I was trying in my last couple of posts to clarify a distinction. But I honestly think now that Zippy has seriously impaired his own power of reason on the subject to the point it is not even worth discussing these matters with him. It's like talking to a liberal. I'd already seen the false victimhood tactic used on me on his blog, but now he's gotten worse to the point of utterly separating himself from any kind of real metaphysical basis on which moral theology is formed.
He's now equated contraception with hatred of children, invented a specious distinction between act and omission to perpetuate his irrational reading of Veritatis Splendor, suggested in analogy to stolen property that a past vasectomy permanently renders someone's reproductive system intentionally contracepted even if the person really changes his mind, and endorsed extremism in opposition to abortion to the point of directly contradicting the Holy See's prudential guidance on capital punishment ("every outlaw abortionist swinging from a gibbet"). He's a wacked out liberal in the guise of a conservative, just like the rad-trads, except he doesn't even have the defense of at least appearing consistent with what was done before. There's no touchstone to reality in any of this; he's just asserting his own positive interpretation as normative without subjecting it to any methodological scrutiny. Like other liberal positivists, he's in the "grip of a theory" with which there is no reasoning.
I don't know what's going on with this guy, but we shouldn't tolerate this sort of wild and unmoored speculation just because he happens to agree with us on the conclusions sometimes, any more than we tolerate any other brand of liberal positivism with regard to Catholic dogma. As I will argue in my development of doctrine post, there is room for healthy speculation, but this is an example of what it isn't.
