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On The Other Hand

Once you get past the hot-button issues, (abortion, adultery, fornication, homosexuality) there are those for whom Catholicism is a fashion accessory for their place in the culture war. The only way they feel secure is the knowledge that these sins are more grave objectively than others. However, if you pile enough situationally grave sins together, you still end up in hell.

The problem for their erstwhile critics on the "cultural Left" let's call it, is that those sexual sins are actually sins. No amount of raging against Right-wing myopia changes that.

The reason I don't call myself "conservative" anymore is that politics is no longer about thinking through issues with a Christian anthropology, and doing the best for the common good; it's about indicating that I'm not Them. And yes, to my mind, the Right is worse about this than the Left right now.

And as soon as you call someone to virtue, either in rejecting these silly binaries, or in actually engaging seriously with issues they've ignored, you're "virtue signalling". Well, I'll just embrace that. Better to signal virtue than to embrace vice. When Jesus asks you what you said and did for refugees and Muslims (often the same people) are you going to shrug and say, "At least I was not an abortionist"?

As long as there's some foolish parent trying to make their 5-year-old into the opposite sex, there's probably enough noise to ignore the force of my objection. It still sits there, awaiting an answer. In the end, this is why I don't have the stomach for lectures from "conservative" Catholics; I never changed my position on the things I listed, and still, there's a will to ignore any moral intuition (not to mention, Church teaching) from anyone "impure".
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