For the Christian churches of the West, today marks the beginning of Lent.

Lent is an annual ritual. Like all rituals it has its traditions: Lent is marked by an increase of fasting, praying and almsgiving for Christians around the world. Lent is a journey: it is marked by its end, that is, preparation for celebrating the mysteries of Christ’s suffering, dying and resurrecting. But isn’t it a bit strange that an event so important as the God-man’s redemption of humanity would require an annual celebration? Shouldn’t it always be on our minds?

We humans are creatures that must be reminded often to remember. Culturally, we embrace rituals and routines because amidst the daily concerns of life we need activities which call our attention back to important events, and perhaps more deeply, to important orientations and directions that our lives must take. For the Christian, Lent is not merely another season, like winter begetting spring, but it is an invitation anew to die with Christ so that we may rise with him. Thus while the Jew celebrates days of atonement to prepare for feasting and the Muslim prepares himself through Ramadan for further submission, the Christian celebrates Lent for one reason alone: to deepen his encounter with the God-Man, who was, is and always will be, his Savior.

In recent times, the secularization of Lent pushes Christians to treat it as another “resolution making” event. The idea of “what I give up” becomes the goal. But scripture says that this is a season to rend our hearts and not our garments. Lent is a time thus to subtract those good things to focus on the Good One. It is a time to add prayerful moments in order to encounter His love for us. Lent should lead, by that encounter with Love, to a deeper awareness of the suffering in our neighbor, so that Faith may have fruits.

Remember Man that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

Follow the Center for Morality in Public Life on Facebook and Twitter.

No matter what you think of his actual prospects in 2012, one thing is clear: Rick Santorum’s name has become synonymous—for good or bad—with the “moral message.”

The former Senator from PA is no stranger to tough talk. More than any other candidate, Santorum is unafraid to invoke object-oriented language in bolstering and defending his positions. Abortion? A “great moral wrong.” Gay marriage? As suspect as bestiality. If Santorum doesn’t believe in it, he’ll let you know—and he’ll tell you why.

Lately, however, Santorum’s views on one topic in particular have been garnering the lion’s share of attention. Birth control—which is enjoying a media heyday in its own right—is near to the top of the list of things Rick Santorum doesn’t like. As a Catholic, he’s personally committed to not using contraception, and he’s even gone so far as to admit that birth control is “harmful to women.” In short, birth control, contraception, sterilization—they’re all morally evil things that should be avoided.

But on this issue there’s a catch. And it’s drawing major fire from some conservatives, who are using the topic to support their own campaigns against Santorum in 2012.

Unlike his remarks on abortion and gay marriage, Santorum’s comments on contraception are almost always qualified. A popular pairing seems to be the phrase “Title Ten.” Just a quick peek at the HHS website—remember them?—turns up the following:

Title X is the only Federal grant program dedicated solely to providing individuals with comprehensive family planning and related preventive health services. The Title X program is designed to provide access to contraceptive services, supplies and information to all who want and need them. By law, priority is given to persons from low-income families.

As one committed to reducing harm to women, children, and society at large, Santorum is opposed to Title X. At least it’s something he’d never vote for.

But, as it turns out, that’s not at all true. In fact, again and again Santorum couches his denunciation of birth control in the context of his historical support for government-funded contraceptive access. An interview this week with Fox News’s Greta van Susteren is a great example. Responding to an off-color joke by a supporter of his campaign, Santorum assures us: “The bottom line is my position is very clear. I’ve had a consistent record on this, of supporting women’s right to have contraception. I’ve supported funding for it.”

As the man with the “moral perspective,” Santorum is an easy pick for those concerned mainly with toppling Roe v. Wade. His strong beliefs and even stronger invectives against gay rights make him a poster boy for traditional family values. But when it comes to something a little less polarized—something almost universally embraced in America’s bedrooms—Santorum’s resolve isn’t so obvious.

On the one hand, his desire to adhere to personal moral beliefs while keeping others’ private choices private is understandable. As I pointed out before, even Thomas Aquinas believed that some things, like prostitution, are just too personal to be effectively brought under the directives of civil law. But if that’s the case, why did Santorum vote positively in favor of Title X? If government has no business regulating bedrooms, it has no business provisioning them, either.

Also strange is Santorum’s remark in the van Susteren interview, that “Only when there are real consequences to society or to the rights of individuals do I feel a need to speak out.” But, he says, “the issue of contraception, that’s not the case.”

What are we to make of this? Perhaps Santorum doesn’t believe any longer that contraception is in fact harmful to women and society. Or at the very least, that such harm is a “real consequence” we should be worried about. The same must be true of the link between birth control and the sexual revolution, since he admits—just moments earlier—that the latter has resulted in “consequences [...] that we are living with in America today.” By the same logic, however, we’re nearly forced to admit that Santorum considers a lack of birth control access for Title X eligible families to be “real” harm. Otherwise, we can presume, he wouldn’t have “[felt] the need to speak out” with his votes.

What’s going on here?

In a word, Rick Santorum isn’t the moral visionary he’s come to be identified with—at least not the type that makes clear, consistent distinctions on tough moral questions. In many cases, Santorum’s vocal style and persistent stick-to-his-guns attitude give the illusion of stability. But where rubber meets road, his principles end up mangled, at best. And his newfound poll numbers aren’t helping: working to edge out Mitt Romney for the GOP nod requires the sort of political doublespeak that’s detrimental to advancing competent, meaningful perspectives on subtle issues.

Despite these shortcomings, though, Santorum is likely to retain the title of the moral messenger. After all, this sums up his perspective on most social issues—and by comparison, he’s head and shoulders above the rest of the Republican field when it comes to making such statements.

The tough part about endorsing Santorum is that he’s more than just a candidate: he’s the de facto figurehead of a much larger, more important movement to rediscover the place of morality in the public life. For all the good things Rick Santorum stands for, he doesn’t quite live up the expectations that have—again by default—been thrust upon him. Ultimately, supporting Santorum for his moral resolve is only going halfway in accomplishing the reintegration of faith and politics. There’s more—in fact, much more—that we should expect from an ideal candidate along these lines.

At all costs—and especially in the seductive and seemingly promising case of Rick Santorum—we must avoid the error of mistaking the messenger for the message, itself.

Andrew Haines is president of the Center for Morality in Public Life, and a PhD student in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. He is also chairman of the editorial review board for Ethika Politika.

Follow the Center for Morality in Public Life on Facebook and Twitter.

Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.

The rules of health indicate activity; psychological man can exploit older cultural precepts, ritual struggle no less than play therapy, in order to maintain the dynamism of his culture. Of course, the newest Adam cannot be expected to limit himself to the use of old constraints. If “immoral” materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are therapeutically effective, enhancing somebody’s sense of well-being, then they are useful. The “end” or “goal” is to keep going.

― Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud

By requiring all public and private institutions to include contraception and abortion “services” in their health insurance plans, the Obama administration has infringed on the right to religious freedom of those citizens whose religion proscribes the use of or complicity with contraception. Of course, this is true, but, to put it bluntly, so what? American Mormons are legally prohibited from practicing polygamy, even though The Book of Mormon permits it; American Hindu women are forbidden to commit suicide on the funeral pyres of their husbands, notwithstanding their tradition’s commands; and pagans and Satanists cannot sacrifice human beings, no matter what the devil demands.

Religious-freedom infringement occurs quite a bit in American legal practice, and it makes sense that it does; for, those in charge of securing the common good of the community, as well as the rights of individuals, have the right and obligation to ban practices that are a direct and serious threat to it. Religious freedom, in the realm of practice at least, is not an absolute right, and so must be balanced with the competing rights of others in light of the overall common good. In short, religious practices can legitimately be proscribed.

Of course, in this case, the right of Catholics not to be forced to provide contraception, directly or indirectly (the more recent “compromise” position of the Obama regime doesn’t change things morally, as Robert George makes clear) is absolute and neither competes with any other genuine rights nor poses a threat to the common good. Indeed, as Humanae Vitae and the Catholic moral tradition teaches, it is the use of contraception itself that hurts people’s bodies and souls, can kill baby humans, and damages the common good of the family and the society at large.  Yet, this right not to become complicit in objective evil has been judged by the competent authority to interfere with the overall good of the American political community and the competing right of others to have what they consider vital health services included in their health insurance coverage. And in reaction to the HHS mandate, the American Catholic Bishops, for the most part, have couched their public protest in terms of religious freedom.

Perhaps their choice of argumentative discourse serves as the most effective, short-term strategy to defeat this particular mandate. But I am afraid that if we “win” using this strategy, it would only be because the Obama regime conceded to the Bishops’ terms out of a pragmatic, self-interested calculus—perhaps just to increase the chances of getting reelected in November. Moreover, the real issue is the evil of contraception and the threat it and our cultural of sexual license poses to the temporal and spiritual good of human beings. Another issue that is sidelined by the Bishops’ rhetoric, which I would like to discuss in this article, is their own public, moral and spiritual authority, the political influence of the Catholic Church in America. As I shall try to show, the long-term effects of playing the religious-freedom card might be disastrous for both Catholics and non-Catholics.

It is understandable why the American Catholic Bishops would protest that the religious freedom of Catholics is being infringed upon, but it is not understandable why they should think that a protest articulated in terms of religious freedom would be sufficiently effective to prevent such attacks, and worse ones, in the future. It is not understandable as both a judgment of prudence and of principle, for it appears to presuppose ideas about the nature of politics and the relation of Church and state derived from the secular Enlightenment, not the theological Tradition of the Catholic Church. By desiring to protect with state power their godless, therapeutic culture, with its cultic religious practices of baby-murder and sexual perversion, Obama and the HHS are trying to unify church and state, as it were, a principled union Leo XIII explicitly taught as the political ideal and which was not changed at Vatican II. In other words, the Obama regime is, in spite of its Rawlsian-liberal rhetoric, promoting a particular conception of the good, not merely advocating more space for the exercise of individual rights. It is attempting to inculcate what it considers “virtue” and to promote the “well-being” of human persons.

These are, all things being equal, Aristotelian and Thomistic moral and political goals, and they indicate a non-liberal role and influence for comprehensive conceptions of the good transcending the merely private and sub-political. In other words, though their evaluative moral scheme and worldview is, well, insane, and the particular values they deem good in truth wicked, by seeking to rid the political culture of a practice they deem evil and vicious, not merely infringing on someone’s rights, the Obama regime is, to this extent, behaving in a manner more in line with traditional Catholic political philosophy and theology than that implied by the Bishops’ classical-liberal-Lockean rhetoric!

The truth is that we live in an officially “therapeutic” state, in the Rieffian sense of this term, with the old revelatory “god-terms” and religious “interdicts” having been replaced at some point in the 60s with the Freudian “self-terms” and their obligatory transgressions. In other words, in spite of the First Amendment, and our delusional insistence that we have a multicultural and pluralistic society, there is an established religion and culture in America, one embodying a particular conception of the sacred, namely, the sacredness of unfettered, individual human desire in its pursuit of worldly and psychological well-being. The HHS decision reflects the desire of those in power to make this established religious and cultural outlook more official by defending it with state power, so much so that it is no longer willing to tolerate public practices that threaten its hegemony, such as Catholics witnessing against the good of deliberately sterile sex by refusing to offer “free” contraception.  In a perverse sense, then, the political authorities are simply doing their duty to protect the common good, therapeutically understood, and to help people attain well-being, as they perversely define it.

Thus, the main political problem with HHS is not its infringing on religious freedom or individual rights, for these are not absolute, as we have said, but that the regime subscribes to and is motivated by the wrong religion and cult. One might concede this point and still protest their un-American desire to make this cult publicly authoritative, but this is also wrongheaded. It may be un-American, but perhaps that is a virtue in this regard. There really is no such thing as a private cult, just as there is no private culture, and, as Catholic social teaching maintains, anyone in a position of political authority has the right and obligation to promote the common good as he sees it, within limits imposed by the natural law, the genuine rights of persons, and reasonable constitutional and legal restrictions upon his employment of coercive force.

When Catholics argue merely for their right to religious practice, that argument is necessarily heard by other Americans in Lockean terms, in which “every religion is orthodox to itself,” and in which the sole power and authority over all matters pertaining to the things of this world is the secular state. Religion is, by this definition, strictly otherworldly, and there is no non-subjectivist way of knowing the truth of religious dogma or judging between conflicting doctrines and practices. In other words, religious relativism is the official lens through which all judgments on the proper bounds of church and state are made in America—ab initio, as  William Cavanaugh, has recently argued. If religion is private, idiosyncratic, and otherworldly, not public, truth-embodying, and world-implicated, it cannot have an authoritative, public role in ordering common life. Defined as a private cult claiming no authority over anything but its own private doctrines and practices, perhaps the Obama regime might concede the Church and its institutions the right to its rather bizarre and barbaric proscription against “responsible sexual activity,” but it would never do so for a Church defining herself as the Mystical Body of Christ and demanding from this regime and all governments the libertas ecclesiae, that is, a liberty prior to, and higher and more privileged, as Dignitatis Humane makes clear, than the generic religious liberty accorded to persons, due to the Church’s unique divine identity and mission.

Indeed, the Obama regime did not decide to offer a compromised position for any other reason than self-serving pragmatism, with some ideological lip service given to a radically individualist conception of the right to “conscience,” meaning, in this case, the right for Catholics to believe in a cruel, sex-hating god, and to play-act in accordance with their fantasy. Are the Bishops satisfied with the Church over which they rule being characterized and treated by the state as nothing more public and authoritative than some superstitious debating society, as long as it can continue to enjoy tax-exempt status and some private freedoms of conscience for its members? Is this truly libertas ecclesiae?

Again, I think the Bishops should try to win this battle using any moral means necessary; and perhaps using the purely practical strategy of appealing to liberalism’s own principles might work—this time. But I fear that playing the religious-freedom card alone won’t work again. The Bishops need to make a straight-forward public declaration of the immorality of contraception, the Church’s authority to make such a declaration (an authority bound up with its divine identity that has been made evident by definite signs in the world and therefore cognizable by unaided human reason), the obligation of political authority to privilege the libertas ecclesiae (while supporting the religious freedom of all); and finally, they need to uphold the natural law as the ultimate legitimizing ground of the employment of coercive power. Without such declarations, their religious-freedom rhetoric may have the effect of securing Catholics the right to refuse contraception, but it would promote, indirectly, the secularist political liberalism that has led to a contraceptive culture-of-death in the first place.

Do the Bishops want to send the message to Obama that his main sin is not being Lockean enough, in not adequately respecting the sacred “wall of separation” between church and state, in mixing politics and religion? Obama is being a bad liberal in not respecting the freedom of religion of some of the citizens, but he is also being a bad man in promoting an objectively evil practice. Do Catholics want to pressure other Americans in power to be merely good liberals, even if that would win Catholics a short-term reprieve? Should not the Bishops consider more carefully the long-term benefit for our country of declaring the truth, in and out of season, especially when it is becoming quite clear that nothing short of mass conversion to the Gospel can save us?

Thaddeus Kozinski is the author of The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can’t Solve It.

Follow the Center for Morality in Public Life on Facebook and Twitter.

Lots of attention has been paid lately to the following statistic: “98% of Catholic women use birth control.” It’s come in various shapes, and with a whole slew of qualifications. But this fact—true or not—is just the tip of a much larger iceberg.

Andrew Sullivan reports that, according to a recent Guttmacher study, the “98% of Catholic women” figure isn’t accurate. More importantly, though, what is apparent is that over 30% of self-identified American Christians (men and women) are sterilized.

Once more, for good measure: 30% of self-identified Christians are sterilized.

If Guttmacher’s numbers are right (something they’re pretty committed to, regardless of implications), what are we to make of this? How does it happen that one-third of the entire population of American Christians seeks not simply to shirk the biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply,” but actually goes so far as to remove the possibility, absolutely?

Anti-religious folks will certainly find a sympathetic reading, here—something like, the Church clearly has little moral sway, and should therefore yield to the demands of progress and reasonableness. But a similar argument could be made in return: that a popular (and government-subsidized) obsession with sexual gratification has led to a division of mind for well over 60% of the national population, who “believe” one thing but practice another. Either case is extremely unhealthy, both for the individuals in question as well as for the integrity of the state.

Religious principles aside, the mere fact that 30% of any population would voluntarily subject itself to sterilization in the name of sexual liberty is alarming. And it’s a problem we should all work to put our heads together about.

Follow the Center for Morality in Public Life on Facebook and Twitter.

As the debate on the HHS mandate enters into its third week, a few concrete lessons are emerging:

• Politics: Election season or not, politics and political discussions remain a poor medium to discuss sensitive cultural issues. American politics tend to admit binary answers only: Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, this or that. Even Obama’s so-called compromise on Friday falls into this binary error, essentially changing nothing about the mandate, except for the incidence of cost.

• Major Media: If politics is a debate about the use of power, the media has become nothing more than the handmaid to facilitate this debate. If most of our public debates continue in the sound bite world of Fox News and MSNBC and in the ideologically driven slants of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, we’re doomed to shallow results. These media, catering to our 30 second attention spans, simply cannot support a sustained debate that we need in a healthy society.

• Victim Blaming: Leave it to conservatives to slice up their own. Pundits like Rush Limbaugh and George Will along with professional Catholic pundits have been quick to blame the bishops for their failure to mobilize the Church against the Affordable Care Act. Flawed as that act was, Catholic social teaching with its concern for the poor and repeated calls for solidarity, both through public and private association, is not to blame here. Short memories, but it wasn’t so long ago that the same social teaching helped topple a certain Iron Curtain.

• Contraception: People on the whole are uncomfortable talking about contraception. While there are ideologues on both sides of the issue, the fact is that the vast majority of Americans accept contraception uncritically ,or at best with a crude cost-benefit analysis: pregnancies, while nice, lead often a drastic change of life circumstances that should be avoided at the lowest possible cost. Still, something probably doesn’t sit right in most people’s hearts about contraception, especially when outside of the coitus interruptus method, humanity has survived and thrived without contraceptives for a very long time.

• Libertarians and Social Conservatives Unite? Like Baptists and Bootleggers promoting prohibition, pro-contraception libertarians and social conservatives now have common cause. How so? For the last 40 years or so contraception has largely been unfunded by health insurance. Is there anything really cheaper out there than a pack of condoms or the basic regimen of the pill? If anything, keeping social policy out of medicine has been a boon to both sides: those who don’t favor contraception don’t have to pay for it and those who do get it at market-clearing prices. A strange, but true win-win.

• Law and Morality: Yet, despite the above, most Americans in the public square fail to distinguish between law and morality. Most of what is immoral is not also illegal. One can be against contraception and yet, in a liberal society, be completely wrong to outlaw its use. But, as many on the left are truly at a loss to see, a position against contraception does not equal a taliban-style pseudo-religious state. This is a red herring we could very much do without.

While still far from over, the conversation begun on contraception really could be a very good turning point for public life. For once, Americans are getting riled up about matters that truly might lead to conversations on first principles.

Mattias Caro is Director of Content for CFMPL and a lawyer from Great Falls, Virginia. In addition to his JD from George Mason University, he holds an MA in Moral Theology from Christendom College and a BA in History from the College of William and Mary. He currently dedicates himself to the practice of corporate law.

Follow the Center for Morality in Public Life on Facebook and Twitter.

The current presidential campaign provides some instructive moments on leadership, ethics and morality. An election represents the will of the people. The soul of the nation is at stake. We have difficult moral and economic problems to address. For this reason, all citizens should want to elect a leader who is good, not just smart or an eloquent debater. To be good means one also can recognize and avoid what is evil, and feel guilt and repent upon harming others. Questions of character, then, are a healthy part of the obstacle course to an election. The vetting of a leader demands this stress test.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich is one example of a candidate willing to submit himself to the gruel and scrutiny of the presidential politics. Pundits and fellow congressman have called the former speaker a hypocrite, a liar, a womanizer, a cheater. One insider calls Newt a “political sociopath,” harsh words even by political standards. Accusations from Newt’s second wife about his conduct notwithstanding, how does candidate Gingrich respond? Newt describes the 1990s as a period when he “felt hollow” inside, a time when he felt empty. Most of us because of our own faults and failings can relate. Honesty about feelings makes a candidate appear real and human.

Yet, Newt describes his transgressions as “mistakes.” A mistake is something we say or do that reflects a misstep, a slip, an error in judgment. Mistakes come in many forms but have one unique feature: reduced moral culpability. Intentional misconduct is not a mistake. It is something far worse. When we knowingly do something wrong, a normal person should experience guilt. Today, an average person can be prosecuted for a crime and do time even when he did not have a guilty mind. Things are so complex and the law so unforgiving, a good citizen may be found guilty of a felony he never knew he committed until it is too late. When we act unaware, but not through neglect, it—the action—is a mistake. Newt harmed and neglected his former wife. He harmed his relationships with others. His actions were willful and vicious, not ‘mistakes.’

To have integrity, our language should reflect the reality of our conduct, not divert attention from it. During the South Carolina primary debates, Newt was ‘appalled’ by questions from the media about his character. These will not go away if he wins the Republican nomination. In the past Newt told us he converted to Catholicism, began to “read the bible again” and “to seek forgiveness” and, for some strange reason, reminds us often that he is a “grandfather” (incidentally, so is Bernie Madoff). Newt’s comments mask deeper rationalizations.  Absent from Speaker Gingrich’s explanations is a singularly powerful word we used to assign to willful misconduct that harms others and our souls: that word is “sin.”

It may sound like a small difference between the word “mistake” and “sin” until you consider the breathtaking lack of accountability among people in power today. We might have a lot less of the problems in our midst if we elect leaders with a real sense of what it means to have a guilty mind. Consider the clarity of the new opening Penitential Rite at Catholic Mass:  I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.  The soul of our nation is reflected in the soul of the leader it elects. Speaker Gingrich wants to fix our problems but he appears unwilling to acknowledge the depths of his own.

Peter C. DeMarco (pdemarco@prioritythinking.com) is the founder and president of Priority Thinking®, a provider of leadership coaching, organizational development and ethics education programs. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, The Good Will Leader, due to be published this summer of 2012.

No sense in rewriting what’s already good. This from Yuval Levin at NRO:

If I understand the White House announcement correctly, their newly proposed rule would not actually change the moral circumstances at issue in any way.

This is the word on the street. And we’re inclined to agree. (Also, we heard something about deck chairs on the Titanic…)

The problem that opponents of the original rule have had is that it effectively requires religious employers to purchase a product (an insurance policy) that provides their employees with free access to contraceptive and abortifacient drugs that they would not have otherwise had, and thus requires those employers to purchase a product that violates their religious convictions. The new rule does exactly the same thing.

But it sounds better. That has to count for something…?

[The new rule] puts religious employers in the position of having to choose between providing their workers with free (to the workers) access to contraceptives and abortifacient drugs or not providing those workers with health insurance at all (and also paying a large fine). The only difference is that the access to those contraceptive and abortifacient drugs would not technically be listed as one of the benefits the employer was paying for directly but would be listed as a benefit the insurer was paying for (with the money the employer paid for the broader insurance policy, of course).

And now for the damning bit.

But employers who offer insurance don’t pay for individual benefits and products when they are provided anyway, they pay for the policy that gives their workers access to those benefits and products when they want them. Under this rule, then, it would still be the case that as a result of being employed by a religious institution that provides insurance coverage (which Obamacare would require employers to do, or else pay a large fine), workers at that institution would have free access to contraceptives and abortifacients that they would not have had if that employer did not offer insurance coverage. So it’s still the case that the rule would require religious employers to purchase a product that violates their convictions, in the same way as the original rule (a fact also highlighted by the administration’s decision to retain the exemption for actual houses of worship in this new rule, just as in the old one). The choice for religious employers is still between paying an insurer to provide their workers with access to a product that violates their convictions or paying a fine to the government.

What ground is the administration giving in this compromise? And how is it any less a violation of religious liberty?

Good questions. But maybe a little too hopeful of real answers.

There is, of course, the following nuanced perspective on the White House’s “accommodation” which facilitates easier understanding of the apparent enigma.

1. The administration thinks Americans are idiots.

2. The administration is confident it will be assisted in its chicanery by the mainstream media.

If this “compromise” flies, we may sadly be assured that both assumptions are warranted.

Follow the Center for Morality in Public Life on Facebook and Twitter.

On Monday, February 6th, the PBS Newshour ran this piece on the “continuing fallout over the Obama administration’s recent decision on covering contraceptives in insurance plans.” Ostensibly, the spot was fair to both sides: equal airtime for those in favor of the mandate and those opposed. (In fact, if there was a time bias either way, it was probably in favor of the opposition.)

Yet for some reason, the overall reporting smacked of a strong, pro-administration agenda. The final, tacit conclusion was that failure of Catholic institutions to comply with the mandate would be bad for the country, even at the level of common sense. But how so?

Bias is par for the course with the news media, not so much because news outlets fail to “represent both sides,” but because journalists often fail to ask meaningful questions—questions that reflect a real dilemma.

The Newshour spot is a perfect example. Even the subtitle—”fallout over [...] covering contraceptives in insurance plans”—evades one half of the central issue, namely coverage of abortifacients and sterilization. In fact, in the entire eight-minute segment, “drugs that would induce abortion” gets only one prefatory mention; the same for sterilization. The bulk of the reporting centers on Catholic opposition to the mandate on First Amendment grounds, and pro-woman support that cites contraceptive access as an “essential health benefit.”

Right from the outset, the terms of the debate are grossly simplified. And all we’re left with is an account of the he-said-she-said. “[T]he Institute of Medicine,” affirms one supporter of the mandate, “all of the scientists and medical experts said that contraception is an essential health benefit that should be available without co-pays, without deductibles.” On the other hand, Catholic University of America president John Garvey remarks: “It is not about whether the health care law ought to provide for or even insist on coverage of contraceptive care for women. It is about whether every institution that provides a health care plan ought to be obliged to pay for that, even if they have religious objections to it.”

The problem seems clear: some folks have a moral hangup about paying for healthcare that’s endorsed by “all of the scientists and medical experts” as “essential.” (And, incidentally, they’re wrong.)

But dig a little deeper and a larger problematic begins to emerge. In this case, what’s at stake beneath the superficial spat isn’t at all whether Catholics should be forced to insure items of healthcare. It’s a more serious question of whether or not contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients actually count as healthcare in the first place. Notice, however, that this is simply assumed from the outset: the holy name of the IOM is mentioned, and it’s good as gold.

And lest there be any doubt that this was all a mere oversight, consider the sources contacted for the program. On the anti-mandate side, a pastor, a few churchgoers, the president of the Catholic University of America, and the general counsel for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. In defense, we hear from Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center, and a “non-practicing Catholic” grad student at CUA. Strangely, all the relevant, intellectual heavy-hitting happens on the opposition side of the aisle, with a strong medical case for contraceptives and abortions wholly absent.

What we’re left with, in a word, is a single “report” concerned with two entirely separate issues, and with no mention of their underlying connection. Not exactly an instance of fair and balanced journalism, and hardly the sort of thing by which listeners can be expected to form reasonable conclusions.

As it turns out—for good or bad—journalists have been entrusted with the sacred responsibility of feeding the rest of us our news. And they owe it to us, and the common good, to be as truthful and incisive as possible.

Conversely, as citizens of a free society, it’s our sacred responsibility to press our journalists, not only to be good writers, but more importantly to be serious and clear thinkers. It is our responsibility to remind them that the integrity of their efforts stands, quite literally, to affect the very coherence of our national identity. And, with the prospects of conscious protection and religious liberty on the line, it is more than ever our civic duty to call our journalists to account for their partisan biases.

In return for our support, the news media owes us a fair and balanced perspective on real issues and real problems. Anything less than that threatens to jeopardize not only the future of our nation, but the security of our own individual freedoms as Americans.

Follow the Center for Morality in Public Life on Facebook and Twitter.

The history of ideas is often illuminating not only of the past but of the present as well. That is, if we come to understand what people thought and why in some former era, we might learn something helpful to us today. Especially is this the case if we still live in the wake of those past intellectual or cultural movements and they continue to exercise a determining influence on our thinking. Let us look at some aspects of the history of thought since the eighteenth century in order to see some of its relevance to discussions in the present.

In many ways the Western world is still living intellectually in the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the era in which intellectual life largely dissociated itself from any form of the Christian religion. That is the reason why it is usually assumed at the highest levels of academic or cultural discourse that the claims of the Christian revelation are hardly worth mentioning, let alone seriously considering. Before the Enlightenment most of the leaders of European thought were Christians, but since that time this has only rarely been the case.  I will not be discussing here the causes or history of the Enlightenment, but simply tracing some of its effects on subsequent thinking, especially how the Enlightenment concept of reason continues to affect us.

The thinkers of the eighteenth century had an understanding of reason that was but a partial and desiccated conception, a kind of either/or approach to reality where reality demands something fuller and richer. Its shallow metaphysics, such as in Locke or Hume, were the outcome of the sterile conflict between rationalists and empiricists, a conflict which Kant attempted to solve but only papered over. By accepting the nominalists’ denial of the mind’s ability to go beyond the particular to the universal, they were forced either to limit knowledge to perception (empiricists) or to choose an altogether different starting point for philosophy (rationalists). Kant’s subsequent limitation of what is knowable to essentially a projection of our own minds is perhaps the worst possible attempt at a solution of this impasse. The Aristotelian and Thomistic realization that our knowledge does indeed begin with sense perception but does not end there had been written out of the debate centuries before, and many people seem to have been unaware that it was even an option.

Given the sort of philosophizing that took place in the eighteenth century, it was not surprising that thinkers such as Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre, who were horrified by the Enlightenment’s offspring, the French Revolution, sought to take refuge in something that seemed safe—tradition. The only conception of reason they were familiar with could be better termed ratiocination, for it was simply a consideration, often superficial, of phenomena and stopped short of an attempt to reach being itself. The reaction against such a degraded notion of reason manifested itself in adherence to tradition and went so far that some writers asserted the only way of knowing the existence of God was by a tradition handed down generation to generation from Adam, since the human mind was incapable of discovering this by its own unaided reasoning powers.

There are a number of objections that can be raised against this traditionalism. One of these is offered by G. K. Chesterton:

A cultivated Conservative friend of mine once exhibited great distress because in a gay moment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need scarcely say that the remark lacked something of biographical precision; it was meant to. Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious cosmic theory, though he had not a special and flaming faith in God, like Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had reference to a truth which it is here relevant to repeat. I mean that in the quarrel over the French Revolution, Burke did stand for the atheistic attitude and mode of argument, as Robespierre stood for the theistic. The Revolution appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all local custom or convenience. If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion; he did not attack the Robespierre doctrine with the old medieval doctrine of jus divinum (which, like the Robespierre doctrine, was theistic), he attacked it with the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short the argument of evolution…. “I know nothing of the rights of men,” he said, “but I know something of the rights of Englishmen.” There you have the essential atheist. His argument is that we have got some protection by natural accident and growth; and why should we profess to think beyond it, for all the world as if we were the images of God! (What’s Wrong With the World [San Francisco : Ignatius, 1994] p. 179)

This quotation shows in a striking manner, albeit with some inexactitude, that the attempt to oppose the Enlightenment by using an argument resting fundamentally on tradition ultimately will fail. The universal claims of the Enlightenment must be met by equally universal claims, grounded in truths of human nature, and finally in truths about metaphysics and about the nature of God. Although a number of Catholic thinkers had joined in this disparagement of reason, the Church never accepted this approach.

Even before Leo XIII’s endorsement of a revival of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas in his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, the Church had asserted a proper understanding of man’s reasoning powers in the First Vatican Council of 1870, in which it was solemnly defined that the existence of God could be demonstrated “by the natural light of human reason.” But with the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), the project of a revived Thomism began to oppose Enlightenment modernity at its intellectual foundation, for Richard Weaver was surely right when he traced the beginnings of modern intellectual error back to the medieval nominalists (see his Ideas Have Consequences). This Pope Leo likewise saw, and his political and economic teachings were based on the foundation of the metaphysics of being of St. Thomas. Political discussion is always grounded in metaphysics and theology, whether perceived or not, and we cannot oppose the characteristic doctrines of modernity without consciously having a philosophy, a philosophy moreover adopted not because it is convenient or useful but because it is true.

Pope Leo was explicit about the connection between the seemingly abstruse doctrines of philosophers and the everyday political, economic and social life of humanity. He wrote,

Whoso turns his attention to the bitter strifes of these days and seeks a reason for the troubles that vex public and private life, must come to the conclusion that a fruitful cause of the evils which now afflict, as well as of those which threaten us, lies in this: that false conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have crept into all the orders of the State, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses. For since it is in the very nature of man to follow the guide of reason in his actions, if his intellect sins at all his will soon follows; and thus it happens that looseness of intellectual opinion influences human actions and perverts them.  (Encyclical Aeterni Patris, no. 2)

All of Leo’s later encyclicals dealing with the foundations of the political order or of socio-economic affairs, such as the famous Rerum Novarum (1891), flowed from the basic principle enunciated here, that right thinking results in right action, and if our ideas are not correct our actions will surely not be correct either.

Philosophy is important, indeed crucial, because in the end no political order or social theory is defensible that is not grounded first in a philosophy of man, and finally in a metaphysics, including a doctrine of God. This does not mean that an appeal to tradition in certain circumstances is not fitting.  It does mean, however, that tradition is never the final court of appeal, and any role for tradition is the role allotted to it by reason. Whenever someone claims a right or a duty, whether this claim is correct or is absurd, it is not enough to answer by an appeal to custom, to history or to established institutions of any kind. At their back there must always be reason, “since it is in the very nature of man to follow the guide of reason in his actions.”

For example, in the current debate over same-sex marriage in the United States, the chief locus of controversy seems to lie in the interpretation of passages from Holy Scripture. Although as a Catholic I accept the authority of Scipture, I do not think it is appropriate to make this question revolve around biblical exegesis. For one thing, not everyone accepts the authority of the Bible nor is there general agreement about how to understand the sacred text or who has the ultimate authority to expound its meaning. More fundamentally, most of the moral code in Scripture that continues to apply to mankind today does so because it is simply a statement of the natural law, the ethical principles rooted in our very human nature or whatness. Opponents of same-sex unions must be able to advance better reasons than simply the scriptural texts if they want ultimately to have a reasonable basis for the opinions they hold, as well as a chance, however slim it may be, of influencing public opinion.

The debate over same-sex marriage and homosexuality is simply one instance of the necessity for having a reasoned intellectual foundation for our thinking. Too many people assume that Christians have no such reasoned foundation nor even aspire to have one. But of course this is not true for all Christians, since the Catholic Church insists that the act of faith is a reasonable act, not dependent upon some sort of leap of faith. But my purpose in writing here is not to engage in controversy with other Christians on such matters, rather merely to point out the absolute necessity that we be able to base our thinking on a reasonable philosophical foundation.

Enlightenment ratiocination is not reason as understood in the scholastic tradition. The usurping of the title to reason by the disciples of the Enlightenment ought not to mean that their opponents acquiesce in that claim. Rather we should be able to show how our use of reason is both more true to the demands of the intellect and does not depend upon tradition or a misuse of what people call “faith.” Even if no one pays any attention to our explanations, fidelity to God himself and to our own intellectual integrity demand this. Otherwise our thinking will rest merely upon sand and will deserve whatever scorn our contemporaries care to cast upon it.

Thomas Storck is the author of three books relating Catholic social teaching and political principles. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Caelum et Terra, the New Oxford Review, and The Chesterton Review, where he sits on the editorial board. An archive of Mr. Storck’s writings can be found at www.thomasstorck.org.

Last April, Scott Lloyd penned what’s turned out to be the most popular post ever at Ethika Politika. After thousands of pageviews, and in light of recent events, we figured it was a topic worth revisiting.

The gist of Lloyd’s argument is pretty basic: the ‘need’ for abortions doesn’t arise in a vacuum, and contraceptives have unarguably contributed to a culture that not only embraces abortions, but even more of them. In his words, “more contraception is associated with higher abortion rates, and a ‘destabilization’ occurs when contraception enters into a population.” There are numbers to back up the claims. And Planned Parenthood’s own Guttmacher Institute admits as much.

Lloyd’s criticism of pro-contraceptive pro-life activism is devastating. People struggle to find practical ways to reduce the number of and need for abortions. But one thing is certain: condoms, IUDs, and the pill aren’t the answer.

Now in 2012, with the HHS contraceptive mandate fresh in mind, the stakes of holding this position are even higher. Without going so far as to compel conscientiously opposed groups actually to provide abortions, the government has struck at the relatively soft target of contraceptive access. To many pro-contraceptive pro-lifers, easier access to contraception might well have seemed like progress—even with the unfortunate rider of those pesky abortifacient methods. “We want to end abortion; and we think contraceptives are the best way to do that. It’s worth giving a little ground for big gains in the future.” The impudent proposal to foist this coverage even upon conscientious objectors, however, made for a common enemy worth opposing. After all, what’s the future of American freedom without the right openly to practice and adhere to one’s religious beliefs?

The move by the current administration to divide the pro-life base has been well-crafted. Posed as a clear threat to religious liberty and conscience protection, the topic of the effectiveness and morality of contraception has been wholly downplayed. Protestant, Jewish, and even non-religious groups are joining to support Catholic bishops in opposing the mandate strictly on the grounds of the First Amendment. Not because of some more basic, underlying dilemma.

When it all blows over—if the HHS mandate and the Affordable Care Act are overturned as unconstitutional—the problem of contraception will remain. And it’ll be absolutely clear along just what lines certain factions are willing to position themselves under certain types of pressure.

It’s not hard to imagine a second wave, this time in favor of widespread contraceptive access without First Amendment hangups. This time around, the Catholics might well be left out to dry. Some will be caught in the middle, stuck on reconciling the benefits of contraceptives with the drawbacks of abortifacients. Most, it’s safe to say, will be an easy sell. Rather than succumbing to pressure to crumble under an unjust law, “pro-lifers” might even invite a little abortion for the sake of a long-term ‘solution.’ The base will be broken. And we won’t have to worry about uniting again anytime soon.

If the pro-life cause hopes to emerge victorious from the throes of a rampant disregard for basic human rights, it needs to realize—and ever more quickly—that abortion isn’t the only way dignity comes under attack. The embrace of abortion is fueled by an embrace of sexual license, and a culture that continues to reduce sexual expression to the unavoidable byproduct of insatiable and unruly desires.

In 2011, you couldn’t be both pro-life and pro-contraception. As it turns out, it looks like a pretty bad option in 2012, as well.

Follow the Center for Morality in Public Life on Facebook and Twitter.