March 21, 2009
Neuhaus's Law states that "where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed."
In America, where we make everything easier to do but the right thing, we will now be able to sign away our freedom of choice and the secret ballot that insures it by "checking a card." Call it Macomb's Corollary to Neuhaus's Law: where freedom is optional, freedom will sooner or later be proscribed.
The two are related in Obama's Wonderland of magic mirrors and rabbits holes to nowhere. Proscripton of the freedom of the individual to vote for or against union membership will make union attacks on member orthodoxy that much easier to accomplish. There is precedent.
A few years ago during UAW negotiations with General Motors, Catholic members of the union reacted with outrage when they learned of a union contract proposal that would compel the automaker to subsidize abortions and union members to violate their consciences. I suspect GM could have cared little one way or the other. The large backloaded medical expenses involved older and retired autoworkers, not pregnant women.
The union -- and GM -- are now on record as having little respect for the individual Christian conscience. And now so is the President the United States. Doctors and nurses will no longer have the option of following their faith and morals when it involves stem cell research and its therapies or abortions. Senators, Congressmen and women, and Episcopal bishops may argue that these doctors and nurses are free to work at hospitals and clinics where government funding is not accepted. The catch is that for decades these same politicians, priests and law professors (that's you, Mr. President) have worked tirelessly to insinuate government money and influence into every aspect of American life, public and private. For the left, the private is public, the private is political, and so the greatest threat to privacy now comes not from the Patriot Act, but from the Obama stimulus plan.
The Democratic Party and its Leader are repaying left-wing unions (and there are no other kind now, see Macomb's Corollary) two-fold. Check card elections which are no elections at all and threats of prosecution and fines for being Catholic firmly entrench the moral numbness of the left in institutional and corporate America. More members, more money, more mischief. Less choice, less freedom, fewer troublesome consciences.
Back in the 1940s Peter Drucker began an ambitious and innovative project of researching how a major American corporation operates. He chose GM. At the time, the corporation was headed by Charlie Wilson. Drucker had complained to Wilson that he seemed to take far too much time choosing plant mangers, vice presidents, chief engineers. Wilson explained that he wanted the best (then) man for the job. It would be far more time-consuming and expensive to go back and clean up the mess that the wrong choice had made. As head of GM, he had better things to do. Charlie Wilson understood the worth of the individual. Not unrelated, he observed that the major problem with the UAW and all unions was that "there was no place for a smart guy to go."
I've belonged to two UAW locals and one SEIU local. I knew what Wilson meant. When office politics and entitlement blended into a toxic brew with ideological politics then vision, insight, and purpose were driven out completely. Then again, being a former union member isn't necessary. Read that funeral march in black, the daily headline.
The unions expect at least a million new members if check card is passed. That's a lot of dues and a lot of people beholden to the largesse of the unions and its Democratic allies. Catholics will have to numb their consciences with the rhetoic of social justice in order to support the union and its party. Some do it now. It will only get worse.
And that brings us back to Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. Until November 4th, he, and men and women like him, often met in the White House with the president. He advised President Bush on one of the most crucial issues of this century and the last. President Obama characterizes bioethics, indeed ethics of any kind related to the Church and its support for the Culture of Life, as attacks on science. He has "returned science to Washington." His science is science wihtout ethics; science as license. As the mathematician in JURASSIC PARK said, "just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should." I wonder if Steven Spielberg remembered that line as he raised millions of dollars for the Obama campaign at parties throughout the Hollywood establishment.
Catholics -- and America -- will regret that Fr. Neuhaus and his successors will no longer be welcome in the Oval Office. The president will miss him too because something will be missing, he just will not be able to give it name.
Let's call it freedom. Let's call it orthodoxy.
Sam Macomb
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