoluble, except by an explicit act of Parliament (the top religious authority of the Anglican Church).⁺  Jews could divorce, following the kettubah and Mosaic Law, as mediated by rabbinical courts, but Quakers, following a strict interpretation of Matthew 19:9, considered marriage even more indissoluble than the Anglicans.  The State had no say in this, because marriage was not an institution of the State.  Marriage was, first and finally, an institution of private, religious, and common life, contracted between the bride and groom and sealed by the blessing of whatever God they worshiped (as long as worship of their God was legal to begin with, that is).  It’s worth asking ourselves, for a moment, how people of this time understood their marriages under this radically different – and ancient – legal regime.

For an Anglican Englishman of 1765, the experience of a wedding likely resembled my own: an exalted, chiefly religious, adventure.  The vows of marriage – which brides and grooms did not write for themselves – were spoken before the whole community, and they bound each partner to a special form of love, a self-commitment that would be free, faithful, fruitful (and by “fruitful” I mean “sexy” and by “sexy” I mean “baby-making”), and forever.**  (One might almost call it a “self-gift,” but that terminology wouldn’t be developed until the 20^th century.)  These terms were understood by even the simplest of citizens, they were expressed in and intimately tied to sexual intercourse (which was forbidden prior to marriage), and the details of their marriage contract were between themselves and (thanks to the Marriage Act 1753) their Church – but never the State.  The marriage could be for politics or property or love, but, whatever the motivation for marriage, what marriage is was clear.  For the English of 1765, even among those who married for love (which was most of them; the love match was already dominant in England by this time), the definition of marriage looked an awful lot like Robert P. George’s “conjugal view”.

The State had one job in all this, and one job only, which it performed with its usual muddling competence: the State enforced the terms of the contract. When one or both spouses violated the contract, it stepped in to adjudicate, like any other contract.  That’s all.  The State did not define the contract, its powers to regulate or authorize the contract were severely limited and incidental to its entanglement with the established Church, and it sure as hell didn’t administer the contract.  Even the Marriage Act 1753, which merely stated that the State would not recognize a marriage contract without banns, was a very bold step for the time, and Parliament had neither the authority nor the appetite for more.  The contract was defined and administered by the various churches, which each (in turn) acted according to their best understanding of natural law (which was, for the Anglicans, at least, really quite good).

Then, one fine summer’s day, the French Revolution broke out of the Bastille like herpes.  Now, the French Revolution was fantastically evil for a wide variety of reasons, but I just want to deal with its invention of civil marriage.

You see, the sans-culottes and their thought-leaders really disliked the Catholic Church.  Some of their reasons were good, though a lot of it was just bigotry and hatred fueled by left-wing atheistic ideology (recall that the French Revolution saw both the genesis and the high-water mark of much of the modern Left).  The Church was very well-established in France and, whatever the reasons, the revolutionaries really wanted to take away its power and privileges.  In 1790, having seized control of the country,they passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which effectively abolished Catholicism, by subjecting priests, bishops,  and doctrine to the control of the State.  Those who refused became criminals, and many were put to death – or simply murdered by the progressive mob.

Finally, on 20 September 1792,^‡ the Legislative Assembly stripped the Church of all its authority regarding marriage.  For the contract to be recognized by the State, it would henceforth have to be executed before secular representatives of the State, according to State policies and procedures, in a State-sanctioned “ceremony,” and under the absolute authority of the State both before and for the duration of the marriage.  Throughout history, the State had, on and off, interfered with marriage, but now the French Revolutionaries launched a wholesale government takeover of the entire institution.  “Civil marriage” was born.

This was not simply a matter of civil housekeeping, nor of mere disestablishment.  As Suzanne Desan shows in her highly-regarded work, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France, the revolutionaries’ takeover of marriage was explicitly ideological:

[B]etween February and September 1792, as republican sentiment, patriotic fervor, and anticlericalism all grew stronger, certain legislators gradually envisioned an increasingly central role for marriage in the constitution of citizenship. In their recurrent debates over the état civil…  redefin[ing] marriage solely as a civil contract under the aegis of the state stirred up endless controversy… In the eyes of proponents, [“]regenerated[”] marriage would become the natural, social, legal, and moral bond that tied the individual citizen to society and to the patrie… The state was now to become the sole guarantor of the legal status of the citizen. […]

“Marriage belongs to the political order,” asserted Muraire. Tellingly, he spoke of the nuptial act as that “interesting moment when, recognizing that his duties toward society are not limited to personal devotion, [the citizen] engages in a contract to reproduce himself.”  […]

By the summer of 1792, Gohier proposed that marriage and all other civil acts, such as birth, death, and inscription into the national guard, be celebrated on a newly constructed Altar of the Patrie… Since spouses should remember that they belonged to the patrie even before they belonged to each other, the civil marriage vow would be sealed with the exultant cry of “Live free or die!” […]

In this same vein, knitting marriage ever closer to patriotism, the deputy Jean-Baptiste Jollivet proposed that loyalty to the nation be part of the legal definition of marriage: it would be a freely chosen contract in which couples pledged “to live together and to raise their children with love of the patrie and respect for its laws” Within its very definition, marriage now implied a political as well as a personal commitment. (Desan 54-58)

The French Revolution took marriage into the State in order to sever the citizen’s ties to the Church and to civil society, binding him closer to the State by converting the most important private relationship in his life into a political communion with the State.  This is civil marriage: not a rational exercise of State power to encourage mothers and fathers to participate in raising their own children, but a nightmare straight out of the Life of Julia.  On 20 September 1792, the Revolutionary French Republic took marriage out of the Churches, lifted it away from common civil life, and set it on a new path leading directly to the Edina DMV.

Not coincidentally, 20 September 1792 was also the day France legalized no-fault divorce.  From the moment the State commenced its usurpation of marriage, it was less than six hours until they fundamentally redefined it from an indissoluble contract to one that could be dissolved at will – the first of many redefinitions marriage would undergo once it became the State’s plaything.  Pope Leo was not surprised.  After all, how could anyone expect people to stay married their whole lives when marriage no longer confers the transformative grace of God, but merely the polite smile of the State?  The French catastrophe loomed large in the background of this section of Arcanum:

When the Christian religion is reflected and repudiated, marriage sinks of necessity into the slavery of man’s vicious nature and vile passions, and finds but little protection in the help of natural goodness. A very torrent of evil has flowed from this source, not only into private families, but also into States. For, the salutary fear of God being removed, and there being no longer that refreshment in toil which is nowhere more abounding than in the Christian religion, it very often happens, as indeed is natural, that the mutual services and duties of marriage seem almost unbearable; and thus very many yearn for the loosening of the tie which they believe to be woven by human law and of their own will, whenever incompatibility of temper, or quarrels, or the violation of the marriage vow, or mutual consent, or other reasons induce them to think that it would be well to be set free. Then, if they are hindered by law from carrying out this shameless desire, they contend that the laws are iniquitous, inhuman, and at variance with the rights of free citizens; adding that every effort should be made to repeal such enactments, and to introduce a more humane code sanctioning divorce.

Now, however much the legislators of these our days may wish to guard themselves against the impiety of men such as we have been speaking of, they are unable to do so, seeing that they profess to hold and defend the very same principles of jurisprudence; and hence they have to go with times, and render divorce easily obtainable. …

Truly, it is hardly possible to describe how great are the evils that flow from divorce. Matrimonial contracts are by it made variable; mutual kindness is weakened; deplorable inducements to unfaithfulness are supplied; harm is done to the education and training of children; occasion is afforded for the breaking up of homes; the seeds of dissension are sown among families; the dignity of womanhood is lessened and brought low, and women run the risk of being deserted after having ministered to the pleasures of men. Since, then, nothing has such power to lay waste families and destroy the mainstay of kingdoms as the corruption of morals, it is easily seen that divorces are in the highest degree hostile to the prosperity of families and States, springing as they do from the depraved morals of the people, and, as experience shows us, opening out a way to every kind of evil-doing in public and in private life. (27-29)

Pope Leo, being Pope Leo, goes on for another five or six paragraphs berating divorce, everyone who advocates for divorce, and everyone who advocates for civil marriage, which leads to divorce.  I’ll spare you the block quotes – he’s made his point.

But nobody listened.

After Napoleon spread the new French civil code to the rest of Europe, marriage never recovered.  England, though never conquered by Napoleon, adopted a similar attitude toward marriage a few decades later, as the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 seized power over marriage for the State and (shock!) simultaneously legalized divorce (under certain, blatantly misogynistic, circumstances).  Where colonialism did not impose State marriage, communism did, and, even as Pope Leo counseled steadfastness, the whole world eventually fell under civil marriage’s sway.  The United States, already noted in Blackstone as something of a divorce hotbed, started getting into the marriage business in a big way after the Civil War, in order to regulate pensions (and Mormons).

That, not entirely coincidentally, is when the federal government began tracking divorce statistics.  The following table represents the number of divorces per 1,000 married women, by year.  There is no word for this data other than “grim”:

SOURCES: source 1 – table 3, source 2 – table 117, source 3; figures for 1870 and 1880 are imputed from tables 1 and 3 here

There is a conservative trope – so much a trope now that even conservatives shy away from it – that marriage collapsed in the 1960s, and was peachy-keen when Leave it to Beaver was on the air, before Griswold v. Connecticut and the advent of no-fault divorce.  This is not true.  The divorce rate today is about twice what it was fifty years ago (in 1960), yes.  But the divorce rate fifty years ago (in 1960) was about twice what it was fifty years before that (1910) – and that’s still more than twice as high as the divorce rate forty years earlier (1870), when it was already so high that Pope Leo was panicking about the dissolution of the family!  The Sexual Revolution was fuel on the fire, yes, but marriages have been steadily burning up in this country, faster and faster, ever since the Civil War – that is, since the government takeover of marriage.

Pope Leo, writing in 1880, could imagine only one practical social evil arising from civil marriage: divorce.  He predicted that it would grow and grow in just this way (“The Romans of old are said to have shrunk with horror from the first example of divorce, but ere long all sense of decency was blunted in their soul; the meager restraint of passion died out, and the marriage vow was so often broken that what some writers have affirmed would seem to be true — namely, women used to reckon years not by the change of consuls, but of their husbands.”), but it was the only evil he could see on the horizon.

Our imaginations are not so limited.  We have corrupted marriage beyond the wildest nightmares of Pope Leo.  We have converted for-cause divorce into no-fault divorce.  We have, for the first time in the Christian Era, given social and legal sanction to contraception (which led to another host of social evils, which were in turn predicted by Pope Paul VI).  We have developed artificial insemination – the creation of children with no reference to the nuptial act at all.  We have started pretending, on legal birth certificates, that parents aren’t even parents (and non-parents are).  We have consigned two generations to a culture of hooking-up and internet pornography.  Our illegitimacy rate – which strongly correlates to future outcomes for children – is simply jaw-dropping, even to a jaded Millennial like me.  Cohabitation is now the norm – and not cohabitation before marriage.  Just plain cohabitation, with a beginning and an end and never a vow spoken.  There’s time for that now, because young people are delaying marriage to the edge of historic norms.  And when you factor out the educated class that knows how to get married and stay married, everything looks two or three times worse.  Barely half of the least-educated class is raised by both mother and father, while the number of intact two-parent households only continues to fall.^§

And should this litany really surprise us?

Civil marriage made people start thinking of marriage as something the government does.  This is evident in all the recent same-sex marriage litigation, where it is now taken for granted that being unable to get a civil marriage is equivalent to an “inability to marry” and that that very deprivation inflicts “severe humiliation, emotional distress, pain, suffering, psychological harm, and stigma” on those so deprived.

But the idea of marriage-as-government-function has penetrated a lot deeper than litigation.  The idea that marriage is just a “piece of paper” is everywhere, and, from what I’ve seen of civil weddings, they’re not wrong: practically and spiritually speaking, civil marriage is a coupon you wave so you can fill out a joint tax return and feel good about the State’s approval of your relationship.  Conservatives fighting back against the “piece of paper” meme, unfortunately, often confirm the very thing they are refuting; instead of arguing that marriage precedes the State, many of them merely argue that it the State’s approval of your relationship really matters and that you need to get that joint tax return.  Even our leading lights – heck, even I – while avoiding the obvious forms of this trap, have offered a vision of marriage that is something like: “Get married, because it will provide optimal social outcomes for you, the State, and the children you aren’t planning to have!” Progressives took the exalted, transcendant vow of marriage and flattened it into a government program.  Conservatives have responded by arguing that it’s a really good government program, which most everyone should sign up for.

Even if this is true ^¶: still! How drab, how empty!  This is a vision of marriage worthy of the Edina DMV, and every bit as inspiring.  When marriage was about something real, something dramatic, something human – the fires of Hell, the honor of the family, a solemn duty to a vulnerable party, or any of the hundreds of other things it has meant throughout human history – people wanted to be a part of it.  People would die for it.  But the vampiric State has drained those meanings from its parody of marriage, and that leaves very little. Deep down, nobody gives one slice of government cheese whether the State approves of their sex life.  No one is going to martyr themselves for the “married filing jointly” checkbox on the 1040EZ.  A dozen reality TV shows portray a wedding as a big, expensive party, a “day about me,” and that’s about it.  (As usual, reality TV tells us more about ourselves than we care to admit.)  If that’s all marriage is, why are we surprised that people don’t care as much about “making it legal”?  Mere patriotism and tradition and rational self-interest were not enough to keep Pope Leo’s “Romans of old” from abandoning the nuptial institution in droves; why should we expect our citizens to do better?  How are we surprised that the poor don’t wed when their whole understanding of wedding centers around a party they could never afford to throw?

This is, admittedly, one of those narrative-cultural arguments that drive progs crazy, because they involve thinking about human beings as something more than animals whose every action can be predicted by Social Science, Big Data, and Maslow’s Hierarchy… but these arguments have an unsettling track record of being right (the link covers two important examples; for more, see Arcanum and Humanae Vitae).

But this is not the only way civil marriage has promoted social injustice and contributed to its own disintegration.  Civil marriage does not merely obscure the natural meaning of marriage for those who do not know it: it makes it impossible for those who do know the natural meaning of marriage to live it.

Consider two Catholics who marry, observing the prescribed canonical form like good papists.  At the altar, they profess a lifelong vow to love one another as husband and wife, both when it is a joy and when it is a cross.  If this were regular law, their mutual promise would constitute a verbal contract, and it could only be undone by annulling the promise on some grounds like duress.

But civil marriage is not regular law.  There are typically not just one or two, but literally hundreds of witnesses to this contract.  The participants must get pre-approval from the State to make the contract – at modest expense (though it is worth pointing out that the license fee is a highly regressive tax) – and are often given incentives to undergo specific training for understanding and embracing this contract.  In many jurisdictions, the participants must undergo a blood test and physical medical examination prior to making the contract, to ensure the mutual fitness of the parties.  A waiting period is almost universally required, again to ensure that the contract is entered into freely and fitly.  A paper record of the contract is made immediately after, and it is immediately filed with the civil registrar.  The actual vows – the contract itself – are now usually filmed, and the terms, for their part, are about as broad as they are plain: mutual, exclusive love and support that is free, faithful, fruitful, and forever – a big ask, but hardly “unconscionable” by the standards of the Second Restatement, especially given that this particular contract has been in regular use since before humans were literate.  If this were regular law, a Catholic marriage would be about the rock-solidest contract in the world.

But civil marriage is not regular law.  On the one hand, the State does far more than it usually does to ensure that those entering into it are free, capable, and fully understand what they are doing, putting up all sorts of barriers (putatively) to screen out those who don’t, and even prosecuting those who enter it fraudulently.

Then, having built a moat, earthworks, and an electric fence around the contractural sanctity of marriage… the State absolutely refuses to enforce the contract, or any of the terms.  As David French put it, the State considers this expensive, laborious, ironclad contract “less binding than a refrigerator warranty.”  The State ignores even the most egregious breaches of the contract – only a handful of states punish adultery, those laws haven’t even been enforced in decades, and they are likely unconstitional under the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas ruling.

And the State openly flouts the terms.  If a married Catholic man decides he wants to abandon his wife and infant son so he can run off with his college-aged ex-student, he can go to the Church and ask for the dissolution of his marriage.  The Church will point out that he vowed to stay and care for his family for the rest of his natural life, and, if he doesn’t want to do that anymore, nuts to him, because Jesus said so and this husband agreed.  Unless something was really wrong at the start of the marriage, nullifying the contract, the contract binds.  This husband then can go to the State and make the same request for release from marriage.  The State will say, “Sure!  You want out of that solemn contract, you get out of that contract,” because that’s the law right now.  Guess which authority the court obeys?   And which one the culture listens to?  (The State’s megaphone is so powerful here that the Catholic Church now risks schism over the authority of an institution – civil marriage – that should not even exist.)

Under these circumstances, the very best the wronged wife can do to protect her family and her uxorial rights is to fight – at great expense – for a delay.  When time runs out, after a year or two, she and their son are toast, stuck in the single motherhood-alimony-joint custody cycle (if she’s lucky!).  This is worse today than before, because no-fault divorce refuses to even acknowledge the injustice done to the wife by her husband… but it has always been a problem, ever since the State asserted the authority to alter the terms of marriage contracts at its whimsy.  The State has always ignored the plain terms of religious marriage contracts that exclude or limit divorce.

One esteemed scholar has written, rightly, that the legal regime of no-fault divorce is personally harmful to every person living under it.  But he does not go far enough: any legal regime under which the State presumes to define, modify, or dissolve a marriage contract, over and against the terms of the contract as understood by the contracting parties at the time of its making and as taught by their Church, undermines the entire institution.  Such a regime is personally harmful to all those who are stripped of the State’s robust defense of what ought to be – what once was – a private agreement that is publicly binding, and it leads inevitably to the disordering and decline of marriage precisely as it has played out during the past two centuries.  Two years ago, I wrote that civil marriage is a public policy tool designed to attach children to intact families.  I could not have been more wrong.  In reality, civil marriage is a weapon against the family.  It was designed to undermine the family by the cruelest of the French Revolutionaries, it was expected to undermine the family by the most conservative of Catholic popes, and, lo! It worked!

Once again, Pope Leo cuts to the heart of the matter:

Marriage was not instituted by the will of man, but, from the very beginning, by the authority and command of God; that it does not admit of plurality of wives or husbands; that Christ, the Author of the New Covenant, raised it from a rite of nature to be a sacrament, and gave to His Church legislative and judicial power with regard to the bond of union. On this point the very greatest care must be taken to instruct them, lest their minds should be led into error by the unsound conclusions of adversaries who desire that the Church should be deprived of that power. (Arcanum 39)

The Pope concedes an executive role for the State in marriage, but only in cooperation with the Church, and never usurping in any way the legislative and judicial authority which is absolutely excluded from the public sphere:

It is of the greatest consequence to husband and wife that all these things should be known and well understood by them, in order that they may conform to the laws of the State, if there be no objection on the part of the Church; for the Church wishes the effects of marriage to be guarded in all possible ways, and that no harm may come to the children. (Arcanum 40)

The separation of powers dictated here was ignored then, and has been forgotten today, even by conservatives.  It was swept away in the great nineteenth-century race to secularize everything, and about the only people who take it seriously now are the vanishingly small sect of Catholic royalists.  But I have come to believe that Pope Leo’s basic model is the only plausible way forward.  (This shouldn’t be too surprising, since Pope Leo was only describing how marriage had worked for the past thousand years, and in most respects from the dawn of human history.  It’s not like he was making it up.)

Of course, Pope Leo writes from a very narrow, Catholic-centric perspective.  I mean, he’s the Pope, and particularly a Pope under siege – and, beyond that, he did not believe that other religions should, ideally, be allowed to exist (a position contradicted by later, infallible, Catholic teaching).  Therefore, his concern was exclusively with Catholic marriage, and his model embraces Catholic marriage in a Catholic confessional state only.  The marriages of Muslims, for example, are not even vaguely contemplated in Arcanum, because Muslims, in Pope Leo’s thinking, should not really be tolerated in the first place.  But Pope Leo’s model for marriage has deeper roots than the Catholic confessional state, and, updated in light of the modern Catholic acceptance of religious diversity, his model can be extended far beyond Rome-State relations.

We can and should adopt – or, rather, revive – a legal model for marriage wherein its terms, especially with respect to children and parenting, are defined by the spouses (within common-law limits), normally (though not always) in consultation with their religious authorities.  The State’s function in marriage would then be to enforce the contract, stepping in when it is breached, within limits defined by the contract itself.

A Catholic couple that wishes to marry should be able to vow lifelong marriage, consign juridic authority over the marriage from the State courts to the diocesan marriage tribunal (including all proceedings for annulment, absolute divorce, and divorce from bed and board), and rely on the State solely to enforce the judgements of that tribunal.   A Jewish couple should be able to do the same, with the rabbinical system in place of the diocesan tribunal and the kettubah in place of the “lifelong vow”.  A Muslim couple should be able to (clutch your pearls, Breitbart!), by mutual agreement, bind themselves to a distinctly Islamic understanding of marriage and to using the Islamic legal system in resolving marital and family disputes.  The non-religious, or those who marry outside their religion, or whose religions do not have all this handled for them, should be capable of defining their own terms and rules of adjudication – as unchurched spouses have done since pagan times – and they ought to be able to depend on the State to enforce the terms of their marriages.   (Presumably most evangelical Protestants will make marriage lifelong “except for adultery,” based on their misunderstanding of porneia in Matt 19, and so forth.)

This would require a fairly significant restructuring of American state and federal law, so much so that Jennifer Roback Morse calls it a “fantasy” with “exactly zero chance” of being enacted.  But it is worth pointing out that Mrs. Morse says this in the context of her own argument for stopping same-sex marriage, repealing no-fault divorce, overturning Lawrence v. Texas, and restoring a child-centric model of State-controlled marriage that has not, in fact, ever existed, nor (as Pope Leo has argued and two centuries of consistent, constant experience have proved) ever could.  While I concede there may be a universe where Mrs. Morse’s plan has a greater than zero chance of succeeding, it is the same universe where “The Moon’s A Window To Heaven” won the 1989 Grammy.  My proposal, by contrast, stood for millennia before we capitulated to the radical redefinition of marriage in 1792.  It’s a heavy lift, but it’s doable.

There are quite a few others out there who object to, or at least worry about, the idea of “getting the government out of marriage,” such as Maggie Gallagher, Robert George (again), Mollie Hemingway, Richard Epstein, the underrated Lydia McGrew, and (in subsequent pieces) Jennifer Roback Morse.  They argue that completely eliminating government involvement in marriage is impossible in any world with sexual reproduction, and that even pretending to totally privatize marriage would lead to, as Gallagher puts it, “a gigantic expansion of state power and a vast increase in social disorder and human suffering.”  They are right.  Marriage is an institution with inherently public consequences, and the State will therefore always be an important stakeholder.  I am not proposing that we “get the government out of marriage.”

But I propose that we stop pretending this particular stakeholder is more than it is.  The State is not marriage’s owner. It cannot legislate marriage.  It cannot intrude on, still less redefine or dissolve, a religious vow made by free citizens before their God.  Yet we’ve spent not ten years, not fifty years, not a century, but two hundred twenty-three years pretending the State can do just that.  We’ve submitted ourselves to its approval, paid its license costs, kowtowed to its courts, and declined to conduct sacramental weddings for those whom the State did not want married – even when the State’s decision was horrendously unjust.  Let’s put the State back on the sidelines, where it belongs: enforcing the marriage contracts, not making them up.

For those of us who hold the “conjugal view” of marriage, there are some downsides to abolishing civil marriage: given our society, there is no doubt that some individuals in a post-civil-marriage world would make use of their newfound private license to make silly or unhealthy arrangements with others and demand that we call those relations “marriage”.  Without the government sitting around playing umpire with everyone’s marriages, we would be powerless to stop this.  But, since this already happens – and will be compelled by the State roughly five minutes from now anyway – it is tough to see what we lose by getting the State out of the marriage-definition (-and-compelling-everyone-to-agree-with-it) business.  We will also be forced to rethink how the State approaches a few popular policies (like Social Security’s spousal benefits) which, under today’s law, depend on a single, State-defined, State-centric conception of marriage.  However, as I have discussed before, we already have a moral obligation to revise these policies to protect people who depend on one another but are not eligible for civil marriage, and, fortunately, we also have powerful legal tools at our disposal for doing so, such as the reciprocal beneficiaries model.

There’s a big upside for the “conjugal” camp, too: if the traditional, natural-law understanding of marriage has any hope of survival and revival, it can only be with the destruction of civil marriage.  As Pope Leo argued and as two centuries of continuous, consistent erosion of marriage have proved, there is no hope whatsoever that any human government can do anything but attack, undermine, and crowd out natural-law marriage at every turn.  In history, wherever you find a thriving marriage culture, built on the natural law as reinforced by the words of Jesus Christ, there you (nearly always) will find a government that remains a respectful distance from the private and religious spheres where those marriages are defined and administered.  I do not pretend that abolishing civil marriage will restore a natural-law understanding of marriage to the culture overnight (too much damage has been done, and too many once-great religions, like the Anglicans, have forgotten this tradition), nor could such a restoration come about without uncoerced mass conversions, but ending the hostile influence of human government on marriage – giving up, once and for all, the conservative fantasy that we can harness the power of government in service of the supernatural end of protecting natural marriage – is a necessary first step in restoring cultural esteem, civic support, and religious authority to the institution of marriage.

We conservatives often seem to be the only ones who realize that the growing disorders of marriage threaten not just the immediate victims, but the rest of us too.  We have poured time and treasure beyond count into shoring up the institution of civil marriage, trying to stanch the bleeding as our culture and civil society collapse around us (leaving only the State as the organizing principle of all society).  But civil marriage is one of the causes of our problems, not their solution.  Civil marriage was born in the bloody orgies of the French Revolution precisely to redefine marriage as the State may please.  Where so much of the Revolution failed, here the Jacobins triumphed, handing their legacy down to the modern Left as they did so much else.  In just two centuries, conservatives and progressives alike have come to see marriage as firstly a government concern.  Civil marriage has been in decline since the day it was invented, its definition growing steadily out of control, far beyond any rational meaning, secular or sacramental – as it must, as long as the government owns it. It has dragged society along with, its fraying causing our culture to disintegrate.

Civil marriage has now entered its terminal phase: it is impossible to imagine the state of marriage getting much worse, because, on most of the metrics we’ve discussed, it is mathematically impossible for the state of marriage to get meaningfully worse.  It’s over.  It’s been over, since long before gay marriage was legal in a single state – probably since before Andrew Sullivan launched the modern gay marriage movement.  Civil marriage is dead.

And it deserved to die.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The proposals made in this piece are a radical departure from pretty much anything familiar in contemporary American politics.  I had a great deal of trouble articulating them at all – you should see all the discarded drafts! – and I still worry that I was unclear at certain points.  If you have questions, or want clarifications, on what this article is saying – or just want to debate my interpretation of Pope Leo XIII – please use the comment boxes below.  I will do my best to respond, and, if warranted, will post a follow-up article clarifying anything that turned out to be especially unclear (or especially wrong-headed).

FOOTNOTES

†† By sheer coincidence, the Supreme Court actually issued this ruling while I was working on the final revisions to this piece today.   I’ve been working on it for over a year – researching, circulating drafts, throwing drafts away – but I suppose it’s lucky that I finally got it finished on the exact day when “civil marriage” is on everybody’s mind.  I am happy to note that everything I predicted about the decision has been confirmed in just the past few hours since it came out.

* Though I am going to disagree with Robert George’s position on marriage law in this post, I want to make clear that I still hold him personally in the highest esteem.  Normally, I would consider it unnecessary to make note of this – obviously, I can disagree with a guy while still acknowledging he’s precisely eleven times smarter than I am and a good man to boot – but, in the marriage debate, there has been an unsettling tendency for all political disagreement to become intensely personal, and for those abandoning the marriage traditionalists to simultaneously disavow their prior associations with their erstwhile allies.  So let me be clear: I’d vote for Robert P. George for president, given half a chance. If he’s ever in the Twin Cities area, he has a standing invitation to my place a bowl of my famous pasta carbonara and some rousing company (on the off chance you’re reading this, Dr. George, we have some shared Facebook friends; you can get in touch with me through them).  And, for what it’s worth, although I now think he’s wrong about how the law should interact with marriage, George’s understanding of marriage as a natural conjugal union remains absolutely correct, as does 99% of his famous paper on the subject.

† Although Catholics do not consider Arcanum an infallible papal document, we are nevertheless obliged to give very serious thought to situations where we find ourselves disagreeing with a Pope in a major document like an encyclical.  I did not have to reconcile my position to Arcanum as a matter of religious doctrine, but it made me very uncomfortable that I could not easily do so.

+ Blackstone does write of two kinds of “divorce”, but neither is what we understand to be “divorce” today.  His “divorce from the bond of matrimony” is known today as “annulment”, and his “divorce from bed and board” is known as “legal separation”.

** Except for the Jews, who only promised to be free, faithful, and fruitful – not necessarily forever.  Still a damn sight more than the “vows” at civil weddings today.

‡ A few online sources give 9 November 1791 as the date for the French creation of civil marriage, but I can’t find any substantiation for that claim.  Suzanne Desan’s book The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France actually gives two dates that are relevant to our inquiry here: the adoption, on 27 August 1791, of the Constitution of 1791, which stated that the State viewed marriage as merely a “civil contract”; and the passage of legislation, on 20 September 1792, which actually made the State the minister of marriage through the laicization of civil record-keeping.   I focus on the second date.  Many governments have viewed marriage as a civil contract, before and since, but left it to citizens to actually define and perform it. It is the French decision to absorb marriage into the State through laicization which, in my view, marks the invention of civil marriage.  While I’m in a footnote, I think it’s worth mentioning that there was some precedent for the French decision of 1792: in the Edict of Versailles, issued by King Louis XVI in 1787, the French had begun allowing civil magistrates to recognize Protestant marriages, without actually acknowledging that a Protestant marriage had occurred – the recognition became, in law, the marriage.  This mess arose because the regime did not feel it could knowingly cooperate with, or give effect to, Protestant sacraments, but their awkward solution provided a civil-esque model for marriage, which the revolutionaries extended five years later into the marriage regime that has more or less prevailed ever since.  This reinforces a point I made earlier: The history of marriage is nothing if not complicated, and nobody should walk away from this piece thinking that there’s a single, simple narrative that describes how marriage has been understood throughout history.

§ The reader may expect me to include “…and the State tried to ban interracial marriage!” in this litany of evils.  The reason I didn’t is because anti-miscegenation laws predate civil marriage: Americans invented them (or, at least, their modern incarnation) over a century earlier.  During King Louis’s flirtations with taking over marriage in the 1770s (mentioned in the previous footnote), the French ancien regime tried on a little racist interference in marriage, as well.  This was abominable, but not something I can blame on the Jacobin Club – not something caused by the State takeover of marriage.   As Pope Leo pointed out earlier in this post (Arcanum 26), the government has often, throughout history, interfered with the legality or validity of marriage, always to marriage’s detriment.  Racist marriage laws are a good example of that.  The French Revolution transformed marriage into a State function, dealing far more serious and lasting damage than prior transgressions, but it was hardly the first offense against the sanctity of marriage in the history of the world.

¶ And there is a great deal of truth in it.  The public interest in marriage is as obvious as the practical benefits for its participants.  It is obvious to Dr. Heaney, obvious to Justice Petersen and the Supreme Court, and I made a pretty decent case for it two years ago.  Again: I am not arguing that marriage is unimportant to individuals or society. I am arguing that the way we have (recently) tried to protect it, by ceding authority over it to government, is an inappropriate and recent overreach that is actually destructive, in several different ways, to natural-law marriage.  I continue to agree with Dr. Heaney on all the important philosophical points, and my carbonara invitation to Dr. George certainly includes him.  Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit for those who didn’t get it from the name that he is my father.  (Dr. Heaney, that is, not Dr. George.)

*****

Resolved,

That we, the members of the Republican party of the United States, in discharge of the duty we owe to our country, unite in the following declarations:

1. That the history of the nation, during the last one hundred fifty-seven years, has fully established the propriety and necessity of the organization and perpetuation of the Republican party, and that the causes which called it into existence are permanent in their nature, and now, more than ever before, demand its peaceful and constitutional triumph.

2. That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Federal Constitution, “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” is essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions; and that the Federal Constitution, the Rights of the States, and the Union of the States, must and shall be preserved.

3. That to the rule of written Law, over the transitory whims of Monarchs, this nation owes its unprecedented increase in population, its surprising development of material resources, its rapid augmentation of wealth, its happiness at home and its honor abroad; and we hold in abhorrence all schemes for suspension of the laws, be they temporary or permanent, come from whatever source they may. And we congratulate the country that no Republican member of Congress has countenanced the current Administration’s loathsome refusal to enforce those valid laws which it has, on its sole and dictatorial authority, deemed inexpedient, without rebuke and with applause from their political associates; and we denounce those acts, lawlessly undertaken despite popular rebuke of their ascendency, as denying the vital principles of a free government, and as an avowal of contemplated treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indignant people sternly to reprimand and forever silence.

4. That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any state or territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.

5. That the present Democratic Administration has far exceeded our worst apprehensions, in its measureless subserviency to the exactions of an ideological interest, as especially evinced in its desperate exertions to force the infamous Health Care Act upon the protesting people of twenty-six states; in construing the relations between executive and legislative to involve an unqualified power to wage war and to appoint federal Officers without the advice and consent of Congress; in its attempted enforcement everywhere, on land and sea, through the intervention of Congress and of the Federal Courts, of the extreme pretensions of the military-surveillance complex; and in its general and unvarying abuse of the power intrusted to it by a confiding people.

6. That the people justly view with alarm the reckless extravagance which pervades every department of the Federal Government; that a return to rigid economy and accountability is indispensable to arrest the systematic plunder of the public treasury by favored partisans, while the recent startling developments of frauds and corruptions at the Federal metropolis, show that an entire change of administration is imperatively demanded.

7. That the new dogma, that the Constitution, of its own force, carries Abortion into any or all of the Territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself, with contemporaneous exposition, and with legislative and judicial precedent; is revolutionary in its tendency, and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country and all her inhabitants

8. That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom; That, as our Republican fathers ordained that “no person should be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to Abortion in any territory of the United States.

9. That, while providing revenue for the support of the general government by taxation upon income, sound policy requires such an adjustment of this taxation as to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country; and we commend that policy of reducing burdensome and arbitrary regulations, thereby securing to the workingmen liberal wages, to agriculture remunerative prices, to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skill, labor, and enterprise, and to the nation commercial prosperity and independence.

10. Finally, having thus set forth our distinctive principles and views, we invite the co-operation of all citizens, however differing on other questions, who substantially agree with us in their affirmance and support.

****

As it turns out, I was mostly just taking big blocks of the GOP Platform of 1860 and changing a few words to reflect modern times.  It is surprising how little needed to be changed for it to fit the Obama presidency instead of the Buchanan presidency.

The original 1860 platform was 17 points long; this one is only 10.  That’s mainly because several of the provisions of 1860 were about very specific issues that have no modern analogue (support for the Transcontinental Railroad, for example, or the admission of Kansas into the Union), but it’s also partly because I simply never finished this document, and did not have time to do so today.

Still kinda fun.  If you think this simple, passionate statement of principle is the sort of platform that you’d like to see the Republican party adopt (in lieu of the zillion-page, special-interest-owned monstrosity that the modern party actually writes every four years), then why not share this post on The Facebook or The Twitters?  There’s some handy sharing buttons right below this sentence.

This week, I finally found De Civitate‘s first important cultural commentary, and it is even more erudite than I hoped.

That’s right, audience: this week, you will learn the correct order in which to watch the six Star Wars films.

It’s the Machete Order: IV, V, II, III, VI.

For the rest, I’ll turn you over to Mr. Machete himself, at his blog.