When Tolerance Becomes Intolerance: Religion Increasingly Pilloried in the Public Square

SACRAMENTO, California, MAY 24, 2003 (Zenit.org).- The Vatican's publication last January of the doctrinal note on the participation of Catholics in political life marked the start of an intense debate in the United States.

The opening round in the battle came just a few days after the note was published, when Bishop William Weigand of Sacramento called on California Governor Gray Davis to either renounce his support of legal abortion or stop taking holy Communion.

Bishop Weigand explained his position during a Mass commemorating the 30th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, the Sacramento Bee reported Jan. 23.

"As your bishop, I have to say clearly that anyone -- politician or otherwise -- who thinks it is acceptable for a Catholic to be pro-abortion is in very great error, puts his or her soul at risk, and is not in good standing with the Church," Bishop Weigand said. "Such a person should have the integrity to acknowledge this and choose of his own volition to abstain from receiving holy Communion until he has a change of heart."

The Bee reported that in a press release marking the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Davis administration claimed credit for California being "the most pro-choice state in America."

Another salvo from U.S. bishops to pro-choice politicians came when Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle was sent a letter from his diocese of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, saying he should no longer call himself a Catholic.

According to an April 17 report by J. Bottum in the Daily Standard, the online edition of The Weekly Standard magazine, Sioux Falls' Bishop Robert Carlson sent Daschle a letter asking the Democrat to remove from his congressional biography and campaign documents all references to his standing as a member of the Catholic Church.

According to Bottum: "Daschle's consistent political opposition to Catholic teachings on moral issues -- abortion, in particular -- has made him such a problem for ordinary churchgoers that the Church must deny him the use of the word 'Catholic.'"

Questioned by the media, Bishop Carlson stated that he "would never break off dialogue or a pastoral relationship with anyone," the Associated Press reported April 17. However, the bishop did acknowledge that he has encouraged Daschle to reconsider his position on abortion and his support for the extreme pro-abortion views of the National Abortion and Reproduction Rights Action League.

Another front in the conflict opened up following remarks on homosexuality made by Senator Rick Santorum in an interview with the Associated Press. Santorum, the third ranking Republican in the Senate, is a noted Catholic. His remarks were made in the context of a case before the U.S. Supreme Court concerning a Texas sodomy law.

Santorum had said: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [homosexual] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."

A wave of criticism followed his statement, with many accusing him of religious bigotry. Richard Cohen, in a Washington Post column on May 1, said: "In advancing religious arguments for public policy, Santorum and others foreclose both debate and compromise -- the basic ingredients of democracy. If you think, simply as a matter of faith, that homosexual sex ought to be a crime, then I cannot reason with you." Cohen went on to accuse Santorum of how his "intolerance swaddled in the tenderness of faith, is polarizing and downright frightening."

But many of Santorum's critics distorted the meaning of what he had said, said Stanley Kurtz, research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, in an article April 24 for National Review Online.

Kurtz explained that Santorum was making a slippery-slope argument: That is, if the Supreme Court rules that the state has no right to regulate sexuality in the case of sodomy, then courts in the future might deny the state the right to regulate even incest.

The media generally ignored the nature of Santorum's argument, preferring to simply accuse him of Catholic intolerance, Kurtz contended. For example, none of the three pieces published by the New York Times on April 22 on the matter mentioned "the real meaning of Santorum's slippery-slope argument."

The note by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith points out that Christians and non-Christians alike can contribute to the democratic process. "The life of a democracy could not be productive without the active, responsible and generous involvement of everyone, 'albeit in a diversity and complementarity of forms, levels, tasks and responsibilities'" (No. 1).

Yet, the document notes how, "the value of tolerance is disingenuously invoked when a large number of citizens, Catholics among them, are asked not to base their contribution to society and political life -- through the legitimate means available to everyone in a democracy -- on their particular understanding of the human person and the common good" (No. 2).

The responsibility of Catholics is particularly pressing given the prevalent cultural relativism, combined with ever-more complex ethical problems in the face of scientific advances. Frequently, observed the doctrinal congregation, "legislative proposals are put forward which, heedless of the consequences for the existence and future of human beings with regard to the formation of culture and social behavior, attack the very inviolability of human life. Catholics, in this difficult situation, have the right and the duty to recall society to a deeper understanding of human life and to the responsibility of everyone in this regard" (No. 4).

Regarding the role of Christian points of view in a democracy, the note comments that the political processes allow discussion of varying proposals. Trying to disqualify Christians from political life because of their moral position "would be anything but legitimate pluralism" (No. 6).

A commentary on the note by moral theologian Robert Spaemann observed that when tolerance becomes a supreme value "it is transformed into intolerance of what alone, in reality, gives tolerance its value: the sacredness of conscience."

Writing in the English weekly edition of L'Osservatore Romano of March 12, Spaemann explained that firm convictions are important because the dignity of the human person is based on a reference to the truth. If we adopt a purely relativist position we run the risk of falling into either anarchy or tyranny, he said. Arguing in favor of measures that respect an order founded on the nature of the human being is not imposing a religion on anybody, but is rather a defense of human dignity.

Elsewhere, Robert Kraynak in his book "Christian Faith and Modern Democracy" explains that a defects of modern liberal democracy is its tendency to promote a limited conception of the good life, reduced to a one-dimensional materialism of middle-class society. The dominant schools of modern liberalism, Kraynak writes, "have followed a flawed strategy of trying to vindicate human dignity by denying the objective existence of a greatest good, thereby allowing each person or nation to determine its own identity."

What Christianity can offer to remedy this is a concept of dignity based on the creation of human beings made in the image of God and redeemed by Christ. The rich doctrinal resources of Christianity "rescues liberalism from its descent into nihilism and breathes into it moral and spiritual vitality," Kraynak contends. Excluding this valuable Christian contribution from politics would only impoverish democracy. ZE03052401

Religion Increasingly Pilloried in the Public Square & elsewhere.

Cardozo Law Review - Nietzsche and Legal Theory (Part I)

Nietzsche Between Jews and Jurists: A Note on the Christian Filiation of The Anti-Christ -Anton Schütz

Where are We When We are Beyond Good and Evil? - Tracy B. Strong

Nietzsche and Aretaic Legal Theory - Kyron Huigens

Limits of Tolerance: Law and Religion After The Anti-Christ - Marie Ashe

Nietzsche and Socrates / Or the Spirit of the Devil and the Law -Anthony Carty

Gay Science as Law: An Outline for a Nietzschean Jurisprudence - Jonathan Yovel

Stealing the Natural Language: The Fiction of the Social Contract and Legality in the Light of Nietzsche’s Philosophy - Jiri Pribán

Law’s Beatitude: A Post-Nietzschean Account of Legitimacy - Richard K. Sherwin

From a Biopolitical Point of View: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Crime - Friedrich Balke

Individual Law: On Some Aspects of Nietzsche’s Juridical and Aesthetic Discourse - Wolfert von Rahden

Nietzsche and the Nazis: The Impact of National Socialism on the Philosophy of Nietzsche Charles M. Yablon

Nietzsche’s Gnosis of Law -Frederick M. Dolan

NOTES ON "THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA" BY ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI. London, February 1909.

(A.) Nietzsche and Morality.

In morality, Nietzsche starts out by adopting the position of the relativist. He says there are no absolute values "good" and "evil"; these are mere means adopted by all in order to acquire power to maintain their place in the world, or to become supreme. It is the lion's good to devour an antelope. It is the dead-leaf butterfly's good to tell a foe a falsehood. For when the dead-leaf butterfly is in danger, it clings to the side of a twig, and what it says to its foe is practically this: "I am not a butterfly, I am a dead leaf, and can be of no use to thee." This is a lie which is good to the butterfly, for it preserves it. In nature every species of organic being instinctively adopts and practises those acts which most conduce to the prevalence or supremacy of its kind. Once the most favourable order of conduct is found, proved efficient and established, it becomes the ruling morality of the species that adopts it and bears them along to victory. All species must not and cannot value alike, for what is the lion's good is the antelope's evil and vice versa.

Thus spake Zarathustra ELIZABETH FORSTER–NIETZSCHE. Nietzsche Archives, Weimar, December 1905.

HOW ZARATHUSTRA CAME INTO BEING.

"Zarathustra" is my brother’s most personal work; it is the history of his most individual experiences, of his friendships, ideals, raptures, bitterest disappointments and sorrows. Above it all, however, there soars, transfiguring it, the image of his greatest hopes and remotest aims. My brother had the figure of Zarathustra in his mind from his very earliest youth: he once told me that even as a child he had dreamt of him. At different periods in his life, he would call this haunter of his dreams by different names; "but in the end," he declares in a note on the subject, "I had to do a PERSIAN the honour of identifying him with this creature of my fancy. Persians were the first to take a broad and comprehensive view of history. Every series of evolutions, according to them, was presided over by a prophet; and every prophet had his ‘Hazar,’—his dynasty of a thousand years."

Ñ Ñ Ñ

Already at the beginning of this history I hinted at the reasons which led my brother to select a Persian as the incarnation of his ideal of the majestic philosopher. His reasons, however, for choosing Zarathustra of all others to be his mouthpiece, he gives us in the following words:— "People have never asked me, as they should have done, what the name Zarathustra precisely means in my mouth, in the mouth of the first Immoralist; for what distinguishes that philosopher from all others in the past is the very fact that he was exactly the reverse of an immoralist. Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things. The translation of morality into the metaphysical, as force, cause, end in itself, was HIS work. But the very question suggests its own answer. Zarathustra CREATED the most portentous error, MORALITY, consequently he should also be the first to PERCEIVE that error, not only because he has had longer and greater experience of the subject than any other thinker—all history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so–called moral order of things:—the more important point is that Zarathustra was more truthful than any other thinker. In his teaching alone do we meet with truthfulness upheld as the highest virtue—i.e.: the reverse of the COWARDICE of the ‘idealist’ who flees from reality. Zarathustra had more courage in his body than any other thinker before or after him. To tell the truth and TO AIM STRAIGHT: that is the first Persian virtue. Am I understood?...The overcoming of morality through itself—through truthfulness, the overcoming of the moralist through his opposite—THROUGH ME—: that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth."

""In advancing religious arguments for public policy, Santorum and others foreclose both debate and compromise"

On some issues there can be no compromise, at least not morally. Sometimes there is just right and wrong, and that is not necessaarily even a religious argument. It seems the left expects politicians to abandon their religious beliefs during their terms of service. That is preposterous. A man, or woman, who is unfaithful regarding his most intimately held beliefs, will be unfaithful in anything as public policy promoted by the democRATs has shown repeatedly. To my knowledge, there have been no Republicans asked to disassociate themselves from their religious institutions, but it has happened numerous times with democRATs, with Bill Clinton himself being the first I am aware of. Think about it. How bad do you have to be for your church, on a national level, to ask you to remove yourself from it? That would bring such deep humiliation to the average person that it would be hard to show one's face in public. But alas, not for the leftist RATs. They know neither shame nor decency and are committed to nothing apart from the acquisition and maintainance of power.

'The Bible is the Book upon which this Republic rests." (ANDREW JACKSON)

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