"Yes, abortion is killing. But it's the lesser evil."
That's the tiltle of an op-ed by Antonia Senior that was published in the Times of London on June 30, 2010. The essay is causing a stir. See this response by Albert Mohler. I haven't found a good link to Senior's essay.
She begins the essay by explaining that she was in the Tower of London and encountered an interactive display that asks visitors whether they would die for a cause. After some reflection, Senior answers that the cause for which she would stake her life is the cause of women's liberation, and for Senior, that includes the right to abortion.
Senior acknowledges that an abortion involves the taking of a life. But she concludes that that realization doesn't change the calculus. She states: "you can't separate women's rights from their right to fertility control. The single biggest factor in women's liberation was our newly found ability to impose our will on our biology." She concludes her essay with these words--"As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil. The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too."
I wish that Senior had heard the fine talk that Erika Bachiochi (see) gave on pro-life feminism at the recent annual conference of University Faculty for Life.
A must-read piece by John Allen, the reporter-on-things-Catholic whom all Catholics, of all stripes, seem to respect:
. . . I’m inclined to think the past week does mean something, and here’s
my first-blush stab at expressing it: Collectively, I think these events
both symbolize and advance the collapse of Catholicism as a
culture-shaping majority in the West. When the dust settles,
policy-makers in the church, particularly in the Vatican, will be ever
more committed to what social theorists call “identity politics,” a
traditional defense mechanism relied upon by minorities when facing what
they perceive as a hostile cultural majority. . . .
Of course, some observers -- and not just religion’s cultured
despisers, but many Catholics themselves -- welcome all this, seeing it
as a long-overdue dose of humility and accountability. On the other
hand, a growing band of Catholic opinion, certainly reflected in the
Vatican, believes that a “tipping point” has been reached in the West,
in which secular neutrality toward the church, especially in Europe, has
shaded off into hostility and, sometimes, outright persecution.
Some blame a rising tide of neo-paganism in the West for the church’s
woes, while others say church leaders, and especially the Vatican, have
no one to blame but themselves. Whichever view one adopts, the
empirical result is the same: Catholicism no longer calls the cultural
tune. Benedict’s decision to launch an entire department in the Vatican
dedicated to treating the West as “mission territory” amounts to a clear
acknowledgment of the point.
Facing that reality, Catholicism, both at the leadership level and in
important circles at the grass roots, is reacting as social theorists
would likely predict, with a strategy that other embattled minority
groups -- from the Amish to Orthodox Judaism, from the Gay Pride
movement to the Nation of Islam -- have often employed: Emphasizing its
unique markers of identity, in order to defend itself against
assimilation to the majority. . . .
To be sure, Benedict XVI’s ambition is not merely that the church in
the West will be a minority, but a “creative minority,” a term he
borrows from Arnold Toynbee. The idea is that when great civilizations
enter a crisis, they either decay or are renewed from within by
“creative minorities” who offer a compelling vision of the future.
The $64,000 question, therefore, is whether Benedict’s version of a
“politics of identity” is the right way to unleash the creativity in
Catholicism that will allow it to play a transformative role in the
cultural movements of the future. One thing’s for sure: projecting a
robust sense of Catholic identity seems poised to be the guiding
principle in Rome for some time to come.
I reflected, by the way, a bit on the "creative minority" idea in this reflection on Deus Caritas Est, "Church, State, and the Practice of Love".
I don't know that I've ever met a relativist. The serious issue, in my judgment, is ethnocentrism. I've met some ethnocentrists.
On the challenge of negotiating the relationship—sometimes but not always a relationship of
tension or even conflict—between “universal” values and “local” values, the
essays in Andras Sajo, ed., Human Rights With
Modesty:The Problem of Universalism
(2004) & Christopher L. Eisgruber & Andras Sajo, eds., Global Justice and the Bulwarks of Localism
(2005) are a good place to start.
There are different relativisms: in particular, anthropological, epistemological, cultural. Most discussions of relativism I've encountered outside the technical philosophical literature are deeply confused and, therefore, confusing. Wringing one's hands about "a dictatorship of relativism" may be, in some quarters, attractive polemical posturing; it is not, however, productive philosophical discussion. In any event, here are some thoughts: Perry, "Are Human Rights Universal? The Relativist Challenge and Related Matters," In Perry, The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries (Oxford, 1998).
This weekend, we in the United States of America celebrate our Declaration -- and, in time, our achievement -- of Independence. We should hope that more than a few of our fellow citizens will mark Independence Day by actually reading the Declaration. Stirring stuff. (Peggy Noonan has an interesting reflection on some words of Jefferson's that were cut out, here.)
Most people, if they are familiar with Declaration at all, know about the "course of human events" and "truths to be self evident" parts. I encourage my first-year law students, though, to read through the bill of particulars against the King, the facts about his "injuries and usurpations" that the Declaration "submit[s] to a candid world." Among these, interestingly, is a complaint about the Quebec Act of 1774, which (among other things) admitted Roman Catholics to full citizenship in Quebec. This Act outraged the American colonists, as Steve Waldman reports:
Alexander Hamilton decried the Quebec Act as a diabolical threat.
"Does not your blood run cold to think that an English Parliament should
pass an Act for the establishment of arbitrary power and Popery in such
an extensive country?…Your loves, your property, your religion are all
at stake." He warned that the Canadian tolerance in Quebec would draw,
like a magnet, Catholics from throughout Europe who would eventually
destroy America.
Sam Adams told a group of Mohawk Indians that the law "to establish
the religion of the Pope in Canada" would mean that "some of your
children may be induced instead of worshipping the only true God, to pay
his dues to images made with their own hands." The silversmith and
engraver Paul Revere created a cartoon for the Royal American Magazine
called "The Mitred Minuet." It depicted four contented-looking mitred
Anglican Bishops, dancing a minuet around a copy of the Quebec Act to
show their "approbation and countenance of the Roman religion." Standing
nearby are the authors of the Quebec Act, while a Devil with bat ears
and spiky wings hovers behind them, whispering instructions. . . .
So, anti-Catholicism fanned flames of a rebellion that would, in time, yield an approach to religious-freedom-under-law that, some say, inspired the content and foundations of the Catholic Church's Declaration on Religious Freedom. And so it goes . . .
Thank you Michael P. for pointing us to Leslie Green's disagreement with Pope Benedict's assertion that we are in danger of "a dictatorship of relativism." My quick read of Green seems to confirm Benedict's thesis. Is it fair to say that Green disagrees with Benedict for two reasons? One, there is danger from non-relativist countries, particularly Muslim countries. And, two, the west isn't relatavist because it imposes democratically arrived at moral norms.
Green's world seems to center on will to power. In some nations God's will as interpreted by the powerful shape the moral norms of the country. Aware of this, Benedict asks, does reason have a place alongside faith. In other nation's (the West), Green asserts that the will of a majority [or, in the case of the U.S., often the majority of the Committee of Nine] establish the moral norms. Does reason supply any criteria? Can the majority ever reach an immoral conclusion? If not, whover has the power to create or manipulate a majority of the populace (or a majority of the Committee of Nine), sets the moral standard. That sounds pretty relativistic to me. What am I missing Michael P.?
John Inazu (Duke) has a worth-reading blog post on the CLS case here (at "The Faculty Lounge") and an op-ed on the case ("Siding with Sameness"), in the Raleigh News & Observer, here. He says, among other things:
Martinez at its core involved a clash between
equality and diversity, and in this case, diversity should have
prevailed. As I note in my op-ed, Justice Alito’s
warning that Monday’s decision “is a serious setback for freedom of
expression
in this country” doesn’t go far enough. Expression presupposes
existence. And Martinez
doesn’t silence the Christian Legal Society at Hastings—it destroys it.
That being said,
this is a hard case. . . .
Also (as always) worth reading and thinking about is what Steve Smith (San Diego) has to say about the case, at "Law, Religion & Ethics":
To be sure, a law school should not be required to admit every type of
speaker to its forum. I would think that the school might permissibly
deny the benefits of its forum to, say, advocates of genocide, to give
just one example. But it is deeply troubling that among the ample
spectrum of views and voices that Hastings welcomes, a traditional
Christian voice is the one that the school in fact singled out for
exclusion. And the fact that the school attempted to defend its
exclusion by concocting a policy that could in principle exclude other
“voices” as well does not negate the conclusion that the school is
excluding voices from the community of its forum. It is even more
troubling that a majority of Supreme Court Justices see no problem with
that exclusion.
The Court framed its decision narrowly, but the decision’s principle
seems to me to be huge. The opinion creates risks for any religious
group (maybe any group) that takes a position on anything and receives
government funding. The government can water down the position of any
group by requiring an “all comers” policy. Would this allow, for
example, a state to require that religious colleges take all comers on
its faculty, permitting discrimination based only on “neutral and
generally applicable membership requirements unrelated to ‘status or
beliefs’”
Here is (the eminent) Prof. Joseph Weiler's argument before the European Court of Human Rights in the Italian crucifix case. Here is a taste:
16.
In today’s Europe countries have opened their gates to many new
residents and citizens. We owe them all the guarantees of the
Convention. We owe the decency and welcome and non discrimination. But
the message of tolerance towards the Other should not be translated into
a message of intolerance towards one’s own identity, and the legal
imperative of the Convention should not extend the justified requirement
that the State guarantee negative and positive religious freedom, to
the unjustified and startling proposition that the State divest itself
of part of its cultural identity simply because the artefacts of such
identity may be religious or of religious origin.
17. The position adopted by the Chamber
is not an expression of the pluralism manifest by the Convention
system, but an expression of the values of the laique State. To extend
it to the entire Convention system would represent, with great respect,
the Americanization of Europe. Americanization in two respects: First a
single and unique rule for everyone, and second, a rigid, American
style, separation of Church and State, as if the people of those Members
whose State identity is not laique, cannot be trusted to live by the
principles of tolerance and pluralism. That again, is not Europe. . . .
Michael Sean Winters' response to the Times story -- posted this morning by Michael P. -- on the scandal is worth reading. Here's the opening:
This morning’s New
York Times “expose” regarding then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s role in the
Vatican’s response to the clergy sex abuse crisis exposes more than it
intended. It exposes the fact that the authors, Laurie Goodstein and
David Halbfinger, and their editors, do not understand what they are
talking about and, at times, put forward such an unrelentingly
tendentious report, it is difficult to attribute it to anything less
than animus.
The article put me in mind of Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The
Importance of Being Earnest. “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may
be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” One
or two mistakes are to be expected. The friend I consult on
environmental matters tells me that when she reads the Times on the
subject, she assumes they will get it wrong. But a slew of such mistakes
raises doubts. Ignorance is a scarcely less heinous crime for a
reporter than bias. You be the judge. . . .
