I generally support the death penalty (except in Canada, for constitutional reasons involving double jeopardy and the government's ability to appeal a jury acquittal) and I think that abortion is adorable. I don't oppose war for it's own sake, even some aggressive wars. Any number of folks like to tell me that the Church doesn't necessarily stand against all war, but they can't cite one that the Holy See hasn't opposed in the last seventy years. I think that charity is a marvelous thing, but when it becomes a duty, it stops being charity. I also believe that government should be awfully careful when committing itself to the charity business.
I disagreed with the Church up and down the line, so I stopped being a Catholic when I was twelve years old. In my mind, that makes me more intellectually honest than the vast majority of Catholics, conservative and liberal alike, both of whom feel that the Church is "misguided" about 50% of its agenda at any given time.
That attitude is as sanctimonious as hell. You know what? They can't be misguided, you assholes! It's their fucking club. If you don't like their rules, get out of their treehouse. Sometimes life really can be as simple as that.
I'm of the mind that the Church is way too stingy about excommunicating fairweather Catholics. If it were my treehouse, Catholic law would be exactly that. Therefore, if you use birth control, get a divorce or an abortion, sit on jury that hands down a capital sentence, or volunteer for an "unjust war" (which, according to Church dogma, is most of them), out you'd go. Religion, after all, is the least democratic construct imaginable. No one has ever suggested that you get to outvote the Word of God.
But because the Church is way down on my list of things that I give a shit about, I'm generally supportive of their right to be wrong about everything. Even the tax exemption for the Church and its subsidiary institutions and charities doesn't bother me that much, even though I think that neither should exist. The Church obviously wants to play politics, so they can pay the entrance fee. I'm also of the belief that charity isn't charity when it is subsidized by the rest of society through the tax code. For that reason, I have never deducted charitable giving through on my taxes. The gifts that I give, however small, are 100% mine.
All things being equal, I try really hard not to think of my former church all that much.
Having said that, the Church has gone out of my way over the last few months to get my attention, both in the United States and here in Ontario, and that's what I'd like to discuss with you today.
Because of a constitutional quirk in the British North America Act of 1867, Catholic schools that want it receive public funding. Prior to 1984 that funding only went through grade 10 in Ontario. Afterwards the system was fully funded through what was then grade 13. The Catholic system is alone among religious schools in receiving public funds here. You'll see why that's important in a minute.
The genetically wrong and quite likely corrupt Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty recently decided that Catholic schools must be forced to accept something called "Gay-Straight Alliances," irrespective of their religious beliefs.
First, the Church's teachings awfully selective. You find almost no references to homosexuality in the New Testament. What you find about them is almost exclusively in the Old Testament, right alongside demented prohibitions against shellfish and tattoos (which immediately follows the queer stuff in Leviticus) and some truly fascinating divorce procedures. If and when religious folks ban their adherents from tattoo parlors and Red Lobster, I'll start taking their feelings about gay people seriously.
On the other hand, schools have sucked for years and are only getting worse. Each new generation is more awesomely fucking stupid than the last. If schools start focusing more on "the three r's" and less on social engineering (on both ends of the political spectrum,) they might finally stop being little more than retard factories. And that's especially true of sex education. The only people I trust less to teach anyone about fucking than the government is an institution that has an antiquated vow of chastity.
As much as I might personally sympathize with the motivations behind the gay-straight alliances, I'm not sure that schools are the proper forum for them, particularly by government diktat. As soon as those little bastards can read Dickens, show me where Pakistan is on an unmarked map or do my goddamned taxes without my winding up in prison, I might feel differently.
So far as "anti-bullying" measures go, most of the things that constitute bullying are already against the law or are in clear violation of existing school policies and definately actionable in civil courts. The question is - as it usually is - one of enforcement. I'm always suspicious when government takes further measures against things that are already criminal or creates drastic civil exposure. Usually, it constitutes nothing more than grandstanding by scumbag politicians of every stripe. For that reason, I rarely credit political types with good faith. And I'm never disappointed as a result.
It seems that the Catholic school boards object to the term "gay-straight alliance" more than anything else, but McGuinty is forcing them to accept it. Amazingly, no one is objecting all that strongly to the school boards' restrictions on the speech rights of their students. But again, it's hard to justify school time and resources being dedicated to non-academic activities (which I would extend to sports, clubs and other purely social functions, like dances and whatnot.) If students feel strongly enough about the issue, they can organize on their own time and call themselves whatever they want without the interference of the Church or the state.
Then there's the outrage and litigation against the Obama administration's insurance mandate for contraception. The Church itself is exempt, but their subsidiary institutions (schools, charities and hospitals) are not. So of course Catholics and sycophantic Republican shitheads are howling about "a war on religious liberty and the First Amendment."
Their argument is problematic in that most of the institutions at issue receive public funding in one way or another, either through direct subsidies, tax exemptions, grants or student loan programs. They're all on the dole to varying degrees and none of them have suggested that their faith is so strong that they're willing to forgo that funding to uphold it. They'd rather keep the money, sue, and become Republicans or members of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.
I'm amazed that the people who can't contain their outrage about gay-straight alliances and contraception mandates are almost always the very people who support drug testing welfare recipients. Those tests are in violation of the Fourth Amendment and individual privacy rights but, as Republicans and Conservative Party members will tell you, you sacrifice certain rights the second you take government money. They aren't wrong either. Private businesses accept all manner of restrictions and mandates when they receive public contracts.
As a matter of simple intellectual consistency, you can't support one government intrusion on liberty when public funding is involved and oppose the other. As a matter of constitutional theory, all rights are created equal. One person's right to the free exercise of religion is no more special than another's right to be free of unreasonable searches, except upon issuance of a warrant. And the reverse is also true. Liberty rights are liberty rights. You can't logically or realistically demand that the state infringe one one, yet insist that another is off-limits.
Of course, forgoing public subsidies probably wouldn't be the end of the matter. The government has the legal right to be involved in educational curriculum, even of home schooled children. And regardless of which party controls the White House and Congress next year, the American government is going to be a whole lot more involved in the health insurance industry.
However, Catholics would have a much stronger argument if they didn't insist on being paid pipers who play their own tune.
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