Posted by
Tracey O'Donnell on Monday, November 05, 2007 6:17:01 PM
Secular liberals are so offended that some people insist on living according to fixed moral precepts that they want it outlawed. That they cannot see the irony in their position reveals their lack of a reference point against which to measure anything.
This latest tantrum follows Pope Benedict XVI’s exhortation to Catholic pharmacists to follow their conscience in carrying out their work. Though individual people (usually pro-life Christians) called “renegade pharmacists” by NARAL have been refusing for years to distribute abortifacient methods of birth control, secularists get another chance to feign indignation after the Pope’s October 29th remarks.
No matter that he did not address these comments to the general public, but rather to Roman Catholic pharmacists: Adults who have willingly chosen to put themselves under his tutelage.
The Pope did not impose his will on anyone, nor even tell anyone what to think. Catholic pharmacists, like Catholic firefighters, Catholic bankers and Catholic gardeners, believe human life to be inviolable. They share this belief with the Bishop of Rome, not “because he says so”, but because it is part-and-parcel of their faith.
As it is common knowledge - especially among pharmacists -that the essential purpose of some “medicines” is to intentionally end human life, it should not be difficult – even for a liberal - to see the contradiction for a Catholic to dispense such products.
People who lack a stable definition of “conscience” misunderstand objection of conscience as a philosophical concept.
Secular activists would not only withhold a legal haven for such moral objections (such legislation is under consideration in several states), they would actively penalize them (as is already the case in several others). NARAL president, Nancy Keenan, projected her aggressive position onto pro-life legislators, claiming “politicians should be supporting personal responsibility and personal freedom, not empowering those who try to impose their ideological values on women.” Indeed.
Who’s ideological values are imposed on whom when people who object to an action on moral grounds are forced by the government to perform it?
It is not only unjust to require people of faith to separate their component parts (this is my Catholic self; this is my pharmacist self; this is my parent self; my spouse self; etc.), but compliance is impossible.
One’s religious philosophy cannot help but inform his day-to-day acts, not only those limited to the strictly “religious sphere.” Perhaps, having no personal philosophy themselves, secularists mistake religion for a mere form of entertainment, a leisure-time occupation for others, something that can be left at the door of church like they leave their tennis rackets at their health clubs.
This is not a Christian’s understanding of faith. Pope Paul VI, in the post-Conciliar (1964)
Lumen Gentium, encouraged Catholic faithful to live according to their beliefs “remembering that in every temporal affair they must be guided by a Christian conscience. For it must be admitted that the temporal sphere is governed by its own principles, since it is rightly concerned with the interests of this world. But that ominous doctrine which attempts to build a society with no regard whatever for religion, and which attacks and destroys the religious liberty of its citizens, is rightly to be rejected.”
To mandate that all participate in the choices of some is precisely to attack and destroy the religious liberty of those who would abstain. Terrified that anyone might take a cue from “men in Rome,” secular liberals will have us all ruled instead by “women in Washington.” As usual, these misguided souls turn out to
be the very evil they denounce. It’s not their fault: They can’t tell north from south.