Thomas More, Cinderella, and Religious Freedom in America

by James J Heaney Posted on 9 June 2012

These comments were delivered at the St. Paul Stand Up For Religious Freedom rally by Dr. Anne Maloney, on June 8th, 2012, in front of the Warren E. Burger Federal Building in St. Paul.  Dr. Maloney is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Catherine.

This is not a place I thought that I would ever be. I am a big fan of St. Thomas More, and I have seen, many times, Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons. Bolt’s play shows us what happens as Henry VIII continues to insist that Sir Thomas swear fealty to him, Henry, as head of the new Church of England. To do so would, of course, violate More’s religious freedom and his conscience, and so More  refuses. When Thomas’ friends express fear that he will be harmed, perhaps even executed, for refusing to violate his conscience, this line keeps coming up:  “oh for God’s sake; this isn’t Spain. This is England.” I always used to sigh when hearing that line, struck by the naivete of those Brits who did not see what was coming, who did not see where they stood. Thomas would be executed for refusing to violate his conscience, for refusing to violate the religious freedom that England’s Rule of Law guaranteed.

Here we stand. I never thought I would be here. Yet here we are.

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Posted in Faith & Morals, Law | 152 Comments

Moderate Republicans Triumph at MN House District 49A Convention

by James J Heaney Posted on 10 May 2012

Just got back from the endorsing convention for Minnesota House District 49A.  After four rounds of balloting, former Pawlenty energy adviser and local GOP establishment figure Bill Glahn secured the nomination with 62% of the vote, defeating former Met Council vice-chairwoman Polly Peterson-Bowles and small businessman Steve Wise.  (Candidates had to win 60% of the vote to avoid facing one another in the primary.)

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Posted in Horse Race, Mere Opinion, Politics | 216 Comments

In Conversation: Some Thoughts on Global Warming

by James J Heaney Posted on 6 May 2012

I started discussing global warming with an eagerly-moderate friend of mine on Facebook, and it made good blog fodder.  I’ve summarized his posts as questions, because I’ve learned that some people don’t like having their exact words reposted on some public blog (even without attribution), but my replies are essentially verbatim.  I will try to keep my interlocutor from sounding like poor Glaucon in my retelling.

Q: What do you think of this HuffPo feature on global warming by Twin Cities weatherman Paul Douglas?

Paul Douglas was the only local weatherman to predict the Halloween Blizzard of ’91, so I will always pay him attention. Never knew he was Republican before; cool.  Still, like nearly everyone talking about global warming, he is long on diagnosis and short on prescriptions less costly than the disease.

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Posted in In Conversation, Mere Opinion, Politics | 1,508 Comments

Why Catholics Don’t Fast on Sundays

by James J Heaney Posted on 1 May 2012

“Because of its special importance, the Sunday celebration gives way only to solemnities or feasts of the Lord.”

—General Norms for the Liturgical Year and Calendar, Chapter 1, Title I, Section II, Item 5

The Sunday feast takes precedence over ALL liturgical events save solemnities and even more major feasts.

You would be surprised by how long I have been looking for the legal basis for the Catholic practice of suspending any fast (including the Lenten fast) when it falls on a Sunday. I posted this on Facebook last night and realized that I may not be the only one who wondered about it. There’s the norm, in black and white, for the Google robots to find. Hope it helps somebody else out there clear it up.

There may be other Church law on this subject, and I would welcome anyone in the comments telling me where I can find it.

Posted in Faith & Morals, Law | 244 Comments

Paul & Minnesota: FAQ 25 April 2012

by James J Heaney Posted on 26 April 2012

Q: I thought Santorum won Minnesota’s primary. Now Paul says he won the caucus? What?

A: Santorum won a non-binding beauty contest vote in February. Ron Paul won the state on Saturday.

Minnesota does not have a primary. We have a caucus. That means our delegates are not appointed by the party beforehand and then bound to a candidate based on the results. Instead, our delegates are selected from the ground up through a painstaking process that moves from caucus (your precinct) to BPOU (a unique Minnesota Republican political subdivision equivalent to a state senate district), then splits into culminating conventions in each Congressional District and State Central. Those nine conventions are where we, the people, actually select the delegates we send to Tampa. (Half are selected by the CD’s, half by State Central.)

Some people are still confused. Even though we get to pick our own delegates, aren’t they still bound to follow the results of the presidential straw poll taken on caucus night? In Nevada, that’s exactly the case: the people still get to choose their delegates, but those delegates must be apportioned according to the results of the Nevada straw poll on caucus night. This is called a binding caucus.

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Posted in Analysis, Horse Race | 862 Comments

REACTIONS: Washington is Not Broken Enough

by James J Heaney Posted on 23 April 2012

Yuval Levin has an excellent short piece over at National Review today.  (In fact, National Review had a particularly good Monday this week overall; I also recommend the editorial defense of the First Amendment and John Fund’s wonkish breakdown of Orrin Hatch’s primary race.)  I’m on a bit of a Levin kick after he explained the “hipster/bureaucrat” complex at the heart of liberalism in this month’s First Things.  Which reminds me: “Hipster/Bureaucrat Complex,” does not only sound like feminism’s beloved “Madonna-whore dichotomy.”  It is also a great band name.

Now that you know everything I read this weekend, here’s the piece I’m actually calling out [ellipses omitted]:

The idea that our system is paralyzed by disagreement is very common, especially on the left. But it has very little to do with the crisis of governance we actually face.  In the last decade, we have seen the enactment of, among other things, a large tax reform (the Bush tax cuts), a large education reform, a huge reorganization of our domestic security agencies, a reform of corporate governance (Sarbanes-Oxley), a new Medicare benefit, a massive response to the financial crisis (including several stimulus bills, an unprecedented bank rescue, a bailout of auto companies, and more, crossing two administrations of different parties), a huge health-care reform, a huge financial-regulation reform, and a budget deal with 10-year sequestration spending caps. That is a very active period of federal legislation–certainly more active than the prior decade or the one before that. It’s true that much of what Friedman wants to see has not been enacted, but that’s because it’s too foolish even for Congress to do.

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Posted in Politics, Reads & Reactions | 144 Comments

Thought for the Day: Abortion within Providence

by James J Heaney Posted on 21 April 2012

One ponders, from time to time, what exactly is going through God’s head.  This is foolish.  God’s ways are terrible and mysterious, and we are most often reduced to the plea of Job:

I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee.  “Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge?” Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.

One does it anyway, at least if one is anything like me.  I have pondered long why we were given universal abortion on demand, not only in this country, but the whole world over.  The entire English-speaking world (the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), save Ireland, instituted abortion-on-demand within a single ten-year period.  God is the Author of life and remains the ruler of death, so one can never call Him unjust when He wills that one of His creations should die.  Yet, as with all great evils, it is difficult to understand why He should permit the unjust murders of so many.

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Posted in Abolitionism, Mere Opinion | 218 Comments

Thought for the Day: Subversive Media

by James J Heaney Posted on 19 April 2012

Film has much more subversive potential than the novel.  In film, characters act and react to one another, but you cannot see inside their heads.  You do not know why they are doing what they are doing.  You have only your senses to aid you, and the cinematographer can do a great deal to mute the things that really matter by burying them under layers of noise and spectacle and artifice.  In a novel, it is difficult to hide the motivations of the protagonist, impossible to do so without calling attention to the fact that you are “pulling a Hemingway,” and even harder to escape the fact that the author must explicitly call out every detail, so that the astute reader must notice them.

Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy were able to write subversive novels only by writing novels that looked, on the surface, as though they were actually being “subversive” in the particular way that the literary establishment favors. That is, they appeared to be unabashedly calling for nihilism and the the downfall of Western civilization—which, since this was and remains the precise agenda of the literary establishment, hardly seems subversive, in retrospect.  They could not hide their Catholic motivations; they could only disguise them as something else.  Percy could not have written Dr. Tom More as, say, a hard-boiled detective and gotten away with it.

Casablanca would never work as a novel.  You would know too much about Rick’s insides to be surprised in the final scene.

Posted in Cinema, Mere Opinion | 1,507 Comments

The James J. Heaney Institute Presents: Where Does Planned Parenthood’s Money Come From?

by James J Heaney Posted on 14 April 2012

Have you heard that “abortions are only 3% of what Planned Parenthood does”?  That number is sort of true, but there are a lot of problems with it, as has been ably documented elsewhere.  It’s been a tedious little irritant in internet comment threads for months.  Tonight, we heard it one too many times, in the context of some angry pro-choicer who was internet-screaming obscenities at pro-lifers who were “trying to kill women” by defunding Planned Parenthood.  (For the sake of our blood pressure, we let slide the 168,740 girls Planned Parenthood literally killed last year.)  We resolved to return to our lair Institute, do some math, and put out a more interesting number.

Planned Parenthood reached its 3% number by counting (and, by some standards, double-counting) all services provided.  We decided to count dollars instead.  Here is what we learned:

Paints a slightly different picture, doesn’t it?

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Posted in Abolitionism, Analysis | 4 Comments