After resisting for years, I finally joined Facebook. And, on Facebook, I found the St. Thomas More Society, a "group designed for Catholics who are practicing lawyers, or law students (doesn't say anything about professors, oh well) to discuss what it means to be a Catholic Lawyer." If you are interested and are on Facebook, I encourage you to consider joining this group.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Thomas More Society on Facebook
Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the NYT: “All the Pro-life News Not Fit to Print”
Somehow, this aspect of Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s life failed to make it into the New York Times obituary for Mrs. Shriver, as well as the Washington Post obituary cited by Rick. As the article makes clear, Mrs. Shriver was forthright and courageous in maintaining that one could be true to the fundamental values of the Democratic Party and a principled opponent of abortion.
The statement issued by her family following her death said that Mrs. Shriver “taught us by example and with passion what it means to live a faith-driven life of love and service to others.” For Mrs. Shriver, however, unlike the members of her family who are currently active in politics, the “others” to whom service is owed included the unborn. Although faithful Catholics like Mrs. Shriver who are also Democrats and opponents of abortion are not unheard of today, they are wholly absent from the ranks of the Party leadership – something that has been on vivid display in the recent efforts of abortion activists to expand the abortion license in the health care reform legislation before Congress.
May the committed solidarity and love that Mrs. Shriver showed to those with disabilities and the unborn inspire a new generation of leaders in politics and civil society. Requiem in Pacem.
How should the Church counsel gays?
I was on vacation last week when the American Psychological Association released its report on "reparative therapy" for gays, but I did see the headlines declaring that "Psychologists repudiate gay-to-straight therapy." The Wall Street Journal has a more nuanced account of the APA's report, noting that the Association said "that it is ethical -- and can be beneficial -- for counselors to help some clients reject gay or lesbian attractions." Get Religion has interesting analysis of the media coverage of the report here and here.
Barbecue Day of Obligation
Ok, Ok, I missed it by a day, but today I am smoking a brisket (rubbed with Salt Lick dry rub) for our RCIA core team, which is meeting at our house this evening. In the early 1990's, we'd get together with the editors of the Texas Catholic papers at a state park every year on August 10 to barbecue in honor of St. Lawrence. Sorry St. Claire, you'll have to share today at our house with St. Lawrence.
Still more on health care and rights
Prof. Bryan McGraw (political theory / Wheaton) has this contribution to our conversation:
I've been reading (and skimming) the various posts on whether there is a "right" to health care and a few things suggest themselves to me. One of the things that comes out very clearly in Wolterstorff's "Justice" was the way in which "rights" are always already embedded in certain contexts and especially in social relationships. They are norms of social relationships, he says, and that seems quite right to me. So in thinking about any kinds of rights, we are actually thinking about the proper shape (or the range of proper shapes) of our social and political relationships. I have a "right" to free speech in the sense that others have an obligation in their relation to me to allow me to express myself. (Note that such rights extend only insofar as we have relationships with others - some provincial governor in Siberia has no obligation vis-a-vis me unless we come into contact). The limits to that right - libel, fighting words, physical safety, national security, etc. - are themselves articulated in the context of our relations to one another and what sorts of mutual obligations overlap with speech - an obligation not to libel others, an obligation not to provoke violence, etc.
The problem with employing "rights" language is not that we do not have any rights when it comes to health care. Given certain resources, I'm happy to say that such obligations exist. The problem is that rights rhetoric tends to obliterate the contexts of those rights and the mutual obligations that undergird and limit them. So in the case of health care, the rhetoric of rights all too often (as is often the case when we talk about welfare rights) erases the distinctions between public and private obligations and public and private resources. It would make a great deal of sense to me to say that, given the collective wealth of our country, there is a "right" to basic health care (which is today, of course, vindicated in the health care that people receive gratis in ERs and medical clinics) but it gets a great deal more dicey when things go beyond that precisely because to say, as some will suggest (perhaps merely to make a rhetorical point), that we all the right to the same health care as, say, members of Congress suggests that the very substantial resources necessary to make that happen are, in fact, collective resources subject to collective determination. To say that one has a "right" to health-care just means that one has a right to the resources necessary to exercise that health care. It seems quite right to say that we have a right, given the resources we have as a country, to basic health care, but beyond that, I think the argument comes to depend on a very strong egalitarianism that is itself underwritten by the sense that the community has at its disposal all the resources in the community. And that seems to me a mistake, though others, of course, will differ in that judgment.
Remember Fr. Coyle
On Aug. 11, 1921, Fr. James Edwin Coyle was murdered in Birmingham, Alabama. (His killer would later be represented by Hugo Black, and acquitted after a Klan-infected trial.) More here.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver, R.I.P.
From The Washington Post:
Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 88, a member of a political dynasty who devoted her life to improving the welfare of the mentally disabled by founding the Special Olympics, died Tuesday morning at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass., after a series of strokes. . . .
In a statement, her family said, "She set out to change the world and to change us, and she did that and more. She founded the movement that became Special Olympics, the largest movement for acceptance and inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities in the history of the world. Her work transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the globe, and they in turn are her living legacy." . . .
Monday, August 10, 2009
A new paper, hopefully of interest ...
... to Rick Garnett and to many other MOJ readers (and to their families and friends):
Religious Freedom and Beyond:
The Right to Moral Freedom
The Right to Moral Freedom
Emory University School of Law; University of San Diego - School of Law and Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies (2009-2012)
August 10, 2009
Abstract:
At the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the celebrated American Jesuit
John Courtney Murray played a leading role, as is well known, in
persuading the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church--the bishops
and, ultimately, the pope--to embrace the right to religious freedom.
Murray was concerned with more than just religious freedom, however; he
was also concerned with what we may call moral freedom. In 1960, the
year in which the first and, so far, only Catholic was elected to the
presidency of the United States, Murray's published We Hold These
Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. Murray
wrote, in that now-famous book, that "the moral aspirations of the law
are minimal. Laws seek to establish and maintain only that minimum of
actualized morality that is necessary for the healthy functioning of
the social order." According to Murray, the law should "not look to
what is morally desirable, or attempt to remove every moral taint from
the atmosphere of society. It [should] enforce[] only what is minimally
acceptable, and in this sense socially necessary."
"But
why should 'the moral aspirations of the law' be only 'minimal'," we
may fairly ask. "Why should 'laws seek to establish and maintain only
that minimum of actualized morality that is necessary for the healthy
functioning of the social order'? Why should the law 'enforce only what
is minimally acceptable, and in this sense socially necessary'?" In
this essay I provide an answer, in the course of defending this claim:
The case for liberal democracy's affirming the right to moral freedom
is analogous to and no less compelling than the case for its affirming,
as it does, the right to religious freedom. Liberal democracy should
affirm the former right, therefore, as well as the latter; it should
affirm moral freedom as well as religious freedom.
This essay is
drawn from my book The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy, which
will be published in 2010 by the Cambridge University Press.
[You can download the paper--free of charge!--here.]
Extreme Wealth and Poverty and the Virtue of Enough
The Sixth Biennial Poverty Conference of the Vincentian Chair of Social Justice will take place on October 17, 2009. The theme for this year's conference is Extreme Wealth and Poverty and the Virtue of Enough. The conference will include plenary session talks by Drew Christiansen, S.J., Editor-in Chief of America Magazine, and H.E. Mr. Oscar de Rojas, Director for UN Financing for Development. A complete schedule and registration infromation should shortly be available on the Vincentian Center website here. In the meantime, a copy of the conference poster is here.
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Sunday, August 9, 2009
The Story Behind the Lemon Case
For those interested in the background of perhaps the most important Establishment Clause case ever, I've posted on SSRN this draft chapter, "Lemon v. Kurtzman: The Parochial-School Crisis and the Establishment Clause." It's from a forthcoming book, edited by Leslie Griffin, called Law and Religion Cases in Context, an entry in Aspen Publisher's new series of stories about famous cases (corresponding to Foundation's "Law Stories" series that many of you know). The abstract:
This chapter . . . traces the background and implications of Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the case that is famous for its 3-part Establishment Clause test and that also inaugurated a series of decisions in the 1970s and early 1980s striking down state efforts to assist parochial schools and the children attending them. In addition to summarizing the arguments, holding, and general implications of Lemon, the chapter draws attention to background and nuances: the parochial-school financial crisis that triggered these laws, the vigorous but unsuccessful attempt of the NAACP and other plaintiffs to challenge the laws for allegedly promoting white flight from urban neighborhoods, and factors (including changes in religious and racial demographics) that contributed first to the rise of Lemon's no-aid approach and then to its decline in recent decisions such as the Cleveland voucher case.
The overall volume should be very good, with contributions from, among other lawprofs, Michael McConnell, Marci Hamilton, Sam Levine (Pepperdine), and Marie Failinger (Hamline).
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