This striking graphic conveys, powerfully, what (or rather, who) has been lost since Roe v. Wade. (Be sure to scroll down to the end, and to click on the last blue dot.)
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
"Multitudes" lost
On this day in history . . .
Ed Whelan recalls:
For the second time in American history, the Supreme Court denies American citizens the authority to protect the basic rights of an entire class of human beings. In Roe v. Wade—the Dred Scott ruling of our age—Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion feigns not to “resolve the [purportedly] difficult question of when life begins,” but in fact rules illegitimate any legislative determination that unborn human beings are deserving of legal protection from abortion. Roe and Doe v. Bolton (decided the same day) impose on all Americans a radical regime of essentially unrestricted abortion throughout pregnancy, all the way (under the predominant reading of Doe) until birth.
Despite scathing criticism, including from supporters of abortion (see point 2 here), Roe’s lawless power grab continues to roil American politics by preventing Americans from working together, through an ongoing process of persuasion, to establish and revise abortion policies.
Promoting the Sanctity of Life and the Legacy of Dr. King
As we remember the life and prophetic witness for racial equality of Dr. Martin Luther King, and as we listen to the recent arguments in the presidential campaign about the role of Dr. King, it may be serendipitous that the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade comes only a day later.
Alveda King, the niece of Dr. King and a former member of the Georgia Legislature, is now a leading pro-life advocate. As she put in a talk to student at Valparaiso law school last September (more on her presentation here):
If her uncle were alive, he could not condone abortion, King said."He absolutely couldn't," she said. "How can the dream survive if we murder the children?"
Greg Sisk
Monday, January 21, 2008
Professor George on the Roe anniversary
Here:
The legal problem with Roe v. Wade is simple: The Supreme Court's decision to invalidate state laws prohibiting or restricting abortion lacks any basis in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution of the United States. The late John Hart Ely, a famous legal scholar who himself supported legal abortion as a matter of public policy, said that Roe v. Wade "is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be." The justices who manufactured a right to abortion in Roe violated and dishonored the very Constitution they purported to interpret by substituting their own moral and political judgments for those of the elected representatives of the people. Their ruling was a gross usurpation by the judiciary of the authority vested by the Constitution in the people themselves, acting through the constitutionally prescribed institutions of republican democracy. As dissenting Justice Byron White put it, Roe was nothing more than an exercise of "raw judicial power." It was not merely an incorrect decision, but an anti-constitutional one.
Pope Benedict's planned speech at La Sapienza University
Pope Benedict was scheduled to deliver a speech at La Sapienza University in Rome at the beginning of the academic year. In the face of a planned protest, the Vatican cancelled the speech because of a lack of the "prerequisites for a dignified and tranquil welcome." The speech the Pope had planned to deliver has been released. Here is a link. The speech, a follow-up to the Pope's Regensburg address, is quite interesting. In the course of the speech, Benedict discusses Rawls and Habermas.
The speech is marked by Benedict's characteristic humility. His main emphasis is on the importance of the university in the pursuit of truth. He mentions the danger that reason --"if it wants only to construct itself on the basis of the circle of its own arguments and that which convinces it at the moment--worried about its secularity--...will cut itself off from the roots by which it lives; then it will not become more reasonable and more pure, but it will break apart and disintegrate."
He closes with a mention of how he sees his role as Pope--"to continaully invite reason to seek out the true, the good, God, and on this path, to urge it to glimpse the helpful lights that shine forth in the history of the Christian faith, and in this way to perceive Jesus Christ as the Light that illuminates history and helps us to find the way to the future." It's a pity that Benedict was not welcomed to deliver this message in person.
Richard M.
UNJUST WAR
Sightings 1/21/08
Unjust War
-- Martin E. Marty
A Stupid, Unjust, and Criminal War: Iraq 2001-2007 by priest, sociologist, novelist, and columnist Andrew Greeley is a collection of 121 columns dating back to 2001, in their original form. As the title suggests, the columns are not long on nuance. They have going for them guts, consistency, a readiness to use the language of the prophets and the Church, prescience, and not a little hold on truth in reporting. Columnists who once supported the war and others who were critical all along can profitably compare notes with Greeley .
The Chicago priest, who has a passion for Catholicism, is dispassionate enough to have a lover's quarrel with the Church, and is impassioned about bringing church teaching on wisdom (as opposed to "stupidity"), just war theory (as opposed to "unjustness"), and law-abidingness (as opposed to "criminality") to bear on events of this long, long war. He celebrates what the popes of these years, Vatican spokespersons, and many bishops have had to say for peace and against capital punishment, nuclear armament, war-making in general, and this war in particular. At the same time he mourns that so little of what they said reached the Catholic faithful. And he is scornful of most religious leaders who were cowed into silence for fear of sounding unpatriotic when they might have been helpfully vocal in criticism of governmental and military policy. In a world where many were snookered into blandness or silence, he remains unsnookered.
The Martys compare opinions as we read four daily papers. We come to most agreement on wartime issues when we read Greeley 's syndicated columns in the Chicago Sun-Times. From before the first gun was fired, he stopped just short of charging that we were being led into the war by leaders who, too often, wanted war but didn't count the cost. Now uncontroversial are his once contentious early comments on how unprepared the U.S. administration and military were before they invaded Iraq. Greeley is no pacifist, and recognizes, for example, the "necessity" of World War II and the valor of those who supported the Allied cause. He is not naïve about the scope of the threat of militant Muslims and terrorists, but was suspicious of those Americans who immediately after 9/11 labeled all forms of action and reaction a "War" on terror.
I do not picture that most readers
of Sightings will read this book, either because they do not welcome
priestly comment and criticism or because they have been reading the columns all
along, usually affirming them, and don't need a repeat. Nor can I
quote enough from these pages to document how true to conditions and prospects
Greeley has been. Instead I
want to pass on something that crossed my mind while reading him, as
follows: Pastors, priests, professors, nuns, teachers,
editorialists, and other leaders were consistently told back during the Vietnam
War that they lacked expertise to analyze what only some military and
governmental leaders, setting out to monopolize comment, knew enough about.
We hear the same now on issues dealing with the environment, the
global economy, and more. It becomes clear once again that
biblically informed, theologically inspired criticism and proposals can come
from highly fallible people who, like everyone else, do not "know enough," but
who do "know enough" from another angle, to make their own contributions to
conversations that remain urgent. Folks like Greeley have the satisfaction of seeing
that their prophecies have been confirmed, but take small comfort in that.
----------
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Interesting Subject Matter
| The Catholic Scare: How Anti-Catholic Prejudice Shaped Brown v. Board |
|
GLENNA GOLDIS New York University School of Law January 11, 2008 |
Abstract:
This essay examines supreme court justice Hugo
L. Black and his times, focusing on the evolving relationship between the
Catholic Church and the legal elite. Part II introduces the compulsory public
school movement of the 1920s. Part III describes Black's career prior to the
Supreme Court, including his membership in the Ku Klux Klan. Contrary to what
Black would later claim, politics did not require him to join the Ku Klux Klan.
Part IV introduces the Roosevelt Court of the 1940s and the race and religion
politics of that era. This section also analyzes Black's majority opinion in
Everson, arguing that he voted with the pro-Catholic side in order to bait the
dissenters into agreeing with anti-Catholic logic. Part V recounts education
debates of the 1950s and shows that progressive elites routinely slurred
parochial schooling as segregation. They professed the ideal of one school
system for all children¿black and white, Protestant and Catholic. A textual
analysis of three related school desegregation cases shows that Black tried to
use them to advance the reincarnated compulsory public education movement. Part
VI concludes that Black had a tremendous impact on law and none on society.
Suggested Citation
Goldis, Glenna, "The Catholic Scare: How Anti-Catholic Prejudice
Shaped Brown v. Board" (January 11, 2008). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1084764
He Had a Dream
Today is the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, who preached that "we must all learn to live together as brothers or we shall perish together as fools." If you get a chance sometime during the day, listen to his I Have a Dream speech or the I have Been to the Mountaintop speech that he gave the day before his assassination.
Living the Campus Life to the Fullest
The December issue of Traces also has an excellent interview with MOJ alum and Notre Dame law professor Paolo Carozza. The December issue is not yet available on line, so I will give you just one snippet:
Carozza: "To work here [Notre Dame] means to have the freedom to live a more intensely whole life: to ask questions in my research that are not artificially constrained by the conventions of a completely secularized academy; to relate to and discuss with students in class and outside of it in ways that embrace all the experience of life; to be part of a community where the prayer and longing of our Liturgy and the prayer and longing of our studies are united."
What's Left of 1968
In an article entitled “What’s Left of 1968” in the December 2007 issue of Traces, Lorenzo Albacete writes:
“… Two happenings not on the typical list of 1968 events quietly revealed what was to come in the following years up to today and showed this year to be indeed the beginning of an ideological contest.
The first was the publication of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, restating the Church’s traditional condemnation of artificial birth control. In the atmosphere of progress that most Americans associated with change, the novelty introduced by the Second Vatican Council had convinced most American Catholics that the Church would accept the use of the contraceptive ‘pill’ being used by more and more American women as an instrument of liberation from a dependence on their bodies not suffered by men. When the encyclical was published, the unity of the Church began to fall to pieces. … Although many dissenters from the Church’s teaching tried to convince others and themselves that this was an issue that dialogue could resolve, it became clear that what was at stake was much more than birth control. Indeed, the struggle was about different ways of understanding freedom and the view of man which these different forms of considering freedom depended. In this 1968 controversy, the true nature of what was happening [with the whole panoply of events that year] began to show its face.
The second event was the release of Stanley Kubric’s movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although seen by many as a science-fiction film, it was really a stunning and majestic presentation of the story of human evolution from a purely secular, scientific, and technological expression, with progress understood precisely as the liberation of man from dependence on his body and the ultimate triumph of the mind.”
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