Mark Shea, as part of his ongoing decades long hatenanny against the Republican party, predicted that Roe would never be overturned and that the GOP was simply using the abortion issue to swindle pro-life voters. Go here to read one of his typical rants on the subject. Now that Roe is one with Nineveh and Tyre, Shea, the born again pro-abort, seizes upon Leftist tropes to say that this is terrible:
Go here to read his screed. Shea is living proof of one of his adages: sin makes you stupid. I would add another adage: hate tends to drive you crazy. Pray for him. Shea is well down a very dark path.
Shea is human garbage. And the fact that he took a random potshot at libertarians (of which there are precisely zero on the bench) is beyond stupid. Speaking of which, the leftists he sucks up to are vehemently opposed to antitrust law, especially when it comes to Big Tech.
And just look at his chief enabler, Stevie Greydanus. Dude’s too much of a pussy to loudly condemn Roe (and abortion in general) on Twitter, but he’ll gladly play Devil’s advocate. Nothing he loves more than being assiduous and finicky about definitions.
https://twitter.com/DecentFilms/status/1540450645731414021/
Chuckles. The late Gottfried Dietze had critiques of some of the items on that menu as did Ayn Rand and as does Richard Epstein. I think Ron Paul and some of the characters at the v Mises Institute do as well, though their priorities run to goldbuggery and promoting neo-Confederate historiography.
Actually existing libertarianism is in the hands of people who don’t give a damn about anything but the drug laws and people whose shtick is national dissolution through open borders. (Mr. Sailer’s term for the latter sort of libertarianism is ‘applied autism’). They don’t give a rip about local communities or about the autonomy of families and businesses contra agents of the state.
There are not enough straitjackets and rubber rooms.
Shea
Well done, Art. 😂
Loving? Clarence Thomas is LITERALLY married to a white woman!! HELLO!?
Mark has never let mere facts stand in his way!
” suppose we apply the Church’s guidance this way:”
Genesis 3,
Pauli, one of the most fundamental leftwing dogmas is that it doesn’t matter what you do or how you live, but rather that you speak the proper words. I call it the John Lennon effect: Lennon issuing a plea to the world to imagine no possessions … from the midst of his sprawling multi-million dollar English estate with a Rolls Royce in the driveway. How you live? Not so much. That you speak the words? All that matters. What Justice Thomas does in his life is irrelevant. Does he speak the leftwing rhetoric or not? From the leftwing perspective, that is what separates the sheep from the greatest of all time.
I’ve been in general very disappointed in the response of the Catholic left who have always claimed to be against abortion but then had some other reasons they had to vote Democratic. Almost none as bad as Shea (who is completely unhinged) but most were even worse than Greydanus’s, who in his replies at least said that he was happy with the Dobbs decision. Many other leftists couldn’t even do that. They all seemed to either ignore it, launch into a whataboutism list of completely lesser issues or engage in calumnious statements about how pro-lifers don’t care about pregnant mothers and children. What do they think those PRC centers that are getting blown up do?
I believe the Church in America lost its way when it failed as a body to rally to the defense of Humanae Vitae. After that, it has been a predictable and logical progression to where we stand today, sharply and bitterly divided over something that should be an apolitical no-brainer, i.e., the defense of innocent life always and everywhere.
I believe the Church in America lost its way when it failed as a body to rally to the defense of Humanae Vitae.
Dunno. There was so much going on at the time.
Gotta love Mark. He rails about the “MAGA Cult” while drinking the Kool Aid…and expecting his enemies to die.
There’s a sort of progression that those who trade their Catholicism for leftism have.
1.) Honest support of the Church’s teachings (since they haven’t sold out their faith yet.)
2.) A focus on the motivations of those for and against. Those on the left will always be honest and good, just mistaken, while those rad trads will be driven by hatred and only coincidentally supporting the right position. No actual argument made against Church teaching will be deployed yet, but the political signaling is already clear.
3.) Lots of Devil’s advocate type arguments. There will no longer be any argument for Church teaching beyond a simple statement like “I of course support this teaching.” This will be followed by a bunch of arguments against Church teaching which are presented as merely “points of view to consider” or “arguments which could be made.” At the end of the discussion the leftist will say that the arguments don’t counter Church teaching, but won’t actually refute them. Thus they effectively argue against the Church while claiming not to.
4.) A minimization of Church teaching. I.e. “Is it really worth worrying about abortion when we all know that it is politically impossible to outlaw it?” Notably at this stage the statements about agreeing with Church teaching will be very rare if they occur at all.
5.) A conflation of leftist policies with Church teaching, usually used to say that opponents are being hypocritical or heretical. Ex. “Sure you may want to outlaw abortion, but you don’t support defunding the police and raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour! How can you call yourself a Catholic?” At this stage claims of being a faithful Catholic will largely be backed up by reciting the not-blatantly-Antichristian points in the democrat party platform.
6.) It doesn’t happen that often, but if the issue is completely forced, the lefty Catholic may renounce Church teaching explicitly.
Note that the tactics from previous stages are used in each stage. So for example someone in stage 3 will not only make “hypothetical” arguments against Church teaching but also will accuse those who support Church teaching of having horrible motivations (and the accusations will be worse than when they were in stage 2.)
I would put SDG at stage 3, Sam Rocha at stage 4, bordering on 5, and Mark Shea at the bottom of stage 5, with the only reason that he hasn’t reached stage 6 being that he hasn’t explicitly said that abortion is good yet.
What I suspect is that Shea, Rocha, Eden, Greydanus, and Dailey have suffered over the years from self-understandings which have been in tension with each other. For most of us, there are core and peripheral affiliations, and confronted with political and cultural power centers who have it in for us, we retreat to the other end of the spectrum. What Midge Decter said, “Eventually, you have to join the side you’re on”. That’s emotionally impossible for some people, and you’re watching them applying chewing gum and twine.
Ron Paul’s great. In fact, the Dobbs decision, while flawed in that it doesn’t ban abortion nationwide (no state has a constitutional right to sanction murder), is precisely how Paul would have approached the issue.
“Mark Shea at the bottom of stage 5, with the only reason that he hasn’t reached stage 6 being that he hasn’t explicitly said that abortion is good yet.”
Rudolph, since the news of the leak, he has argued passionately for Roe to remain legal and abortion to be allowed. He has woven strange arguments about how Jews don’t believe in banning all abortion, so it would be an attack on Jews if we made abortion illegal. Something he has suggested is the ulterior motive of MAGA white supremacists.
At the end of the day, there comes a time when we must call a spade a spade. It does no good to say ‘but he hasn’t technically said’, when he has done and said everything else that defines what he technically hasn’t said.
And Greydanus will keep rushing to his defense on Twitter, all while he sanctimoniously scolds anybody who spews a fraction of the venom Shea coughs up on an hourly basis.
By the way, the movement conservatives Shea abhors are some of the most vehemently pro-Israel, pro-AIPAC activists on Earth. The problem with the right isn’t anti-Semitism. It’s pro-Zionist zealotry. But putting that aside, where does the buck stop? The Church of Scientology believes in scamming dumb rich people into giving them millions of dollars. Does freedom of religion apply to them? No? Then the same can be said for Reform Judaism’s pro-abortion bloodlust.
The problem with the right isn’t anti-Semitism. It’s pro-Zionist zealotry.
There is no such thing in this country.
Ron Paul’s great. In fact, the Dobbs decision, while flawed in that it doesn’t ban abortion nationwide (no state has a constitutional right to sanction murder), is precisely how Paul would have approached the issue.
General police power belongs to state governments. Ron Paul has distracted himself for a generation promoting goldbuggery and he never noticed that.
The thing with Shea is that his current ramblings are so deranged it is hard to derive what his position is at all. I’m not sure if he is lockstep with the most extreme left of the US or if he is just crazy.
In his linked screed he suggests that MAGA christianist bigoted etc. are hypocrites unless they support laws which would jail pro-life politicians who do not support a living wage until they recant their desire to jail women who (“driven by poverty”) have an abortion.
This is such a convoluted and bizarre position that is difficult to make heads or tails of the intention. It could just be that Shea supports abortions and is trying to obscure this. His use of (ten year old) leftist talking points on abortion surrounding this point do lend credence to that notion. But I have never heard any other leftist of any stripe making an even remotely similar claim. They would say something more straightforward, like advocating for jailing politicians who oppose legalized abortion or who do not implement democrat economic policies. None of this “jail them for opposing one policy until they agree to a different policy” nonsense. And it’s easy to see why: the argument makes no sense whatsoever from either a conservative or a leftist frame. So it’s possible that Shea is just deranged. But it’s also possible that he’s playing the “I’m TOTALLY opposed personally but the law should be different” game and is just really bad at it.
Why any serious Catholic reads a single word Shea writes is beyond my understanding. God has blessed each of us with a finite amount of time here on earth to worship Him, bless His Name, and give him thanks. Do you really want to waste some of that precious time to consume Mark Shea’s thoughts?
Yes, so long as Catholic institutions pay him to give talks under the mistaken belief that he is a Catholic apologist.
Yes, so long as Catholic institutions pay him to give talks under the mistaken belief that he is a Catholic apologist.
I suspect part of his upset is that he’s not receiving many invitations.
This is a puzzle to me. Dailey and Shea are not young men. (They are, respectively, 57 and 64). As recently as ten years ago, they were on the contributors list at Crisis. For my own part, I cannot say my worldview was fixed at age 30, but there have only been incremental adjustments since. People bouncing off the walls in late middle age and in early old age seems quite odd to me. (The late Eugene Genovese and his wife might be a counter-example, but there were a number of visible triggers in their case).
Constant feedback can do it– Shea had bad habits for his blog, and when he started lying For A Good Cause (as he believed it) with waterboarding, he started purging folks who value truth even when it’s not useful.
That behavior spread elsewhere, because it feels good to have people tell you how wonderful and brave you are in your goodness. Especially publicly. So you do more of what they approve of….which lead to the left-ward spiral.
Going off of the public “I’m so sorry” posts, he was getting told his behavior was unacceptable at least 15 years ago, probably longer.
He’s always been bombastic, too.
Why do you keep saying to “pray for him”? You can pray for him once or twice but after his insanity continues unabated praying for him becomes degradation.
No, it isn’t. It’s like Christ telling us to forgive seventy times seven. He also admonishes us to pray for our enemies. In the Civil War Lee claimed to pray for his opponents each day of that bloody struggle.
I agree with Foxfier, it’s the constant feedback. I would also add the fact that he lives in Seattle. Seattle is very hard to live in as a Catholic. I know that when we lived there, it was very easy to allow for little changes in thought. Quickly, these would escalate under the CONSTANT barrage of far left thought (and I am sure, demonic influence).
Thank God we moved back to the Midwest when we did. Now I actually recognize some of the ways I was slipping in my thinking.
Pray for Mark and his family.
Yes, Donald is correct as usual. You have got to pray for Shea, if for no other reason than reasoning seems to do nothing. “This kind only comes out by prayer and fasting,” Our Lord said of possessed people. I deeply feel for Shea, yet I cannot reach him.
Foxfier brings up an important point: “Constant feedback can do it– Shea had bad habits for his blog… …he started purging folks who value truth even when it’s not useful.” Perfectly said. Shea was an early participant in cancel culture. He would ban people from commenting if they made good counters to his arguments, and he even tried to get a person fired from their job once. I’m been banned and blocked several times by him on social media and blogs, and that was back when he styled himself as, or pretended to be, a conservative. When cancelations on the left really took off post-Trump, Shea fit right in. Now he won’t entertain any voices who dissent from his tailor-made position.
Like I said earlier, although his words disgust me, I deeply feel for Shea. I have a male relative with an almost identical position and life trajectory. In an unguarded and ironic moment a year or two ago, Shea admitted that he has struggled all his life with solipsism. Raging while sitting in front of a keyboard does nothing to treat this admitted malady of his intellect.
Some time ago, Shea said something on his Facebook page which was mildly critical of Biden and was immediately set upon by several of his more vicious commenters to his left. He meekly allowed them to correct him. This is truly a prison of his own design and creation. Every time he hears a Catholic democrat deny church teaching and rage about the right to abortion I am sure that it goads him far worse than anything I could say to insult or ridicule him. For a salve on these wounds, he turns to the sins of the right, both real and perceived, and sings them loudly to drown out the blasphemies of those on his own chosen side. Not a good way to exist day to day.
There is no such thing in this country.
There most certainly is, and the distinction between it and delegated powers is not something esoteric.
At this point, only a blind man or a fool would deny the tremendous influence AIPAC has over the U.S. government. Which are you?
Someone who has figured out that American aid to Israel as a share of Israel’s gross national income has declined continuously since 1984. It was inconsequential prior to 1973 and grew quite rapidly over the succeeding 11 years coincident with efforts to broker a settlement between Israel and Arab parties. Egypt also received a generous slice of cake. As of now, it accounts for about 1.2% of Israel’s gross national income and is delivered in the form of credits to buy equipment from American munitions and aerospace firms. It has accounted for about 7% of the U.S. foreign aid budget in that time.
Now you can start whinging about the USS Liberty.