Most of the time, I try to get what I view as the most important story of the day at the top of the APR charts. But sometimes... you just have to go with the most ridiculous.
Ross Douthat, is very, very concerned for the pope.
... it helps to understand certain practical aspects of the doctrine of papal infallibility.
On paper, that doctrine seems to grant extraordinary power to the pope — since he cannot err, the First Vatican Council declared in 1870, when he “defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church.”
In practice, though, it places profound effective limits on his power.
Those limits are set, in part, by normal human modesty: “I am only infallible if I speak infallibly, but I shall never do that,” John XXIII is reported to have said. But they’re also set by the binding power of existing teaching, which a pope cannot reverse or contradict without proving his own office, well, fallible — effectively dynamiting the very claim to authority on which his decisions rest.
Not surprisingly, then, popes are usually quite careful. On the two modern occasions when a pontiff defined a doctrine of the faith, it was on a subject — the holiness of the Virgin Mary — that few devout Catholics consider controversial.
Ah, so popes are only infallible when they are careful to say things that don't contradict anything that any pope has ever said in the past, and in confirming things that everyone already believes. What a lovely, conservative box you've built for the pontiff, Mr. Douthat. But what if a pope should
want something to change? Say, an end to two millennia of mistreatment of homosexuals, or an end to the ridiculous and demeaning treatment of people who choose to end a marriage?
But something very different is happening under Pope Francis. In his public words and gestures, through the men he’s elevated and the debates he’s encouraged, this pope has repeatedly signaled a desire to rethink issues where Catholic teaching is in clear tension with Western social life — sex and marriage, divorce and homosexuality.
yes, and...
Over all, that conservative reply has the better of the argument.
Oh, of course they do. You see, if the church were to admit that homosexuals were not living in sin, or that the annulment system wasn't utterly idiotic, it would mean admitting that some pope, at some time in the past, was... wring. I mean worgn. I mean... oh, you know.
Hang on. We're coming to the best part.
Such a reversal would put the church on the brink of a precipice. Of course it would be welcomed by some progressive Catholics and hailed by the secular press. But it would leave many of the church’s bishops and theologians in an untenable position, and it would sow confusion among the church’s orthodox adherents — encouraging doubt and defections, apocalypticism and paranoia (remember there is another pope still living!) and eventually even a real schism.
Yes, folks. Ross Douthat, henceforth known as the Jefferson Davis of Catholicism, has nailed his Sunday morning missive to the editorial page of the New York Times. He's declared that, should His Holiness, the Bishop of Rome and the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church, seek to use his power for more than decorative purposes, his papal bulls are... bull. And unless Francis sits down and stops noticing that it's not the sixteenth century, Ross is going to march his boys over to Mater Ecclesiae monastery, drag Benedict away from his oatmeal, and declare him the once and future Pope. So there.
If you're not a catholic, this may seem like an esoteric (though hilarious) argument. However, I'm not sure I've ever seen a better capsule summary of the conservative world view: I have a huge respect for the system—Mr. President, Your Honor, Your Holiness—so much so, that if you don't agree with me you're simply wrong. And I'll bring the system down to prove it.
Okay, enough. Come on inside.
Dana Milbank on the South Dakota senate race.
Many issues are at play in these 2014 midterm elections. The 1970s Abscam scandal has not been one of them.
Until now.
Former Republican senator Larry Pressler, mounting an independent candidacy to recapture the seat he lost 18 years ago, has made a campaign theme of his refusal to take a bribe. In 1978.
“This press conference is not for me to be bragging about Abscam,” Pressler said at a campaign event Thursday, before bragging about the scandal, which inspired the 2013 movie “American Hustle.” ...
That’s nice, but for all the typical American remembers of Abscam, Pressler might as well be talking about his role in Teapot Dome.
Yet the event was emblematic of Pressler’s quixotic — and surprisingly successful — candidacy. He’s running on a platform to return politics to the way it was when he served in Congress, from 1974 to 1997 — before the flood of money and proliferation of ideological purity tests turned the legislature into a combat zone where little gets done. His idea is so crazy it just might work; it already has, in a way, by shaking up a race that was supposed to be easy for the Republicans.
It never hurts to hold up a mirror to the Conservatives to show them how un-conservative they've been.
Carly Fiorina weeps for ALEC.
In recent months, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been under siege by an army of professional activists. Its weapons: radically oversimplified arguments and online pressure campaigns. Its victim: free and open debate. The attacks have prompted Google, among other tech giants, to part ways with ALEC, an alliance of state legislators who advocate limited government, free markets, and individual liberty. Unfortunately, such shortsighted thinking all too often shapes corporate strategy at a time when policies with enormous, and potentially damaging, economic implications are gaining ground.
That's right, people. You "professional activists" have been stiffing public debate by waging, um, public campaigns on ALECs army of, um, private lobbyists. You monsters. Oh, and climate change is not happening, not our fault, not that important, inevitable, too expensive to change (pick as many from the list as you like).
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a city in crisis.
Over the past two and a half months, black St. Louis and white St. Louis have recognized in meaningful ways that regardless of one’s views on the still undetermined specifics of how and why Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson shot Mr. Brown, racial disparity has fed the community’s narrative for too long.
The Ferguson movement, in its various forms, has grown strong enough that on Tuesday, Gov. Jay Nixon used the power of state government to give St. Louis the opportunity to change itself, to heal, to move forward, to find unity in our historical division.
The governor has been criticized, including by this editorial page, for being slow to recognize the historic opportunity for change that the Ferguson protests offer the St. Louis region. But he’s here now, and in creating a Ferguson Commission, he has set the table for important, potentially groundbreaking conversations. ...
Now comes the heavy lifting.
The governor has given the community a charge: Examine the social and economic conditions “underscored by the unrest” and make specific recommendations to create “a stronger, fairer place for everyone to live.” That’s a broad but immensely important task. For the Ferguson Commission to be successful, the first step will be the hardest. Who gets a seat at the table?
It's not the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but maybe it's a start. And if you haven't already seen it, go look at the photo that runs with this editorial of a white male Rams fan trying to steal an American flag from a black female protester. The current situation in a nutshell.
Nicholas Kristof on the departure of the American Dream.
The best escalator to opportunity in America is education. But a new study underscores that the escalator is broken.
We expect each generation to do better, but, currently, more young American men have less education (29 percent) than their parents than have more education (20 percent).
Among young Americans whose parents didn't graduate from high school, only 5 percent make it through college themselves. In other rich countries, the figure is 23 percent.
The United States is devoting billions of dollars to compete with Russia militarily, but maybe we should try to compete educationally. Russia now has the largest percentage of adults with a university education of any industrialized country — a position once held by the United States, although we’re plunging in that roster.
No, no. Helping our own people through education (or medicine, or housing, or food) is communism. Buying billions of dollars worth of useless weapons systems is only stupidism. Americans support stupidism.
Sean McElwee on cheating to win.
Since 2008, people of color become a growing share of the voting population while the GOP has, if anything, moved further to the right. It has further alienated voters of color with racist attacks and laws. But as they say: if you can’t beat ‘em, make sure they don’t vote. Over the last four years the Republicans have gone through elaborate attempts to make sure populations that don’t support them don’t get a chance to vote.
Since 2006, Republicans have pushed through voter ID laws in 34 states. Such laws did not exist before 2006, when Indiana passed the first voter ID law. The laws were ostensibly aimed at preventing voter fraud, but a News21 investigation finds only 2,068 instance of alleged fraud since 2000 (that is out of over 146 million voters). They estimate that there is one accusation of voter fraud for every 15 million voters. As Mother Jones notes, instances of voter fraud are more rare than UFO sightings. There have been only 13 instances of in-person voter fraud (the sorts that a voter ID law would reduce), while 47,000 people claim to have seen a UFO.
Yeah, but if only those people who saw UFOs could vote, I'll bet the GOP would win big time.
Akiko Bush wonders what you're so afraid of.
A time of year when we celebrate and indulge in what frightens us may be a good moment to consider how fear begins. It could be anything: a sound, a dog’s bark or bite, some infant terror of being left alone, darkness, a taste, some memory, the unknown, the unseen, the known, the seen. Almost always, its origins are unclear. ...
We have clear directives about what is really worth our fear. Participants in the real parade of horrors include radical changes in the carbon cycle, the rate of species extinction, extreme weather, genetically modified food, institutional financial misconduct that puts our security at risk. The archive of very real menaces threatening us now is so full, it would seem we hardly know how to choose what to be scared of.
Except that we do choose, and what we choose are generally the ordinary fears such as heights, public speaking, insects, reptiles. They are all things that have about as much chance of harming us as the characters behind some of this season’s top trending scary costumes: zombies, werewolves and cast members from “Duck Dynasty.”
Well, to be fair, some members of Duck Dynasty are doing real harm. But when it comes to public speaking, I would happily perform Homer's Illiad in the original Greek in front of the United Nations–naked–to stave off any of the real fears in the first list. And now you have something else to be afraid of.