Posted by Jay Livingston
Poor Rev. Conroy. It was the sociology that got him fired.
Since 2011 and up until two weeks ago, he had been the chaplain for the House of Representatives. Then House speaker Paul Ryan fired him.
By most accounts, what triggered Ryan was the prayer Rev. Conroy offered during deliberations on the tax bill.
| As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all Members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great Nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans. |
Ryan believes in God. He does not believe in social structure, though in some ways they are similar. They are both very hard to see, visible mostly in their effects, so that non-believers can remain unaware of how they alter and influence the paths we take.
Institutions and structures are at the core of sociological thinking and research. If the gap between rich and poor is much greater in the US than in other wealthy countries, there must be something going on beyond mere individual choices. But Conservatives like Ryan don’t buy that idea. For them, whether a person succeeds or struggles is purely a matter of individual virtue. As Margaret Thatcher famously put it, “There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
The tax bill that Ryan was trying to pass would increase the wealth of the wealthy. Or as Donald Trump told his rich friends at Mar-a-Lago when the bill passed, “You all just got a lot richer.” Ryan also planned to use the inevitable deficits from the tax cuts to justify reductions in government aid to the poor and elderly.
It’s pretty obvious that the tax code and food stamps change the structure of economic distribution. But when Rev. Conroy spoke of structures and then went on to suggest that maybe the government should not further comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted, well, it got Ryan’s Irish up, and he gave the Jesuit the boot. Those fifty words of Rev. Conroy – the micro-est of microaggressions against conservatives – were apparently too much for Snowflake Ryan to bear.
I wonder if leftists have gotten anyone fired – from a university or anywhere else – for a ten-second sermon preaching the Thatcher gospel of purely individual causation.
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