But Catholics are big on the whole hierarchy thing. ~Jonah Goldberg

It’s a right-wing shibboleth that Jesus’ phrase “judge not lest ye be judged” should be ignored, because after all it’s only an excuse people use for not doing what we (the good people, the religious in-group) know to be the right thing. ~Mike Potemra

Yes, as you can see, just as Sullivan and Sager have told us, Christianity has deeply pervaded the upper echelons of the conservative movement and suffused conservative pundits’ every thought.  What insight!  What profundity!  Ahem. 

In fairness, Goldberg was more or less defending the role of Catholic teaching authority against the burblings of Hannity, who has apparently decided that some elements of Humanae Vitae are less important to him than others and feels compelled to say as much publicly.  As Hannity sees it (see here for video), this is okay because he went to seminary and studied Latin and theology (in fact, these are excellent reasons why his public views should be scrutinised even more closely and held to an even higher standard, since he theoretically ought to know better than the average layman why he should not publicly contradict church authority).  In his fairly disrespectful exchange with one Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, Hannity manages to distinguish himself as being even more loathsome than we already thought he was.  Watch as he actually equates contraception with natural birth regulation.  For his next trick, he will equate aggressive war with self-defense.  Oh, wait, he’s already done that one. 

Perhaps the most appalling thing, besides flinging scandal in the face of a priest as a means to diminish church authority (Donatist, thy name is Hannity), is the way in which Hannity rationalises his support for contraception as being the lesser of two evils, which suggests that his lessons in moral theology at whichever seminary he allegedly attended did not take.  It is “better” to use contraception rather than have an abortion only in a purely utilitarian sort of analysis, which at once degrades the people involved and embraces an act contrary to nature by accepting that the only alternative to this is another evil.  At once, Hannity affirms his contempt for created nature, his lack of discernment and his effective denial of the realistic possibility of the cultivation of continence among non-Catholics, which seems to this non-Catholic to contradict the very idea of ius gentium. 

Mr. Potemra’s comment was also a strange one worth noting, since I don’t assume that it is a “right-wing shibboleth” that we ignore Dominical commands.  If there were such a shibboleth, it would need to be destroyed right now.  It also has nothing to do with whether “we” are “the good people” and it is not, in fact, what “we” know that matters, but rather it concerns what the authoritative interpretation of Scripture shows us to be the truth, which we Christians are in turn called to declare to the world.  When conservatives object to the flippant invocation of this verse, they are objecting to people using it precisely the way in which Hannity was using it: as a shield against doctrinal and moral correction.  It is remarkable that a verse that implies that God alone is Judge–which is in its way a terrifying and humbling thing to understand–can be taken as a kind of “get out of jail free” card for sinners, when its plain meaning is entirely the opposite.  If God alone is Judge, and if He has called us to be perfect and if He has given us the Way to perfection, this makes lapses and errors even more serious than they would be otherwise.  Fortunately, God is all-merciful at the same time, but then that mercy is found in exhortation, reproach, command and chastisement.  So, too, are those entrusted with the care of God’s people called to love them just as God loves them. 

When the verse is coupled to exhortations to not be “judgemental” (which is code for accepting anything and everything), it is the people who hide behind that verse to defend their errors and lapses who abuse or ignore the actual content of the verse.  The verse’s meaning is at least twofold: it drives home the point that God is Judge, and it is not your place to judge the state of another man’s soul or his righteousness (or lack thereof), while also inculcating a sense of humility that every man should be concerned first with putting out the fire in his own house before he begins quibbling over his neighbour’s broken windows.  Distinct from all of this on the one hand is indifference to sin and error, which most of the people who invoke this verse defensively possess, and moral discernment, which is something to which all are called to practice.  Offering a brother reproof in a spirit of charity or challenging a member of your confession who openly contradicts the Faith in public is not only entirely different from passing judgement on him, but the latter in particular is aimed both at the correction and lifting up of the fellow Christian who has fallen into the ditch and at the instruction of the rest of the flock who may be tempted by the bad example set by the one who has fallen into an error.