Today we, in the Catholic Church, celebrate the Queenship of Mary. I have been helping out a local pastor at his parish during my summer teaching in the US.
During the Octave of the Feast of the Assumption and today’s celebration, we have been reciting a Marian Litany at the Masses celebrated in this parish. During these recitations I have come to appreciate more the importance of Mary as a source of inspiration to Catholic intellectual thought. Two of the stanzas of the litany are “seat of wisdom” and “mirror of justice” (catchy name for a blog!). All of us, be we contributors or readers of MOJ, might pause for a few prayerful moments today to offer thanksgiving to her as a model of many virtues but, in particular, those of wisdom and justice.
Today is the tenth anniversary of the Welfare Reform Act, passed by a bipartisan majority in Congress and signed by President Clinton, while opposed by a large coalition, including the Catholic bishops, who claimed that it violated principles of social justice.
Ron Haskins offered these observations (the full piece can be found here):
The left, led by senior Democrats in Congress, the editorial pages of many of the nation’s leading newspapers, the Catholic bishops, child advocates in Washington and the professoriate, had assaulted the bill in terms that are rare, even by today’s coarse standards. Democrats speaking on the floor of the House labeled the bill “harsh,” “cruel” and “mean-spirited.” They claimed that it “attacked,” “punished” and “lashed out at” children. Columnist Bob Herbert said the bill conducted a “jihad” against the poor, made “war on kids” and “deliberately inflict[ed] harm” on children and the poor. Sen. Frank Lautenberg said poor children would be reduced to “begging for money, begging for food, and . . . engaging in prostitution.”
Many Democrats and pundits shouted that the bill would throw a million children into poverty. Marion Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund said that no one who believed in the Judeo-Christian tradition could support the bill. Even God, it seemed, opposed the evil Republican bill.
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In the decade that has passed since the 1996 reforms, the welfare rolls have plummeted by nearly 60%, the first sustained decline since the program was enacted in 1935. Equally important, the employment of single mothers heading families reached the highest level ever. As a group, mothers heading families with incomes of less than about $21,000 per year increased their earnings every year between 1994 and 2000 while simultaneously receiving less money from welfare payments. In inflation-adjusted dollars, they were about 25% better off in 2000 than in 1994, despite the fall in their welfare income.
Over the same period, the child-poverty level enjoyed its most sustained decline since the early 1970s; and both black-child poverty and poverty among female-headed families reached their lowest level ever. Even after four years of increases following the recession of 2001, the child poverty level is still 20% lower than it was before the decline began. Similarly, measures of consumption and hunger show that the material conditions of low-income, female-headed families have improved. Although welfare reform was not without problems, none of the disasters predicted by the left materialized. Indeed, national surveys show that almost every measure of child well-being—except obesity—has improved since the mid-1990s.
Robert Samuelson makes similar observations (his full piece can be seen here):
President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as “welfare reform,” on Aug. 22, 1996. A decade later, it stands as a rarity: a Washington success story. It did not succeed in the utopian sense of eliminating all poverty or family breakdown. It succeeded in a more practical way. It improved life modestly for millions of people and showed that government could orchestrate constructive change. There are small and large lessons in this. The small lessons involve poverty; the large lessons involve politics.
One little-known fact is that we have made gains against poverty in recent decades—and welfare reform deserves some credit. The poverty rate among blacks has fallen sharply, though it’s still discouragingly high. From 1968 to 1994, it barely budged, averaging 32.4 percent. By 2000 it was 22.5 percent. (The poverty rate is the share of people living below the government’s poverty line, about $19,500 for a family of four in 2004.) Similarly, there have been big drops in child poverty. Since 1989 the number of children in poverty has fallen 12 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 14 percent for blacks.
* * *
One lesson is that what people do for themselves often overshadows what government does for them. Since 1991, for example, the teen birthrate has dropped by a third. [Sisk: Note that this is not because teenage girls were forced into abortion with reductions in welfare, asabortion rates fell continuously during the same period.] The mothers least capable of supporting children have had fewer of them. Welfare reform didn't single-handedly cause this. But it reinforced a broader shift in the social climate -- one emphasizing personal responsibility over victimhood.
Of course, poverty endures. Some mothers are unemployable and are worse off without continuous welfare. Even those with low-paying jobs often depend heavily on other government benefits, mainly food stamps and Medicaid (health insurance). And one reason that poverty hasn’t decreased more is an unending inflow of poor immigrants. Unlike non-Hispanic whites and blacks, Hispanics are the only major ethnic or racial group with more children in poverty over the last 15 years. Since 1989 the increase is 58 percent.
So: we've made a stubborn problem a bit more manageable. It’s pragmatic progress, not a panacea. Why can’t we do the same for other pressing problems—energy, immigration, retirement spending (Social Security, Medicare)? Here, welfare reform’s political lessons apply.
Of possible interest to some MOJ readers, I'm scheduled as a guest Dr. Albert Mohler's radio show this afternoon, at 5:19 EST, "for approximately 10 minutes", to discuss my recent Business Week essay, "Confessions of a Genetic Outlaw." You can listen to the show live on-line. Dr. Mohler blogged about my essay today. Dr. Mohler is President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was labelled by Time.com as "the reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the U.S."
Northwestern law prof Anthony D'Amato's new paper, "Porn Up, Rape Down," offers a thesis that we discussed on MoJ earlier this summer. Here is the abstract:
The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.
He cites some statistics showing a strong correlation between internet access and a reduced incidence of rape, suggesting that perhaps "internet porn has thoroughly de-mystified sex."
This morning at his news conference, President Bush indicated his support for the over-the-counter sale of the Plan B morning-after pill. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops does not share this view. (HT: Amy Welborn) Perhaps the President is focused on his evangelical base?
Wilfred McClay takes issue with the suggestion that there is a "party of death" at work in America, rather than a party "in love with . . . a shortsighted and impoverished vision of life: the dream of complete and unconstrained personal mastery, of the indomitable human will exercised on the inert and malleable stuff of nature by the heroically autonomous and unconditioned individual who is ever the master of his fate and captain of his soul, and whose own existence is, or deserves to be, infinitely extensible." One obvious symptom of this mindset is, according to McClay, our reliance on rights talk, which "does not necessarily give rise to responsibility-talk. Sometimes it may have the opposite effect, in luring us into a false sense that we have fulfilled all righteousness merely by dutifully observing the rights of others."
Much less eloquently, I try to press a related point in this Christianity Todayarticle, appearing as part of the magazine's coverage of the controversy over pharmacists' claimed rights of conscience.
As we gear up for another semester of loving the law, I want to commend to the wider world three very helpful books that I read this summer. In the first, Who's Afraid of Post-Modernism?, James Smith, a philosophy prof at Calvin College, explains why Christians should not presume that postmodern thought is a threat to the faith. By way of (woefully) cursory summary, he argues that:
Derrida's insight that there is "nothing outside the text" should push us to "recover two key emphases of the church: (a) the centrality of Scripture for mediating our understanding of the world as a whole and (b) the role of community in the interpretation of Scripture."
Lyotard's assertion that postmodernity is "incredulity toward metanarratives" is "ultimately a claim to be affirmed by the church, pushing us to recover (a) the narrative character of Christian faith, rather than understanding it as a collection of ideas, and (b) the confessional nature of our narrative and the way in which we find ourselvesin a world of competing narratives."
Foucault's claim that "power is knowledge" should "push us to realize . . . (a) the cultural power of formation and discipline, and hence (b) the necessity of the church to enact counterformation by counterdisciplines. In other words, we need to think about discipline as a creational structure that needs proper direction. Foucault has something to tell us about what it means to be a disciple."
Smith, writing as an evangelical, concludes that postmodern theology will be "much more hospitable to both dogmatic theology and the institutional church," and that the postmodern church "must be radically incarnational," affirming the incarnation's scandalous "particularlity with respect to both space and time." This requires, in turn, "a healthy sense of being constituted by our traditions as we look forward to an eschatological hope in the future."
A fascinating read, due in part to the fact that the postmodern evangelical church, as prescribed by Smith, looks quite Catholic.
I found today's Angelus meditation by Pope Benedict XVI particularly timely, as I hurtle towards the beginning of a new semester. You can find the entire address at the ZENIT site (Reference ZE06082002).
Among the saints of the day, the calendar mentions today St. Bernard of Clairvaux, great doctor of the Church, who lived between the 11th and 12th centuries (1091-1153). His example and teachings appear particularly useful also in our time.
Having left the world after a period of intense interior turmoil, he was elected abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux at 25 years of age, remaining at its head for 38 years, until his death.
His dedication to silence and contemplation did not prevent him from carrying out an intense apostolic activity. He was also exemplary in his commitment to overcome his impetuous temperament, as well as in his humility in being able to acknowledge his limitations and faults.
. . .
It is necessary to pay attention to the dangers of excessive activity, regardless of one's condition and occupation, observes the saint, because -- as he said to the Pope of that time, and to all Popes and to all of us -- numerous occupations often lead to "hardness of heart," "they are no more than suffering for the spirit, loss of intelligence and dispersion of grace" (II, 3).
This admonition is valid for all kinds of occupations, including those inherent to the governance of the Church. The message that, in this connection, Bernard addresses to the Pontiff, who had been his disciple at Clairvaux, is provocative: "See where these accursed occupations can lead you, if you continue to lose yourself in them -- without leaving anything of yourself for yourself" (ibid).
How useful for us also is this call to the primacy of prayer! May St. Bernard, who was able to harmonize the monk's aspiration for solitude and the tranquility of the cloister with the urgency of important and complex missions in the service of the Church, help us to concretize it in our lives, in our circumstances and possibilities.
We entrust this difficult desire to find a balance between interiority and necessary work to the intercession of the Virgin, whom he loved from his childhood with tender and filial devotion, to the point of meriting the title of "Marian Doctor."
The indefatigable Howard Bashman links to a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, dealing with death-row volunteers and questions of their competence to volunteer for execution (or, more precisely, to end legal efforts to stop their legally authorized execution).
When I was in law practice, a client of mine volunteered for execution. That is, he wrote to the prosecutor and the court and expressed his desire to end all proceedings and be executed as soon as possible. He changed his mind, though, and his death sentence was eventually vacated.
I've been interested in the death-row-volunteer issue since reading "The Executioner's Song" in law school, and wrote this article a few years ago, exploring my concerns about the standard capital-defense practice of challenging the "competency" of death-row inmates who volunteer for -- or, give up resisting -- execution. The paper might be of interest to MOJ readers, in that it tries to bring moral-anthropology claims to the conversation about volunteers. Here is the abstract:
What should lawyers think about and respond to death-row volunteers? When a defendant accused of a capital crime attempts to plead guilty, or instructs his lawyer not to present a particular defense; when a convicted killer refuses to permit the introduction of potentially life-saving mitigating evidence - or even urges the jury to impose a death sentence - at the sentencing phase of a death-eligible case; when a condemned inmate refuses to file, or to appeal the denial of, habeas corpus and other post-conviction petitions for relief; when he elects not to object to a particular capital-punishment method, to call into question his own competence to be executed, or to file an eleventh-hour, last-ditch appeal citing newly discovered evidence of his innocence -what should lawyers do?
These are not questions of merely professional interest, narrowly conceived, for lawyers and judges. That said, the death-row volunteer is of particular interest to lawyers because he poses particularly pressing problems for lawyers. It is suggested in this paper that something is missing from our thinking and conversations about the death-row-volunteer problem: Our arguments - which sound primarily in the register of choice, competence, and autonomy - reflect and proceed from an unsound moral anthropology. That is, they proceed from a flawed account of what it is about the human person that does the work in moral arguments about what we ought or ought not to do and about how we ought or ought not to be treated. The unfortunate result is that the professed commitment to human dignity that drives and sustains so many capital-defense lawyers is often undermined by these same lawyers' responses to death-row volunteers.
Larry Solum has this announcement about Professor Kent Greenawalt's new and no-doubt-indispensable book, "Religion and the Constitution: Volume I: Free Exercise and Fairness." Here is a description:
Balancing respect for religious conviction and the values of liberal democracy is a daunting challenge for judges and lawmakers, particularly when religious groups seek exemption from laws that govern others. Should members of religious sects be able to use peyote in worship? Should pacifists be forced to take part in military service when there is a draft, and should this depend on whether they are religious? How can the law address the refusal of parents to provide medical care to their children--or the refusal of doctors to perform abortions? Religion and the Constitution presents a new framework for addressing these and other controversial questions that involve competing demands of fairness, liberty, and constitutional validity.
In the first of two major volumes on the intersection of constitutional and religious issues in the United States, Kent Greenawalt focuses on one of the Constitution's main clauses concerning religion: the Free Exercise Clause. Beginning with a brief account of the clause's origin and a short history of the Supreme Court's leading decisions about freedom of religion, he devotes a chapter to each of the main controversies encountered by judges and lawmakers. Sensitive to each case's context in judging whether special treatment of religious claims is justified, Greenawalt argues that the state's treatment of religion cannot be reduced to a single formula.
Calling throughout for religion to be taken more seriously as a force for meaning in people's lives, Religion and the Constitution aims to accommodate the maximum expression of religious conviction that is consistent with a commitment to fairness and the public welfare.
I look forward to reading this. At first glance, it strikes me that our view of the book's goal of "accommodat[ing] the maximum expression of religious conviction that is consistent with a commitment to fairness and the public welfare" will and should depend a lot on the content Professor Greenwalt gives to "fairness" and "public welfare."
