19 February 2012 -
Today it is contraception and
the morning-after pill. Tomorrow it will be kosher slaughter, or
matrilineal descent, or circumcision, or other matters of existential
importance to Jewish observance. If the Obama administration gets away
with forcing Catholic institutions to step across lines of life and
death in the name of “health,” the federal government will have a
precedent to legislate Judaism out of existence — as several other
countries have already tried to do.
Now the Obama administration has told Catholic institutions that they
don’t have to dispense pills that kill babies. Instead, they can pay
the insurance company, and the insurance company will dispense the pill
for them. It is an accounting trick (as
Paul Ryan called it) that the White House misrepresents as a
compromise. The Catholic bishops, of course, reject it. And only one
Jewish organization, the haredi organization Agudath Israel, offered a sharp response. Its Washington director Abba Cohen stated:
Whether or not the White House’s new “compromise” proposal adequately addresses the religious freedom concerns raised by the Catholic Church is for the Catholic Church to say, not us – and, frankly, not the White House, either. The important points here are that no religiously sponsored entity, and no religiously motivated individual, should be forced by government to violate its or his sincerely held religious principles; and that the determination of religious propriety must be left to the religious entity or individual, not to the government.
The Orthodox Union, according to press accounts,
guardedly praised the “compromise,” saying: “The president’s stated
commitment is a positive first step forward, the details of
implementation are crucial and we look forward to working with the
administration to see that through.” As a late-in-life returnee to
Jewish observance, I habitually defer to the Orthodox Union leadership
in such matters. Having had the misfortune to have spent half my life
among the atheists and religion-haters, though, I know how embittered
and unrelenting are the supposed disciples of science. They are in fact
religious fanatics of the worst kind. You can’t make a deal with them.
After they come for the Catholics, they will come for us. They already
are coming for us all over the world.
It isn’t happening in the United States — not yet, except for a laughable referendum in San Francisco last year
to prohibit circumcision. But it’s happening in England, where the
country’s highest court has ruled that the religious definition of
Jewish identity is racist. It’s happened in several European countries
as well as New Zealand, which have banned or might ban kosher slaughter.
Contraception is not the issue. The issue is whether science has the
right to decide the ultimate matters of life and death, or whether this
is reserved to faith. We can argue the practical consequences all day
and not get anywhere. It’s not as if contraception has ushered in a
glorious era of human reproduction in which every child is planned and
wanted. More than half of births to American women under 30 now occur outside of marriage, the New York Times
reported Feb. 18, and overwhelmingly to working-class women who are
economically unprepared for single motherhood. And 71% of total
African-American and 53% of Hispanic births are out of wedlock as well.
The cultural shift from the nuptial mystery of religion to the
blandishments of recreational sex has left us with a catastrophic rate
of illegitimacy and the prospect of a self-perpetuating underclass.
But that isn’t the issue. The fact that the liberals have left us
with a social dystopia instead of a golden age is beside the point. The
issue is: Who has the right to draw the lines where life and death are
concerned? Morning-after pills may not seem too horrible to most of us.
It’s not the same as sucking out the brains of a fully-developed fetus
in a so-called “partial birth abortion,” or dismembering a 3-month-old
fetus that responds to stimuli and can feel pain, is it? The Australian
comic Jim Jeffries has made a career out of a routine that
claims heaven must be boring; if you think of eternal bliss as a simple
extension of ordinary time, you’d get used to it eventually. That sort
of paradox of time has been in the literature since St. Augustine. But
the paradox cuts both ways. If you don’t like sucking the brains out of a
fully-developed fetus at eight months, how about 7 months? Or six
months? Or five months? Three months? How about three months less one
minute? Or less one second? Where do you draw the line? Nothing in our
science can tell us where life begins. If you can overrule the Catholic
assertion that life begins at conception on putative scientific grounds
and require Catholic institutions to pay for morning-after pills, you
have given “science” carte blanche to determine where life begins — and
ends.
Exactly the same issues arise in other matters of existential
importance to Orthodox Jewish communities, for example, the most basic
of all questions: Who is a Jew? The answer under Jewish law is: the
child of a Jewish mother. Parts of the Jewish community that reject
Jewish law don’t like this, to be sure. Almost half of American Jews
intermarry and the Reform movement conveniently discovered patrilineal
descent. But Jewish law remains clear on this subject as it has for
thousands of years.
England’s Supreme Court, though, ruled in 2009 that it was “racist” to determine Jewish status by maternal descent,
as opposed to such criteria as belief, observance, and so forth. The
ruling responded to a lawsuit by an intermarried couple who sought
admission for their child at the Orthodox-led Jewish Free School. The
application was rejected because the child was not Jewish by Orthodox
criteria, but Britain’s highest court overruled the religious
authorities. Britain’s chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, declared, “An
English court has declared [the religious definition of Jewish status]
racist, and since this is an essential element of Jewish law, it is in
effect declaring Judaism racist.”
Britain’s Catholic leaders supported Jewish leaders strongly and
without qualification. Oona Stannard, director of the Catholic
Education Services of England and Wales, announced, “We support our
Jewish colleagues and feel that it is important that the right to
determine who is a member of any religion ought to lie with the
religious.” The Church of England refused to comment (as an editor at First Things magazine at the time, I tried and failed to obtain a comment).
Think it can’t happen here? Wait. Some insidious liberal will devise a
way to label Judaism “racist” through the courts. It is not much of a
leap from “Zionism is racism” to “Judaism is racism.” If it can happen
in America’s mother country, the cradle of Anglo-Saxon liberty, it can
happen in America.
The same issues of life and death emerge in the matter of kosher
slaughter, which is now banned in Norway, Iceland, Sweden, and
Switzerland, and is under threat elsewhere. All of these require
electric stunning before slaughter, which under Jewish law is effected
by a single cut by a trained specialist that severs all the major
arteries and causes near-instant loss of consciousness. But stunning
renders the animal unfit for consumption under religious law. The Dutch
have been debating a similar ban for the past year under pressure from
animal rights activists, and a dubious compromise
is now under discussion. The Dutch ban almost certainly would have
passed, if not for the serendipitous publication of an Israeli scientific study showing
that electric stunning of animals causes them pain. Well and good: but
what if someone were to invent a method of stunning that made slaughter
entirely painless? Would that constitute grounds to outlaw a method of
slaughter that Jews have employed for more than three millennia?
Kosher slaughter is consistent with the Torah’s concern for the
welfare of animals, including not only their physical well-being but
also their feelings (one can’t muzzle an ox that is threshing grain, for
example, or kill a calf in the presence of the mother cow). I wrote
about that here in
Asia Times during the Dutch debate. It may seem quaint, or even
primitive, to enlightened secularists that we refuse to eat some animals
(although one might ask why they do not eat dogs, cats, or chimpanzees,
and by what criteria they draw the line). And it may seem strange that
we require animals to be slaughtered through the severing of the major
arteries. It happens to be the case that kashrut is consistent with the
most stringent requirements for humane treatment of animals, but that is
not the main point: Our consumption of meat is bound up with the
mysteries of life and death, and observant Jews consume animal life for
our own sustenance only with divine sanction, and under the supervision
of religious authorities.
Kashrut thus bears on the divine origin of life and our recognition
of its sanctity. If we do not recognize the absolute right of the
Catholic Church to act in accordance with its doctrine regarding
sanctity of life, to whom will we appeal when the campaign against
kosher slaughter comes to America? Animal rights activists have been
preparing the ground for this since 2004, when PETA circulated videos alleging abuses at one of the largest kosher meat processors.
Open the door to “scientific” determination of matters of life and
death, and America’s Orthodox Jews — a minority within a minority — will
be vulnerable to a new Inquisition. On this issue, there can be no
compromise. Agudath Israel is right: Jews should stand by the right of
the Catholic Church to determine what is acceptable by its standards,
just as we one day will ask the Catholic Church to stand by our right to
determine what is acceptable by our standards. To its credit, Britain’s
Catholic Church stood by us in 2009 when the English courts shamefully
and wrongly ruled that our most basic religious criteria were “racist.”
Shamefully and wrongfully, some Jews have failed to stand by the Church
under the Obama administration’s persecution. I appeal to these Jews:
Don’t be naive. We’re next.
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