Founding Fathers

Originally posted at Talk to Action.

One of the things I have stressed in my series on the Catholic Right is that we have got to understand natural law in order to understand the Catholic Right and increasingly allied conservative Evangelicals.  That being the case, I think any reasonable understanding of the wider Religious Right is incomplete without it.

The Summer 2008 issue of The Public Eye magazine has just published what I hope provides a useful primer: "How Roman Catholic Neocons Peddle Natural Law into Debates about Life and Death".

Here is an excerpt:

 With the birthday's of Washington and Lincoln and the coming of President's Day, I wrote this post:

Right now I'm reading Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States and it's a wonderful book of the contributions and struggles that women, African Americans, Native Americans, workers' groups and various other marginalized people have made to build up America.  It's a history that needs to be told, as these stories talk of the struggles of marginalized people to be included in America's democratic experiment, and Zinn sees a struggle based on an oppressive economic system.  One of the few things where I disagree with Zinn is in his take on the Founding Fathers and their relationship with slavery.  Slavery was a subject that the Founding Fathers struggled with mightily, and their inability to resolve the issue was something that they themselves realized was one of their greatest failures. 

The neo-orthodox Catholic Right often define liberty as "what one ought to do." But this narrow definition raises a very troubling question for those of us who value the separation of church and state: By whose standards are we to decide what "one ought to do?"

Catholic Rightists Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel are trying to tell the world it should be an orthodox Catholic standard.  Of course, they could never get away with that religious supremacist claim outright. So, like their Protestant co-belligerents of the religious right, they say that's what the Founders wanted.