A fascinating piece by the Becket Fund's Luke Goodrich in the Wall Street Journal:
. . . Last week, Mexico's lower house of Congress began the process of amending the Mexican Constitution to formally declare the country to be "laica"—meaning "lay" or "secular." Supporters say the amendment merely codifies Mexico's commitment to the separation of church and state. But the term "laica," like the term "separation of church and state," means different things to different people. In fact, Mexico has been fighting over the meaning of church–state separation for over a century, with pro-church factions seeking greater political control for the Catholic Church, anti-clerical factions seeking to suppress the church, and few factions willing to agree on government neutrality towards religion. The key question is: What version of the separation of church and state will this amendment embody?
Unfortunately, the context surrounding the amendment suggests that it might be a step backwards for religious liberty and true separation of church and state. . . .
(P.S.: If you care about dignity-grounded religious liberty for all -- and you should -- then you should be giving money to the Becket Fund. Here's the link.)
In response to Rob's recent post, I would echo what one of the commenters observed, namely, that the health-insurance-funding measure(s) currently under consideration fund abortion not only through the subsidization of insurance policies that "happen to cover abortion", but also through direct funding of "community health centers" (e.g., Planned Parenthood clinics) that provide abortions. This funding comes with no anti-abortion restrictions. In addition, the last I heard the current proposals include direct funding for abortions in Indian Country. (If this is no longer on the table, I'd welcome correction).
The president's latest proposal mirrors legislation that has passed the Senate, which doesn't include a Hyde Amendment, and would inevitably establish abortion as a fundamental health-care service for the following reasons:
• It would change existing law by allowing federally subsidized health-care plans to pay for abortions and could require private health-insurance plans to cover abortion.
• It would impose a first-ever abortion tax—a separate premium payment that will be used to pay for elective abortions—on enrollees in insurance plans that covers abortions through newly created government health-care exchanges.
• And it would fail to protect the rights of health-care providers to refuse to participate in abortions.
The president's plan goes further than the Senate bill on abortion by calling for spending $11 billion over five years on "community health centers," which include Planned Parenthood clinics that provide abortions.
It seems to me that the President's pro-life supporters -- who also support some kind of overall of the health-insurance-funding system -- should be asking themselves, and him: "Why is he so insistent on abortion-funding when, if he were willing to just go along with Stupak and the Bishops, he could -- his party enjoys a huge majority, after all -- sweeping health-insurance reform?" Is it so important to deny those pesky pro-lifers a "victory"?
Check out Nate Oman's very interesting post (and paper), at Concurring Opinions, on the Court's landmark Reynolds opinion. Here's the paper abstract:
In 1879, the U.S. Supreme Court construed the Free Exercise Clause for the first time, holding in Reynolds v. United States that Congress could punish Mormon polygamy. Historians have interpreted Reynolds and the massive wave of anti-polygamy legislation and litigation that it midwifed as an extension of Reconstruction into the American West. This Article offers a new historical interpretation, one that places the birth of Free Exercise jurisprudence in Reynolds within an international context of Great Power imperialism and American international expansion at the end of the nineteenth century. It does this by recovering the lost theory of religious freedom that the Mormons offered in Reynolds, a theory grounded in the natural law tradition. It then shows how the Court rejected this theory by using British imperial law to interpret the scope of the first amendment. Unraveling the work done by these international analogies reveals how the legal debates in Reynolds reached back to natural law theorists of the seventeenth-century such as Hugo Grotius and forward to fin de siècle imperialists such as Theodore Roosevelt. By analogizing the federal government to the British Raj, Reynolds provided a framework for national politicians in the 1880s to employ the supposedly discredited tactics of Reconstruction against the Mormons. Embedded in imperialist analogies, Reynolds and its progeny thus formed a prelude to the constitutional battles over American imperialism in the wake of the Spanish-American War. These constitutional debates reached their dénouement in The Insular Cases, where Reynolds and its progeny appeared not as Free Exercise cases but as precedents on the scope of American imperial power. This Article thus remaps key events in late nineteenth-century constitutional history, showing how the birth of Free Exercise jurisprudence in Reynolds must be understood as part of America’s engagement with Great Power imperialism and the ideologies that sustained it.
I confess that I'm one of those Americans who really wants to understand health care reform, but every time I see a sustained adult discussion of it on a show like Charlie Rose, my eyes begin to glaze over and I switch over to watch people say dumb things on Jay Leno so that I can feel smart again. Not surprisingly, then, I don't know whether the Senate health care bill ends up funding abortions or not. Timothy Noah says it doesn't:
What really rankles Stupak (and the bishops) isn't that the Senate bill commits taxpayer dollars to funding abortion. Rather, it's that the Senate bill commits taxpayer dollars to people who buy private insurance policies that happen to cover abortion at nominal cost to the purchaser (even the poorest of the poor can spare $1 a month) and no cost at all to the insurer. Stupak and the bishops don't have a beef with government spending. They have a beef with market economics.
The Washington Postreports on a former executive of Catholic Charities, Tim Sawina, criticizing the decision to change spousal benefits policies in order to avoid legitimizing same-sex marriage. A quote:
"Providing health care to a gay or lesbian partner -- a basic human right, according to Church teaching -- is an end in itself and no more legitimizes that marriage than giving communion to a divorced person legitimizes divorce, or giving food or shelter to an alcoholic legitimizes alcoholism."
The response from the Archdiocese of Washington -- at least the response reported by the Post -- was not exactly compelling:
The archdiocese responded to [Tim] Sawina's letter Thursday, calling it an inaccurate portrayal of the Church's position and saying that his appeal to the organization's board of directors would have no effect, because the board can't overturn the archbishop's decision.
For more analysis, check out Get Religion's coverage. So what should the Archdiocese have said in response to Sawina's letter?
Challenges was my first post on the new Law, Religion, and Ethics blog. In that post, I posed some questions for both theists and secularists, concluding with:
Can and should theology and theologically informed philosophy provide a foundation for the rights, liberty, and equality we cherish (the inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration) in our pluralistic society? Is Christian intolerance of difference a real concern? Is it any more of a concern that secularist intolerance of Christian belief? How do we achieve the right balance between communal needs – the common good – and individual freedom to diverge from communal norms? Is the right balance more likely to be achieved in a secularist state where religion is privatized and marginalized or in a theistically informed secular state where the ultimate questions are welcomed and robustly debated in the public square?
If you want to weigh in comments are open at the link above.
Bill Stuntz, Harvard law professor, nationally recognized scholar, devout Christian, and friend to many in the Mirror of Justice community, is interviewed on the Patheos web site. As another friend of Mirror of Justice said in passing this link on to me, this is a moving and inspiring account of a faithful and faith-filled person who is openly facing the end of his life. Rather than attempt to provide a synopsis or excerpts below, I encourage everyone to read the full interview here.
Alan Wolfe has an interesting review of E.D. Hirsch's new book, The Making of Americans. Apparently Hirsch, as characterized by Wolfe, takes issue with school choice as a "conservative" movement:
School choice by its very nature militates against one of his major recommendations: the adoption of a common curriculum that all students must learn. Libertarianism, his analysis reminds us, is not the same as conservatism. Unquestioning reliance on the free market puts the individual and his or her immediate desires at the center of the moral universe, not unlike the cultural and moral liberationism celebrated during the 1960s. If the New Left was particularistic rather than universalistic, so are advocates of school choice. By contrast, Hirsch argues that we need more common space and not the invasion of the schools by consumer culture.
And then Wolfe adds:
[Religious schools] are not part and parcel of the common culture. Even if they are not narrowly sectarian, they still teach from a particular point of view. In doing so, their insistence on Christian or religious ways of knowing borrows from advocates of identity politics in the secular realm who insist that women or racial minorities have voices that must be heard in a multicultural curriculum. I for one do not believe that there would have been a religious revival in the 1980s without the countercultural revival of the 1960s as a model. If our common culture is fractured, religious communities must share the blame.
I agree that school choice need not be portrayed as "conservative," and that many Christians who are active in the public square today owe a lot to the identity politics of the past. But the purported tension between the emerging pluralism in the educational sphere (of which I'm a fan) and a "common culture" is overstated, I fear. There is a lot to say in response, but not having read the book yet, I'll limit myself to pointing out that a common culture is not a uniform culture, and that a shared civic culture is not necessarily precluded by a rich diversity of communities within that culture. If we think of American civic culture as the lowest common denominator in terms of shared ideals about liberty, equality, and virtue, why would we need to discourage communities from inculcating values that transcend -- without necessarily defying or ignoring -- the lowest common denominator? In that regard, does religious diversity itself threaten our common culture?
The horrifying rape and murder of high schooler Chelsea King brings to mind one of the most vexing questions facing our criminal justice system: what should we do with sex offenders? I don't have an easy answer, other than that we need to be careful not to expand the category of sex offenses to include folks who do not pose a significant risk of danger in the future. But for those who fall squarely within that classification, how do we safeguard the community while respecting the dignity of the offender? As science helps us identify tendencies, there will be a temptation to intervene earlier and more aggressively. Chemical castration is a popular option, especially since life imprisonment for most sex offenses is not an option. But as John Stinneford has argued in this excellent paper, chemical castration itself poses (or should pose) significant problems for those committed to human dignity.
If we have more time to think, are we more likely to make the selfless choice? A new study of the sinkings of the Titanic and Lusitania seems to indicate as much. Is this evidence of "the presence of the divine?" Does it show that the intellect can be altruistic when it has a chance to trump instinct? Or does it show that we're "hardwired for empathy?" (Or maybe just that the men on the Titanic were more noble than the men on the Lusitania?)
