We’ve all seen public accounts by priests and ex-seminarians (here is just one) describing Catholic seminaries as hothouses where clerical authoritarianism, combined with tolerance or encouragement of sexual immorality, drives good men out of priestly vocations. This (allegedly) leaves behind a clergy where yes-men, political chameleons, and sexually active gays (and straight allies) are overrepresented… the next generation of the “lavender mafia.” Many of us are familiar with Goodbye, Good Men, Michael Rose’s book about how this culture operated during the ’70s and ’80s, where it advanced under the flag of theological liberalism. I’ve heard enough hair-raising accounts of seminaries in those days to be confident that Rose’s narrative is basically correct.

However, as The Scandal rolls into its 33rd year, we are seeing indications that, even as conservatives have largely changed the theological orientations of most Catholic seminaries toward Tradition, the underlying culture of clerical authoritarianism and sexual impropriety… maybe has not changed so much as we’d like to believe. Cardinal McCarrick’s recent and notorious abuse of his own seminarians, even as JP2 elevated him to cardinal and McCarrick served as the bishops’ PR guy on abuse, seems to be but the tip of the iceberg (look at Lincoln).

I know a lot of recent ex-sems, and I hear stories. Some of them are very good! Most ex-sems I know have many very fond memories of their time in seminary.

But some of the stories are… weird. Any one of them, I might dismiss as an aberration or somebody with an axe to grind. In the aggregate, though? Combined with everything else we’ve been seeing in the press? I have found reason for concern.

But I don’t have the full picture. Outside the clergy, I’m not sure anybody really knows what overall American seminary culture is like.

I think it’s time to change that.

If you were recently a Catholic seminarian or seminary employee, I’d like to hear from you. What was your seminary like? What’s working? What’s not? Did you find a culture where clericalism and/or sexual immorality were problems, or no? If so, how so?

Write me at james.j.heaney@gmail.com, and I’ll publish what you have to say right here on De Civitate.

A few ground rules:

• I’m asking about recent seminarian experiences, particularly since the abuse scandal went national in the U.S. in 2002. So if you haven’t been in a seminary since before 2003, this isn’t directed to you.

• If you are currently at a seminary, this probably isn’t for you, either. It’s going to be tough to be objective or candid about your experience while you’re still having it.

• I’m happy — in fact, eager — to publish both positive and negative accounts of your seminary experiences. My intention is to get a sense of what seminaries are like today. If it turns out seminaries are, by and large, doing great, that would be fantastic (if somewhat surprising) news.

• I will publish anonymous accounts. However, if you choose anonymity:
  • You may not name names, either of seminary personnel or the seminary you attended. The line between speaking uncomfortable truths and gossiping is whether you put your own name on it.
  • You still have to tell me who you are, so I can do some cursory verification that you are who you claim to be.

• If you publish under your own name, you can be as specific as you consider prudent and just.
  • On the one hand, don’t commit detraction.
  • On the other hand, don’t delete or obfuscate important details just because you’re afraid somebody somewhere might accuse you of detraction. McCarrick survived another decade in office because one Dr. Fitzgibbons wouldn’t go on the record about it in 2002 out of fear for McCarrick’s reputation. Our Catholic reflex to talk about troubles without identifying the troublemakers has gone on long enough, hasn’t it?

• I may lightly edit for spelling, grammar, clarity, and so forth. I won’t go further than that (unless asked). Even if I disagree with what you say, I’ll print it. This is a soapbox for you to speak honestly about your experience of the seminary. My job is to get out of the way and let you say what you feel needs saying, be it 100 words or 100,000.

Again, my email address is james.j.heaney@gmail.com. I have a brand-new baby at home (Irene Amelia, born November 5th, named for St. Irenaeus of Lyon, she’s great), so I might not get back to you immediately… but I will get back to you.

I hope this project sparks enough response that we are able to gain a more complete picture of what seminary life is like for young Catholics today.

And I hope the news is better than I’m expecting.

UPDATE: I have received and posted several testaments, linked here:

#1: Peter Stine

#2: Anonymous Assistant

#3: Aidan Toombs

https://malacast.libsyn.com/interview-with-james-heaney

We had a good conversation, which ran about a half-hour.  I haven’t had a chance to listen to the final cut yet, but I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

I’ll give a little warning that, in live interviews, I am less circumspect than I am on the blog. You can’t check your facts, you can’t wait to decide the best way of saying something, so you just talk. The net result is that I let my right-winger flag fly a little more than I do here on the blog. Which was… kinda fun, actually!

Overall, Mr. Masnick agrees with me (and I with him).  He has one quibble with my presentation: its title (“Why Free Marketeers Want To Regulate the Internet”).  He writes:

…[T]he underlying claim about all of this [is] that Title II is somehow “regulating the internet.” It’s not. It’s never been about that at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s about choosing which form of regulation internet infrastructure will be ruled by. The anti-net neutrality crew like to make this mistake (and they make it often), trying to pretend that internet infrastructure is the internet. It’s not.

This is a good point.  Internet infrastructure is just a “series of tubes“, and it tends toward natural monopoly.  The actual Internet — perhaps, more properly, the World Wide Web — is an infinite space where any entrepreneur can hang out his shingle to sell any good or service, with no permits, no regulation, and no limits except his imagination.  It is closer to the fabled “perfectly competitive free market” than anything else mankind has ever seen… probably ever will see.

Despite the title of my piece, free marketeers don’t want to regulate the Internet.  We want to regulate the infrastructure that undergirds the Internet precisely in order to preserve the freedom of markets and peoples who are actually on the Internet.  The distinction is important, it is too often forgotten, and it has recently been exploited by ISPs making the specious argument that invoking Title II against Internet infrastructure providers (say, Comcast) would force the FCC to also invoke it against World Wide Web content providers (say, Google), destroying the freedom and innovation of the online marketplace.  The reality is just the opposite: if we don’t regulate internet infrastructure, the infrastructure monopolists will attack the online free market… and win.

Mr. Masnick goes on to observe that internet infrastructure has always been both regulated and heavily subsidized by governments at all levels.  As free marketeers know, government subsidies are just another form of regulation, no less disruptive to markets than price controls.  The big ISPs are only discovering the beauty of markets now that regulation might hurt their bottom line. I don’t know that that adds anything to our economic case — I doubt it — but it sure does make me feel less guilty about throwing the book at them.

The only other thing I’d like to mention from the pingbacks is that, contra the good folks at Engine.is, I am not Cleveland State University Lecturer Dr. James J. Heaney — although, looking at his publications list, I’m certain we’d get along famously.  I am the mere Mr. James J. Heaney, Minnesota software developer, founder and director of the James J. Heaney Institute for the Inquiry into Natural Philosophy and Science-y Things, and Star Trek audio drama producer (and, yes, that site is long overdue for an upgrade).

I’m sure you’re inundated, and you sure as heck don’t know me, so there’s no need to respond to this.  But I really appreciated your post the other day, and wanted to share my reaction with you.  Perhaps it will be of some use in figuring out Mozilla recovers from this catastrophe.

As I see it, there are still two big reasons why I and people like me — broadly speaking — are going to have to withhold support Mozilla for the foreseeable future, even after our current anger subsides:

(1) In your post, you give the public your assurance that Brendan really did leave of his own accord; that he really wasn’t forced out; that the Board actually fought to retain him as CEO.  The problem is that your assurance is not a very strong authority outside Mozilla’s walls, and it has to be weighed against the evidence.  This certainly looked, from the outside, like a standard corporate decapitation, where the Board decided to fire the CEO and allowed the CEO to “resign” only to retain his own dignity.

We saw Brendan promising never to resign just a couple days before he did.  We watched Robert George predict — to all appearances accurately — how this was going to play out. We heard the dead silence from the principal players.  (Why hasn’t Brendan said a word in defense of Mozilla since he left?) We noticed that all other accounts of his resignation say the Board tried to retain Brendan as CTO — but pointedly not as CEO. Above all, we read Mitchell’s (very unfortunate) blog post on Resignation Day.  In that post, she seemed to concede that Brendan never should have been hired, that “equality” trumps free speech in this case, and that Mozilla’s biggest takeaway from all this is that, given the chance to do it all again, they’d have fired Brendan even faster.

In this light, your anonymous sources are just not very convincing, even given your bona fides as Mozilla’s last public marriage traditionalist.  (Perhaps especially given those bona fides: what happened to you two years ago would seem to support the suggestion that Mozilla’s commitment to inclusion is skin-deep at best.)

(2) Even if you are absolutely right, and leaving was entirely Brendan’s idea, it still sends a terrible message to the world: “Mozilla can be bullied.  We cannot protect our leader from a bunch of petty thought police on the internet.  We will leave him on the front line, alone, to take 100% of the incoming fire, and then we’ll thrust the blame on ‘outsiders’ when the wounds take him out.”  If that’s the case, then perhaps Mozillans really do still believe in the radical inclusion the project was founded on — but it hardly matters, because Mozilla is no longer calling the shots.  The bullies have taken control, and Mozilla is impotent to resist their imperious will.

In either case, Mozilla is not something many of us feel we can be a part of — or should be — right now.

You mention forgiveness.  If Mozilla wants forgiveness (and I am not even convinced that it wants to be forgiven as forgotten right now), I think it will have to demonstrate some level of repentance and some level of autonomy.

First, repentance: Mozilla must recognize that what happened was not a causeless tragedy that mysteriously destroyed the co-founder like a bolt of lightning.  This happened because the entire community failed.  It wasn’t just the few who raised their voices in protest against Brendan.  It was also those who were publicly ambivalent and conflicted (there were so many!), and even those who supported Brendan but refused to put their foot down and demand that he be retained.  The community either openly attacked or (more often) simply failed to defend either the principles of the project or the concrete policies that give those principles life.  The community’s reluctance to close ranks around the project — not the CEO or his particular beliefs, but the whole concept of an open-source browser that everyone can be part of — was the key fact that made the subsequent media bonfire successful.  It was a sin by the entire community, and it needs to be acknowledged and addressed by the whole community, not just in individual “I feel sad we lost Brendan” posts on Planet Mozilla.

Second, autonomy: social conservatives need to know that Mozilla not only regrets what happened to Brendan, but that it has the desire and ability to make sure that nothing like it will ever happen again.  That people who have “offensive” political opinions still have a place at Mozilla, that our contributions are valued, and that we can even become leaders within the organization.  That Mozilla has not been conquered by ideological interests at Slate and Salon and OKCupid, but remains a genuinely global project that embraces literally anyone who is willing to work toward the (crucial!) goal of a free and open web.

I don’t know how Mozilla might go about doing this, and (unlike those who waged war last week) I don’t presume to dictate terms.  I only know that Mozilla has done absolutely nothing whatsoever since the resignation to restore our sense that it is a “safe space,” and I know that it cannot ever do that without positive action of some kind.  When a university administration is accused of discriminating against racial minorities, they will often establish programs and endowments to ensure that members of those minorities are hired and are able to contribute to the university project without fear of reprisal or undue discomfort.  Perhaps (perhaps) something along the same lines for ideological minorities would help restore the public trust.

For now, however, I’m afraid I won’t be on my favorite browser, and neither will my clients.  This is written from Chrome, which is gross… but at least I know I could go to Google and have a productive career there despite my private beliefs… even if they harvest all the data about my private beliefs and sell it to the NSA.

I don’t know where the open web goes from here, but, fundamentally, a web controlled by the same forces that led to Brendan’s resignation is not an open web at all — except for those privileged to have the “right” opinions.  That means Mozilla, as it currently looks from out here, as it currently operates, cannot carry forward the open-web ideal — not until this is addressed and corrected.

Maybe this all looks completely different from within the Mozilla community. I don’t know; I’m pretty much just a longtime fan and user and promoter, not a contributor.  And there are my two cents.

I’m not going to say anything else about the debate, I think — kinda got my impromptus out in our panel discussion.

Q: What do you think of this HuffPo feature on global warming by Twin Cities weatherman Paul Douglas?

Paul Douglas was the only local weatherman to predict the Halloween Blizzard of ’91, so I will always pay him attention. Never knew he was Republican before; cool.  Still, like nearly everyone talking about global warming, he is long on diagnosis and short on prescriptions less costly than the disease.

Isn’t the real problem our failure to innovate?  While China is cornering the solar market, America is failing to use its political capital as the leader of the free world — and our laxity could cost us the planet!

See, that’s the thing every says, “Let’s innovate! Just like the moon shot!” We’ve been innovating, with not insignificant portions of GDP and government largesse lavished upon the green sector, for twenty years — twice as long as the Apollo program — relying on much stronger technologies. It hasn’t really changed anything. Solar is still absurdly expensive. Wind is still absurdly inefficient. Nuclear is still absurdly berated. Our energy needs are only continuing to grow. At this point, the marginal economic benefit of each new PV cell (because of its environmental friendliness) still seems to be far less than the marginal economic cost of manufacturing it (because they are friggin’ expensive), despite heavy subsidy. Mr. Douglas just bought himself a hybrid car, but, even if we eliminated ALL carbon emissions from American automotive vehicles tomorrow (switching all cars and trucks to electric instantly at no cost), that would still leave about 85% of U.S. carbon emissions in place. Switch planes and boats to electric, too, and we make a somewhat larger dent.  (The EIA has a good annual breakdown of energy consumption by sector and type.) Plus, we’re not even the biggest carbon emitter anymore! The “big” solutions, like Cap’n Trade, end up functioning as gigantic opportunities for big-business political rent-seeking with little real reduction in greenhouse gases and a lot of opportunities to ruin economies.

I’m afraid I’m on the verge of sounding ranty. Not trying to be. All I mean to say is that, if we accept Mr. Douglas’s premise that the Earth is warming — which I do — and that anthropogenic sources are a primary contributing factor — which I am willing to entertain in the interest of risk management — nobody has proposed any serious solutions to the problem except the people who propose reducing the Earth’s population by three billion people within ten years (by emigration in some cases and extermination in others). Most of what we see, whether in Washington or in Europe, are hand-wringing measures intended to make people feel good because they’re “doing something” and “at least it’s a first step” while the only practical effect is to maximize the control of central governments over their economies and populations. China, the most centralized government on Earth, has demonstrated exactly zero interest in curbing its emissions, though it is happy to sell us expensive toys to make us feel like we are.

If global warming is coming — and it sure seems to be — it seems sensible to me to get ready for it, not try to stop it, which appears to be only a theoretical possibility, if that. Let’s figure out desalination to deal with the water problem, build irrigation infrastructure where it’s going to be necessary, strengthen the supply lines necessary to deal with famine in unexpected parts of the world, and continue to focus on maximizing crop yields per acre.

Can we really doubt the anthropomorphic origins of climate change, given that 98% of scientists agree with it, and the other 2% are on Big Oil’s payroll?

The clear and ongoing pattern of silencing dissent and outright excommunicating climate scientists who step “out of line” is a deep pathology in the field. It was most clearly seen in the Climategate incident, but I can think of half a dozen other examples. Those who support the “consensus” behave with frequent hypocrisy. (If it’s a warm winter, the “consensus,” Douglas included, will ALWAYS say “This is more evidence of global warming.” If it’s a cold winter, like last year, the “consensus” will ALWAYS say, “Simple weather of the moment can never be treated as evidence of global warming!” I can pull New York Times editorials demonstrating the point if you like.) They adopt, moreover, a practice of outright policy advocacy entirely inappropriate to their discipline.  This should make any good scientist blush.

This adds weight to my own research, carried out in high school, which concluded that large sectors of the environmental science “discipline” are not doing science at all, but repeating thirty-year-old special-interest propaganda from the likes of Zero Population Growth and Planned Parenthood without study or even subtlety. Moreover, while you are free to accuse “the 2%” of being on Big Oil’s payroll, who do you think funds “the 98%”, and why do you believe that vested interests and shoddy science end at the lip of the government trough?

Finally, this is a discipline that has gone from a “consensus” favoring global cooling thirty years ago to global warming fifteen years ago to global “weirding” today. Climate scientists always have a consensus, but it’s a consensus whose parameters change very quickly. The business of predicting the future is big business — especially for them — but it is even less reliable than predicting the weather tomorrow.

In short, the “climate science” discipline, already a singularly difficult and error-prone field, has deeply compromised itself in a variety of ways. They did not need to do this, but they did, and they cannot be treated with the same deference I give to, say, chemists. I have no more reason to trust them, at this point, than I do the “scientific” studies of old showing that cigarette smoking is perfectly safe. (The same goes for studies both pro and con anthropogenic global warming.)

So I am willing to entertain the AGW hypothesis, but I am literally incapable of drawing even reasonably strong conclusions.

This is a side point, as you observed, but a fairly important one. I can’t get mad at my fellow Republicans for disagreeing with me about whether there’s sufficient evidence that global warming is happening at all; the discipline has failed in its duty to impartial, objective observation. It’s not some mad anti-science putsch like the ongoing attempt on the Left wing to ignore the absolutely indisputable, observed, and repeatable fact that human life begins at conception. It’s just basic distrust of a group of people who have shown themselves to be as imperfect as the rest of us.

Isn’t China just waiting for the U.S. to take a leadership role in cutting emissions, since they feel they have a right to pollute as much as we did when we were a developing power, because it’s “their turn”?  Isn’t the same true for India?  Doesn’t the world still take its cues from the U.S.A.’s policy?

I have seen no evidence whatsoever that China is “waiting for U.S. leadership” on the climate question. China has long made it clear that it could not care less about U.S. global leadership. On the contrary, China has acted, with laser-focus, in order to further its own interests in the region in the world — and has done so with no regard for the international community or its own people’s human rights. They brazenly prop up the regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran. They oppress Tibet whenever its gets upstarty. It continues to expand its own military, launch its own space program, and pollute like crazy. The European Union’s efforts to reduce emissions inspired no motion in Chinese politics, and, indeed, we are beginning to see even the EU’s extremely limited efforts unravel. Your second sentence is more accurate: China and India do see us as major long-time greenhouse gas emitters, and they do seem to see this as “their turn.” If we start to ramp down our emissions, that isn’t going to make it any less “their turn,” nor is there any reason to believe that, in thirty years when it is no longer “their turn,” they are going to generously ramp down their emissions to comply with whatever international standards may by then be in place. Neither does any nation make economic decisions based on how well they are doing relative to other countries; they make economic decisions based on domestic economic conditions. India is not going to say in 2050, “Oh, well, our unemployment rate is way better than the U.S.’s, so I guess we can afford to relax and late a few hundred million more Indians go out of work.” The foreign policy consensus on this question among liberals — and I say this as a foreign policy idealist who likes to think the best of foreign powers — is fantasy of purest spun gold.

Isn’t wind becoming more efficient?  And aren’t the profits being reaped by overseas companies that make the components?  Couldn’t we use those jobs here?  Can’t we say the same for solar and nuclear?  Have you heard of fast-neutrino plants?

Wind is becoming more efficient. So is solar. At the rate we’re going, according to the more alarmist projections, they should both be economically viable just after New York City slips into the Atlantic Ocean.

You mention innovation, but hasn’t our effort been pretty half-hearted?  I heard that Big Oil receive tens of billions in subsidies from Uncle Sam.  If we just started funding research at that level, wouldn’t our problems be solved and technology quickly advance?  Aren’t we incentivizing non-renewable energy development over sensible clean energy research?

The largest NASA budget in history (as a percentage of GDP) was the budget in 1966 ($5.9 billion). It was 0.7% of total U.S. GDP. Most of the ’60s saw budgets somewhat smaller than that. Last year, the federal government *alone* spent 0.2% of GDP ($30 billion) on clean energy research and subsidy — and 0.2% of GDP buys you a lot more now than it did in 1966 — and that doesn’t count state-level subsidies, which are also widespread. Our research spending parallels research around the world, especially in Europe, over twice the length of the Apollo program. If we take the Apollo program as a guideline, the spigots on this problem are already open very wide indeed. The needle is not moving any faster. The research solution, to invert a Chestertonism, has not been found difficult and not tried; it has been tried and found wanting.

The big oil “subsidies” are not subsidies in any generally accepted definition of the term. The U.S. government does not hand Big Oil a check every year. No, these “subsidies” are only such in the left-wing twilight world of “tax subsidies” (an oxymoron), where your money belongs to the State unless the State generously decides to allow you to keep some of it. For instance: the U.S. government considered royalty payments to foreign powers to be deductible income for tax purposes under certain circumstances. This rule is applied to every company, equally. Since that includes oil companies, this constitutes, to Democrats, a “billion dollar giveaway!” Somehow it isn’t a billion dollar giveaway when that same deduction is used by small import/export businesses – no, the Democrats want to specifically target Big Oil with new taxes. And this is supposedly eliminating a subsidy. Or consider the fact that, in 2004, the government imposed a new tax rate on domestic manufacturers, which included a special 6% income deduction clause. Oil companies benefit from this tax break when they are also domestic manufacturers – this is apparently a grand Republican conspiracy to shovel money into oil executives’ pockets. In fact, all the Republicans are doing is refusing to take extra money out of their pockets for having committed the crime of being unpopular. You can read all about it on the sites favoring these very measures, like this one.

Notably, even if we were to go insane and count equally-treated and fairly arrived-at untaxed private profits as “subsidies,” they’re not very large. The bill I linked above would have raised another $20 billion from oil companies in new taxes, but… that’s actually less than we spent in 2011 on energy R&D. The incentives clearly favor renewable energy. It just hasn’t made any difference, because renewable energy is a niche technology. It is not leaving that niche to become a carbon replacement until and unless “peak oil” hits – or until the price of carbon-based energy is artificially inflated until it is triple or quadruple what it is today. Since we already spend nearly 10% of GDP on energy, this alone would cost the U.S. more money per year than total federal spending and borrowing COMBINED, twice over. The only thing that cost the U.S. more economic activity was the Great Depression, and it eventually ended – this wouldn’t. (The Great Recession, by contrast, cost only about 6% of GDP at its worst.) This energy disaster may happen someday. But I hope to God it doesn’t.

I don’t mean to be too much of an alarmist. Nor am I against wind, solar, and nuclear – I do want to see research continue into them and other new power sources, and there is already a rightful place for them on the current grid – especially nuclear. But there is no plan on offer to reduce energy emissions far enough to avert, or even significantly reduce, what the IPCC projects to be the anthropogenic impacts on climate change. None. Zero. The Republicans are denying the problema and the Democrats are doing political theater with it, with their proposed solutions conveniently doing more to achieve secondary political ends than to actually reduce emissions. At this point, denial seems more likely to lead to better policy outcomes.

Now, yes, we will eventually get our atmospheric CO2e back below 350 ppm. Global population is going to level off around mid-century and hopefully will remain stable. Efficiency is going to continue to grow insofar as it is actually economically beneficial (which is determined by markets, not central planners), and it is only going to keep getting more profitable… but slowly. Research should continue, and the U.S. government is pretty good at funding research. Eventually, one day, solar energy is going to be cheaper than oil drilling, and people are going to switch over, gradually, as it makes sense for them. And that’s great. But all this is going to happen well after the watersheds of global warming are in the past. Attempts to accelerate this will fail unless governments are willing to do things much more damaging (and/or evil) than suffering through a new age of warmer winters and better crop yields in Northern Europe.

Or so it seems to me. This is not my area of policy expertise, and I am always open to being corrected or introduced to new ideas.

Hold on.  Even though we spent a lot less on the space program in the ’60s, wasn’t a billion dollars worth a lot more back then?  Wasn’t a $5bil spend in 1960 more like a $50bil spend today?

Yep, $5bil would be, thanks to the magic of inflation, about $33bil today, so, if you’re looking at real value instead of percent national effort, we are annually putting almost as much value into greening things as we were in 1966 on lunar ventures.

Sure, environmental science has had a bad time for the past thirty or forty years, has barked up some pretty rotten theories, and today faces a healthy and serious skepticism on account of its past and present sins.  But doesn’t every scientific field go through a stage like this, as academic chemistry did a century ago?  Won’t EnviroSci outgrow its funk?

I do hope and believe that the practitioners within the EnvSci discipline will one day lift themselves out of the muck and start acting like scientists. Until then, though, they must be treated with considerable skepticism.

Isn’t the rapidly changing consensus within the climate science community a sign of health, not sickness?  Science moves quickly!  Hypotheses are abandoned!  What was certain is vanquished as falsehood!  Isn’t that the fun?  More importantly, isn’t that ultimately what keeps science healthy?

You’re quite correct that science changes quickly as experiments continue. This is exciting and a lot of fun, but it does mean that, with the science constantly changing, it is very unwise to build long-term policy based on relatively new science! Imagine if we’d done what Paul Ehrlich recommended when the population bomb reared its ugly head. By the time it was exposed as an error, we would have already done incalculable damage to our economy and our people. It is great that science changes — both for scientists and for the long-term store of human knowledge. But it is not great for politics, which rely on a stable, long-term set of facts in order to make decisions about the far future.

This isn’t a question.  Diplomats from India and China have told us, straight-up, that they will start cutting emissions if the U.S. takes the lead.  A professor we both know (at least by reputation) has first-hand knowledge of this.

Anything a diplomat says is, at best, an earnestly hoped-for expression of what the ambassador has been told is the national will — and, at worst, a bald-faced lie. I make a special exception for Chinese diplomats, because the People’s Republic is a totalitarian state that does not hesitate to lie, steal, and kill its way to its policy objectives. The fact that they’ve rejected even the modest limits on carbon emissions Europe suggests shows that they are about as serious about this problem as we are — except that our nation’s government will not collapse in revolt and revolution if our economy slows or we stop building more and more impressive public works with which to propagandize the people. I don’t believe anyone actually believes Chinese protestations on this point — although, if our mutual friend, the professor, genuinely believes they’ll do it (and doesn’t just hope it), she is far more expert than I. (India, being a democracy, is a little more flexible… but faces geopolitical pressure of its own that would seem to outweigh the risks of a modest rise in sea level, at least on a back-of-the-envelope analysis.)

There the conversation ended amicably.

If the Catholic Church wants to contemplate something that is far more relevant, perhaps they should consider the irony of their outrage against the Obama administration for originally requiring them to provide contraceptive coverage in their employee health insurance plans. While the Church is claiming that Obama is forcing his beliefs on THEM, isn’t that exactly what they are doing to every female employee — even the non-Catholic ones — who work for them? Now that is outrageous.

To which I replied:

If Catholic employers were somehow preventing female employees from spending their salaries on birth control, there would be some irony to their call for religious freedom. It would also be a violation of the free exercise clause — just like the President’s mandate.

And back:

There are religions who don’t believe in voting. If that church employed people who weren’t members of their religion and refused to give employees time off from work to vote (which is required by law), do you think that would stand up to Constitutional muster? What about churches that own housing? What if they want to ignore fair housing laws and refuse to rent to single mothers or gay couples? I think there is a fine line between having the freedom to practice your own religion and denying non-member employees access to contraceptives covered by their healthcare insurance when public policy requires all other employers to provide that benefit.

Here is my final response:

You carelessly use the word “denying,” as you carelessly used the word “forced” in your OP. I have seen this carelessness consistently in all anti-exception arguments, and I come to wonder: is there now a widespread belief in this country that refusal by Entity X to specifically *pay* for Good Y on behalf of Entity Z is “denial” of Product Y to Entity Z by Entity X?

By this standard, it seems to me that handgun purchases must be fully subsidized by the government, because gun ownership is a constitutional right — but this is absurd. A refusal to pay is not “denial.” It is a *refusal to participate*, and implies no curtailment whatsoever on Entity Z’s constitutional liberty to purchase Product Y with his or her own resources. This feels to me like I’m splitting hairs, but I’ve seen the mistake made so often now that I feel like it must be important for reasons that escape me.

Anyway, of your two examples, both would (generally) pass Constitutional muster. Separation of church and state is a two-way street. Indeed, your housing example is specifically contemplated by and exempted in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (even though the exemption manages to circuitously limit discrimination on the basis of race anyway, assuming religions requiring it are not bona fide religions). The Religious Freedom Restoration Act goes even further in protecting the special sphere of religious practice in this country. However distasteful — and even evil — I find the practice of some heartless and happily hypothetical religious charity denying housing to an otherwise blameless single mom, the First Amendment demands that I defend to the death that charity’s right to do so. Employees have even less ground to stand on, since they were under no compulsion to sign a contract with a religious employer anyway, knowing that that employer could not in good conscience act the way other employers typically act.

It is a little surprising to see so many people who understood this principle (and even took it rather further than the Constitution demands) in the case of Fred Phelps so ready to ignore it in the case of the Roman Catholic Church.

Until now, there has never been a serious possibility of a major, bona fide religion coming into intractable, dogmatic conflict with federal antidiscrimination/entitlement laws, so case law on this point is fairly thin. Nevertheless, the courts have a strong record of upholding the rights of religious organizations to carry out their bona fide missions without undue burden by the state. They have no choice, given the text and history of the Constitution and federal statutes affirming religious liberty in these and similar matters. In light of Hosanna-Tabor’s unanimous opinion, I am frankly astonished the President believes this mandate could possibly survive judicial scrutiny.

That last point is why I am not worried, though I am very much annoyed by the President’s illegal infringement on my former employer’s rights of conscience. The only practical effect of this kerfuffle will be to make President Santorum ten times more likely.

***

The response I received?  “Zzzzzz.”  My interlocutor was and is a friend, but I find it nevertheless amusing to observe that the progressive response to a patent attack on the Constitution and the Church — and this is a progressive who defended Fred Phelps, so it’s not like he can’t see the problem here — is boredom.  Progressivism is not happy with religion, and is happy to turn a blind eye to an attack on its fundamental freedoms as a result.  What happened to the ACLU that once defended the free expression rights of Nazis?

Also, to be fair, my reading of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 is, in retrospect, strained, since the exemption in question seems only to protect religious discrimination on the basis of religion.  The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, however, serves as robust statutory protection for such cases, so long as they pertain to bona fide religious guidelines.

Update 20 Feb 2012: I must have struck a nerve; my friend has unfriended me.  He had always promised to do so to anyone who spoke uncivilly of our President.  I don’t believe I crossed that line.  It’s a shame, but, in this day and age, when politics are raised to the level of religion (and frequently beyond), and the country’s diverse political communities crash daily on the internet, it takes a Herculean capacity to indulge contrary political beliefs enough to allow even a small friendship space to grow.  I’ve never been on the breakup side of a relationship over politics, but I’ve been on the broken-up side often enough that I’ve nearly learned not to take it personally.