The Fishwrap and Sr. Fiedler bow to Hillary Clinton’s Magisterium

Sr. Fiedler may finally be having some memory problems.  She has a deeply confused and poorly written piece in the National catholic Fishwrap lauding the Magisterium of Hillary Clinton, who definitively teaches Fishwrap about the human rights of people who do unnatural things with their bodies.

Sr. Fiedler’s article is bad all the way through, indeed so bad that I shouldn’t be spending much time on it.  But there is one particular problem that I have to point out.

Here she is. Just be patient.

In short, Secretary Clinton said the human rights and equality of all human persons include gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. And she injected that sentiment directly into the foreign policy of the United States, saying that the U.S. will defend that principle with both foreign aid decisions and diplomacy. It was a breathtaking statement in many ways, but one that should be applauded by everyone concerned about universal human rights. I may be wrong, but I have yet to hear any Catholic bishop praise that statement. [The bishops oppose gay marriage, but they claim to defend the equal rights of LGBT people otherwise].

Typical.

Sr. Fiedler doesn’t realize that we already have a Pope and a Magisterium and that Catholics don’t look to Hillary Clinton and the Magisterium of Nuns for their understanding of “human rights”.  Sr. Fiedler thinks the US Bishops should be listening to …. Hillary Clinton?

Shades of the Patriotic Church in China!  The Fishwrap and their tribe think that the Bishops should take their marching orders from the People’s Party… so long as the People’s Party is not… well… that other party.

But here is the important thing to understand about just how deeply wrong and confused Fiedler and the Fishwrap have become.

Since we have a Pope, we should consider what he has to say about the confusion of civil rights and human rights.

Pope Benedict, in his address to the UN and speaking about the UN’s Declaration on Human rights, underscored the problems that result from a confusion of civil rights (from positive law) and human rights (from natural law and therefore from our having been made by God in His image). Benedict says that giving civil rights to some group or class does not thereby point to previously unrecognized human rights. For Benedict, civil rights should be founded on human rights, which are prior and superior to civil rights.  Civil rights, just because they are legislated, do not by that fact alter human rights.  People are more and more talking about human rights as a common point of reference for all peoples.  They seem to be misusing or misunderstanding that human rights are grounded in what God has made.  Civil rights, legislated by man, do not alter what God has made.

Civil rights must properly reflect what God has written into the human person.

When the Holy Father spoke at the UN General Assembly, he said this.  Remember: he is primarily dealing with abortion and speaking in “UN-speak”.  You have to think about what is he is saying.  It pertains perfectly to the topic:

“Experience shows that legality often prevails over justice when the insistence upon rights makes them appear as the exclusive result of legislative enactments or normative decisions taken by the various agencies of those in power. When presented purely in terms of legality, rights risk becoming weak propositions divorced from the ethical and rational dimension which is their foundation and their goal.

And this, from Benedict’s Message for World Day of Peace 2007:

“Today, however, peace is not only threatened by the conflict between reductive visions of man, in other words, between ideologies. It is also threatened by indifference as to what constitutes man’s true nature. Many of our contemporaries actually deny the existence of a specific human nature and thus open the door to the most extravagant interpretations of what essentially constitutes a human being. Here too clarity is necessary: a ‘weak’ vision of the person, which would leave room for every conception, even the most bizarre, only apparently favours peace. [Get that Fishwrap?]

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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9 Comments

  1. Mundabor says:

    I truly, truly hope “Sr” doesn’t mean the lady is a religious sister…

    Then they complain about apostolic visitations…

    Mundabor

  2. Peggy R says:

    Hillary also explicitly said that religious beliefs are getting in the way of “gay rights” in many countries around the world. That sounds ominous.
    —-
    I’d like to see the idea of “discrimination” understood in a more reasonable fashion. The word has such a pejorative sentiment embodied in it. In economics, we speak of “undue discrimination.” We also have “price discrimination” which is permissable, until it becomes “undue.”

    That is, in economics we say that “like” customers (eg) or customers “similarly situated” should be treated alike, ie, offered similar terms, conditions and prices. Customers that are not alike or not similarly situated can reasonably be treated differently from others. We see this often with firms (often utilities) who have customers of different “classes” based on say size and other metrics. Regulatory and anti-trust laws reflect these economic ideas.

    In any case, we need to apply these ideas to the legal treatment of homosexual relationships. They cannot be treated under the law “like” heterosexual marriages, because they are not alike. They are not “similarly situated” for the various reasons we know. There is justification for different treatment, or “discrimination” as a result.

    But that freaks people out to say it is okay to discriminate. Yet, we need to grow up and realize that not all discrimination is bad or unreasonable. I should hope my kids exercise discrimination in choosing friends or spouses, for example.

  3. Tom in NY says:

    It’s important to remember that the fundamental political lesson of the Exodus is that Pharaoh doesn’t own his subjects. They take their dignity from a Higher Power.
    Salutationes omnibus.

  4. DisturbedMary says:

    Human rights? How can anyone pay homage to the human rights record of a woman who denies humans the right to be born including millions of LGBTs caught up in her human rights slaughter.

  5. James Joseph says:

    Are the underground Chinese bishops who greatly desire the free exercise of the Chair of Peter in selecting bishops called Ultra-Continests?

  6. pm125 says:

    – ad hoc EMBH’s with discrimination –

  7. snoozie says:

    MCMasotti…thanks for the link….IDENTICAL twins…….is this article not proof that there is no ‘gay gene’? QED.

  8. Brad says:

    My favorite Hillary story, I mean aside from being named after Sir Edmund, and aside from almost being shot down over her husband’s wag the dog war, is when she visited Mexico and asked the Bishop who painted the tilma. “God did, Mrs. Clinton”, he replied, not amused.

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