New York-area readers take note:

NEW YORK, NY - MAY 23, 2012 - The Center for Public Conversation at the Institute for American Values will host a conversation on Tuesday, May 29th with Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton. Professor George will examine what constitutes the human good while discussing some of today’s most pressing-and often divisive-issues facing our society. This public conversation will be moderated by David Blankenhorn, the founder and president of the Institute for American Values.

There is a very real and growing concern, from many quarters, regarding increased threats (real or perceived) to religious liberty here in America. From healthcare legislation and education, to same-sex marriage and judicial appointments, questions about religious liberty have taken a front seat within the public square. At the heart of these debates are also fundamental questions about the role of government, the market, and the often overlooked sphere of civil society. Professor George offers his insights about these and other topics in what promises to be an informative and far-ranging conversation.

More info here.

Here’s something different: a job posting for a “quirky and funny” guy with “an interest in death and rituals” that was sent to the American Anthropological Association:

I am a casting director with a Major Cable Network dedicated to Nature, Science and Exploration; we are currently gearing up to produce a pilot.

The show will explore death rituals around the world.  The tone of the piece will be smart, engaging and witty, akin to No Reservations for death instead of food.  We’re searching for a male-co-host and I wanted to reach out to you and see if you knew anyone who might fit the bill.

We’re looking for a guy, mid ’20s to mid ’30s, who can act as a quirky and funny sidekick to our edgy female host.  He’ll have to interact with people and be able to interact with people on the fly, so be comfortable creating conversation with a camera around.  He has to have an interest in death and rituals – whether professional or personal.  (An emerging paleontologist, archaeologist, anthropologist)

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with any questions.

Thank you for your time!

Sincerely,
Jamie Carroll
Casting Director | NGC

I’d suggest our own Russ Saltzman, who’s written with humor (and with real insight) on both death and ritual. I recommend in particular his columns about the passing of his father and about the funnier elements of serving as a Lutheran pastor.  Russ, what do you say?

Via @daralind

Hans Kung denounces Benedict’s move to regularize the situation of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X:

With such a scandalous decision, Pope Benedict would, in his overall regretted isolation,  would be even more separated from the People of God. The classical doctrine regarding schism should be a warning to him. According to it, a schism of the Church happens when it separates from the Pope, but also when the latter separates himself from the body of the Church. “Even the Pope could become a schismatic, if he will not guard the unity and communion proper to the whole body of the Church.” (Francisco Suárez, major Spanish theologian of the 16th/17th centuries).

A schismatic pope loses his position according to that same teaching of the constitution of the Church. At least, he cannot expect obedience. Pope Benedict would be therefore encouraging the already widespread  popular movement of “disobedience” against a hierarchy that is disobedient to the Gospel. He would bear sole responsibility for the grave rift and the strife created inside the Church. , he would have alone the responsibility. Instead of reconciling with the ultra-conservative, anti-democratic, and anti-Semitic SSPX, the Pope should rather care about the majority of reform-minded Catholics and reconcile with the churches of the Reformation and the entire ecumenical movement. Thus he would unite, and not divide.

These amazing photos, of 40,000 Orthodox Jewish males filling New York’s Citi Field (with another 20,000 off-site), have been making the rounds. Some writers suggested the all-male meeting was sexist and/or excessively secretive. Predictable reactions from those made anxious by such a striking visual expression of the size and vitality of a faith community often ignored by the commentariat.

The meeting focused on the perils of the internet and included a discussion of the problem of internet pornography that presumably would have been quite awkward had both men and women been present. (more…)

Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at UCLA and Twitter pro, has compiled an amusing list of fake “First Things pitches” based on the immortal “Slate pitches” meme. Some of the jokes, I’ll admit, hit a little close to home.

Check out Gabriel’s pitches below and suggest your own in the comments: (more…)

Michael Sean Winters reads Sebelius’ speech at Georgetown:

In her speech she, too, referred to JFK’s famous Houston speech, and quoted the single dumbest line of the entire text. Sebelius said: “In that talk to Protestant ministers, Kennedy talked about his vision of religion and the public square, and said he believed in an America, and I quote, ‘where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials – and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against us all.’” Hmmm. Was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a “religious body” seeking to “impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace?” Of course it was.

I do not expect much from Secretary Sebelius in the way of thoughtfulness. But, I was deeply disappointed that the nearly 100 Georgetown professors and administrators who wrote such a forceful letter to Congressman Paul Ryan in advance of his speech on campus last month could not bestir themselves to write a similar letter to Sebelius. . . . The signatories of the Ryan letter are as morally compromised by their failure to address a similar letter to Sebelius as the USCCB is compromised by its unwillingness to point out that Republicans only care about religious liberty when it suits them.

That last point is the main one of Winters’ piece: that the Catholic bishops are effectively partisan because they’ve failed to agitate forcefully enough against unjust and un-Christian laws like the statute in Alabama that bars the church from serving illegal immigrants. I think that’s a very great misreading of the bishops’ actions, but the larger point still stands: religious liberty is not a partisan issue. It faces threats from the right as well as the left.

Speaking at Georgetown, Kathleen Sebelius nods to JFK:

In that talk to Protestant ministers, Kennedy talked about his vision of religion and the public square, and said he believed in an America, and I quote, “where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials…”

That’s all well and good, Madam Secretary. But what if we try turning that around? Should America also be a country “where no public official seeks to impose her will directly or indirectly upon a religious body” in a way that interferes with its peaceful public witness?

As an American citizen, I lament that Sebelius has so grossly misread our Constitution and laws (like RFRA). As a Christian, a very imperfect one, I struggle to find love for an official who knowingly and unapologetically persecutes the suffering body of Christ.

In one of today’s “On the Square” features, Patrick Deneen greets the Secretary by bidding a sad farewell to Georgetown.

In a long report on how McDonald’s is seeking to boost its image, Keith O’Brien describes the new “McDonald’s Channel,” which will one day play in its franchises:

The content on the nascent channel is breezy (think Top 10 lists) and anodyne. The objective is “an agnostic view of the world,” according to Lee Edmondson, the founder of ChannelPort Communications, the California company building the channel for McDonald’s (its only client). In the test markets, at least, this means there will be no jarring images from CNN or Fox News. Instead, every few minutes between short features, the company’s catchy jingle — ba-da-ba-ba-bah — serenades the dining room as a reminder that all is right and good.

The next time you’re inclined to dismiss observations about how global capitalism is at odds with traditional belief and social practices, recall this anecdote (remember as well that real agnosticism is something far more serious than what Lee Edmondson has in mind). The company that begins by seeking to serve all does not simply ignore the particularities of its customers, it actually fears them.  The existential commitment involved in religious belief and political solidarity interferes with our role as consumers, and so agnosticism—or at least a very loose and low conception of it– becomes the one true corporate faith.

None of this, probably, will change whether or not one goes to McDonald’s (I do sometimes, for reasons of convenience and economy), but I’d rather get affordable food without the side order of religious and political indifferentism.

Writing for the New York Review of Books, the indefatigable Garry Wills asks, “Why do some people who would recognize gay civil unions oppose gay marriage? Certain religious groups want to deny gays the sacredeness of what they take to be a sacrament. But marriage is no sacrament.”

Wills goes on to offer a host of distortions of the history of Christian marriage, to which Brandon Watson offers a conversation-ending response:

Wills confuses marriage as a religious ritual with marriage as a sacrament. A sacrament is, at its most basic, a sign of spiritual things. There is no getting around the fact that marriage is a sacrament or mystery in some sense, since Ephesians 5 explicitly treats of it in those terms, and, contrary to Wills, calling marriage a sacrament goes back as far in Christian history as we can find explicit statements on the subject, not just to the eleventh century. Augustine, for instance, writing well before the eleventh century, explicitly discusses the sacramental character of marriage.

There is much, much more. Please read all of Brandon’s piece.

St. Paul’s medical advice to his disciple Timothy, “use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments,” holds up pretty well according to some recent studies:

Scientists have found that components of red wine seem to improve intestinal health, promoting the growth of beneficial bacteria. Research on human subjects is limited. But one recent study that examined the claim was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

In it, a small number of healthy adults were instructed to avoid all alcohol for two weeks — a so-called washout period.

Then they went through three separate phases of 20 days each. In one, the subjects drank red wine, about a cup daily. In another, they drank the same amount of red wine daily, but this time with the alcohol removed. In the third, they drank up to 100 milliliters a day of gin each day.

In the end, the researchers found that both types of red wine produced improvements in the bacterial composition of the gut, lowered blood pressure and reduced levels of a protein associated with inflammation. Slight improvements in gut flora were seen among gin drinkers, but the effects in the wine drinkers were much more pronounced.

Luke may have been the apostle with medical training, but science is vindicating Paul’s homespun remedy.

Via @davidschaengold

The Rev. Dr. Amy C. Schifrin, pastor of Mission in Christ and Faith Lutheran Churches in Iowa, writes about the time she went to a Planned Parenthood clinic to get a pregnancy test:

Lacking a home physician, we made an appointment at the local Planned Parenthood clinic where I could have a pregnancy test.

Sitting together in the waiting room anxious for the results, a healthcare worker called me in and said that my husband would have to stay in the waiting room. I didn’t understand; couldn’t he come in with me? No, she said, they wanted to talk to me alone first. I didn’t understand. Even more anxious and worried that something was terribly wrong with me, I was finally given the news that I was pregnant. Overjoyed, I wanted my husband to hear, and that’s when I found out from Planned Parenthood that they always tell the mother alone first in case she does not want to continue the pregnancy. In fact, she was surprised that I did, for I had been the first woman in many weeks for whom the news was heard as good news.

Word spread like wildfire among the doctors, nurses, and technicians, who then treated us like royalty. Even those who dealt in death could yet be surprised by life, and in that moment our joy was contagious. I can only hope that in some small way it had a lasting effect to help turn their hearts to life.

The rest can be found at the website of the Christian Leadership Center, a very impressive project headed up by frequent First Things contributor Leroy Huizenga.

Christianity Today asks three contributors whether Christians should shut down their social service programs when the state commands them to act against Christian belief. In line with my advice in response to Obama’s gay marriage announcement, Ryan T. Anderson offers a stirring “no”:

Christians should not stop their adoption and foster-care programs, but neither should they comply with laws that would force them to place children with same-sex couples. Christians should continue operating their charitable organizations according to their principles, and they should continue serving the least among us until the state coercively shuts them down.

But why should Christians take a stand here? It is not as though authorities won’t allow us to celebrate the sacraments: (more…)

One doubts whether Christ observes America’s great civic holiday for celebrating and thanking our mothers, but it’s surely a fitting day for American Christians to think of that lady, Mary.

Only three years ago, Evangelical and Catholics Together released the momentous statement, “Do Whatever He Tells You: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Christian Faith and Life,”  which affirmed the shared evangelical Protestant and Catholic love for the mother of our Lord:

Since the sixteenth century, the subject of the Blessed Virgin Mary has been a primary point of differentiation, and even conflict, between Evangelicals and Catholics. While figures such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli retained a special reverence for Mary, this dimension of their teaching and piety was largely lost by their followers in the course of growing animosity between Protestants and Catholics. On the Catholic side, the determination to draw a clear line against Protestantism sometimes led to exaggerations and distortions in Marian devotion.

In our time there is among Evangelicals a renewed interest in Mary, and among Catholics a determination to make clear that the greatness of Mary is in her faithfulness to Jesus Christ, her Lord and ours. In the words of the Second Vatican Council, “No creature could ever be counted as equal to the Incarnate Word and Redeemer. . . . The Church does not hesitate to profess the subordinate role of Mary” (Lumen Gentium 62). Whatever is said about Mary is ever and always in the service of what must be said about Christ.

The drafters of the statement offer some particularly appropriate thoughts for today:

Agreeing on the miracle of the virgin birth, we would also encourage a fuller reflection on the maternity of Mary. As the mother of Jesus, she was the first to learn of his nature and mission, and she was the first to give faith’s assent: “Let it be with me according to your word.” We picture her nursing him at her breast, teaching him his first words, kissing his bruises when he fell, introducing him to Israel’s understanding of the ways of the Lord—the mother who helped him memorize the psalms and say his prayers, even as he grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man (Luke 2:52).

What does it mean for a woman to be the Theotokos, the bearer and mother of God? This is the question at the root of Christians’ longstanding reflection on, and devotion to, the the woman we all confidently can call “mother.”

On the cover of this week’s Time magazine, we see a mother breastfeeding her son of nearly four years. In my book, that’s too old for a child to breastfeed.

What I’m really worried about, though, isn’t the child’s age. It’s the baring of a breast on the cover of a mainstream magazine. This is just lurid. How could an image of a breastfeeding mother ever be allowed in public?

Oh, wait . . .

(more…)

Bishop Fellay spoke appreciatively of what he characterized as the pope’s efforts to correct “progressive” deviations from Catholic teaching and tradition since Vatican II. “Very, very delicately — he tries not to break things — but tries also to put in some important corrections,” the bishop said.

Although he stopped short of endorsing Pope Benedict’s interpretation of Vatican II as essentially in continuity with the church’s tradition — a position which many in the society have vocally disputed — Bishop Fellay spoke about the idea in strikingly sympathetic terms.

“I would hope so,” he said, when asked if Vatican II itself belongs to Catholic tradition.

“The pope says that … the council must be put within the great tradition of the church, must be understood in accordance with it. These are statements we fully agree with, totally, absolutely,” the bishop said. “The problem might be in the application, that is: is what happens really in coherence or in harmony with tradition?”

Insisting that “we don’t want to be aggressive, we don’t want to be provocative,” Bishop Fellay said the Society of St. Pius X has served as a “sign of contradiction” during a period of increasing progressive influence in the church. He also allowed for the possibility that the group would continue to play such a role even after reconciliation with Rome.

“People welcome us now, people will, and others won’t,” he said. “If we see some discrepancies within the society, definitely there are also (divisions) in the Catholic Church.”

“But we are not alone” in working to “defend the faith,” the bishop said. “It’s the pope himself who does it; that’s his job. And if we are called to help the Holy Father in that, so be it.”

One wonders if the other bishops of the SSPX will accept this view–indeed, in the same interview Fellay acknowledged the possibility of a split within the society. The task of reconciling the traditionalists certainly seems too immense for any human power.

Or so argues Fr. Ryan Erlenbush in a post at the New Theological Movement:

There is nothing in the description of the figure of Job which would make us think that he was not an historical person. Indeed, though one may hold that the various dialogues and discussions in the book of Job are stylized and that the work is not a word-for-word transcript, we most certainly need not conclude from this that none of the characters (especially Job himself) even existed! (more…)

Matt Franck has a good piece at Public Discourse today offering his thoughts on Obama’s announcement of his support for gay marriage and on the Richard Grenell controversy, part of which played out on these pages. You can find Matt’s piece here.

Lest the president feel bad about my criticisms of his gay marriage stance, I hasten to add that I think he’s gotten too much flak for his youthful musing on T.S. Eliot. The young future president wrote to his then-girlfriend:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year… But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. (more…)

President Obama has come out in support of gay marriage today in an interview with ABC news. Well, that’s not quite right. He actually was in support of it back in 1996 before his position then “evolved” toward opposition. Today the dissembling ended, which may be good for the president’s conscience, but what importance it should hold for the rest of us I fail to see.

President Obama, for all his accomplishments, is not a moral theologian, a religious leader, or even (whatever some have thought) a prophet. He is a politican responding, reasonably enough, to political pressures. The impatience of the well-connected and wealthy gay lobby in the Democratic party forced the president’s hand. To call his move “courageous”—or to call “oppressed” the gay citizens whose outsize purchasing power and political influence has propelled their cause—is a long stretch indeed.

The courageous stand would have been to buck the ossifying, self-complimenting elite consensus and come out strongly for marriage, but Obama, here as on most matters, very sincerely agrees with the establishment. The correct opinion is not always the courageous one, and when it comes to gay marriage the President’s view is neither.

Beneath this political circus, of course, a real moral and philosophical question lies. What is marriage? Is it merely a way of signaling our social approval of committed love between any ordering of two (or more) people? Or is it a definite institution ordered toward the rearing of children and defined by permanence, exclusivity, and sexual complementarity? I think the latter. President Obama, barring further evolutions, thinks the former.

My advice to the president is that he lead those who agree with him in arguing civilly, that he examine the views of his opponents without resorting to charges of bigotry or bad faith. This is not a plea; it is a warning. If the Democratic party decides to declare war on religious institutions and private citizens who recognize the natural truth of marriage, it will have a very messy fight on its hands.

Of course, Americans do not want to offend their gay friends and family members. But nor do they want to see religious groups and other actors—Catholic charities, Pentecostal soup kitchens, the Boys Scouts of America—bullied into silence. If believers take a courageous stand—if they refuse to simply comply or shut down but instead force the state to shut them down—Americans’ tentative (and still minority) support for gay marriage will begin to fracture.

A man in North Carolina spent each month of last year trying out a new religion. Laughable religious tourism? Not so, says Peter Berger: “his story is emblematic of American religious pluralism and instructive for understanding the latter.” Berger continues:

In the pluralistic situation every religious institution, whether it likes this or not, becomes a voluntary association. Max Weber, one of the fathers of the sociology of religion, distinguished between two institutional forms of religion—the “church”, into which one is born, and the “sect”, which one joins as an adult. The historian Richard Niebuhr suggested that American history has created (presumably inadvertently) a third form of religious institution—the “denomination”, which in many ways looks like a “church”, but which one nevertheless freely joins and belongs to, and which is in competition with other religious bodies. On the level of consciousness, religion loses its taken-for-granted quality, instead becomes a matter of individual decision. The peculiarly American term “religious preference” nicely catches both levels. Put differently, the challenge of secularity, where it exists (it does in some places, notably in Europe), is that there is an absence of gods; the challenge of plurality is that there are too many gods. (more…)

Will outlawing abortion increase maternal mortality resulting from clandestine abortions? A study by a professor of family medicine at the University of Chile (the country has tight pro-life laws) suggests that the answer is no:

From a public health view, restrictive laws are hypothesized to cause a dissuasive effect on the population, similar to restrictions on tobacco or alcohol consumption. We observed that reduction of maternal mortality in Chile was paralleled by the number of hospitalizations attributable to complications of clandestine abortions. While over 50% of all abortion-related hospitalizations were attributable to complications of clandestine abortions during the 1960s, this proportion decreased rapidly in the following decades.

Indeed, only 12-19% of all hospitalization from abortion can be attributable to clandestine abortions between 2001 and 2008. These data suggest that over time, restrictive laws may have a restraining effect on the practice of abortion and promote its decrease. In fact, Chile exhibits today one of the lowest abortion-related maternal deaths in the world, with a 92.3% decrease since 1989 and a 99.1% accumulated decrease over 50 years. [ . . . ]

A plausible hypothesis after the Chilean study is that abortion restriction may be effective when is combined with adequately-implemented public policies to increase educational levels of women and to improve access to maternal health facilities. A restrictive law may discourage practice, which is suggested by the decrease of hospitalizations due to clandestine abortions estimated in Chile. [ . . . ]

Our study confirms that abortion prohibition is not related to overall rates of maternal mortality. In other words, making abortion illegal does not increase maternal deaths: it is a matter of scientific fact in our study.

Nevertheless, although our study definitively ruled out any deleterious influence of abortion prohibition on the maternal mortality trend, it cannot be immediately concluded that solely making abortion illegal is a direct causal factor for decreasing maternal mortality by itself.

The reduction in the maternal mortality trend in Chile is controlled by other factors, especially the educational level of women that positively influences other key variables, such as access to maternal health facilities, sanitary services and reproductive behaviour.

More here.

Democrats like cognac and Republicans enjoy light beers, Thomas B. Edsall reports:

Who would have guessed that the most Democratic drink by a long shot is Cognac, or that such lite beers as Amstel Lite, Michelob Ultra, Miller Lite and Sam Adams Light tilt so far to the political right, while Bud, Miller High Life, and Natural Lite are Democratic?

(Click graph to expand.)

Scotch, Guinness, and Bud Light sit right in the middle. Those who abstain from alcohol, including many Evangelical voters, are of course left out altogether.

Ross Douthat on the Obama campaign’s telling “Julia” slideshow:

The liberalism of “the Life of Julia” doesn’t envision government spending the way an older liberalism did — as a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working families, providing insurance against job loss, decrepitude and catastrophic illness. It offers a more sweeping vision of government’s place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decision — personal, educational, entrepreneurial, sexual — can be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington.

The condescension inherent in this vision is apparent in every step of Julia’s pilgrimage toward a community-gardening retirement. But in an increasingly atomized society, where communities and families are weaker than ever before, such a vision may have more appeal — to both genders — than many of the conservatives mocking the slide show might like to believe.

Apparently someone in the White House thinks so, which makes the life of Julia the most interesting general-election foray by either campaign to date. Interesting, and clarifying: in a race that’s likely to be dominated by purely negative campaigning on both sides, her story is the clearest statement we’re likely to get of what Obama-era liberalism would take us “forward” toward.

Today’s liberalism seeks to ensure absolute autonomy from family and community, and in the process creates a massive dependence on the state that would be unhealthy even if it were sustainable. An agenda of thoroughgoing individualism collapses into nanny-statism.

Peter Berger reports that more religious citizens are—counter t0 many assumptions—actually less likely to support the death penalty:

Support for the death penalty correlates negatively with degree of religious involvement – 65% in favor among those who attend services weekly or more, 69% among those who attend monthly, 71% of those who attend rarely or never. There are interesting differences as between religious groups – 71% of Protestants are in favor of the death penalty, 65% of Catholics, 57% of those with no religious preference. There has been a notable decline in support among Catholics (possibly due to recent teachings about a “culture of life” by the Catholic Church). Across all denominations, Christian as well as Jewish, religious conservatives are more in favor of the death penalty than religious liberals. Not surprisingly, this difference is very visible within Protestantism—among clergy and lay people, and in official positions of church bodies. All mainline Protestant churches have made abolitionist statements, while Evangelical churches (notably the Southern Baptist Convention) have supported retention.

Note that Catholics have become more opposed to death penalty even as the Church has taken what many call, wrongly, a “conservative” turn. Keep this in mind when you hear shrill accusations of the Church becoming nothing more than another Republican Party lobby.

Unlike Greg Forster, I find Matt Franck’s worries about the reshaping of our foreign policy to promote a very particular and controversial gay-rights agenda wholly understandable. The bending of American foreign policy to prosecute the culture war abroad has been taking place for some time, as documented by R.R. Reno in our February issue (subscribers only), and we need more clear-eyed takes like Matt’s, not just to counter the agenda of sexual libertinism, but also to preserve the integrity of our foreign policy.

What I want to object to here, though, was a response from Kevin Williamson arguing that the contest over marriage’s legal meaning doesn’t matter because, well, no-fault divorce has already rendered marriage unrecognizable. The unions most Americans enter into, Williamson says, have nothing to do with the thing described by St. Paul or by the doctrines of the Catholic Church: “Marriage has been shot through the head, and they are calling the dentist. What we call “marriage” today is certainly not the marriage of the New Testament, the Christian tradition, or our Anglo-European heritage.”

This is an impossibility. The Christian tradition which Williamson tries to characterize understands marriage precisely as something whose meaning cannot be effaced by changing legal definitions. Despite the rise of no-fault divorce, most couples think of marriage as permanent. Despite the rise of swingers, most think of marriage as exclusive. And even if gay marriage is broadly recognized, most people will think of marriage, centrally, as involving a complementary sexual union. That’s why gay couples adopt. Because marriage just is the kind of thing that leads to children.

I doubt Williamson recognizes the serious implications his view would have in the internal life of his Church. It would mean, for one, that almost any marriage entered into by your standard, inattentive cultural Catholic—anyone who doesn’t take the time to read Elizabeth’s Anscombe’s Contraception and Chastity or John Paul II’s Theology of the Body— is annulable. As John Allen just wrote in reporting on a conference in Rome: