SAVE THE DATE!
On September 21, 2007,
The Law Journal of the University of St. Thomas School of Law
hopes you will attend its fall symposium entitled:
"Peace with Creation: Catholic Perspectives on Environmental Law"
Our contributors include:
Keynote Speaker: Archbishop Harry Flynn, Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis
Panel on Stewardship:
· William C. French, Loyola University of Chicago
· Keith Douglas Warner OFM, San Juan Bautista, CA
· John Nagle, Notre Dame School of Law
Panel on the Preferential Option for the Poor:
· Lucia Ann Silecchia, Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law
· Dr. John Hart, Boston University
· Andrew Morriss, University of Illinois College of Law
Panel on Subsidiarity:
· Greg Beabout, St. Louis University Dept. of Philosophy
· Others TBA
The symposium will be at the University of St. Thomas Law School in Minneapolis, MN.
CLE credits are being applied for. Detailed registration information will follow.
When even CNN notes that we are now living in a "porn-driven culture," we have a serious problem. It's not a healthy situation for boys, to be sure, but as the father of three daughters, my focus tends to be on the girls:
"Instead of pornography or performative sexuality being one choice among many ways of being sexual, it's essentially become the standard of sexiness," says Simon [a high school counselor and therapist]. "It's also the standard by which a man or woman is a prude, depending on how much they embrace that kind of sexuality." . . .
While boys tend to seek out porn for their own sexual pleasure, Simon sees a sexual disconnect with girls who exhibit provocative behavior they're not ready for -- from undressing online to performing oral sex on boys. "It doesn't have anything to do with their sexual pleasure," says Simon. "It has to do with pleasing somebody else -- the grasping for attention. As a parent, it makes me want to cry."
According to The Hill, it is possible that the Democrats in the Congress will attempt "to alter or repeal several longstanding policy measures restricting federal funding of abortion when the panel marks up legislation over the next two weeks." (These "measures" include, for example, the Hyde Amendment.) The piece also reports, though, that President Bush has informed Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Reid that he would veto any such attempts, and that his veto would be sustained. Stay tuned . . .
Click here for the latest, at Vox Nova, in a series of posts on the question whether Catholics should "follow the utopian vision of modern democratices" (today's entry is on the thought of Joseph de Maistre). And, here is an interesting post on "the individual and the person." Good stuff.
I recommend Lew Daly's article, In Search of the Common Good: The Catholic Roots of American Liberalism, from the current Boston Review. Writing for a largely secular, progressive audience, Daly tries to bring some coherence to the increasingly popular "common good" by focusing on John Ryan and the role of CST in the New Deal. Daly concludes that:
Catholic social teaching had revolutionized the moral landscape of capitalism, not only by reinforcing the progressive critique of laissez-faire constitutionalism but, more importantly, by stealing the thunder of higher-law reasoning and restoring its communal roots. It was a turning point that made the welfare state morally necessary and, because of that, politically possible.
As for what happened to the "common good" after the New Deal, Daly writes:
Sexual freedom, extreme secularism, and other agendas of the new social liberalism did not merely replace the common good as a normative framework. It shifted the whole framework of rights from the worker and his family and community, viewed as something in need of protection, to the detached individual of liberal philosophy, regardless of economic position or need. Essentially, the common good was supplanted by individual liberation, and what remained of it in public discourse was little more than empty rhetoric (think “compassionate conservatism”).
New Deal liberalism’s common-good ideal gave workers and their families a new (yet very old) moral ground for claiming resources and power necessary for their self-preservation. . . . The individualistic social liberalism that came to dominate decades later clearly weakened, and in some ways fundamentally attacked, the familial and communal understanding of rights that shaped New Deal social policy. The protection of the family and the home from economic tyranny was no longer a certain or even desirable policy objective in an era of individual liberation marshaled against the traditional culture of family and community. Not coincidentally, as the common good disappeared from the discourse of rights in the 1960s, big business re-established its dominance in American politics, and families and communities received no new protection from the government even as older protections came under attack. The family living wage paid by a substantial majority of U.S. businesses literally vanished from the country by the late 1970s.
Daly concludes that the religious dimension of the common good was crucial to its vitality, and that "reviving a secular version of the common good" will not "guide us from chaos to community."
The EEOC just published guidelines on when discrimination against caregivers might constitute unlawful disparate treatment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Americans with Disabilities Act. The preamble stresses that, while no federal law prohibits discrimination against caregivers per se, there are circumstances in which particular employment decisions affecting a caregiver might constitute unlawful discrimination on the basis of some prohibited characteristic, such as gender, pregnancy, race, or association with a person with a disability.
The examples are fascinating, covering a broad range of caregivers -- mothers, fathers, people caring for elderly parents and disabled spouses. The EEOC cites many of the strong recent works of scholarship on the effect of caregiving on employment, including Joan C. Williams & Nancy Segal, Beyond the Maternal Wall: Relief for Family Caregivers who are Discriminated Against on the Job, 26 Harv.Women's L.J. 77 (2003), Mary Still, Litigating the Maternal Wall: U.S. Lawsuits Charging Discrimination Against Workers with Family Responsibilities (2005) and Joan Williams, One Sick Child Away from Being Fired: When "Opting Out" is Not an Option, (2006)
