I might do that; you are right.

Side note: perhaps you should cross-post your more theological posts at the Well. Breathe some much needed life back into it. That may set an example for me to buckle down and post something once in a while. Possibly Brendan too, if he can pull himself away from that whole “family” thing he has going on (get his priorities straight;)

Pax Christi,

Ok, I suppose that’s where we disagree. I don’t think you can have a stable community or social order without laws, and without people to enforce those laws, which is why I’m not an anarchist.

But you’re right, in theory, people associate themselves with democracies voluntarily. But within the democratic political community there is certainly coercive force. The principle of democracy is the principle that majority rules, and this rule is not something that is or can be enforced spiritually.

I think so. Anarchists believe that political community can and should be non-coercive. I also think that in theory democracies proclaim themselves to be voluntary communities, not coercive.

How is this text any different from any other leftist crank’s litany on the evil that is America ? Throwing in “Christian” a couple of times doesn’t really change much.

It’s a rare thing to see someone call Hauerwas a “leftist.”

Gerald, people can point to “the evil that is america” and base that judgment on different principles.

In that case, I was talking about you and me.

The Church is a political community whether you’d like it to be one or not. It is, of course, more than a political community, but it is political nonetheless.

I think there is a misunderstanding between us concerning the proper use of the word political. By political, I mean a community that is bound together by some coercive authority. I think you are using political in a broad sense to mean any human relationship or group of people.

Must all political communities operate by coercion?

Yes, in all political communities there is necessarily a coercive force. A political community requires laws and there must be punishment for transgressing those laws. The enforcement of that punishment requires a coercive force. It sounds odd to me to have to explain this – I thought this is perhaps the only thing that defines a political community as distinct from any other type of community – am I crazy?

In the classical understanding of a political community, people come together to benefit from the various associations that result naturally from human interaction. In order to preserve order and provide protection, the community establishes laws and a group to defend the community from attackers.

Now obviously there are other types of communities that do not require coercive force. They can and do influence the political communities, but they themselves are not political per se.

I think this is the source of a lot of misunderstanding between me and you, and others. Am I wrong to define a political community as necessarily coercive?

Hauerwas, in his more sophisticated essays on abortion, really brings MacIntyre into his discussion of it as well. “Accoring to Alasdair MacIntyre there is nothing peculiar about the failure of our society to reach a moral consensus concerning the appropriate manner to deal with abortion. Indeed the very character of debate in a liberal, secular, pluralistic culture like ours shows that there is no rational method for resolving most significant matters of moral dispute. Any rational method for resolving moral disagreements requires a shared tradition that embodies assumptions about the nature of man and our true end. But it is exactly the presumption of liberalism that a just society sustained by freeing the individual from all tradition.

“MacIntyre illustrates his argument by calling attention to three different positions concerning abortion

[quoting MacIntyre from "How to identify Ethical Principles"]

“MacIntyre suggest the interesting thing about these arguments is that each of the protagonists reaches his conclusion by valid forms of inferences, yet there is no agreement about which premises are the right starting points. And in our culture there is no generally agreed upon procedure for weighing the merit of rival premises. Each of the above positions represents fragments of moral systems that exist in an unease relation to one another. Thus position A, premised as ‘an understanding of rights which owes something to Locke and something to Jefferson is counterposed to a universability argumen whose debt is first to Kant and then to the gospels and both to an appeal to the moral law as conceived by Hooker, More, and Aquinas.’

“The fact that these are ‘fragments’ of past moral positions is particularly important. For as fragments they have been torn from the social and intellectual contexts in which they gained their original intelligibility and from which they derive such force and validity as they continue to possess. But since they now exist only as fragments, we do not know how to weigh one set of premises against another. We do not know what validity to grant to each in insolation from those presuppositions that sustainted their original intelligibility.

“To understand the roots of our dilemma, MacIntyre argues that we must look to the moral presuppositions on which our society was founded. For in spirite of the appeal to self-evident truths about equality and right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there was the attempt to provide some cogent philosophical basis for these ‘truths.’ The difficulty, however, begins when appeals such as Jefferson’s to Aristotle and Locke fail to acknowledge these to be mutually antagonistic positions. We are thusa society that may be in the unhappy position of being founded upon a moral contradiction.

“The contradiction, in its most dramatic form, involves the impossibility of reconciling classical and modern viewa of man. Thus as MacIntyre points out:

the centeral preoccupation of both ancient and medieval communities was characteristically: how may men together realize the true human good? The central preoccupation of modern men is and has been characteristically: how may we prevent men interfering with each other as each of us goes abaout our concerns? The classical view begins with the community of the polis and with the individual viewed as having no moral identity apart from the communities of kinship and citizenship; the modern view begins with the concept of a collection of individuals and the problem of how out of and by individuals social institutions can be constructured.

“The attempt to answer the last question has been the primary preoccupation of social theorists since the seventeenth century, and their answers to it are not always coherent with one another”

Etc, that’s only the beginning — it’s a good article, “Abortion: Why the Arguments Fail.” But he really tries to follow from MacIntyre.

Personally, it ends up individualism without tradition is relativism. And this is why our society, formed on it, can go from slavery to abortion.

I think the passage you cited had to do with Hauerwas’ view that the Church should be a community that seeks the truth. I don’t suspect Hauerwas expects Obama to be the perfect bearer of truth. It seems that he is making more of a pragmatic decision to vote for him.

Oh, and the permissiveness law of abortion is contrary to human freedom.

I agree. But the fact that the woman was able to seek out an abortion does not mean that she was forced into doing it.

Of course, I imagine that that is in fact his point. Again, though, I question his judgment. Even in that scenario, how would overturning Roe somehow hurt? I understand that it’s not the system and that the system (whatever we may mean by that) underlies Roe, but how on earth would that translate into any hesitancy about WANTING Roe overturned?

MacIntyre’s point about why Roe should not be the sole focus is because overturning Roe will not end the battle, so to speak. It will defer matters to the states and there will certainly be states who uphold the “right” to abort, effectively only imposing a perhaps annoying car ride upon women from pro-life states who want to exercise that “right.” But granting this, why would we hesitate to overturn Roe ANYWAY?

What’s not at all clear, and seems dangerously presumptive, is the notion that overturning Roe will have NO (absolutely no) positive effect: it will save no lives. Good luck finding enough evidence to support that claim, when the utter force of common sense suggests it will certainly save infant lives, even if its not at all the final victory. Why not then?

So again: it just seems to me that anyone with strong opinions about abortion should not even hesitate to want Roe overturned. Even all of those (like me) who think its but a step, and focus should be concentrated in countless other dimensions….if an interviewer asked you “Yes, but what if I told you you had the opportunity and the power to overturn Roe, would you?” Would we say anything else but “Oh, sure! Heck, why not! Of course, icing on the cake! etc. etc.”

Bottom line: granting Hauerwas’ concerns about the system and striking at the root, I simply can’t imagine any scenario in which he would still NOT want, or even hesitate to want, to see Roe overturned. If you had a headache that was one symptom of a deeper illness you couldn’t cure in one day, why wouldn’t you take the headache medicine anyway? Would you say “Now I don’t want to suggest that I want my headache to be overturned?”

Likewise, I can’t imagine a possible scenario in which any pro-life advocate would say “Now I don’t mean to say that I necessarily want to see….a law that protects a false right of citizens to murder their unborn children at will, effectively denying human rights and dignity to children…….overturned.” Can you?

Pax Christi,

Hauerwas said, “Do we want to know that we’re the richest people in the world, raping the rest of the world [so] that we can remain rich? Do we want to know that Iraqi war really is about cheap oil? Do you really want to know that?

Do you really want to be told that, ‘Look, America is a racist country, and the terms keep getting changed to hide that from ourselves?’”

Response:
How was that not for Obama? So either he gave reasons for him voting for Obama or he didn’t. If he didn’t, then, well, he should learn how to give reasons for his position. It seems to me that if those weren’t his reasons the only reason he gave was on racism. Give me a break.

You said,

“A permissive law “made” her go to the hospital intending to get an abortion? I thought conservatives were all about personal responsibility?”

Yes, the fact that it is legal means she can go to a hospital and the doctor can perform it. The doctor did perform the early part of the abortion and you know what? That doctor cannot even be taken into account of the fact that the baby is injured.

And I *am* about personal responsibility: response to the Gift of Christ.