The introductory pages of Commissioner Peter Kirsanow's important statement in the Peaceful Coexistence Report resound in themes taken up by Mary Eberstadt in her new book, It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies. Both Kirsanow and Eberstadt suggest that the difficult cultural and legal impasse we've reached between SOGI laws and religious liberty is so fraught because, at base, the conflict concerns competing "religious" beliefs, one secularist, the other Judeo-Christian. And as such, both are fundamentally identity-forming, especially as regards sexuality.
Kirsanow's statement at pages 43-4 of the report:
The tension between religious liberty and nondiscrimination principles appears most acute when religious liberty and sexual liberty conflict....It is a conflict between two worldviews, both held with the intensity generally associated with religious belief. The first, which is secularism, holds an individual’s unfettered sexual self-expression as a preeminent concern because it is an aspect of their self-creation. This interest in the individual is now construed as a positive responsibility to ensure that everyone has the ability to engage in sexual conduct without cost or consequence, whether in money, unwanted children, or hurt feelings. An individual’s sexual behavior is considered an act of self-creation and something that goes to the deepest level of their identity. Criticism of an individual’s behavior is considered an attack on the dignity of the person. Naturally, this worldview is at odds with many aspects of traditional morality grounded in sexual restraint.
Eberstadt makes the claim as to the religious character of the conflict more unequivocally:
[I]t seems beyond dispute that progressive ideology shares recognizable features with Judeo-Christianity, even as it repudiates all traditionalists tenets that threaten its substitute theology. The bedrock of contemporary progressivism can only be described as quasi-religious. In sum, secularist progressivism today is less a political movement than a church....The so-called culture war...is [] a content of competing faiths: one in the Good Book, and the other in the more newly written figurative book of secularist orthodoxy about the sexual revolution.
And here, Kirsanow could be quoting Eberstadt (who, for example, compares embattled Christians to the victims of the Salem witch trials): "One reason for the bitterness surrounding the debate is that the secularists tend to make their interpretation mandatory for society. Because they consider the providentialist view a heresy, and often regard the non-elite adherents of the providentialist view with disdain, they are unwilling to allow different views to exist in different places."
Kirsanow concludes his lengthy statement with the question Eberstadt suggests animates her book: But why should secularists care about threats to religious freedom?
Kirsanow's answer (read Eberstadt's book for hers!):
Because if they destroy the moral and religious assumptions underpinning the idea of human dignity, they may accidentally destroy the idea of human dignity itself....As discussed earlier in this statement, the effort to force traditional religious believers to bow to certain sexual mores is really an attempt to replace the old faith with the new. But if the old faith is destroyed, and with it the idea of human dignity, the adherents of the new faith may rue the day they did so. Secularists may believe that they are simply expanding the idea of human dignity to encompass various important facets of human behavior, but in so doing they are destroying the foundation of the idea and are unlikely to find a similarly compelling basis. Revolutions often turn on their instigators. The Judeo Christian belief that man is created in the image of God, the imago Dei, undergirds Jefferson’s proclamation that “all men are created equal”. Despite the failures of its adherents, as is the case with any set of principles, this concept is the root of the traditional Christian belief that people are ends, not means, and that therefore every person - male, female, black, white, disabled, gay, straight - is inherently dignified, despite his undoubted sins and perhaps seemingly dubious prospect of salvation. Without that foundation, the idea that everyone has equal dignity is little more than a polite fiction to be brushed aside for greater convenience.
As perhaps an example of the transformative influence of imago Dei in Christian sensibilities, Kirsanow offers the Christian response to slavery in a later rebuttal statement in the report. It too is well worth quoting:
Of course, there were Christian slave owners in America. That is indeed a repugnant period in American and Christian history but, unfortunately, unremarkable when viewed in the context of history as a whole. Slavery has been an almost universal institution. It is the abolition of slavery, largely because of individuals motivated by their Christianity, that is unusual. So, it is peculiar that the Chairman singles out Christianity for opprobrium in regard to slavery. Slavery has existed in almost every society and among the adherents of almost every major religion. But it was only in the Christian world that a serious critique of slavery arose. Those Christians who supported slavery were utterly unremarkable in the sweep of human affairs, no better or worse than millions of others throughout history. In contrast, it is remarkable, perhaps even astonishing, that there were Christians who rose far above the historical propensities of humankind to call for abolition as a religious and moral imperative.
It was the self-avowed Christian British Empire that initially ended its own involvement in the international slave trade and then acted to curtail the slave trade within the Muslim world. As the Middle Eastern scholar J.B. Kelley wrote: "No movement of any consequence towards abolition ever arose of its own accord in the Muslim world; it was the reproach of Muslim slavery, not Christian, that men and boys were castrated for service in the harim; and it was a Christian nation, Britain, which led the campaign to end the Arab slave trade and to compel Muslim rulers to forbid it to their subjects. . . . It was [British officials], after all, who led the Arab tribes of the Persian Gulf to cease trading in their fellow Muslims, the Somalis."
Religious believers were also in the forefront of the civil rights movement. Of course, the most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement were disproportionately Christian ministers - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, Rev. C.K. Steele. Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, perhaps our own Commission’s most renowned member, was among them. “More than 900 Catholics participated in the Selma protests” and a log of out of town participants in the Selma protests included “140 priests, 50 sisters, 29 ministers, four rabbis” [footnote omitted.]
He concludes his statement quite gracefully, and for those of us living in this post-Roe era, most presciently, one thinks:
A sense of modesty, humility, and perspective should temper our remarks about those who lived before us. We are all creatures of our own time, our minds and attitudes shaped by influences and assumptions of which we are largely unaware, our actions constrained by weighty responsibilities and unacknowledged self-interest. We all like to think that had we lived in the past we would be among the few righteous. But history is plain - the visionary righteous are few. Most of us are far more likely to have subscribed to the conventional wisdom of our time, or in good faith to have been unable to see our way clear to what is now considered self-evident. We cannot know the reasons future generations will condemn us. All we can know is that they will indeed condemn us, and hope that they judge us with more charity than the Chairman does our predecessors.
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
The Journal of Family and Economic Issues has published an intriguing study testing the famous birth-control-pill-as-technology-shock theory articulated by George Akerlof/Janet Yellen in 1996. Remember that Akerlof and Yellen had argued that the emergence of the pill in 1960 followed by liberalized abortion laws into the 1970s were to blame for the precipitous rise in single motherhood into the 1980s. (By contrast, Charles Murray had blamed increases in welfare benefits, and William Julius Wilson, lack of employment.) I write about all this as it relates to Catholic teaching here.
Economist Andrew Beauchamp tests Akerlof's theory in reverse, analyzing the lack of state abortion funding on rates of single motherhood: “The results showed that women in states that removed public funding saw decreased single motherhood and increased cohabitation among women giving birth. Estimates showed a 13 percent lower chance of being single following a birth in a state where funding was removed. This policy impact is substantial. If the entire sample were to experience a removal of abortion funding, these estimates would imply that the probability of cohabiting or marrying among low-income mothers would increase by between 12 and 18 percentage points conditional on giving birth. These estimates mean that among the children of low-income mothers, the fraction of children living with both biological parents at the time of birth would rise by 10 percentage points.”
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Public Discourse has posted my article, Rendering the Sexed Body Legally Invisible: How Transgender Law Hurts Women. In it, I rely substantially on the courageous work of Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, a political theorist and radical feminist out of the UK. Her website Sex and Gender: A Beginner's Guide is well worth the read, straight through. She also recently gave an hour long presentation on her views in which she argues that the "doctrine of gender identity" is conceptually incoherent. She has a sharp mind, trained as an analytic philosopher, and anyone who is interested in what "gender identity" is ought to take a listen (here's the Q/A). This article too is a very good and fair-minded read detailing the way in which trans' claims tend to suffer from the very gender essentialism radical feminists have been fighting for the last half century. Radical feminists are ticked--and are releasing a collection of essays, with a foreword by Germaine Greer, very soon. And here, Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk discusses the impending collision course of the new Obama edict with Title IX more generally. Did anyone take any time to think any of this through? (Alas, another merit of the system in which extensive political discourse beats out rendering executive "decrees".)
The children involved here deserve the most attention, and many of these feminists are thankfully coming to their defense. The speed at which the medical community and legal establishment seems to be bending over backwards to help children conform their body to their mind rather than their mind to their given body is astonishing. (By conforming one's mind to one's given body I mean only that a boy need not think he must become a girl because he has more characteristically "feminine" personality traits and tastes, and vice versa.) Reilly-Cooper discusses this at length in her talk.
In everything I've read so far, I agree with the radical feminists (and thankfully, under Justice Ginsburg's guidance, the Supreme Court's limiting principle in sex discrimination law is the sexed body). The erasure of the female body has enormous consequences, as I discuss in my article today. But here's where these feminists suffer from a rather significant blind spot: abortion. My article's penultimate paragraphs:
Radical feminists should be commended for resisting the trans movement’s current attempts to erase the female body from our law. But a feminism that embraces abortion as its sine qua non must bear part of the blame. It is one thing to claim that traditional gender norms confined women unfairly to roles and traits that denied them the opportunity to use their talents to contribute to the broader community. Few would now disagree with that basic “gender” critique. It is another thing altogether to assert that the equality of the sexes depends on women having the legal authority to destroy the child’s body growing within their own body.
Like the transgender’s attempt to alter his given body to better fit his ailing mind, the abortion activist seeks to distort women’s given bodies to fit into a culture ailing in its hostility to dependent children. For a prior generation of feminists, the biological asymmetry between men and women was a prescription for authentic social change, not a license to distort the wondrous capacity of the female body. Thus, it is no surprise that a society that rejects women’s bodies and the bodies of their vulnerable children would now countenance a distortion in the law so great that it portends the ejection of every body.
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
I've been waist-deep in "gender" for the last couple of weeks, grappling with the legal consequences of the astonishing claim the Department of Justice made earlier this month that "trans women are women" for the purposes of Title VII and Title IX. Public Discourse is publishing what I've written, and I'll post it when it's out.
For now though, I wanted to excerpt at length here from a very helpful self-published book out of the UK entitled, Flesh Made Word. In it, philosopher Daniel Moody argues that the sexed body has been eclipsed from the law. (He blames abortion, and I think that's right, though I for different reasons than him.) Near the end of the slim book, he makes his point clearest in his analysis of the prefixes “cis” and “trans”. (“Cis” is used by the trans community to distinguish a “trans woman” from a “cis woman”--like this blogger-- whose gender identity and biological sex align.)
[I]t would seem that Joan [a “cis” woman] is ‘legally female because physically female’ and John [a “trans woman”] is ‘legally female despite physically male’.
But how can this be, given that there is only one legal definition of the word Female. John’s legal status as female has to be the same has Joan’s.
In Joan’s case the name Female signifies her sex. But [law] does not have the power to change John’s sex from male to female. Any ‘femaleness’ John possesses he possesses only in his mind. So, given that [law] cannot take John’s state of mind and elevate it to the height of a female-sexed body, the only way to make his legal status as Female equal to Joan’s is to take her body and legally downgrade it to a state of mind. Joan is de-naturalized in law; de-sexed so that her femaleness too is legally understood to be a state of mind. If John’s LEGAL status as FEMALE exists in the form of LEGAL permission, so too does Joan’s. [emphasis in original]
If John is LEGALLY FEMALE (gender identity) despite physically male (sex)’ and if the only LEGAL meaning of the word Female is not attached to the definition belonging to a sexed body, then we can take this as proof that Joan has ceased to be ‘legally female (sex) because physically female (sex)’ and, quite bizarrely, is now LEGALLY FEMALE (gender identity) despite physically female (sex)’ FEMALE despite female.
Joan’s legal identity changed conceptually but it did so without changing linguistically.
Moody concludes that the two legal identities that are now offered to each individual (i.e., cisgender and transgender) are simply the two possibilities that flow out of ejecting the human body from the law. The trans individual is “merely somebody who has chosen to take advantage of the [legal] absence of his body” while the “cis” individual simply has not so chosen. But every person’s identity remains a choice, unbound from any objective standard, untethered from reality itself. Moody: "Understanding cisgender enables us to stop chasing after the innocent man--transgender--and instead turn the spotlight onto the real culprit, namely the ideology named Gender..."
More at Public Discourse soon...
