Bittersweet

1bit·ter·sweet n \ˈbi-tər-ˌswēt\

1. Reading a critical review by Florence King of a book by P.J. O'Rourke that derides my age group as"fish living in a sea of hooey."

More on Religious Accomodation

According to news reports, the Military will soon allow service members to sport turbans, beards, tattoos and piercings as part of an expanded accommodation of their religious or non-religious expression.

The Hill reports, "A new Pentagon policy states that military departments will accommodate religious requests from individual service members unless a request would interfere with military readiness, a mission, unit cohesion, or good order and discipline. 
This would include religious clothing, facial hair, religious tattoos and piercings."


The article concludes by quoting a Pentagon spokesman, "The Department of Defense places a high value on the rights of members of the military services to observe the tenets of their respective religions and the rights of others to their own religious beliefs,"  "including the right to hold no beliefs,"

The revised DoD Instruction R 1300.17 is available here. On my first reading, I found some revisions that seem to weaken the requirements of the Services to accommodate religious practice. Perhaps more on that later.

I suspect the Church of Body Modification will soon grow in membership.

But still no slack for the Little Sisters of the Poor...

In the battle between Charity and Indulgence, Indulgence has won

Am I alone in my suspicion that the Obama Administration likes these "sisters"



more than these sisters:



Because, of course, this work:



is so much more beneficial to society

 than this work:


Nah. What could give me that idea?

It might be that the Administration has issued at least 729 waivers to Obamacare mandates to unions, municipalities and corporations but is fighting the Little Sisters  and over 300 other plaintiffs all the way to the Supreme Court to enforce the mandate that they violate their religious believes and allow free birth control and abortifacients to be provided through their health insurance plans.

If it wins, the Administration will have the power to fine the Little Sisters out of their ministry to the indigent elderly people. Like it already has forced Catholic Charities out of providing adoption services.

Meanwhile, back at the DOJ: "Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the federal government will recognize so-called “marriages” performed in Utah between persons of the same sex that even Utah itself does not recognize as marriage."

While "IRS/White House Collusion in the War on Religion"

And the list of people with faith being subject to compulsion to act contrary to the tenets of their faith continues to grow: "The Huguenins, who run Elane Photography, have no right to choose not to take on a same-sex wedding, according to the court.... A florist in Washington has been sued for declining to create floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding ceremony. A family-operated inn in Vermont was sued for supposedly declining to host a same-sex wedding reception on its premises. Cake makers in Oregon and Colorado have been sued for declining to create cakes for same-sex wedding ceremonies. A promotional printer in Kentucky has been sued for declining to print shirts for a local gay-pride festival."

They each face a variety of civil damages, fines and potential jail sentences. In each case, they face closing their businesses - and losing their livelihoods if they refuse to participate in events that they consider morally wrong.

Perhaps this is the sort of progress Obama had in mind in his Presidential Proclamation for LGBT Month, "This year, we celebrate LGBT Pride Month at a moment of great hope and progress, recognizing that more needs to be done."

I shudder to think what more he hopes for on this front, which the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and the Obama Administration seem to consider a sacred rite.

Imago Dei

Time reports on a campaign among Evangelicals that seeks to refocus their engagement with the culture and also to present their beliefs in a more positive light.

Time quotes the campaign's statement of purpose, "The Imago Dei, or Image of God, pledge is simple: “I recognize that every human being, in and out of the womb, carries the image of God; without exception. Therefore, I will treat everyone with love and respect.”""

Now, as a Catholic, this really seems like a big so-what? Of course a Christian recognizes the inherent dignity of every human being from conception to natural death and recognizes his responsibility to God and to his fellow creature to treat him with love and respect. We often fail, but we ought never forget our responsibility exists.

During this week of the March for Life, I would expect Time to notice the explicit reference to "in and out of the womb."

Nah. Like clockwork, Time buried the Pro-Life lede two days before the March for Life.

TIME's headline is funny, really - but not in a good way:

The Imago Dei Campaign: Evangelical Groups Say Gays Made in God’s Image


Like it's breaking news, or something.

Because, of course, Evangelicals have always thought that every human being - except gays - were created in God's image. I'm trying to recall when Ken Ham or Jerry Falwell said, "Man was created on the 6th Day of Creation, out of mud, 10,000 years ago; except Gays. Gays evolved from monkeys in West Africa."

Apparently Time heard them say that somewhere. Maybe in a dream.

Seems like the Imago Dei Campaign recognizes the work cut out for it exemplified by Time's ignorant and biased vision of Evangelicals. Its list of objectives includes:

Enrich and redeem the narrative of American Evangelicalism by replacing the perceived image of an angry homogenous evangelical demographic that opposes everything to a convicted yet compassionate multi-ethnic kingdom culture community committed to sharing truth with love.

People are having similar difficulties with Pope Francis' efforts to evangelize folks like Time, its readers and  Elizabeth Dias, the author. So called 'liberal Catholics' and those ignorant of the teachings of the Church (like Time, et.al.) leapt at some of his comments as hints that he was open to changing Church doctrine on homosexual acts, divorce, birth control, etc.  and figured he misspoke or was throwing a bone to B16-philes when he said, "of course I'm a son of the Church" and that he affirms everything the Church teaches on those issues.

Perhaps this pictorial essay in The Week may help Time readers to understand how we can recognize a person as created in the image of God while he or she is attempting to obscure the Imago Dei.

God sees us as He created us, kind of like the picture on the left (Gen 1:27 So God made man in his own image, made him in the image of God. Man and woman both, he created them. 28 And God pronounced his blessing on them....31 And God saw all that he had made, and found it very good.)



Our own accretions to ourselves, when they diverge from God's design for us, may be colorful, entertaining, 'edgy', or whatever. We may think they are authentic expressions of who we think we really are. We may think they make us more happy.

But God sees us as we really are, as He created us. And He sees that all He has made is very good. The things we do to ourselves to alter that creation are not really improvements. They aren't beautiful, true and good.

Christianity demands that I recognize, love and respect the human person created in God's image beneath the caricature of a person as she represents herself in the picture on the right. I needn't love or respect the rib cage corset or skull headpiece. In fact, I ought, in a loving way, share with her that she would be more comfortable, more authentic and more truly happy being as God created her to be.

Nor does loving a person Imago Dei require me to love or respect his disfigurement of his sexuality, his responsibilities to the poor or to the defenseless. That is how I do my duty to my fellow man, created in God's image, and to God, Who created him.

ADDENDUM: Here is another example of the Imago Dei exposed and concealed.


Of course, Our Father sees us in our hearts, as we really are. I pray he doesn't see a made-up clown when He looks at me.

Death by a Thousand Cuts by Hanlon's Razor

This is the most confounding administration I have ever seen. Every indication leads to the conclusion that it's intentionally committed to the destruction of the remnants of Constitutional order that still flutter like tattered shreds from the bent and corroded flag pole of our body politic.

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that nothing this administration has done has been to the benefit of the country, while nearly everything it has done has been to its detriment. Granted, some interest group, grievance mob or financial concern has benefited greatly from this or that particular policy. But it is clear that the General Welfare has suffered and continues to do so.

Such a perfect record of perfidy cannot be unintentional, can it?

But can we be sure that the administration is guilty of  deceitfulness; untrustworthiness.

synonyms:

treachery, duplicity, deceit, deceitfulness, disloyalty, infidelity,faithlessness, unfaithfulness, betrayal, treason, double-dealing,untrustworthiness, breach of trust;

I feel like we can.

But, is it possible that this is The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight on a gargantuan, whole-of-government level?

Before we leap on the crazy train of conspiracy theory, we should at least try to eliminate any more likely possibilities.

My first inclination is to assign the mal-government of the current regime to a gargantuan case of Groupthink among the Progressive/Liberal/Leftist "elite" operating in this country.

According to the Oregon State University web site on the subject, it appears so:

Groupthink occurs when a homogenous highly cohesive group is so concerned with maintaining unanimity that they fail to evaluate all their alternatives and options. Groupthink members see themselves as part of an in-group working against an outgroup opposed to their goals.

The symptoms are familiar to anyone following the antics of the current administration and its fellow travelers: 

To make groupthink testable, Irving Janis devised eight symptoms indicative of groupthink.

Type I: Overestimations of the group — its power and morality

• Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
• Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.

Type II: Closed-mindedness

• Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group's assumptions.
• Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, impotent, or stupid.

Type III: Pressures toward uniformity

• Self-censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
• Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
• Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of "disloyalty"
• Mind guards— self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

And the outcomes also seem to fit Professor Irving Janis' observations:

Groupthink, resulting from the symptoms listed above, results in defective decision-making. That is, consensus-driven decisions are the result of the following practices of groupthinking

• Incomplete survey of alternatives
• Incomplete survey of objectives
• Failure to examine risks of preferred choice
• Failure to reevaluate previously rejected alternatives
• Poor information search
• Selection bias in collecting information
• Failure to work out contingency plans.

That's my working hypothesis. But there is another possibility: Stupidity.

Hanlon's Razor posits: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.


Are we experiencing massive stupidity at a cost of $1.1T per year in direct costs and who knows how much in indirect costs? But isn't the Administration filled with Distinguished Harvard graduates and high ranking government officials?

Yeah, so what? Not like a Harvard education equips them to identify the capital of Canada, or anything like that. The list of Harvard graduates also includes, Enron crook Jeffrey Skilling, a geneticist and child molester named W. French Anderson, and Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.), who was raided by the FBI in August and found to have $90,000 hidden in his freezer and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, Class of 1962.

No, I'm afraid we have to seriously consider near universal stupidity within the Obama administration and among Progressive/Liberal/Leftists in general before we can leap to any conspiracy theories.

After all, "Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so."