“Like the April Fool’s articles,
the Mobile Party cartoon was created
with satirical intent. Both were
meant to bring attention to particular
attitudes that, unfortunately,
are present in our campus community:
namely, disrespect for women,
those with homosexual orientations
and those who defend unborn life.”

So the original cartoon itself was an incompetent attack on students’ alleged bigotry. The reaction to that incident has been used to justify censoring one of the great Catholic professors at the school.

I detect a pattern here like the “heads I win tails you lose” coin flip.

It’s a slippery slope (and I’m perfectly fine with slippery slope arguments).
I mean, discriminate against gays so that they can’t enroll there, and you don’t have this problem in the first place. But take the lenient position of “it’s sinful but we refuse to discriminate” and you have all these people enrolling who take that inch and try to turn it into a mile. Why not preclude giving them the chance?

And it will probably have little or no impact on the day-to-day lives of the target audience of the student newspaper. At best, it might provoke some thought. More likely, it will serve as something to be sneered at. Call it pride, but most young Roman Catholics are convinced that they know better. This is an age-old phenomenon – RC church teaching on sexuality does not fall on fertile intellectual ground among the young. And with further cultural acceptance of homosexuality, it will seem more and more like the church is speaking in state-of-the-art Latin.

The student editors blew it – they should have published the piece. The students who read it would mock how out-of-touch the piece feels to the student readers, and then the student editors could have claimed the moral high ground of openness.

I had an email correspondence with Prof. Porter over her article:
______

Having read your letter published in Friday’s South Bend Tribune, I could not help but note the view you take of those who agree with the Church’s position on abortion:

“I would respectfully suggest that someone who is prepared to develop his or her own moral judgments through a process of thoughtful, open-minded reflection is a better person morally, all things being equal, than someone who goes along with the prevailing opinion out of fear or complacency.”

Here you are implying in a rather condescending manner that anyone who adheres to the position that abortion is a grave moral evil does so because he/she has not engaged in “a process of thoughtful, open-minded reflection”. It may surprise you to learn that among adults, it is predominantly the “pro-choice” advocates who are the ones who adhere to their position as a result of going “along with the prevailing opinion out of fear and complacency”. I can not only offer a thoughtful, carefully considered, and meticulously reasoned defense of my position that abortion is a grave moral evil, I have lived it… (I go on to review my experiences with and defense of pro-life initiatives)

You close your letter with:

“[Notre Dame] cannot really sustain our mission and identity as a great Catholic university by compromising our identity as a university — a community of open intellectual inquiry, in which diverse views can be explored in an atmosphere of mutual openness and respect.”

Yes, Notre Dame is a Catholic university, though from the contents of your letter it is hard to come to any other conclusion that you would prefer for Notre Dame to focus on the “university” and ignore the “Catholic”. You call for an atmosphere “in which diverse views can be explored in an atmosphere of mutual openness and respect”, but provide no evidence that the Center’s pro-life fund will somehow prevent this. You claim that a Catholic university promoting a moral position that is consistent with the moral position of the Catholic Church somehow compromises the institution as a true “university”. However, you raise no similar objection to the various university-sponsored projects relating to social justice issues also consistent with the moral positions of the Catholic Church. I see you have no problem with your faculty organization, ND Watch, promoting a gaggle of ardent champions for abortion-on-demand (NARAL, Planned Parenthood, etc.) as resources for women faculty. You would no doubt defend promoting these resources by invoking the right your group has to act according to its conscience and interests. However, you cry “foul” that a Catholic institution exercises its right in promoting a cause consistent with its conscience and interests.

Finally, it is hard to see how you fulfill your own call to treat diverse views in an atmosphere of mutual openness and respect, given your earlier condescension towards those who believe that abortion is a grave moral evil. Perhaps you should have amended the previously cited paragraph to read “diverse views I agree with….”
____

She responded:

Thanks for your message. I did not mean to imply that no thoughtful person could support the official Catholic position on abortion. My point was simply that it’s very hard to reach a thoughtful, mature position on this question — whatever it may be — in an academic environment in which one point of view is sharply discouraged, so much so that people are reluctant even to discuss the matter. That’s been my experience, at any rate.
___

To which I replied:

I understand your position; however, I can not imagine in the least – nor did you specify in your SB Tribune letter – how the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture’s pro-life fund affects the academic environment to such a degree that the “pro choice” view is “sharply discouraged”. The fund is barely a month old; do you honestly wish me to believe that it has been the cause of any reluctance on the part of your students to discuss the abortion issue?

The university has sponsored and encouraged many social justice initiatives, without any complaint from you that they would somehow sharply discourage opposing views. I therefore find your sudden concern for the discouragement of a point of view interesting, especially in light of the fact that your faculty group, ND Watch, provides a list of resources for women faculty that is, to say the least, rather lopsided in regards to the issue of abortion:

Pro-Life:
1. National Right To Life Committee
2. Independent Women’s Forum (though they claim neutrality on the issue, I’ll put them here due to the majority of the site’s content on the issue)

Pro Choice:
1. NOW
2. NARAL
3. Emily’s List
4. Feminist.com
5. Feminist Majority Foundation
6. Center for Reproductive Law and Policy
7. Planned Parenthood
8. Ms. Foundation for Women (the main site is pretty neutral, but the blog most certainly is not)

So I’m supposed to believe that the very existence of the Center for Ethics and Culture’s pro-life fund will “sharply discourage” one point of view, but that your own faculty organization’s list of resources, in which the number of pro-choice groups dwarf the number of pro-life ones, is not overwhelmingly encouraging one point of view. Apparently, I’m also supposed to believe that, if the Center had started an “Abortion Rights” fund, you would have similar concerns about the pro-life view being “sharply discouraged”.

We both know that none of that is true.
____

I’m no scholar, but I found Prof. Porter’s article and response to my criticism of it to be rather feeble.

Another piece of context for this is the inexplicable publication, by this same newspaper, of a stupid and offensive cartoon strip, where the punch line was something about beating gays into a coma with a baseball bat. The editors and the University were rewarded for that bit of negligence with some unwelcome national attention. I think the editor’s ridiculous response to Dr. Rice undoubtedly has something to do with that. (Notice that this is not a new topic of his columns – he has reaffirmed the Church’s teaching on the matter repeatedly, and they have always published it.) Not an excuse, of course! Especially since Dr. Rice conspicuously quotes the Catechism’s statement against “every sign of unjust discrimination” against homosexuals.