Funny You Should Mention That! (i.e. the SGP)

It was interesting to see Rick's last post because the SGP has been on my mind again. As the person who kicked off the "thought experiment" on that idea, I guess I should report on its strange persistence outside the four corners of MOJ. Soon after our blog discussion I started to get random emails from folks wanting to sign up, to which I had the same embarassed response as Rob and any other academic stunned at actually being taken seriously. More important. the SGP (or something like it) was a topic of conversation at the 9th Annual Cardinal Bernardin Conference of the Common Ground Initiative this past weekend in DC (the Holiday Inn in Arlington, actually) on the topic of "Religion, Law and Politics." I was joined at this conference by co-blogistas Greg Kalscheur, Amy Uelmen and Vince Rougeau, and by Catholic law profs Cathy Kaveny and Robert Rodes of the Golden Dome, David Gregory of St John's, Dean John Garvey of BC and the great Judge John Noonan. Also present were the Three Wise Men of CST, David Hollenbach, Brian Hehir and David Langan, as well as a bunch of other smart folks. Unfortunately missing from this attempt to find "common ground" between left and right were most representatives of the right. Among the few who was there was my new colleague Jeanne Heffernan, a Villanova political philosopher with an affiliate appointment in our law school whom I would describe as somewhat right of center (but still eminently reasonable.) That left the conversation a little one-sided and non-passionate, but it was still very interesting, and I learned a lot.

            We spent most of our time agonizing about the issues that fell out of the last election, with which most of our blog group and our readers are already painfully aware, and we focused on the problems as ones of both discipleship and citizenship. The conversation turned, however, to the question of why the notion of the consistent ethic of life has not had the kind of cultural and political resonance that the culture of death/culture of life dichotomy has had. Without that kind of resonance, of course, the SGP may be an interesting thought experiment, but as the foundation for a mass democratic movement it is DOA.

               One answer, of course, has been that of realpolitik. As David Carr of the USCCB pointed out at our conference, after Cardinal Bernardin gave his SG speech, his friends in the peace movement complained that the linkage with abortion would kill the church's influence with the lefties in the peace movement. His friends in the prolife movement pleaded with him not to link abortion with all that peacenik stuff and opposition to capital punishment! In short, the cultural/political forces that were really important and influential could not stomach the linkage of values in the CE of L. So it is no mystery that the concept has not had cultural/political force.

              Another answer, of course, and one frequently heard from the right, is that the CE of L is philosophically and theologically incoherent because abortion involves a fundamental evil, a primordial affront to life, while the other values all involve prudential decisions about which people can disagree reasonably, i.e. the non-equivalence argument. We spent some time talking about this (tho not enough). I think part of the response is that there are at least some prudential issues to be considered by both citizens and lawmakers as to how the moral evil of abortion is to be handled as a matter of law in a pluralistic democracy, and that the questions of just war, capital punishment, amelioration of poverty involve the principle of life in such a way that not all disagreements can be dismissed as reasonable prudential disagreements. So there is more equivalence than is assumed by critics on the right. Furthermore, the argument that all of these issues are not "equivalent" in importance, even if true, does not mean that they are not linked by the principle of life in a way that requires a consistent approach to them all.

              I think the real answer, however, is that the culture of death/culture of life dichotomy, which is encapsulated in the incandescent abortion  and now same-sex marriage issues, addresses a profound complex of fears about human sexuality, the status of women, the future of the family, and social disorder and collapse that is widespread. It is a characteristically American response to another profoundly American cultural phenomenon: radical value skepticism, moral relativism and an insistence on the individual's radical autonomy. Of course, those of us who value the CE of L are equally concerned about those things, which lead us to similar opposition to abortion on demand, the fetishism of choice, exploitative, trivialized sexuality and so on. But it also leads us to concerns about race, poverty, war etc. that the first group I described not only may not share, but actually may find threatening. In other words, we link on abortion, but not much else, and they have the political juice. We don't. Why? Someone else needs to tell that long story.

                   Part of the problem with turning to Catholic imagery, the institutional Church, or to Catholics for leadership and influence is that we are ourselves divided between the Culture of Death crowd and the Consistent Ethic of Life crowd. I am sure that the responses to this post will show how real that division is, even if the post argues that there should be no such division.  If we can't get our act together, how can we lead? But I learned this weekend that there may be hope: apparently a "Democrats for Life," has formed, and a group of students in Boston has apparently started an email buzz organizing like-minded folks. Not that any of this actually constitutes a mass democratic movement, but it is interesting. But assuming that there is some force behind the CE of L as an organizing principle -- or what our friends at St Tommy are calling "Pro-life Progressivism"-- what should the goal(s) be? I'll be talking about that Friday in MN, but will try to blog some ideas before I do,

--Mark