Named: 15 U.S. Catholic colleges that featured anti-life/family commencement speakers

[_Abyssinia]

Fifteen U.S. Catholic colleges invited abortion or gay ‘marriage’ supporters to give addresses to graduates this year, according to the Cardinal Newman Society (CNS).

CNS, a watchdog group seeking to ensure Catholic colleges live up to their Catholic identity, issued its annual report on commencement speakers and honorees Friday.

They argue that the invitations of the speakers contravene the 2004 instruction issued by the U.S. Catholic Bishops called ‘Catholics in Political Life,’ which forbade Catholic institutions from granting honors and platforms that might suggest support for opponents of Catholic teaching.

“Catholic colleges have a choice of speakers and honorees,” said CNS. “And when they make a choice — especially when selecting someone to serve as a role model for graduation — the choice should be for speakers and honorees who best exemplify the standards of a Catholic college education.”

lifesitenews.com/news/named-15-us-catholic-colleges-that-featured-anti-life-family-commencement

 

[Rich_Olszewski]

Fifteen U.S. Catholic colleges invited abortion or gay ‘marriage’ supporters to give addresses to graduates this year, according to the Cardinal Newman Society (CNS).

CNS, a watchdog group seeking to ensure Catholic colleges live up to their Catholic identity, issued its annual report on commencement speakers and honorees Friday.

They argue that the invitations of the speakers contravene the 2004 instruction issued by the U.S. Catholic Bishops called ‘Catholics in Political Life,’ which forbade Catholic institutions from granting honors and platforms that might suggest support for opponents of Catholic teaching.

“Catholic colleges have a choice of speakers and honorees,” said CNS. “And when they make a choice — especially when selecting someone to serve as a role model for graduation — the choice should be for speakers and honorees who best exemplify the standards of a Catholic college education.”

lifesitenews.com/news/named-15-us-catholic-colleges-that-featured-anti-life-family-commencement

The speakers, not just the colleges, should have been named. Otherwise, how are we to evaluate the article?

 

[Kit15]

It kinda amuses me to see a college I recognize and yet I’m being bombarded with internet ads attacking their chosen speaker for being “anti-choice” and a homophobe. Guess he’s not anti-life or anti-family enough.

The speakers, not just the colleges, should have been named. Otherwise, how are we to evaluate the article?

That and what were the guidelines used to determine if one was “anti-life” and “anti-family”? Just being against partial-birth abortion **alone **is enough to be “anti-choice” in some watchdog’s books.

 

[JimG]

It appears that the speakers were named, in the annual report link given in Abyssinia’s post.

 

[sedonaman]

Liberals are so obsessed with radical egalitarianism that everything must be made equal, and so they deny the existence of the better and of the worse. Distorting Truth becomes necessary for reality to conform to their ideology.

First, the source of this is their belief that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative – that the only way to be moral is by not discriminating between ANYTHING, even right and wrong, good and evil, better and worse, truth and lies, because your act of discrimination might just be a reflection of your personal bigotries.

Indiscriminateness, therefore, is a moral imperative because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated.

Second, indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy. It leads the modern liberal’s invariably siding with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Very simply, if nothing is to be recognized as better or worse than anything else, then success and truth are unjust. If nothing is better than anything else, then there is no explanation for success other than success committing the injustice of having cheated, and the greater the success the greater the injustice. Conversely, and for the same reason, failure is proof of victimization of the injustice, and the greater the failure, the greater the proof of victimization. Truth excludes lies, right excludes wrong, good excludes evil, therefore lies, wrong, and evil must be blessed with victim status and must be made equal to truth, right, and good in order to be included. – “Hating What is Right” by E. Sayet

Catholic academia has bought into this absurd line of thinking hook, line, and sinker because they don’t want to appear unenlightened vis-à-vis secular institutions who have made these their causes célèbre. And that is why pro-abortion speakers are invited to Catholic academic graduations.

 

[Beau_Ouiville]

I think ‘anti-family’ is in the eye of the beholder. There are much more important issues for Catholic colleges, like their educational standing. Some folks demand orthodoxy, however.

 

[Ranp]

I think ‘anti-family’ is in the eye of the beholder. There are much more important issues for Catholic colleges, like their educational standing. Some folks demand orthodoxy, however.

Good Catholic educational standing can be nothing less than orthodoxy!

 

[sedonaman]

I think ‘anti-family’ is in the eye of the beholder. There are much more important issues for Catholic colleges, like their educational standing. …

Hmmm. Educational standing of an institution is more important than the basic unit of society?

 

[_Abyssinia]

Good Catholic educational standing can be nothing less than orthodoxy!

Well said.

 

[sedonaman]

… Some folks demand orthodoxy, however.

Is an idea wrong because it has been generally accepted? Is it right because it is novel and chic?

The standard Enlightenment narrative has had a powerful influence on the way modern people understand the relationship between authority, tradition, and common sense on the one hand, and science and rationality on the other. We tend reflexively to assume that the popular or received wisdom, especially if associated with some “official” source or long-standing institution, is always ripe for challenge, and also that if some independent thinker or writer takes an unconventional position, however extreme or counter-intuitive, then there simply must be something right in it, or at least worth listening to. “Innovator” and “iconoclast” are among our favorite terms of approbation, and “questioning authority” and “thinking outside the box” are applauded even by many self-described conservatives. By contrast, “unoriginal” and “conventional” are treated as if they were synonyms for “unintelligent” and “unthinking.”

The picture of science that has gone along with this tends, accordingly, to portray it as in the business of overthrowing long-standing opinions and common sense in general. We used to think the earth was at the center of the solar system, but Copernicus showed that the sun is; Einstein revealed that whether two events are simultaneous is, contrary to common sense, relative to who is observing them; and so forth. The history of science, as popularly understood, is thus a story of daring individuals constantly challenging current orthodoxies and authorities, and constantly being proved right.

Now as the philosopher David Stove has argued, the modern tendency toward hyper-skepticism seems largely to be the result of a massive over-generalization from a mere handful of cases where common sense turned out to be mistaken. Another philosopher, Michael Levin, has given it a name: the “skim milk” fallacy, the fallacy of assuming, in the words of Gilbert and Sullivan, that “things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream,” so that common sense can in general be presumed to be mistaken. To be sure, where phenomena remote from everyday human experience are concerned – the large-scale structure of space/time, the microscopic realm of molecules, atoms, and so forth – it is perhaps not surprising that human beings should for long periods of time have gotten things wrong. But where everyday matters are concerned – where opinions touch on our basic understanding of human nature and the facts about ordinary social interaction – it is very likely that they would not, in general, get things wrong. Biological and cultural evolution would ensure that serious mistakes concerning such matters would before too long be weeded out. The detailed reasons for this are complex, but when spelled out they provide the basis for a general defense of tradition and common sense of the sort associated with thinkers like Burke and Hayek.

– “We the Sheeple? Why Conspiracy Theories Persist” by Edward Feser, tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092006B

One would think this would be common sense, but no. A single generation arises and thinks it knows more than all the collective knowledge of the ones before it down through thousands of years.