Mirror of Justice

Friday, January 18, 2008

Fred Thompson, Christian

[From The Opinionator, New York Times online:]

January 18, 2008, 10:00 am

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s: Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, in his Washington Post column, says that Fred Thompson lacks “moral seriousness” for his dismissal of President Bush’s global AIDS initiative. Gerson writes:

At a campaign stop attended by a CBS reporter in Lady’s Island, S.C., Thompson was asked if he, “as a Christian, as a conservative,” supported President Bush’s global AIDS initiative. “Christ didn’t tell us to go to the government and pass a bill to get some of these social problems dealt with. He told us to do it,” Thompson responded. “The government has its role, but we need to keep firmly in mind the role of the government, and the role of us as individuals and as Christians on the other.”

Thompson went on: “I’m not going to go around the state and the country with regards to a serious problem and say that I’m going to prioritize that. With people dying of cancer, and heart disease, and children dying of leukemia still, I got to tell you — we’ve got a lot of problems here … ”

“While he is not an isolationist, he clearly is playing to isolationist sentiments,” Gerson writes of Thompson. “His objection, it seems, is not to government spending on public health but to spending on foreigners.” Gerson also writes:

In this case, Thompson is limiting government to a half-full thimble. Its duties apparently do not extend to the treatment of sick people in extreme poverty, which should be “the role of us as individuals and as Christians.” One wonders, in his view, if responding to the 2004 tsunami should also have been a private responsibility. Religious groups are essential to fighting AIDS, but they cannot act on a sufficient scale.

Thompson also dives headfirst into the shallow pool of his own theological knowledge. In his interpretation, Jesus seems to be a libertarian activist who taught that compassion is an exclusively private virtue. This ignores centuries of reflection on the words of the Bible that have led to a nearly universal Christian conviction that government has obligations to help the weak and pursue social justice. Religious social reformers fought to end child labor and improve public health. It is hard to imagine they would have used the teachings of Christ to justify cutting off lifesaving drugs for tens of thousands of African children — an argument both novel and obscene.

In the lifeboat dilemma Thompson proposes, we are asked to throw overboard either an American child with leukemia or an African child with AIDS — and, by gum, it had better not be the American. The real issue is different: Should we increase the amount of money devoted to our generous cancer research efforts at the expense of African lives that can be saved for about $90 a year?

"Save Catholic Schools" (!!!)

By Rick Garnett

This essay is going on a year old, but I re-read it recently, and hope others will, too.

For 150 years, America’s Catholic schools have helped turn millions of disadvantaged children into responsible, productive citizens, thereby contributing mightily to the public good. Now that serious obstacles are slowing them, will the public—either philanthropists or government—help them stay in the race?

Abortion numbers

By Rick Garnett

Any thoughts on this news?

The most comprehensive study in years of abortion in America underscores a striking change in the landscape, with ever-fewer pregnant women choosing abortion and those who do increasingly opting to avoid surgical clinics.

The number of abortions has plunged to 1.2 million a year, down 25 percent since hitting a peak in 1990, according to a report being released today — days before the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.

The abortion rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1974, the first full year after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized the procedure nationwide.

The annual rate has been falling steadily since 1981, paralleling a sharp decline in the number of abortion providers.

In the early 1980s, nearly one in three pregnant women chose abortion. The most recent data show that proportion is closer to one in five.

"That's a significant drop, and it's encouraging," said Randall O'Bannon, director of education and research for the anti-abortion group National Right to Life.

Women looking to end pregnancy in its early stage are gravitating to pharmaceutical abortion, in which they take two pills under a doctor's supervision to induce miscarriage. This approach lets them avoid surgery — and the protesters who often picket clinics — and expel the embryo in the privacy of their homes. The Food and Drug Administration approved the pills in 2000 for use through the seventh week of pregnancy.

By 2005, the most recent year covered by the report, the pills accounted for 13 percent of all abortions.

The research was conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based nonprofit that focuses on reproductive matters. The institute supports abortion rights and has received funding in the past from Planned Parenthood. Abortion opponents, however, generally view its statistics as reliable.

The Guttmacher report came to no conclusions about why the abortion landscape has changed. But that didn't stop activists on both sides from speculating.

Abortion-rights advocates suggested that women may not be terminating as often because they're avoiding unwanted pregnancies, thanks in part to emergency contraception, known as the morning-after pill, which is sold without a prescription to women 18 and older.

Opponents of abortion contend that the more women learn about the procedure, the less likely they are to choose it. The falling abortion rate, they say, may be the result of laws mandating counseling before an abortion.

In addition to the data on abortion rates, the Guttmacher report offered the first comprehensive census of abortion providers since 2000.

The number of abortion clinics nationwide was down 15 percent, a net loss of four dozen surgical clinics. But other women's health centers — and doctors in private practice — filled the gap by offering medical abortions.

Skeel (Again) on Christian Legal Scholarship

By Rob Vischer

Penn law prof David Skeel's earlier paper, The Unbearable Lightness of Christian Legal Scholarship, provoked some sharp critiques for claiming that "the scope of Christian legal scholarship is shockingly narrow." He has posted a new paper, The Paths of Christian Legal Scholarship. Here's the abstract:

The history of twentieth century Christian legal scholarship- really, the absence of Christian legal scholarship in America's elite law schools- can be told as a tale of two emblematic clashes: the first an intriguing historical footnote, the second a brief, explosive war of words. In the first, a tort action in Nebraska circa 1890,William Jennings Bryan and Roscoe Pound served as opposing counsel; the second was a war of words in the 1940s between a group of neo-Thomist scholars and defenders of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Using these two incidents to frame as a starting point, this essay briefly chronicles the disappearance of Christian legal scholarship from the elite law reviews for much of the twentieth century. In the past few years, however, there have been signs of a possible renaissance. The second half of the essay focuses on the signs of renewal. To organize the discussion, I address three very basic questions: What?, Who?, and How? - What are the most promising directions for Christian legal scholarship? Who is a Christian legal scholar? And how can Christian legal scholarship best be facilitated?

Prof. Skeel does not back away from his earlier claims, but he does seem to soften them a bit. And as one sign of the Christian legal scholarship "renaissance," I'm happy to note, he cites MoJ as "an important voice on faith-inflected issues."

Thursday, January 17, 2008

The More Radical Dependency --"Let it be"

By Elizabeth Schiltz

I wrote about some of the connections between the feminist critique of autonomy-based theories of justice (a la Glendon), its connection with Alisdaire MacIntyre's work in Dependent Rational Animals, and how Catholic thought enriches that critique, in the 2006 St. John's symposium on the Jurisprudential Legacy of JPII.

But all this focus on man's dependence on man shouldn't obscure something else that seems missing from the Rush-like world view -- our dependence on God. That's a dependency much more radical than even the dependencies of childhood, old age, and disability than is typically the focus of "dependency justice" talk. Maybe I'm straining too hard to make a connection here, but I just wanted to share something from an amazing book I'm currently reading about an amazing woman by another amazing woman. It's (yes, you're reading this correctly) The Complete Idiot's Guide to Mary of Nazareth, by Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda (and, yes, she is related, by marriage, to our very own Michael S.).

M. R. Scaperlanda points out that the words "Let it be" are spoken at three crucial points of the Scripture: by God, during the creation of the world; by Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane; and by Mary, at the Annunciation. Mary's "Let it be" became her life-long prayer. I don't honestly know how this furthers the current discussion, but I keep returning to the following passage from the book on the significance of this prayer, which seems to me to be saying something radical about the "dependence" to which we're all called. (And yes, the Beatles song keeps running through my head as I think through this.)

Mary knew that each human being is accountable, that what we do, how we live, and the choices we make are never without consequence. So by choosing to say to God, "Let my life be your will, and not mine," meant she was willing to live through that end result -- not even knowing what that meant!

When Mary responded to the angel with the words, let it be done to me as you say, she was able to do so because her life's foundation included two important factors.

Mary believed in God, in a good and merciful God. Her image of the creator of the universe was of a mightly and holy being, whose mercy to his people lives on from age to age. And, because this was her understanding of God, Mary was willing to put her entire life in his care -- and her son's life as well!

Mary trusted her God so completely, so deeply, in fact, that she called herself the servant of the Lord. This understanding of "servant," then, is not actually about submissiveness. It is instead about trusting in God's goodness. But it does include Mary's willingness to place the direction of her life in God's hands -- all of it. No matter what "surprise" came her way.

Becoming a mother while still a virgin. Giving birth to the Son of God. Wise men from the east coming to pay her son homage. Listening to her husband's dreams -- even when it meant leaving her home and family and living as refugees.

In every new situation placed before her, Mary was able -- and open -- to see that reality, whatever it was, as parat of God's will for her life and the lives of those whom she loved.

She didn't have to, you know. She chose to say yes over and over. But just because her yes was a prayer did not prevent her from being accountable for the consequences of that yes, in every situation -- even standing at the foot of a cross watching her son die.

Mary was willing to turn her will and her life over to the care of God, and she did so deliberately and consistently, because in the midst of a crazy world, she trusted in the goodness of her Creator.

More on Limbaugh and dependence

By Michael Scaperlanda

Michael P. are you also relishing the fact that probably for the first time in MOJ’s four year history another blogger can use our names interchangeably without the need for an identifying P or S?

Rick, your point is well taken, in context Limbaugh might be talking about a Dave Ramsey-type life strategy. And, you are also right that “[i]t is not at all obvious that Limbaugh was trying to make anything like Glendon's sophisticated, anthropological point.” Can the argument be made, however, that Limbaugh’s overall body of work contains elements of an implicit anthropology at odds with an authentic understanding of the human person?

Over the years I have listened to Limbaugh’s show occasionally when driving in the car. My impression is that the line between healthy skepticism about government and a rugged individualistic rhetoric (a strain of radical autonomy) is often blurred. I don’t know whether he is merely waging a political fight against the forces of big government unaware of the ambiguity in the rhetoric or if he implicitly or explicitly holds to an individualistic anthropology.

What I do know (from personal conversations over the years) is that some of his listeners who describe themselves as “conservative” or members of the “religious right” confuse these concepts. It is one thing to say “I earned this money, and I don’t want the government taking it from me through higher taxes because I think that I (along with my peers) am a better steward of my resources than the government.” It is quite another to say, “it is my money, I earned it through my own hard work, and it is nobody else’s business what I do with it.” The latter denies the web of relationships that brought the person to and sustains the person in a place of financial peace. It denies God’s radical gift of all that we are, including our intelligence and ingenuity. It also fails to see that using my wealth for the common good and the good of others is not solely an act of charity but also can be an act of justice. As Mike Schutt says, there is an awful lot of this sort of modernist autonomy thinking going on even in conservative Christian circles, which is one of the reasons I eschew the label conservative for myself.

To the extent that Limbaugh’s rhetoric is fanning these flames of confusion, it ought to be criticized.

Schutt on Rush

By Rob Vischer

Regent law prof (and author of a wonderful new book) Mike Schutt offers this response to my question about Rush Limbaugh's embrace of self-reliance:

I think you have it pegged about right (and I think Michael hit this, too) so maybe this isn't even worth saying, but there is an awful lot of this "autonomy" stuff going around, even in "Christian" thinking about politics, and it's a problem. I'm a conservative because I think government is a generally a lousy vehicle through which to love one's neighbors and, as you point out, is not the most effective way to meet human needs. Charity itself is denatured and community destroyed when human beings begin to rely on government to care for the poor, house orphans, take care of widows, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and the like. It's also wasteful, but that is a secondary problem. The trouble is that community is also destroyed-- and charity made impossible-- by a vision of the human person that says community is not a necessary part of humanness. So Rush has it wrong. Body life is a fundamental Christian and biblical concept that is lost on modern conservatism. I think conservatism has capitulated to modernism, which holds radical autonomy as fundamental tenet. I guess the bottom line for me, as a Christian conservative living in the midst of modernity, is that we aren't fully human beings without meeting the needs of others and having our needs met by others, yet the vehicle for this interdependence is properly the body of Christ in ministry both within and to outsiders, rather than the state.

Actually, Michael . . .

By Rick Garnett

. . . I think it does get "clearer than that." It is not at all obvious that Limbaugh was trying to make anything like Glendon's sophisticated, anthropological point. Limbaugh said he didn't want to be dependent, or "owe" people, but he was also talking about "insurance plans," which suggests (to me) that he is indicating a desire to be financially, or materially, independent. He's talking about -- or, he could easily be understood as talking about -- a Dave Ramsey-type life strategy, not metaphysics or the mystery passage. There's nothing non-Catholic about not wanting to be in (financial) debt or not wanting to be in the uncertain position of depending on public assistance. (To say this is not, of course, to question the importance, in the Catholic Social Tradition, of providing such assistance to those who need it.)

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Limbaugh v. Glendon

By Michael Perry

Glendon: "Despite our attachment to the ideal of the free, self-determining individual, we humans are dependent, social beings. We still begin our lives in the longest period of dependency of any mammal. Almost all of us spend much of our lives either as dependents, or caring for dependents, or financially responsible for dependents."

Limbaugh: "I don't depend on anybody else for anything, and it was one of my objectives when I grew up. I didn't want to be obligated. I didn't want to be dependent. I didn't want to owe anybody."

It seems to me, Rick, that it doesn't get much clearer than that!

More on "dependence"

By Rick Garnett

I cannot pretend to know exactly what Rush Limbaugh was getting at, with the remarks that Rob quoted here. It seems unlikely, though, that he was proposing for our consideration a deep, well-considered moral-anthropology claim, i.e., a claim about the nature and destiny of the human person.

So, when Michael says "no politically conservative Catholic with a well-formed conscience could assent to Rush’s aspirations of radical autonomy", I guess I agree, if we assume, for discussion's sake, that Rush is inviting us to a particular vision of the person -- a misguided one, for reasons that, Mary Ann Glendon, Alasdair MacIntyre, and many others have set out. After all, in a chapter I contributed to Michael S.'s book, I wrote:

We [Catholics] have . . . an alternative vision to propose, one that turns the received anthropology on its head, one that emphasizes not so much our autonomy and moral self-sufficiency as our dependence and incompletion. After all, the fact that freedom of choice is a gift, and even that its value is “inestimable,” does not make it the only valuable thing; that we are distinguished by our capacity for choice does not mean that our dignity is reducible to that capacity. We are not merely agents who choose; we are people who belong, who exist in and are shaped by relationships. We live less in a state of self-sufficiency than in one of “reciprocal indebtedness;” A Christian anthropology acknowledges our limits. It recognizes, as Professor Gilbert Meilaender put it recently in a beautiful essay, that we occupy an “in between” place, “between the beasts and God.” It grounds our dignity not so much in claims of self-sovereignty as in our status as creatures. That is, it proposes that “the greatness of human beings is founded precisely in their being creatures of loving God,”and not self-styled authors of their own destiny. Its fundamental proposition is that “the person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love” and whose “proper due is to be treated as an object of love.”

That said, it seems more likely to me -- I could be wrong, of course -- that Rush was not purporting to say anything well considered about the nature of the human person, and was instead expressing his views that, for example, some policies might create dignity-sapping dependence on government, or that it is healthy, in a free society, for persons and families to be, to the extent possible, not entirely dependent on the public authority for support and maintenance.

We might disagree with these views, but they are certainly not ruled out by a Catholic understanding of the human person.

Now, the rhetoric Rob quotes certainly lends itself to criticism, and maybe Rush really is proposing that we take reasonable and appropriate skepticism about government programs "to another level, turning it into a principle that stands in direct conflict with the nature of the human person, as expressed through the ideas of solidarity, reciprocity, subsidiarity, and the common good." If so, he's wrong. But again, to worry about the kind of "dependence" that many conservatives believe is created by some government programs -- and is unhealthy -- is not to embrace the anthropology of the mystery passage.

Mirror of Justice

Fred Thompson, Christian

The Gospel of Fred

"Save Catholic Schools" (!!!)

Abortion numbers

Skeel (Again) on Christian Legal Scholarship

The More Radical Dependency --"Let it be"

More on Limbaugh and dependence

Schutt on Rush

Actually, Michael . . .

Limbaugh v. Glendon

More on "dependence"

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