The Faithful Departed - A review

Philip F. Lawler’s The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture is an account of that collapse from the perspective of a Catholic right wing hardliner.   In Lawler’s view,  everything that has gone wrong with the Church is due to its abandonment of its once uncompromising stance that “extra ecclesiam nulla salus” – without the church there is no health.  The church has failed because it has opened itself up to the modern world, whose highest values are increasingly those of democracy and an enlightened embrace of diversity, and come to doubt the wisdom of  holding to a singular notion of truth and authority.  To Lawler, the Catholic Church can never be a “big tent” church.  It must always be exactly and only what the pope and his curia say it is, not what may be derived from the larger body of believers working in concert.

Lawler’s version of  Catholicism, which he adamantly insists is the only possible view that can be called “catholic,” demands unquestioned obedience to the bishop of Rome, and strict adherence to a bevy of dogmatic claims all focused on keeping power over life and death and one’s eternal soul in the hands of the men who run the church.   To a belief that to be a Catholic you have to force a woman who has been raped and impregnated to give birth to the baby.  That you cannot practice birth control, cannot have a sex-change operation, cannot have a hand in euthanasia, cannot vote for a Catholic congressman who favors abortion rights, even for non-Catholics.

I suspect Lawler is wrong when he concludes the church is dead.  It is not dead, but simply evolving.  The bullying church is on the ropes, at least in Europe and America, but the pastoral church is likely to go on for the forseeable future.  The problem is, Lawler doesn’t accept this division.  For him there is only one church and he sees no reason not to label the 90% of Catholics who practice birth control as non-Catholics.  Or not-really Catholics.

Lawler gets the problem right: Church leaders derailed the church in Boston (and this applies elsewhere as well) by yielding to the temptation to build up their power and influence for its own sake, rather than nurturing the religious solidarity on which they depended.   “Cardinals became preoccupied with the needs of the archdiocese as a secular institution, sometimes even to the detriment of the archdiocese as a community of faith.” (p. 248.) 

But he gets the solution wrong – that the church should speak with one voice, and that that voice should be the voice of central authority.  And he sabotages his own solution by writing wistfully of a day when politicians took their orders from bishops and people knelt and kissed their ring.  It’s not the “community of faith” he appears to be longing for but a community of power in numbers, a community run by authoritarians who brooked no dissent.

Lawler and I are working from opposing ideologies.  His is that there is a single divine truth, that it has been revealed to the pope and curia of the Roman Catholic Church, and that there is no room for divergence from their magisterium.  Mine is that truth is not revealed, but discovered, that knowledge is the sum total of all human experience to date, subject to change with every piece of new and conflicting evidence.  There is no middle ground between these two ideological stances, but I trust I can at least describe his views fairly and objectively before explaining why I disagree with them.

Here is Lawler’s evidence for the decline of Catholic power and influence in Boston and beyond:

• A 1958 Gallup poll showed that three out of four American Catholics attended Sunday Mass regularly; by 2000 the figure was closer to one out of four. 
• In that same time period nearly half of all Catholic elementary and high schools closed. 
• The number of Catholic marriages solemnized in churches fell by over 30% and the number of marriages annulled went from about 350 a year to nearly 50,000.
• The number of priests fell by about 20%; the number of ordinations dropped by about 65%.
• Two-thirds of the country’s seminaries closed and the number of women religious fell by over 50%.  Teaching orders declined from 104,000 in 1965 to about 8,000 today.   (p. 73)

“For the Catholic Church in Boston today,” Lawler writes, “there is no earthly hope.”

…Empty buildings—cavernous Gothic churches, rectories, convents and schools—urgently need repairs, but the paltry collections are not even enough to keep up with the current fuel bills.  Priests and nuns are aging, and precious few young people are entering the seminaries and convents to take their place.  The congregations, too, are aging; the pews are dotted with gray heads, while young couples spend their Sunday mornings at home with the newspaper and the television programs that cater to serious-minded secular viewers by featuring discussion of current events.

The entire massive structure of Catholicism totters along on borrowed time.  But the trend is clear.  That whole structure will come crashing down, perhaps within the next generation, unless there is some dramatic change…   (pp. 252-3)

Lawler thinks the church’s problem is that it is a willow when it ought to be an oak.  It should be standing firm and strong, eternal and unchanging.  It should never have surrendered to worldly pressures but held firm against all temptations to modernize.  Vatican II was the beginning of the end, he says – not because of the work of the council itself, but because of what happened afterwards.  The church never should have abandoned Latin, the universalizing language.  Priests should never have begun turning and facing the congregation at worship but continued with his back to them as he led the body in the ritual of worship and the mysteries of the faith.  The problem began in Boston, he says, when the Kennedy family met at Hyannisport to figure out how Catholic politicians now entering the mainstream should compromise as political leaders of Americans outside the faith.  They should never have allowed them to think independently of Rome.  There should have been no allowance for politicians who voted, for whatever reason, for birth control or abortion.  Lawler’s book could have been written by Rick Santorum.

There has probably never been a better illustration of how one can miss the woods for the trees.  The priestly abuse scandal, Lawler says, had three parts: The first part is the abuse itself.  The second is the prevalence of homosexuality among Catholic priests.  And the third is the abdication of authority when bishops, confronted with evidence of abuse, chose to ignore abuse complaints and enabled predators to continue as predators.  (pp. 7-9)

Lawler’s reasoning is that people lost faith in the church because of its failings.  The abuse scandal destroyed the credibility of the church as a moral force, and has caused catastrophic financial harm.  There’s no arguing with his first point.  Moreover, the public image of a church lying to protect its reputation and placing the welfare of its priests over the welfare of their victims was an even greater moral failing.  There is no arguing with his third point, either. 

There is, however, a serious problem with his second claim.  By putting emphasis on the sexuality of the priests in question, rather than on their inclination to abuse children, Lawler says little about the scandal and a great deal about his own homophobia. 

Lawler is a hammer in search of a nail, and he finds one in homosexuality.  Mired in the misconception of homosexuality as a mental disorder, he draws the line not between abuser priests and non-abuser priests, but between gay priests and non-gay priests.  He makes much of the John Jay Report on the scandal, commissioned by the bishops,  which noted that 81% of molestations were of males, and concludes this proves a connection between abuse and sexuality, without seeing the obvious – that even if 100% of all Catholic priests were homosexually inclined, the problem would still be the capacity of any particular priest to abuse, and not his sexual inclination.  According to the John Jay Report, only about 4% of priests have been charged with sex abuse and the number found guilty, obviously far fewer.    Most gay priests do not abuse boys, just as most straight priests do not abuse girls.   And opportunity – the fact that priests are left alone with boys but not with girls – would seem to be an obvious way to explain the rest. 

Lawler, however, is a dog with a bone.

When intelligence agencies discover an enemy spy within their own ranks, they…root out the effects of his treachery.  If the bishops had been determined to conduct a thorough study of sexual abuse they might have done similar investigations into the backgrounds of the priests who were accused.  Who were there (sic) friends among the clergy?  Where had they been assigned?  Did they share vacation cottages with other priests or bishops?  Who had been their seminary teachers? (p. 226)

Nobody could lay better ground for a witchhunt.   The child abuse scandal wasn’t the only reason for the church’s decline, as anyone familiar with the recent uproar in Germany over a rape victim being turned away from a Catholic hospital can tell you.  It does have more than a little explanatory value, though, provided you get the explanation right.  Lawler gets it all wrong.

Lawler’s assumption that homosexuality is by nature corruption leads him to the inevitable conclusion that the very presence in the church of gay people is what is corrupting it.  Not deception, not injustice, not hypocrisy, but rot from within as exemplified by "rampant" homosexuality.  Some people advocate frisking every black kid on the block on the grounds that the high percentage of black kids in trouble means you increase your chances of getting the bad guys.  Round up the homosexuals and anyone who has anything to do with them.  That’ll get the child abusers!

One might expect so much more of Lawler.  He is a Harvard graduate, the author of six books, editor of several magazines.  His articles have appeared in over 100 newspapers in the U.S. and abroad.  But even monkeys fall from trees.  And even good historians – and The Faithful Departed is very readable informative history – can trip over their own ideological blindess.  Lawler doesn’t just stumble, though.  His advocacy of blind obedience to a closed system hobbles him from the start.

Lawler is Director of Studies for the Heritage Foundation, now headed up by Tea Party leader, Jim “homosexuals should not be teaching in the public schools” DeMint.  If you go to their website, the first thing you see is “Join Rush Limbaugh and hundreds of thousands of other conservatives as a Member of The Heritage Foundation today.”   No man should be judged entirely by the company he keeps, of course, but one gets an idea of what Lawler seems to have in mind when he speaks of conservatism.

His solution to what ails the church – to return to the day when young couples living together before marriage should be denied communion – is bizarre.   His advocacy of conservative causes fills his pages.  He uses terms like “pro-abortion,” rather than “pro-choice.”  He speaks of Father Coughlin, the fiery radio-priest of the 1930s as a kind of buffoon, as being “dogged by charges of anti-Semitism.”  (p. 88) Which is an interesting way to put it, when you consider Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.   He bewails (p. 129) the change from the time when Catholic children learned the Baltimore Catechism by the rote question-and-answer approach… to “master truths.”  In writing of the Vatican response to the demand for same-sex marriage, a document titled Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons, he stresses that “The Vatican noted that these arguments were ‘drawn from reason’ rather than revealed truth and practically in the same sentence notes that “Considerations described homosexuality as a “troubling moral and social phenomenon,” missing the point that the only arguments used against LGBT rights for some time now have been those attributable to so-called revealed truth. (pp. 208-9)

Lawler makes the case that Vatican II did not change anything, that most Catholics are wrong in thinking that it did.  It was the liberals who hijacked the Council, says Lawler, catching “tradition-minded” Catholics off-guard (p. 71).  He makes no concession to a need for reform, no recognition that priests once turned away women wearing lipstick from communion.  No recognition, in other words, that “conservative” has no meaning out of context.  That what matters is not whether one is liberal or conservative but what one is liberal or conservative about, what is being conserved and what is being cast out.  Lawler makes no mention of the offensiveness of the prayers for the conversion of the Jews in light of charges Pius XII failed to step in with any effective opposition to the persecution of the Jews – for the same reason the church today is shamed by the child abuse scandal, because it acted to preserve the institution at all costs, and not to protect the bodies and souls of the vulnerable.  He cherry picks his events the way he accuses “cafeteria Catholics” of following those rules they will choose to be governed by and rejecting the others.

The church will rise again, is Lawler’s conclusion.  After all, Catholics in Boston were a minority back in the early 19^th Century, oppressed by a hostile majority, as they are today.  “With the power of faith it could happen again.” (p. 258)

Faith, and a return to the old ways.  Back to a time before the 60s and the sexual revolution and easy divorces.  Back before the breakdown of gender roles, before all this talk of ecumenism. 

How is that to be accomplished?  Through unity of thought by imposition of orthodoxy.  By embracing the church militant, marching in lockstep and silencing all dissent.

Lawler tells us only what he thinks went wrong, not how one persuades the world that they should embrace his particular choice of orthodoxies and not some other.

That would be a topic for a different book.

page references are to Lawler, Philip F., The Faithful Departed: the Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture, paperback edition (with a new 2010 preface by the author), Encounter Books, NY and London, 2008

Much Ado

I keep coming back to that bizarre story I blogged about the other day,  about how a rape victim had been turned away at a Catholic hospital in Cologne last December.  Each time I went looking for more details, the central focus seemed to change.  

The story started with a woman waking up on a park bench one Saturday afternoon in December with no recollection of the past nearly twenty-four hours.  She got her mother to take her to the emergency room, where she was treated by Dr. Irmgard Maiworm, the GP on duty at the time.  Maiworm suspected she had been drugged and possibly raped.  With the patient’s permission, Maiworm called the cops, and prescribed the morning-after pill.  

Maiworm then got her assistant to call the gynecological clinic at neighboring St. Vinzenz Hospital to get her a full gynecological examination.  No can do, say the folks of St. Vinzenz.  We don't do rape cases.  We had somebody do that recently and lose their job.  For two months new rules had been in effect forbidding Catholic hospitals from providing post-rape exams.  These new rules came in response to the increasing use of the morning-after pill.  Such a pill, according to the guidelines, was not in keeping with Catholic values.

Maiworm can't believe her ears.  She phones another hospital, this time Heilig-Geist Hospital, only to get the same answer.  Eventually they find a Protestant hospital that will take her.

I know there are many people out there convinced there is a big daddy in the sky who wants very much for you to do certain things and not do others.    I wasn’t born yesterday.  I also know Big Daddy is not all that clear on what those things are, but that’s OK.  There are people around convinced he has empowered them to speak for him.  All you have to do is believe.

Leprechauns.  Trolls.  Wizards.  Witches,  Ghosts, Gremlins and Roman Catholic bishops.  I have trouble telling them apart.

* * *

Once this story started making the rounds, Germans went ballistic. On one television talk show, moderator Günther Jauch asked his guests what they thought about the Roman Catholic Church in Germany today.    His guests were so critical that he felt he needed to do another one, this time with practicing Catholic guests (plus the head of the Protestant Church in Germany who could be guaranteed to be at least diplomatic, and probably totally friendly on ecumenical grounds, which he was.)  The Catholic guests fell all over each other distancing themselves from the incident.  Lots of use of words like “outrage,” “disgusting” and “shameful,” and virtually everybody agreeing “this is not what the Catholic Church is all about!”   

Missing from the discussion was the fact that a hospital spokesman had given a press conference early on in which he insisted the whole story was a media circus full of misinformation.  There were no absolute guidelines.  Doctors were free, as they have always been, to make their own decisions.  One man’s guidelines being another men’s directives, the statement to the press came off pretty much as not very effective damage control.  The fact remains the Church had put out a clear condemnation of morning-after pills and the letter was fresh in the minds of hospital employees.

So the Cardinal decided to step in and ask some very smart questions.

How does this pill work, exactly?  Does it destroy a fertilized egg?   Or does it simply prevent implantation of the sperm?

The distinction, in the Catholic way of thinking, is crucial.   If it destroys the fertilized egg, it’s an abortifacient, since a fertilized egg is defined by catholic officialdom as a human baby.  It’s a killer.  And if it doesn’t, but simply prevents the sperm from reaching the egg, arguably no abortion has taken place.  It’s not a killer.  It’s just a “preventative.”  And, Meisner opines, a “preventative” would be OK.   (Details on the pill are available here and here and here.) 

Let that sink in.

A form of birth control would be OK?

Did he really say that?  The cardinal?

What appears to have happened is that where once there was one rigid, hard-and-fast rule about birth control (it’s a no-no), now there are two:

Rule 1 (for married people):  If you’re married, you cannot practice birth control and if you get pregnant you cannot abort the baby.  No change in policy, in other words.  It’s still a no-no.

(And, just to dot our i’s and cross our t’s, we might consider Rule 1-A: if you’re not married, you don’t need to worry about this because you are not having sex.  The birth control issue is irrelevant.)

Rule 2 (for women who are raped): If your rapist’s sperm fertilizes your egg, you are pregnant and you must have the baby.  If there is a means of preventing fertilization, such as the “morning after” pill, you may use it. 

For the first time, under these limited circumstances, birth control is now allowed.

Meisner’s was not the last word on the subject.  The German Bishops have begun debating the issue at their conference now going on in Trier, and speculation is strong they’re going to back Meisner up.

* * *

Meanwhile, over here in America, the story is no longer about the rape victim, but about the fact that the German Catholic Church seems to be ahead of their American counterparts in reconciling the two churches – the official hierarchical structure, on the one hand, and the “people’s church,” the body of believers who focus less on power and more on pastoral concerns, on the other.   One Catholic spokesman, James Salt, of Catholics United used the word “amazing” to describe the step of moving from “no birth control” to “birth control under certain very limited circumstances.” 

While I have to admit the step from zero to 1 is in most cases a bigger step than from 1 to 2, the only thing I find amazing is that the church once actually held the view that one must take no steps whatsoever to protect the life and well-being of a women who has been raped.  I really ought to be a bit more generous and recognize that for Catholics, any step forward toward greater human rights and recognition of the needs of women and others previously excluded by the church – I’m thinking, of course, of gays in particular – is a cause for celebration.

But I can’t help it.  I can barely keep back the hysterical laughter and the suggestion we ought to maybe break out the champagne or cry with joy that this retrograde organization has decided to give women a taste of dignity they had not allowed them before.

What will they do for an encore, put full postage on their mail?  Start using left-hand turn signals when they turn left?

Just as you needed a Republican like Nixon to open China – because if a leftist had tried it he would have been shot down – Cardinal Meisner was apparently the right guy in the right place at the right time for this job.  He isn’t just anybody.  Not one of those bleeding-heart liberal types.  Not a renegade theologian like Hans Küng, who wants the Catholics and the Protestants to get back together.  Not a Garry Wills, who wants to get rid of the priesthood.  Not a Leonardo Boff or a Gustavo Gutierrez keeping the Vatican awake at night with their pain-in-the-ass demands for “liberation theology,” trying to make the church less about silken robes and golden rings and more about caring for the poor.  Cardinal Meisner is one of Germany’s most prominent Catholic clergy, heading up the largest and the richest diocese in the country.   The man whose home is that magnificent Cologne Cathedral.  Consider the company Meisner keeps.  First off there’s his protégé and right-hand man, Opus Dei Cardinal, Archbishop Rainer Woelki, famous for his description of homosexuality as an “offence against the ‘order of creation’.”  Meisner and Woelki’s father went to school together.

And Meisner has long been a personal friend of the pope.  When Josef Ratzinger was elected God’s representative on Earth, Meisner, we are told, burst into tears of joy in the Sistine Chapel.

On the occasion of the pope’s 85^th birthday, a group of German papal loyalists put out a kind of “Festschrift”  to sing his praises.  The publisher explained that she was motivated in part by the desire to counter some of the negative press the pope got when he addressed the German parliament and so many people walked out on him.  Speaking at the press conference was none other than Georg Gänswein, the pope’s personal secretary and editor of and contributer to the book.  Also among those contributors is Meisner.  The book is called Benedikt XVI – Prominente über den Papst. (Benedict XVI – Prominent People Speak Out about the Pope).

* * *

It wasn’t missed in church circles that a conservative prelate had moved birth control out of the no-no column into the “under certain circumstances” column.  The first question was to what degree was Meisner acting on his own.  As if he actually could.  Or would.  An American publication, The National Catholic Reporter strongly suggested Meisner may actually have cleared his remarks with the Vatican.   And a report by the Irish national public service broadcaster, RTÉ confirmed it, straight from the horse’s mouth, almost, by diocese of Cologne spokeswoman Nele Harbeke.

So it’s official.  The Vatican has arrived in the modern era by recognizing that sometimes it’s a good idea to get in nature’s way in the baby-making process.  The rest of us never had a problem with this, and we wonder why it is the church couldn't have said from the beginning that rape is contrary to the will of God and therefore what goes on in rape is pain, not baby-making.  But probably they figured that would only lead to the slippery slope.  As it is, one has to wonder how long it will be before somebody decides the church can get behind the blocking of the sperm of a fifteen-year-old boy when it’s heading toward an egg in his fourteen-year-old girlfriend.  As long as they do it in a timely fashion.

* * *

So there’s the story.  Or so it would seem.  The church is getting closer to admitting that

women are equal in God’s eyes to men, and each time there is any progress, no matter how small, we can’t help but speculate how much more freedom from darkness and obedience to blindly held principles might come down the pike.  Will they let women speak for the official church as equals one day?  Will they recognize that although the animus that once led to the execution of homosexuals is gone, use of language such as “intrinsically disordered” and “offensive to God” when describing their natural desire for physical and emotional union with another person of the same sex still sets the tone for gay-bashing, trivialization and exclusion?

The church has been brought kicking and screaming one more inch closer to the modern age only because it got caught napping.  It could have done it without all this embarrassment if it had taken a pastoral approach to rape victims in the first place, and not waited for somebody to test the law.

But that's not the way the church works.  It prefers, even now, even after all these years, to argue over the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin.

All this kerfluffle.  All these hours of press conferences, emergency sessions of ethics committees, all this hair-splitting.  Some people are trying to downplay the event as manipulation.  The Catholic News Agency, for example, published an article to that effect.  When you look closely at it, though, what you see is some really lousy journalism.   You see little more than  a conservative doctor trying to “correct” the good Cardinal.  He says the cardinal was manipulated, but in fact there is no evidence to back that up. 

But there’s no need for conservatives to expend that effort on denying what Meisner has done.  All he has actually done is declare that in an act of violence, one we may safely assume was not what God was thinking when he asked us to be fruitful and multiply, there is no harm in preventing the fertilization of an egg in the body of an unwilling victim.  We are not preventing a life that was meant to be.  We are preventing a life that was not meant to be.   And not prevent in the condom sense, but prevent in the “keep these people apart” sense.

When the dust settles, we have to recognize this is not really about birth control at all, since all the old birth control restrictions remain firmly in place.  And so is the rule that if the rapist should succeed in getting that sperm into the egg, it’s all over.  The baby is on the way.  The victim can seek therapy, close her eyes and think of England, or give the baby up for adoption.  She just can’t stop the birth.

The church, who speaks for God, has made it clear what God wants.  If you get to the sperm in time, he wants you to stop the baby-making process.  If you don’t, he clearly means for a baby to be born. 

Isn’t it nice to have clarity where once we had a grey area?

* * *

In the final analysis, I think the story will be told this way:

A woman went to a doctor.  There was evidence she had had sex without her knowledge and consent.  The doctor took action to make sure she wouldn’t have a baby.  She didn’t split hairs over whether there was a fertilized egg in her womb; she simply looked out for the welfare of her patient.  Call that Irmgard Maiworm’s way.

Agents of the Roman Catholic Church working on what they thought were church guidelines decided the patient should not be treated because such treatment might involve abortion, or the appearance of approval of abortion.   When word got out, these agents issued an apology and insisted it was all a misunderstanding.

We now know how to prevent a rape victim from being further victimized.  We have the technology to keep her from having to carry a child fathered by her rapist.  God appears to favor women who live in advanced countries with access to that technology.  If women take advantage of that technology within the first couple of days after being raped, they do not offend him.  If they are not in a position to take advantage of that technology, either because they are poor, or uninformed, or because they live too far from people who have that technology, they just have to wait and watch while their ovum becomes fertilized.  The correct interpretation of that eventuality, in that case, is that God intends for that baby to be born.  Call that Bishop Meisner’s way.

We have two Roman Catholic churches.  One, the pastoral church, consists of the majority of people who identify as Catholic.  They would like the church to go Irmgard Maiworm’s way. The other consists of an old boys’ club of increasingly irrelevant authoritarians whose desire to maintain control over the institution they run occasionally leads them to cruelty.

If you, or anyone you know, is ever raped, pray you fall into the hands of the Maiworms of this world, and not the Meisners.

If At First You Don't Succeed

Too much focus on the national news isn’t good, I think.   Watching Republicans at the national level having to filibuster things right and left and work their fingers to the bone to make sure the poor pay their fair share can get you down.  Sometimes it’s useful to turn our attention to politics down where the rubber meets the road.

Take Rick Brattin, for example.  Handsome dude.  Nice family man. Member of the NRA.  Republican gentleman from Missouri’s 55^th District (Cass County, south of Kansas City), and Missouri House floor whip.

Like everybody who’s anybody, Rick’s got his own web page.  Nobody can make a web page on his own, of course.  We all need a little help from our friends, so I thought I’d see what I might do to help floor whip Brattin become a better whip.  Here are my suggestions for changes to his web page. 

Rick has six sections on his web page: Welcome, About Rick, Brattin Plan, New District, Press Library, and House Reports.

If you click on the first, “Welcome,” you read: 

We do not need the government to try to stimulate and attempt to control our economy, the government needs to just get out of our way and stop wasting our hard earned money on endless programs that have proven time and time again to be ineffective. It's time to bring the power back to the People, back to the free market, and put a stop to the slow erosion of our God ordained liberties and freedoms. Allow the hard working taxpayer prosper and to reap the benifits of the fruits of their labor--That was what our Founding Fathers envisioned for our Country and those beliefs and core values are enshrined into both our Federal and State Constitutions. God Bless America!

Not bad.  Got a run-on sentence there in that first sentence.  “Benifits” should be “benefits” and things are enshrined “in” and not “into” the constitution, but other than that, the message is a nice clear example of Republican thought.

The notation “Peculiar bridge construction” is not a typo.  It refers to bridge construction in the town of Peculiar.  There really is a Peculiar, Missouri.

Click on the second item, “About Rick”, and you find:

He has been an actvive and prolific lawmaker sponsoring and cosponsoring several bills in his first two sessions of his first term. Rick won re-election to represent the new Missouri 55th District to inlcude most of the previous 124th District of central Cass County.

“Actvive” should, of course, be “active” and “inlcude” should be “include,” but two misspellings aren’t bad.  Thirty-nine of the words in that paragraph are spelled right.  (Although, to be fair, two of those are numbers.)

In the third item, “Brattin Plan” you find:

Due to the budget shortfalls, some are talking about proposing increased in sales tax, fuel tax, and even toll roads on higways we already paid to build. We must look into new ways to streamline our roadways while at the same time making sure that taxes and costs are minimum.

I believe that should be an s and not a d at the end of “increased”, and you left out the second h in highway, Rick, and “toll roads on highways” could use some tweaking.  As could “costs are minimum.”  But we get the idea.

In the fourth item, “New District” you find:

On 1868 the county surveyor, Robert Cass, platted the Town of Peculiar. The city received its name when the first postmaster, Edgar Thomson since his first choice, Excelsior, was already in Atchison County. 

I’m still getting my head around why anybody in his right mind would name a town “Peculiar” – much less actually go and plat it.  Probably has something to do with the time when his first choice already existed.  Which was on 1868, apparently.

Rick gets full marks for the final section.  Most of the words on the page are either “house” or “bill” and both are spelled correctly.

Now let’s turn to Rick’s legislative contributions.

Here’s his latest, House Bill 201, a  a proposal he introduced yesterday to enhance science education, since Rick “I’m a huge science buff” Brattin is apparently hugely science education oriented.

It speaks for itself, sort of:

HB 291 -- Missouri Standard Science Act

Sponsor: Brattin

This bill establishes the Missouri Standard Science Act which

requires that science instruction in public elementary and

secondary schools and in introductory science courses in public

higher education institutions be standard science instruction as

defined in the bill.

           

That’s pretty clear, right?  What’s established is what is defined.

Any empirical data, as defined in the bill,

must have been verified, be capable of being verified, or be

identified as nonverifiable.

It’s always useful to verify things, when you can, of course.

To present an item as a scientific law, as defined in the bill, the law must have no known exceptions in its verified empirical data. When scientific theory, as defined in the bill, is presented, the bill prescribes the level of detail required for the presentation of theories of origin and biological origin in teaching and textbooks. Textbooks covering any scientific theory of biological origin must devote equal treatment to evolution and intelligent design.

I see.  No known exceptions in verified empirical data.  Intelligent Design.

Physical evidence must support the teaching of prehistory, and any conjecture about occurrence, causes, dates or lengths of time must be presented as theory or hypothesis, as defined in the bill. Naturalistic processes in prehistory must be duplicated by analogous naturalistic processes, as defined in the bill. False theories or hypotheses must be identified as false.

Good idea, I think, to have naturalistic processes duplicated by analogous naturalistic processes, but I’m not sure exactly how one identifies a false hypothesis.  I’ll have to work on that.

HB 291 is not the first time an intelligent design bill has been introduced by Rick.  A year ago he and five others started with HB 1227, and by the time they got to HB 1276, they had introduced an anti-evolution bill five times.    By the time January 13, 2011 rolled around, they had already introduced two that year, as well.  There was HB 1651 in 2010, and on and on.  Actually they’ve been at this for quite a while now in Missouri.  HB 911 in 2004, for example, followed by HB 1722, also in 2004.   You get the picture.  

I’ll leave you, gentle reader, to find your own way to the rest of this current bill 291, and to follow its fate, if you’re interested in how the leaders of Missouri are helping the children of Missouri make their way in the world.  (And we should not dump this all on Missouri.  Intelligent design bills have been introduced in Colorado, Montana and Oklahoma, as well.)

In any case, I’m sure at least some of the kids Rick is looking out for will make a name for themselves at univeristy. 

Is that how you spell it?

Must look that up.

source for Intelligent Design muscle

source for Missouri State Univeristy