Thursday, June 30, 2022

Mark Shea responds to the Roe decision

You/'ve been waiting for it, you know you have.  Here is one of his posts on the subject.  I've seen several comment on his various posts since the decision.  I was going to let them bother with Mark on this one.  Most of what he wrote is what one expects. 

But this post jumped out at me.  Here's why.  Take a look at how he frames it:

’m seeing comments all over the web like this:

“We pro-life people now need to work to create the conditions where life can flourish, which means certain social guarantees, including healthcare, decent employment, education (through graduate school), housing, nutrition, freedom from war, and a safe and pollution-free environment.”

The fatal word in this is “now”. 

Now I've learned not to trust Mark.  For the longest time we could attribute his constant stream of errors and falsehoods to laziness or partisanship on his part.  But too often he has spread false accusations and lies, and accepted errors long debunked in order to drive his agendas.  By his own standard, whereby a single mistake or misstep by a conservative is enough for Mark to condemn all conservatives, I believe Mark less than I believe your average cult leader in a Waco compound. 

Nonetheless, note what he did here.  He's suggesting that this is some MAGA conservative pro-life advocate saying 'now we need to care about moms and babies.'  As if up until now they haven't.   My first instinct is that Mark wrote that quote himself.  After all, I know of nobody remotely to the right who would say this.  This is laundry list of leftwing and democratic economic agendas and policies and theories.  

Or it could be one of those 'anti-abortion leftwing democrats'.   One of those liberal or democrat or atheist for life types who are against abortion, plus the death penalty and all other such things, but otherwise hardcore to the left of center in almost everything else.  

I'm willing to cut Mark some slack and make that second assumption.  He has taken something from a leftwing pro-life advocate and used it to regurgitate the old pro-abortion talking point that people against aborting pregnancies don't care about moms or babies.  Or worse, those pro-life advocates dare to question the policies and narratives of the political Left. 

That last part I'll buy.  There actually are some people who look at the numbers and question the narrative that if we just give more government mandated support for individuals, they'll stop sinning.  Some actually believe this sort of mentality doesn't make them sin less, it just shifts the sins around.  They believe that, as well meaning as some of these proposals are, they are short term benefits at best, that lead to long term problems that make things worse. 

Or Mark is trying to suggest pro-life advocates have never cared about moms or babies.  At that point, the invitation still stands: please show data demonstrating that pro-life activists are any less charitable than anyone else.  

But I had to respond to this one, since Mark doesn't link to the source of the quote, nor mention it, or identity who wrote it in any way.   I'll be charitable and assume it's someone left of center who otherwise is against abortion.  But if that is the case, it speaks to the assumption that God is little concerned with our widow's mites, cups of cold water, clothes for the naked and visits to jail; that the Almighty only cares about what political and economic policies of Caesar we support.  Which, by my understanding of the Gospel, is a false assumption of the most dangerous kind. 

UPDATE:  Apparently this was a two parter or something, since I was sent a link to a follow up post.  It seems to be some series.  Anyway, here is the link.  I was going to comment, but again, why?  Time is too precious.  It's bad enough to read any of it, but for those who enjoy misery, here's your chance. 

18 comments:

  1. I like this series. Is Greydanus next?

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    1. He should be. Good way to close out the week.

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    2. Sadly, Dave can't do one for Pope Francis because...he never reacted. Aside from granting Pelosi communion, which is the equivalent of giving the pro-life movement the finger. Loathsome man.

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    3. This is true. I've waited for some definitive statement from Pope Francis, but haven't seen one. The two times he has said anything, it's been vague at best. Not like when he comes down on those who question Covid lockdowns or who attend a Latin Mass. Then he's straight to the point. But though he calls this baby murder, it doesn't seem to be much of a deal breaker for him.

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  2. IOW, here's a vague, dubious and unattainable laundry list that if you don't immediately seize upon as self-evidently determinative is justification for capitulating to whatever the Zeitgeist demands.

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    1. Yep. Mark pretty much says the same thing over and over again. I think it's how he justifies his alignment with what he once called the Party of Death. If you want to align with the Nazis in WWII, then you must convince yourself, if not others, that the real threat to the world is FDR and the Americans. I think much of what Mark does is along those lines.

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  3. We pro-life people now need to work to create the conditions where life can flourish, which means certain social guarantees, including healthcare, decent employment, education (through graduate school), housing, nutrition, freedom from war, and a safe and pollution-free environment

    Shea isn't suffering from inadequate nutrition.

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    1. Shea supports liberal war criminals and wants to flood the country with immigrants (both legal and illegal) who'll end up driving down domestic wages. But he cares a lot about the poor because he likes to print them money. Poor people love inflation.

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    2. It always goes down tough when Americans living in luxury and freedom attempt to paint the country that gave them that as the worst country in the world. Of course Mark makes sure we understand any problems with America are purely the fault of the Right.

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  4. This all makes me think of that scene in Out of the Silent Planet where Weston makes a nice little speech, but since Ransom lacks the fluency in Martian to translate the rhetoric his translation only includes what Weston is actually aiming for (i.e. that humans should take Mars from the Martians by force, simply because they can.)

    I wonder what a similar translation of Mark Shea's words would end up with. Stripping away the hysteria, here are the actual reasons I can see that Shea gives for the overturning of Roe v. Wade being a bad thing:

    1.) It will be ineffective since outlawing abortions won't stop anyone from getting an abortion.
    2.) It's all been a huge distraction where the GOP has not done anything good out of the excuse that overturning Roe v. Wade was all that mattered.

    Though I don't think you can even use 2.) without the rhetoric, since the obvious conclusion from that is that if it really was all a sham then it would be more beneficial for the GOP if Roe v. Wade were never overturned. In his follow-up Shea suggest the problem is now the GOP will turn its efforts towards laws supporting gay relationships (since, you know, Catholics obviously should support those I guess?) but even then it's just a case of the GOP not doing anything in a different way.

    So really it comes down to the decision not being effective in stopping abortions (again, granting Shea's obviously false narrative), meaning that things are no worse in that regard than they were before. This means that even if we grant Shea every point he is trying to make, it still makes no sense for him to be this apoplectic about the situation. There are only two groups of people who actually listen to him:

    1.) Actual hardline democrats who know that Shea is lying about being supporting Church teaching but are okay with it since lying is the democrat way.
    2.) People who are easily misled by rhetoric. They see Shea talk about the "MAGA cult" enough and think that they must be bad simply because Shea is calling them names, simple as that.

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    1. I’ve never commented here before but I regularly read this blog.

      Does Ransom lack fluency in the Martian language? I remembered it as the Martian language lacking the obfuscating and euphemistic rhetoric that Weston was using, which necessitated Ransom stating Weston’s case more simplistically and therefore brutally. Kind of like Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” but in fictional form.

      I agree with your assessment of Shea’s rhetoric though. I am someone who came into the church in the early 2000s and was greatly helped by Mark Shea’s posts back then (he appears to have repudiated most of his blogging work from that era in a recent essay, which is interesting.)

      Sometime in 2004 I believe he went on a hiatus and when he returned he was much nastier and seemed to be “enjoying it” a lot less. I got reprimanded by him in the comments for, I believe, arguing that not all trads are anti-Semites. His strategy seems to be 1. Create categories of terrible people (“Rubber-hose right” “Pro-Life MAGA Cult”). 2. Place everyone who he disagrees with in one of these categories. 3. Accuse the entire category of worshipping Satan and hoping for every evil thing to happen. 4. Impugn the honesty of anyone who disagrees with his assessment of his enemies, and most likely place them in one Of his categories.

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    2. Can I just say how thrilled I am to see Lewis' Space Trilogy brought up in random conversation in this, the year of our Lord 2022?

      That is all. I salute you men of culture, Optatus and Rudolph.

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    3. I don't have a copy of the book so I can't check the exact reason for Ransom having difficulty getting the argument across "correctly." I recall a lot of translations followed by things like "no, that's not quite the right term" though I don't remember if that was due to Ransom being new to the language, the language lacking the required terms, Ransom just not being a skilled rhetorician, or some combination of the three.

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    4. If I remember correctly it was that the unfallen and innocent Martians had no terms that allowed them to obscure the true meaning. So when Weston was trying to say-without-saying “I’m going to murder the Martians and take their land for my own use” Ransom basically had to say it that way. Weston wanted to say something like “hostile native populations may have to be removed from the area, by force if necessary, in order to allow for full development.”

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  5. Mark Shea isn't an intellectual. He's a vending machine for word-sallads.

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    1. Don't be ridiculous. Mark doesn't know the first thing about salads.

      That being said, you can tell that he's fuming. He spent years insisting that the GOP would never overturn Roe. Now that Trump's the first post-Roe Republican president to have never nominated a pro-abort to the high court, he's decided to own the MAGA cult by...supporting Roe.

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    2. Donald, Anon is right. The main reason Mark gave for throwing off the GOP all those years ago was that the GOP was never about ending Roe, and only used the promise to sucker Christian conservatives. He often used the image of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. Though in fairness, and perhaps revealing, that once Trump was in office and we saw the justices he was nominating, Mark began shifting from 'they'll never overturn Roe' to 'why overturning Roe means nothing at all.' Now, of course, he's fighting to keep Roe on the books. Quite a turn from the man who coined the phrase 'Murder, Inc.' to describe Planned Parenthood and the Democratic Party the Party of Death.

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    3. I'm not sure anything I said disagreed with anything anon said

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