My friend and colleague, Carter Snead, who direct's Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture, has a very strong -- indeed, very moving -- statement on Gov. Brown's tragically wrong decision to sign assisted suicide into law in California. Here it is:
By signing legislation permitting assisted suicide in his state yesterday, California Gov. Jerry Brown has threatened the lives and dignity of all vulnerable people, according to O. Carter Snead, University of Notre Dame law professor and director of the University’s Center for Ethics and Culture.
Quoting the highly personal terms in which Brown had cast his decision — “In the end, I was left to reflect on what I would want in the face of my own death,” the governor said — Snead insisted that “Gov. Brown and those like him — affluent, privileged, able-bodied and with supportive families — are not the ones who will pay the price for this new ‘freedom.’”
“What Gov. Brown should have been reflecting on instead,” Snead said, “was the poor, the disabled, the marginalized and the elderly who are now exposed to grave and lethal new risks of fraud, abuse, mistake and coercion. He should have been reflecting on those who are suffering from untreated, but treatable, depression or badly managed, but manageable, pain, people for whom the path of least resistance is now self-administration of lethal drugs.
“Gov. Brown should have been reflecting on the aged, who are now at risk of an entirely new form of elder abuse. He should have been reflecting on the financially disadvantaged, whose insurers will now weigh the low costs of assisted suicide against more expensive palliative treatments. He should have been reflecting on the disabled, who are terrified about the subtle coercion that will now be brought to bear by others who consider their lives not worth living. He should have been reflecting on the path taken by countries like the Netherlands and Belgium, where assisted suicide quickly gave way to euthanasia, first voluntary, then nonvoluntary, in the name of false autonomy and compassion. He should have been reflecting on the experience of Oregon, where there is no meaningful data collection, and virtually no referrals for psychological evaluations or pain management consultations, even though those with suicidal ideation require both forms of basic health care.”
According to Snead, “Gov. Brown has purchased the right to assisted suicide at the expense of the disabled, the marginalized, the poor and the elderly. Shame on him for being so selfish and short-sighted.”
This is very interesting. In the Oct. 5 issue of National Review, Kevin Hassett has a piece called "An Epidemic of Loneliness." Here's a taste:
For more than a hundred years, economists and sociologists have studied an empirical regularity: When the population share of Protestants relative to Catholics rises, suicides increase markedly. Two major theories emerged to explain the pattern. The first rests on theological differences, and holds that Catholics but not Protestants are dissuaded from suicide by the fear that it will lead to eternal damnation. The second is that Protestants are more likely to have weaker ties to the community, and it is this separation from the support of a community that leads to despair and suicide.
While the early literature focused on these two competing forms of Christianity, researchers have begun to explore religion and the role of community more generally. As time has gone on, the community-based rather than theological explanation seems to have become more widely accepted in the literature. For instance, research has found that while Protestants commit suicide more than Catholics, atheists are even more likely to take their own lives than Protestants, an observation that would favor the community-based rather than theological channel. . . .
. . . As Protestantism spread and Catholicism declined in Europe, individuals found themselves increasingly separated from the community support mechanisms that could help sustain them in difficult times. Suicides surged. Today’s coarsening world is having a similar effect on far too many. Suicide has become an urgent public-health crisis with astronomical economic costs.
Yet another reason to regret the recent enactment in California of assisted-suicide legalization.
Fleming Rutledge is one of the great preachers of our time. Check out her "Generous Orthodoxy" website here--and get a hold of any (or all) of her sermon collections on Paul, or Romans, or the Old Testament, or Easter, or The Bible and the New York Times. She confounds both conservatives and liberals by preaching universal themes--original sin, amazing grace, and their social and cultural implications--that undercut all our more partial political perspectives. She was also one of the first dozen or so women ordained in the Episcopal Church.
Now she's released The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, her "magnum opus" as The Christian Century's reviewer calls it. A bit of the review:
Don’t conservative and evangelical churches regularly preach the cross and the crucifixion? Yes, they do. But they often reduce these themes to formulaic, even mechanistic interpretations of their meaning, related only to individuals and their fate after death. Moreover, as Rutledge argues persuasively, such proclamations are often theologically incoherent, doing violence to the trinitarian nature of God and rendering the God now separated from Jesus Christ into a monster.
Perhaps partly in reaction to the predominance of such reductive and misleading interpretations of the crucifixion by conservatives and evangelicals, other parts of the church—mainline, liberal, and progressive congregations and their preachers—have had less and less that is substantive to say about the crucifixion. Pelagianism, ever knocking at the mainline door, sidesteps the cross to emphasize Jesus’ good works and his role as a moral exemplar and spiritual guide. Then proclamation tends to become telling stories about Jesus rather than preaching Christ crucified. In some mainline church settings, the crucified One is portrayed as just another innocent victim of the empire, not as the One whose death constituted God’s redemptive disruption of the world.
Protestantism has had a particular problem handling this problem of sin and redemption, reducing it either to "fire insurance" for the afterlife or confident prescriptions about social reform today. But as I see it, Catholic thinkers have to deal with the same issues.
I'm running to the store (well, to Amazon) to get Rutledge's book.
Monday, October 5, 2015
Rick beat me to posting about California's new assisted-suicide law.
It's kind of sad when the solace one takes in reading of such an unfortunate development is that the LA Times at least chose not to use the political language of "aid-in-dying" law that the newspaper had previously used. (Headline: "Governor sends aid-in-dying bill to Gov. Brown")
Another form of solace in the category of "at least there's that" comes from the fact that this unfortunate change at least came through the appropriate political branches.
The judicial sensibility that brought us Washington v. Glucksberg was sound. When there's no law on a matter, the lawful decision is to decline to pretend there is. This may mean that the Court is unable to save us from ourselves, and we are stuck with laws we'd rather not have. But a Court that won't save us from ourselves when it can't do so lawfully is to be preferred to a Court anointed to save us even if that requires making up the law.
With the ascendancy of the Obergefell identity, we may not much longer enjoy the sting of an honest loss.
Bad news out of California.
Caught between conflicting moral arguments, Gov. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit seminary student, on Monday signed a measure allowing physicians to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients who want to hasten their deaths.
Approving the bill, whose opponents included the Catholic Church, appeared to be a gut-wrenching decision for the 77-year-old governor, who as a young man studied to enter the priesthood.
“In the end, I was left to reflect on what I would want in the face of my own death,” Brown added. “I do not know what I would do if I were dying in prolonged and excruciating pain. I am certain, however, that it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill. And I wouldn’t deny that right to others."
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Today I gave a presentation at the Christian Legal Society's national conference in New Orleans. The presentation is called "Getting to Purple: Religious Freedom Arguments to Reach the Persuadable Middle" (here are the power point slides). It continues with the three kinds of arguments--civil libertarian, civic republican, and pragmatic--that I've laid out earlier in an article called "Progressive Arguments for Religious Organizational Freedom." The continued goal is to try to bridge what appear to be the hardening lines between conservatives and liberals over the value of religious institutional freedom.
I conclude the presentation with some lessons to draw from Pope Francis, who is a great model for both Catholics and others seeking to defend the freedom of religious institutions to serve others in a joyful and sacrificial spirit. I'll blog about that separately.
And for a lagniappe (Creole for "bonus or extra gift"), here is a picture from New Orleans with church-state associations. It's a jazz band at a wedding that had just finished in the church at the old Ursuline convent. You might remember that when the Ursulines nuns feared that their school for orphan girls would become subject to disruptive American regulation after the Louisiana Purchase, they wrote President Jefferson, who responded that
the principles of the Constitution [a]re a sure guaranty to you that [your property] will be preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and that your Institution will be permitted to govern itself according to its own voluntary rules without interference from the civil authority.
(Rick, Carl Esbeck, Kim Colby, and I discuss Jefferson's letter to the Ursulines in our overview of historical sources of church autonomy, here, at p. 182.)
Friday, October 2, 2015
Here's the abstract for a new book by a senior lecturer at Keele University:
This book aims to examine and critically analyse the role that religion has and should have in the public and legal sphere. The main purpose of the book is to explain why religion, on the whole, should not be tolerated in a tolerant-liberal democracy and to describe exactly how it should not be tolerated - mainly by addressing legal issues. The main arguments of the book are, first, that as a general rule illiberal intolerance should not be tolerated; secondly, that there are meaningful, unique links between religion and intolerance, and between holding religious beliefs and holding intolerant views (and ultimately acting upon these views); and thirdly, that the religiosity of a legal claim is normally a reason, although not necessarily a prevailing one, not to accept that claim.
Yossi Nehushtan, "Intolerant Religion in a Tolerant-Liberal Democracy" (Hart 2015).
Wow.
