A peculiarity of the age is that one of our most profound Christian intellectuals is a reclusive Calvinist writer of (mostly) fiction who lives in Iowa City. Marilynne Robinson will receive the Kuyper Prize from Princeton Theological Seminary next Thursday and deliver a lecture entitled "Open Wide Thy Hand: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism" (details here). Anyone who has not read her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead should do so immediately.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Marilynne Robinson
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
The Massey Mine Disaster Remembered
Today was the 1 year anniversary of the Massey Energy Upper Big Branch coal mine disaster, which took the lives of 29 men. Mining is dangerous and necessary. Even under the best of circumstances, miners lose their lives doing important work. Please remember the miners and their families. The Wall Street Journal covered the story today.
“Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think”*
David Brooks’s column in today’s New York Times about Congressman Ryan’s budget plan joins a host of recent pieces about the end of the welfare state and the model of economic growth and social democracy that most of us take for granted--I’m thinking also of my friend Yuval Levin’s “Beyond the Welfare State” in National Affairs, Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, and Walter Russell Mead’s writings at The American Interest (here and here). While I know there’s room to question many details of this account (and some will reject the account outright), I’m more interested in the implications of this for Catholic social thought. Much of CST--in both its more liberal (Dan Finn, for example) and more conservative (Michael Novak, for example) forms--is premised on something like the modern welfare state, viewed either with enthusiasm or with skepticism. Certainly much of the papal social encyclical tradition and the US Bishops’ 1986 pastoral letter on the economy are very much about the who, where, what, and how of the role of the state in regulating the economy and redistributing wealth.
But what if we really are on the verge of a new economic order--at least with regard to the ability of the state to finance entitlement programs to aid the poor, the sick, and the elderly--and the approach of the social tradition to economic questions needs to be reframed? A tradition that goes back to John Chrysostom and Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi should surely have something to say about the ordering of economic life that doesn’t start with certain modern premises. So what is it?
*The title of an essay by David Foster Wallace (an epochal genius, though tragic) reviewing John Updike’s Toward the End of Time, which has nothing to do with the topic of this post.
Emergency contraceptive rule struck down in Illinois
Several years ago Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich promulgated a rule that required pharmacies to dispense emergency contraceptives. Today, thanks in significant part to the tireless advocacy of Catholic University law prof Mark Rienzi, an Illinois court struck down that rule as a violation of the Illinois Healthcare Right of Conscience Act, the Illinois Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Here's an excerpt of the court's ruling on the free exercise claim:
The evidence at trial established a Free Exercise violation because the Rule is neither neutral nor generally applicable. The Rule and its predecessors were designed to stop pharmacies and pharmacists from considering their religious beliefs when deciding whether to sell emergency contraceptives. The record evidence demonstrates the Rule and all prior rules were drafted with pharmacists and pharmacy owners with religious objections to selling emergency contraceptives in mind. This lack of neutrality requires a strict scrutiny test be applied to this Rule. Furthermore, the law is not generally applicable. The Rule excuses compliance for a host of "common sense business" reasons, but not for religious reasons. And the variance process is, by the government's admission, a system of individualized governmental assessments that is available for non-religious reasons, but not for religious ones, even though the government acknowledged that the proximity of willing competitors nearby Plaintiffs' pharmacies made any health-related impact of their religious constraints unlikely.
The court rejected the pharmacists' Fourteenth Amendment argument (as laid out in Rienzi's law review article that was discussed on MoJ a while back). It will be interesting to see if this ruling stirs things up on the litigation front in other states.
Rev. Jenkins to Speak
Rev. John I. Jenkins, President of the Univerity of Notre Dame, will be speaking on "Faith in a Pluralistic Democracy: Passionate Convictions & Respectful Conversations," at the Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory Univerity on April 14th at 7:30 pm. Information is available here.
Strengthening Secularism
A propos, one possible approach to the management of religion when it does "its worst."
People Are Wretched, Religion To Blame
This column by Roger Cohen is noteworthy for the earnestness of its anger against religion -- its "disgust." In truth, I have little quarrel with the claim that lots and lots of people in this world are miserable, including many of the people Cohen discusses. In fact, I have great sympathy for that view, and can remember having it reinforced almost every day as a state prosecutor. And that was just after dealing with defense counsel. I can even forgive Cohen for painting in rough and uncareful strokes. After all, I'm not sure it's really true that Representative King, as misguided as his hearings may be, is in precisely the same category as the guy who murdered the Swedish man, or the other one who killed the Catholic policeman. There seem to be relevant differences there. I also don't quite understand the charge that Newt Gingrich and King are choosing "opportunistically" to target "creeping Sharia" "at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein." Opportunistic as their motives may be, I am not sure I see the connection to the President's middle name. But maybe I just haven't been keeping up with this nonsense. And of course, I understand that wrathfulness becomes more rhetorically pleasing as one wraps together disparate incidents into a single ball of seething self-righteous disgust.
Interestingly enough, Cohen finds in "religion" the lightning rod for his lightning. This is a move made with greater elegance by Professor Amos Guiora in this book as well, and one can find some nice discussion of it in Paul Horwitz's book too (see the section on the "New Commissars of the Enlightenment"). Non-religious people like Cohen (see the last line), eschewing the usual liberal tolerance of religion, are electing instead to take a more aggressive tack and blame religion itself for what ails us. I won't rehearse the standard replies to this move, as they will be familiar to the readership here. But I often do wonder the extent to which this new approach -- a bit more Voltaire and a bit less Madison -- might or might not influence the law of religious liberty.
Doubts about CST and Gene Patents
I think I’m less confident than Kevin Lee seems to be that Catholic social thought and the words of Pope John Paul II speak to the AMP v. USPTO case, which was argued Monday in the Federal Circuit (summary of the issues here). I think one can agree with John Paul that the “biological cannot be separated from the spiritual, family and social dimensions” of the person without coming to any firm views about the correct understanding of the Patent Act’s limitations on patenting “products of nature,” which involves some thorny issues of statutory interpretation and striking the right policy balance between encouraging competition while also properly incentivizing biotech research. There is also the troubling fact that DOJ’s current position is a significant departure from the longstanding position of the USPTO and the National Institutes of Health on the patentability of isolated DNA. Finally (and nicely following on earlier posts about the Supreme Court’s standing decision on Monday in Winn), it appears doubtful that the plaintiffs in AMP v. USPTO meet the controversy or particularized harm requirements for standing because they have no legal interests adverse to the patent holder. While I can hardly disagree with Pope John Paul II that “man goes beyond the sum of his biological characteristics,” I’m reluctant to trample the Article III limitations on standing or the settled expectations of scientific researchers to make the point.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Patenting Genes
Here's a case where Catholic Social Thought might be in agreement with the ACLU and the Obama administration. Association for Molecular Pathology v. USPTO, which was argued today in the DC Circuit, involves a patent held by Myriad Genetics for the isolated BRCA gene, a risk factor for breast cancer. The ACLU filed an action against the USPTO claiming that the Myriad patent is in contravention of the Patent Act and, that in granting the BRCA patent, the Patent Office exceeded the Constitutional mandate to Congress for creating intellectual property. The Obama Justice Department has sided with the ACLU on this.
Patenting isolated human gene sequences would seem to comodify the person, making the physical body a mere accessory to the spiritual dimension. Several years ago, John Paul II gave an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences which cautioned:
The ability to establish the genetic map should not lead to reducing the subject to his genetic inheritance and to the alterations that can be made to it. In his mystery, man goes beyond the sum of his biological characteristics. He is a fundamental unit, in which the biological cannot be separated from the spiritual, family and social dimensions without incurring the serious risk of suppressing the person's very nature and making him a mere object of analysis.
At issue in this case is whether, as the Justice Department brief argues, the patent grants exclusivity to "The chemical structure of native human genes" even when it is isolated from its natural environment. If the structure of the BRCA gene is "native" then it is presumably not patentable.
The case is worth watching.
Savings Lives at Home
A few days ago, I posted a message of appreciation to President Obama for his controversial but, in my view, morally well-justified actions in saving lives by preventing an impending massacre in Libya. Now if only he would take steps to save unborn lives here at home -- or at least not threaten to veto or shut down the government to ensure continued federal funding for Planned Parenthood and to prevent any restrictions on abortion. Note this story from Politico:
“We have a positive relationship with the Obama administration, and we applaud its strong commitment to reproductive health, family planning and preventive health care,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of public policy and advocacy for Planned Parenthood, said in a statement to POLITICO. “President Obama has reinforced this commitment by calling for an increased investment in an essential women’s health care program” in his latest budget
* * *
[I]n a news conference on March 11, Obama signaled he would not accept a budget proposal that included any provisions slashing the budgets for federally funded programs that social conservatives don’t like, including Planned Parenthood.
* * *
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), co-chairwoman of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, told POLITICO the group has consulted with the White House on a “regular basis” and expressed confidence the administration is committed to blocking any bill that includes abortion restrictions. “The White House has been steadfast in its position,” she said.
* * *
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List, which opposes abortion rights, said the strategy reveals “without question” that Obama “is the most important ally that Planned Parenthood has."
Greg Sisk
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