Rick is right, in his post on the policies of the two tickets concerning abortion and abortion reduction, to bring up the Freedom of Choice Act and Medicaid funding of abortions and the effects their enactment would have in raising the number of abortions. These measures were in fact evaluated by the authors of the recently released study sponsored by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. The authors concluded that Medicaid funding would increase the abortion rate and numbers, but not by as much as a generous rise in AFDC-TANF and WIC payments to needy families would decrease the rate/numbers. (See Tables 1 and 2, pp. 12 and 16 respectively of the PDF.) They also concluded that the passage of "informed consent" provisions, which the Freedom of Choice Act would likely forbid, does not have as much of a reduction effect as the AFDC and WIC increases would. I cannot vouch for their methodology; in particular, after reading their report I'm quite puzzled by how they treated the effects of informed-consent statutes passed and enforced. See their statistics, Table 2 at p. 16 of the PDF, and their narrative discussion at p. 9 of the PDF. As best I can tell, they acknowledge that an informed-consent provision does reduce abortion rates significantly if it's not invalidated by a state court: that is, if it doesn't suffer the same fate that the Freedom of Choice Act would likely deal it. Even from this study's figures, so far as I can see, the Freedom of Choice Act by invalidating abortion regulations would be a big step backward, as Rick points out (I'm not certain it would be enacted but it's obviously much more likely if Obama is president). Maybe someone can help me understand the study better on this point.
At the same time, the study clearly supports the claim that increases in social-welfare spending targeted at low- to modest-income families do have a significant effect in reducing abortions -- an effect great enough, the study says, to outweigh the effects of Medicaid funding. Given this, it remains a significant problem for me that Republicans are the ones most likely to block what Rick calls "sensible social-welfare programs that result in fewer abortions." (Current information says that 30 of the 41 co-sponsors of the Pregnant Women Support Act in the House and Senate are Democrats.) While I admire much of John McCain's pro-life stance, I remain concerned that his blanket pledges to restrict government spending will block measures that will have a positive practical effect. Would he veto them if a Democratic Congress passed them? I don't know.
I also think it's regrettable that the subcommittee drafting the Republican platform on abortion unanimously removed a sentence saying, "We invite all persons of good will, whether across the political aisle or within our party, to work together to reduce the incidence of abortion" (see p. 46 of this PDF). With all the hubbub given to the Democrats dropping "safe, legal, and rare" from their platform, the dropping of this language should also receive criticism. It's true, and commendable, that the final platform still endorses several ways of supporting women facing unplanned pregnancies, including crisis pregnancy centers and adoption assistance. It seems clear to me, however, that the final language is calculated to leave out any support for social-welfare spending of the kind that the recent study says is particularly effective. I still find prevalent in the GOP an opposition to social-welfare measures that is driven less by empirical evidence than by ideological commitments, cutting taxes and spending, that somehow seem to prevail no matter how loudly the Party calls abortion a great social injustice.
Let me be clear: I am not claiming that this makes the Democratic position on abortion equivalent to the Republican. I agree that the Democratic position is greatly to be regretted for its symbolic statements about the unborn, for its defense of the constitutional mistake of Roe, for its greater likely threats to religious liberty, and for those measures it supports that would increase the abortion numbers. However, on the net numerical effects -- on what positive, morally worthy actions will reduce the number of abortions -- I do not give the Republicans a clear nod. And although statements of principle and effects on the constitutional structure matter, as Rick says, nevertheless those of us who think that Republicans have a very bad recent record on many other important issues -- conducting foreign policy, responding to climate and other environmental challenges, managing government with integrity, etc. -- tend to want there to be a payoff in real abortion reduction from electing someone who would continue a number of those other policies. But McCain has said he'll change some of them, and maybe he will? These are the kinds of questions I'm asking in deciding my vote this year.
For these reasons, I agree with many of Greg's criticisms of Obama, and commendations of Gov. Palin, but cannot accept that this issue is entirely one-sided as he says. Beyond that, I think that our discussions would generally be more productive if we stuck to proposed policies rather than using personal biographies (themselves OK) in a selective way. It is great, of course, that the McCains adopted an orphan. It is also great, is it not, that Obama worked to empower poor people on the South Side of Chicago. Does Greg mean to argue that the first shows greater concern for the needy, including vulnerable children, than the second? It's also plainly a distraction to object that Obama's campaign "sneer[ed] at [Palin's] service as a small-town mayor." We've heard plenty of "sneering" from McCain's campaign about Obama's relatively short time in national politics (or was that legitimate criticism?).
Friday, August 29, 2008
The recent discussions of the location and foundation of human dignity -- is it primarily inherent in discrete individuals, or is it relationship-oriented? -- are interesting. But it seems to me that the only well founded of Steven Pinker's recent criticisms of dignity was the concept's lack of developed content, its ambiguity on lots of questions. For example, does human dignity forbid, or allow (even require as some say), holding a person responsible with his life for murdering another? To take another, Is dignity defined primarily by autonomy, or by substantive norms of behavior reflecting the highest possibilities of being human? How do we advance on fronts like this? (Admittedly, this is also true of other foundational concepts like "freedom," but to that extent those concepts also are not real helpful except for rhetoric, and need to be analyzed further.) Does answering the question whether dignity is a "way of being human" or a "property of being human" gets us very far on determining what human dignity requires?
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Jim Wallis reports from Australia that in their election of a Labor government last November, a "pivotal" cause was the swing in votes of some evangelicals and pentecostals (see here), based on "new" issues like climate change, global poverty, and the Iraq war and on the presence of an openly religious (Catholic) party leader. Those factors are operating here, although we don't know how strongly and you'd want to compare Obama's specific positions with how Kevin Rudd as PM has handled similar issues.
At any rate, the Australian headline "On a swing and a prayer" is clever.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
I think that Susan and Greg have articulated well the reasons why the proposed boycott at AALS is a bad thing, and they help me put details on my not-fully-articulated question about whether the presence of "market power" makes this wrong. (I think we agree that the boycott is legal -- an exercise of the boycotters' own speech and other freedoms -- except perhaps for Fr. Araujo; I'm not sure how to read his argument that the boycotters "are challenging [Mr. Manchester's] right to exercise his political voice"). I do think we have to be careful about saying that "it's not within [an organization's] nature or purpose" to engage in a given expression of conscience in the marketplace. That's the argument that's used to say landlords shouldn't refuse to rent to unmarried couples, pharmacists shouldn't refuse to dispense Plan B, and federally funded soup-kitchen program shouldn't consider religion in hiring: their purpose, the argument goes, is simply to provide commercial and social services, not to express conscience. But I agree that the presumption should be different when a scholarly organization with a wide membership, i.e. encompassing the whole legal academy in a given subject matter, takes an official stance based on someone's expression of views. Such organizations should have a much stronger ethos of maintaning a neutral stance between people (including their own members) of fundamentally different political views. I was pointing toward something like that with the "market power" question, but the others articulate it much better.
I think Greg is also right to recognize that SALT, which is an an ideologically grounded rather than an umbrella subject-matter organization, presents different questions. In response to Greg's charge that SALT is contradicting its professed commitment to freedom of speech, I imagine SALT would say that if Mr. Manchester's giving his money to a cause based on his belief is speech, then so is their members' withholding their money based on their beliefs.
Now if Mr. Manchester repeatedly expressed racist views, or contributed $125,000 to a constitutional-amendment drive to reverse the right to interracial marriage, would Greg, Susan, et al. respond differently to a proposed boycott? If so, that would bring us back again to the argument, which recurs in all of these disputes, that opposing same-sex marriage and seeking to reflect that opposition in the law, should not be treated the same as racism. There is, at the least, enough room for good-faith debate about this issue that those with whom one disagrees ought not to be marginalized, not just in the academic sphere directly -- this is not a boycott against academic speakers who oppose same-sex marriage -- but in closely related spheres like where to hold a conference. Thus Patrick's post on the same-sex marriage/racism comparison is highly relevant.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
From the National Law Journal (thanks to Mark Scarberry at Pepperdine Law for the pointer):
Organizations representing thousands of legal educators say they will boycott the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting in January if it is held at a San Diego hotel owned by a foe of same-sex marriage. . . .
The groups are the Society of American Law Teachers; the Legal Writing Institute; the AALS Section on Legal Writing Research and Reasoning; and the AALS Section on Teaching Methods. The groups represent as many as 2,500 members.
Several of us here, in varying degrees, emphasize the importance of, prima facie, letting people express their conscience in marketplace actions (landlords renting a few apartments, pharmacies refusing to dispense Plan B) without government interference. We also emphasize the value and inevitability of people acting in groups, not just as isolated individuals. So a boycott like this is legitimate, yes? -- but at what point should a "market power" counterargument kick in?
