Pete Seeger died on Jan. 27, rich in years (94) and
in honors (a lifetime-achievement Grammy, the
National Medal for the Arts). His death rated a segment
on the
PBS News Hour
, during which the inconvenient
fact that Seeger had been a member of the U.S.
Communist Party for years was finessed by the
expedient of noting that he had eventually left the Party.
What Pete Seeger never left, of course, was the Left:
not the pragmatic liberal world of Harry Truman, John
F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson, but
the hard Left that created Stalin’s Popular Front in the
‘30s and later spelled the country’s name “Amerika” in
the ‘60s.
With songs like
“Where Have All the Flowers
Gone?” “If I Had a Hammer”
and
“Turn, Turn, Turn”
(best performed, if I may say, by the Byrds), Seeger did
as much as anyone to popularize the folk music
renaissance of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. But the
adulation that came Seeger’s way in recent decades had
less to do with his mastery of the five-string banjo and
his song-writing than with his status in certain circles as
a living martyr: the man who stiffed the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), found
himself blacklisted, and was reduced to performing on
college campuses for a while.
Blacklisting is obviously bad business. What’s
worth noting today, though, is that the ugly habit of
blacklisting has migrated on the political spectrum. Ask
a lot of people the first thing they think of when they
hear “blacklist,” and the response
will likely be “Joe McCarthy” or
“HUAC.” The proper response
would be “Andrew Cuomo.”
In mid-January, the New York
governor indulged himself in a
remarkable rant on a local radio
station. His principle vexation was
the “gridlock” in Washington that,
on his account, was caused by
“extreme Republicans,” which he
distinguished from “moderate
Republicans” (i.e., Republicans
who tend to do what Andrew Cuomo
wants them to do). Then, turning to
his own Empire State, he announced that such
extremists, among whom he listed “right-to-life”
people, “have no place in the state of New York.”
My professional obligations take me to New York
with some frequency; and despite Cuomo’s rant, I
somehow doubt that there will be customs agents at
Penn Station checking to see if I am one of those
deplorable right-to-lifers before I detrain and begin
contributing to New York’s exchequer by paying its
exorbitant sales tax on various goods and services. Still,
it’s instructive to know that, by the lights of its 56th
governor, I am in New York on sufferance: much like I
was, I suppose, when I crossed into East Berlin in 1987
and was given a hard stare by the goon who examined
my U.S. passport and looked at me as if I were a lower
life form.
Andrew Cuomo is a blacklister -- in the moral, if not
literal, sense of the term. He deems unfit to live in his
state those who disagree with his fervent, indeed
fanatical, embrace of the most extreme form of the
abortion license. Press him hard enough and he might
even say such people are un-American. Thus has the
HUAC ethos been reconstituted in our time by the
governor of New York.
So it was not without a certain sense of ironies in the
fire that I read Governor Cuomo’s statement on the
death of Pete Seeger, who waited until three years after
the collapse of the Soviet Union to apologize “for once
believing Stalin was just a hard driver,” not the mass
murderer that more honest and discerning men and
women on the democratic Left knew him to be a half-
century earlier: the Pete Seeger who, according to the
motu proprio from the gubernatorial cathedra inAlbany,
inspires Andrew Cuomo and, Cuomo hopes, others in
their quest to “make New York State the progressive
capital of the nation.”
Where have all the liberals gone, long time passing?
Not quite all have gone hard Left. But Andrew Cuomo
has, becoming a blacklister in the process.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of
the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington,
D.C.
The
Catholic
Difference
Weigel
Andrew Cuomo and the liberal blacklist
The Catholic Church is often
criticized as rigorist, unrealistic, and
unbending, especially in regard to
its teaching on sexuality. How could
anyone, we hear over and again,
possibly live up to the Church’s
demands concerning masturbation,
artificial contraception, or sex out-
side of marriage, etc.? Moreover,
every poll that comes out suggests
that increasing numbers of Catho-
lics themselves don’t subscribe to
these moral demands. Few expect
the Church to acquiesce to the moral laxity of the envi-
roning culture, but even many faithful Catholics think
that it ought at least to soften its moral doctrine, adjust a
bit to the times, become a tad more realistic.
I wonder whether I might address these questions a
bit obliquely, shifting the focus from the sexual arena
into another area of moral concern. The Church’s teach-
ing on just war is just as rigorist as its teaching on sex-
uality. In order for a war to be considered justified, a
number of criteria have to be simultaneously met. These
include declaration by a competent authority, a legiti-
mating cause, proportionality between the good to be
attained and the cost of the war, that military interven-
tion is a last resort, etc. Furthermore, in the actual wag-
ing of a war, the two great criteria of proportionality
and discrimination have to be met. The latter means, of
course, that those engaged in the war must distinguish
carefully between combatants and non-combatants,
targeting only the former. If these criteria are strictly
applied, it is difficult indeed to find any war that is mor-
ally justifiable. Many would hold that the Second World
War met most if not all of the criteria for entering into
a war, but even its most ardent moral defenders would
have a difficult time justifying, in every detail, the wag-
ing of that war. For example, the carpet bombings of
Dresden, Frankfurt, and Tokyo, which resulted in the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, certainly
violated the principles of discrimination and proportion-
ality. Even more egregious examples of this violation,
of course, were the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Catholic moral theology would characterize
all of these actions as intrinsically evil, that is to say,
incapable of being justified under any circumstances.
In the wake of the atomic bombings in 1945, the
English moral philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe made
the Catholic case vociferously in a number of public de-
bates. She went so far as to protest President Harry Tru-
man’s reception of an honorary degree at Oxford, on the
grounds that a great university should not honor a man
responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
innocents. In answer to Anscombe’s criticisms, many
Americans -- Catholics included -- used frankly conse-
quentialist forms of moral reasoning, arguing that the
atomic bombings undoubtedly saved untold numbers
of lives, both American and Japanese, and effectively
brought a terrible war to an end. And I am sure that a
poll of American Catholics conducted, say, in late 1945
would have revealed overwhelming support for the
bombings. But does anyone really think that the Church
ought to lower its standards in regard to just war? Does
anyone really think that the difficulty of following the
Church’s norms in this arena should conduce toward a
softening of those norms?
Here is the wonderful and unnerving truth: the
Catholic Church’s job is to call people to sanctity and
to equip them for living saintly lives. Its mission is not
to produce nice people, or people with hearts of gold or
people with good intentions; its mission is to produce
saints, people of heroic virtue. Are the moral demands
regarding warfare extravagant, over the top, or unrealis-
tic? Well, of course they are! They are the moral norms
that ought to guide those striving for real holiness. To
dial down the demands because they are hard and most
people have a hard time realizing them is to compro-
mise the very meaning and purpose of the Church.
Now let us move back to the Church’s sexual moral-
ity. Is it exceptionally difficult to live up to all of the de-
mands in this arena? Do the vast majority of people fall
short of realizing the ideal? Do polls of Catholics con-
sistently reveal that many if not most Catholics would
“Extreme Demand, Extreme Mercy:
The Catholic Approach to Morality”
Word on
Fire
Fr. Barron
See father barron, page 8
6
Gulf Pine Catholic
•
February 28, 2014
