Thunder from the archbishop

"The moral conflicts that permeate our public policy debates are endless and irresolvable because our culture no longer has a rational, mutually accepted way of getting to moral agreement. The answer of the liberal state (including our own) to these stubborn disputes is to remove morality to the private sphere. But that course of government is itself a value judgment, a morally loaded act disguised as neutrality. All law and all public policy embody somebody's idea of what we ought to do, including the notion that we 'ought' to keep personal moral beliefs out of public debates.

"The underlying assumption of our public discourse today is that facts and values are radically distinct. 'The plane crashed' is a statement of fact, and therefore 'real.' Crash evidence is tangible. Nobody can argue with debris. On the other hand, 'Don't kill the disabled' is a statement of value. It's an expression of opinion and sentiment-- so the logic goes-- and therefore not 'real' or 'true' in the same solid sense. For example, the importance of protecting disabled persons is an admirable and widely shared view; surely that's obvious. But some people might disagree. Some people might argue quite sincerely that disabled persons are a waste of precious resources, and we'd be better off without them. Some people did argue that way in Germany in the last century, with great effect.

"Of course, for most of us, murdering the disabled, starving the poor, or deliberately targeting innocent civilians in war is an appalling idea, a crime against humanity. But apparently sucking the brains out of unborn children, or trading in their body parts, is not so appalling. It may even be 'good,' because we already do it. We not only do it, but we also build a fortress of pious-sounding chatter about reproductive rights to surround and bless it.

"This is the kind of obscenity that comes from reducing a nation's politics to a clash of allegedly equal values. What it masks is a transfer of power from proven traditions of moral wisdom to whoever can best lobby the media, the courts, Congress, and the White House."

-- from Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World, by Charles J. Chaput (Archbishop of Philadelphia)