Eutopia
The Vatican seems to have a strange lack of acquaintance with reality – at least its Council for the Family does. It has a statement on the family and human rights which floats weirdly free of the difficulties that humans tend to encounter.
The father and the mother, as a couple, with the characteristics proper to them, procreate and raise the child. The child thus has the right to be welcomed, loved and recognized in a family.
That’s a pretty idea, but the trouble is, it’s the Vatican itself that does more than any other human institution to make that right impossible to implement. It’s the Vatican that forbids birth control, thus removing (in intention at least, which is what’s relevant) people’s ability to avoid having children who are not wanted and thus at risk of not being welcomed. The same applies to abortion. The child may have a right to be welcomed and loved, but what of it? who is going to force the parents to welcome and love the child if they don’t in fact want it or (in the event) love it? The Vatican? How?
As the first natural community, the family is the exemplary place for solidarity. In the family human beings gradually become aware of their dignity, acquire a sense of responsibility, and learn to give attention to others. In the family, solidarity develops beyond the spouses’ love relation and extends to the relations between parents and children, siblings, and inter-generational relations.
Need for reality check again. ‘In the family, solidarity develops’ when it does, but when it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Has no one at the Pontifical Council for the Family ever encountered an unhappy (a ‘dysfunctional’) family? Has it never encountered a family that is more indifferent than anything else? Or one that is downright hostile, or one that is bullying and demanding and controlling? One that is shot through with tensions and jealousies and resentments? One that is estranged? Does the Pontifical Council for the Family really seriously think that all families are of their nature and essence loving and loyal and generous? Some are, certainly, but all of them? No. Yet the Pontifical Council prattles away as if it had never even read any Jane Austen, or any newspapers.
Family values people are like that, I suppose – they’re so keen to stamp out all the freedoms and choices and eccentricities and ways of living that thrive outside the familiar ones that they’re forced to pretend there is no flourishing outside The Family and no misery inside it. But then do they convince anyone?
I am not a “family values” person myself. In fact, being around most families makes me uncomfortable. Some members of my biological family, for instance my sister, are close friends. I haven’t talked to others for years. I know that some families are incredibly supportive, but I find most of them to be suffocating. I like to choose whom I spend my time with, not to have personal relations predetermined by the fact that we have genes in common. So you can imagine my opinion of what the Vatican Council says. I’ve managed to live almost 45 years outside the family as far as possible, and I’m a living example of how perverted, asocial, nihilist, unnatural, unlikely to celebrate holidays or to watch TV those who reject family are. The Vatican could hire me (for a good Vatican salary) to scare small children from straying from the true path of family values. Do you all know the joke about the Pope and Coca Cola?
In my wild and crazy sort of opinion “family values” is an encoding of the proposition that a woman is no problem if you keep her barefoot in winter, and pregnant in summer.
BTW, as happy a New Year as possible in the circumstances.
C’mon amos. Out with the pope joke. Men in drag can be pretty funny.
Oh yeah. I meant to agree with you, amos. Commonality of genes is vastly overrated.
Commonality of Genes? Hell, Doug, we share 52% of our genes with cabbages.
Like I said…
I think I read somewhere that something like 1/3 of European types can trace some tiny twig of their family tree to JS Bach — or was it Charlemagne? Who cares?
The Coca Cola Corporation decides that a really hot sales gimmick would be to change the Lord’s Prayer from “give us our daily bread” to “give us our daily Coca Cola.” So they send their vice president in charge of marketing to talk to a top bishop in the Vatican. The Coca Cola man offers 10 million dollars to change the prayer and the bishop indignantly refuses the offer: “the prayer contains the words of our Savior Jesus Christ, you are blaspheming his Holy message.” So Coca Cola sends their executive vice president to talk to THE top cardenal in the Vatican, this time with an offer of 100 million dollars. The cardenal explains that the prayer is a an ancient tradition of the Church, which cannot possibly be altered, but thanks the executive for his interest in Church theology and blesses him as he leaves. Now, Coca Cola sends its CEO to talk to the Pope. Pope, says the CEO, there is one billion dollars in unmarked bills in this suitcase and it’s yours if you change the fucking prayer. The Pope says nothing, but picks up a telephone, pushes a button and asks: how much was the bread industry’s last offer?
¡Muy cómico, amos!
Good joke. I heve heard for-real tales like that about certain national leaders.
And actually affirming the family instead of condemning gays or whoever is bad because…?
In a world where fathers are becoming little more than sperm doners I am kind of glad the pope says this sort of stuff, although the points raised by O.B are well taken.
A sperm doner? That’s one HELL of a kebab…
More to the point, R, have you not noticed that what ‘the Pope’ says is worded as a normative, emphatic statement of truth, when a moment’s reflection on ordinary human experience will show that it is not so? Doesn’t that pose a problem for your gladness? If they had even troubled to make it an ‘ought’, there might have been something to discuss; but they make an ‘is’ what is patently an ‘is not’; which merely proves, as if further proof were needed, that they live in cloud cuckoo land.
Yeah, I must say, the doings of The Church in Ireland made an interesting backdrop to reading the Pontifical Council’s deeply sentimental and deceptive blather. The Church in Ireland broke up families by taking children away from their mothers simply because the mothers were unmarried. The Church in Ireland imprisoned women in Magdalen laundries and took their children away from them simply because they were unmarried.
“And actually affirming the family instead of condemning gays or whoever is bad because…?”
It does depend on how one goes about it, but it’s also true that ‘family values’ are code for (among other things) antifeminism; several things the Pontifical Council says in the charter are (though subtly and cautiously) antifeminist.
Basically this whole schtick of saying The Family Is Everything, the family is the source of all value, etc etc etc, is a covert way of closing off other options (by persuasion rather than violence) and of discouraging women from being anything other than mothers.
It is subtle though. I would have to write a separate post to point out the places where the handcuffs peek out from the disguise. I might do that.
Except the forbidding of abortion and of birth control are of course not subtle at all, and both prohibitions make women’s rights impossible.
“The father and the mother, as a couple, with the characteristics proper to them, procreate and raise the child. The child thus has the right to be welcomed, loved and recognized in a family.”
Oh, my Papa –
What kind of world is/was the Vatican living in – as it was certainly not the kind of world I was raised.
Family how are you!
Twins who grew up in Goldenbridge were for half a century by a Sister of Mercy denied access to knowledge of their background. Despite the fact that the selfsame Sister of Mercy was a friend of two of their Aunts – who were also themselves, Sisters of Mercy. One of the twins who was at thirteen years of age taken out of Goldenbridge to work for the same Sister of Mercy [who was by her order transferred] was not only cruelly separated from her twin – but she constantly asked the sister for information about herself – but was given none. There are countless people – who grew up in institutions – still battling with wanting to find out from whence they came. I was told [as a teenager] by the Sisters of Mercy that I once had a mother – but that she had died. Not having had any concept of this ‘mother thing’ it did not sink in. They were indeed just empty words. When I later discovered this ‘family thing’ in the outside world I then began to wonder what I had missed. I eventually realised that I had to have come from somewhere. I was living in a hostel in London at the time and decided to come back to Ireland in search of a grave. Instead, I found a mother and an extended family I was numb struck and painfully aching all over for the next five years. My body just shook so much from all the tears that continually gushed from my being. To this day I have never ever recovered. Family to me equates with pain, rejection, and absurd sadness. I find it so hard to forgive the sister of Mercy for denying me the right to know about my birthright. The twins who grew up with me feel exactly the same. We have never ever mentally or psychologically recovered from the trauma. The Sisters of Mercy came under the religious jurisdiction of their local bishops who in turn came under the jurisdiction of the Vatican. These religious organizations who perpetually spout out about family values are in my judgment just full of nonsensical contradictions. They need to put their own houses in order before they start interfering in the houses of other families.
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you through and through, I chose you to be mine” And you chose the twins and the rest of the little children as well – who were by the religious torn away from their families. Never to be properly re-united!
Just so (and there are abundant reports of this kind of thing).
Yet the Vatican has the gall to set itself up as an authority on and protector of The Family – while not so much as mentioning its own sadistic record in this area. It’s sick-making.
Certain US states have reactionary movements now trying to redefine “personhood” because of their religious delusions. Of course they want the concept to apply from the moment of the fertilization of the egg. Check out this 4 1/2 minute video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHxH40aDlHE&sdig=1
or:
http://tinyurl.com/334ajs
Bye the way, OB, I was wondering:
“Eutopia” = “The Good Place”
as opposed to
“Utopia” = “No Place”
??
Elliott: Yeh. Utopia is taken to mean either of those, so I used the Greek spelling to make it unambiguous, or cryptic, or something.
It’s exactly like Euphemisms & Dysphemisms!
There’s eugenics and dysgenics, too, though I can’t say I’ve ever actually seen ‘dysgenics.’
Dare I suggest that:
“dysgenics” = “Doin’ What Comes Naturally”
??