Thursday, April 10, 2008
This new publication, described by Maggie Gallagher, looks like a good resource:
This month iMAPP, in conjunction with the Marriage Law Foundation, is announcing a new monthly e-publication, the "Marriage Law Digest."Edited by Bill Duncan, the Marriage Law Digest aims to provide readable summaries of key legal opinions affecting marriage and family life in the U.S., with links to the opinions themselves where possible.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Having just returned from a few days' vacation, let me second Rick's invitation to Twin Cities-area readers to check out the program we are doing here at St. Thomas Law's Murphy Institute, this coming Monday April 7, concerning the conflicts over interreligious evangelization. In addition to Rick revisiting his excellent paper on "Changing Minds," we'll have a companion address by Ali Khan, a very interesting Islamic law scholar from Washburn Law School in Kansas, and responses from two Twin Cities religious leaders, Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman of the Temple Israel (Reform) synagogue and Wilbur Stone, a professor of global ministry at the evangelical Protestant Bethel Seminary. Speakers from four different religious traditions, offering legal, theological, and pastoral perspectives on what are increasingly viewed, as Rick notes, as matters not only "of piety and zeal, [but] of geopolitical, cultural, and national-security significance as well." Hope to see some of you there, at 4:30 p.m. with a reception following.
Tom
Thursday, March 27, 2008
The California Court of Appeal has granted a rehearing petition in the case in which it held that home-schooling parents must have teacher credentials and rejected any constitutional right to engage in home schooling. The Alliance Defense Fund news release is here. Rick's earlier post on the case is here.
The usual pattern in the past with home-schooling has been that courts have rejected constitutional claims by home schoolers and then the political branches have enacted statutes or regulations protecting them. We'll see if this case ultimately ends up in a court win.
Tom
Monday, March 24, 2008
Although I haven't read Tom Perrotta's novels Little Children and The Election, both made for excellent films (Tracy Flick for vice president!). So Perrotta's new book The Abstinence Teacher, whose plot-instigating device is a high-school sex-ed controversy, might well be worth a read.
Tom
That's what the University of Siena's annual International Law and Religion Summer School offers. I taught there two summers ago, enjoyed spending the week with faculty and students from throughout Europe, and highly recommend the program and the city (including the marvelous frescoes "The Allegories of Good and Bad Government" in the medieval city hall). From this year's notice:
[T]he International Summer School in Law and Religion will take place in Siena, Italy, from June the 18th to June the 22nd 2008. For full information (speakers, registration, fees, deadlines) please report to the official website of the School. This year we will be concentrating on "Women in Law and Religion". Given the importance of the subject in our times and within the international context I hope you will be interested in the event, and inform anyone you deem could be interested.
Tom B.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Christianity Today reports on what the three remaining presidential candidates have said so far concerning the future of funding for faith-based social services and of questions concerning their autonomy. Obama seems the most skeptical, McCain the most positive: no surprise I guess. Obama's comment that "if the federal government starts paying the piper, then they get to call the tune" is (as I've argued here) not a good reason to eliminate the initiative and remove the option to seek funding -- because faith-based organizations also face pressures on their autonomous program decisions if they have to compete with preferentially funded secular providers. The choice whether to participate in funding should be up to the organization.
One interesting comment in the piece:
Jay Hein, current director of the White House's faith-based office, has sought to make the faith-based initiative permanent by expanding it to the state level. According to the White House, 35 governors and more than 100 mayors now have faith-based offices.
"Outside Washington, this is not a partisan issue," said Doug Koopman, a Calvin College political science professor. "Inside Washington, it's identified with President Bush, who is an outspoken evangelical. That edge to it has never gone away."
Tom
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The BBC reports a disturbing ruling in Wales (HT to my colleague Teresa Collett):
A gay Christian who won a claim against the Church of England has been awarded more than £47,000 in compensation.
John Reaney took the Hereford diocesan board of finance to an employment tribunal after his appointment as a youth worker was blocked.
According to an earlier BBC story, Mr. Reaney seemed to be in line for the job but then, in a final-stage interview, the bishop of Hereford asked him a series of questions about whether he could remain celibate outside of marriage as the Church of England's rules require. Reaney's claim was that the bishop wouldn't have asked these questions of a heterosexual applicant, and/or that such an applicant's assurances that s/he could remain celibate would have been accepted. From the current story:
In his evidence to the original tribunal, Bishop Priddis said anyone in a sexual relationship outside marriage would have been rejected.
However the tribunal last month ruled Mr Reaney, who now lives in Cardiff, had been discriminated against "on the grounds of sexual orientation."
There is a distinction between orientation and extramarital conduct as grounds for employment actions; and one might criticize, say, the Catholic Church on theological grounds (as several MOJers have) for rejecting men with a "deeply rooted" homosexual orientation as priests regardless of whether they can convincingly claim a past and future commitment to celibacy. (A counterargument here.) But from what I can see, this case exemplifies why that distinctions should not form the basis for imposing liability on a church for its hiring -- especially for a position that appears pretty pastoral (Mr. Reaney speaks of "numerous young people who have become Christians due to my work and ministry among them"). It looks like there was indeed reason to raise questions about Mr. Reaney's commitment to celibate conduct, since according to the earlier story he had "resigned [a previous youth-worker position] after being asked to choose between his partner and his job." With the prospect of a tribunal deciding after the fact whether any given line of questions was more than a straight applicant in similar circumstances would have faced -- and $100,000 in damages possibly at stake each go-round -- surely a lot of church interviewers will just let the celibacy subject drop. The Hereford diocese spokeswoman puts a brave, but not altogether convincing, face on it when she says:
"We are now aware that when making such an appointment we must make it clear if it is a genuine occupational requirement that the post-holder should believe in and uphold the Christian belief and ideal of marriage, and that sexual relationships are confined to marriage."
Tom
Monday, February 4, 2008
A new blog, "Prez4Life," is developing the fictional narrative of a "pro-life progressive" -- a former Minnesota Democratic senator -- running for president as an independent. It looks interesting, both for its effort at serial blog fiction incorporating real campaign developments, and for the vision it imagines. The author is, at this point, anonymous and unknown to me (despite the reference to the "pro-life progressivism" conference at St. Thomas Law a few years back).
Tom B.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Continuing with the theme of assessing compassionate conservatism -- which, to my knowledge, not one Republican candidate since the long-departed Sam Brownback has given a serious mention (Huckabee offers only occasional stabs, not any coherent policy).... Here's Michael Gerson's perspective on Bush's commitment to the idea (the faith-based initiative, AIDS/malaria funding, etc.), and why the idea hasn't stuck.
Bush has received little attention or thanks for his compassionate reforms. This is less a reflection on him than on the political challenge of compassionate conservatism. The conservative movement gives the president no credit because it views all these priorities -- foreign assistance, a federal role in education, the expansion of an entitlement -- as heresies, worthy of the stake. Liberals and Democrats offer no praise because a desire to help dying Africans, minority students and low-income seniors does not fit the image of Bush's cruelty that they wish to cultivate.
Compassionate conservatism is thus a cause without a constituency -- except for the large-hearted man I first met in 1999 and who, on Monday night, proposed to double global AIDS spending once again.
I agree that Bush deserves credit. But I think it's also undeniable that his focus on compassionate conservatism got crowded out not only by opposition in both parties, but by his focus on fighting terrorism and going to war in Iraq.
Commenters are remarking now on John McCain's lack of interest in any more than a few domestic issues -- and empowering the poor doesn't seem to be one of them. Although maybe global assistance to the needy would trigger McCain's "national greatness" sympathies? A running mate like Brownback could articulate the theme in the campaign, although it seems to require someone as hard-nosed as Dick Cheney to make the vice president's office work as a policy engine.
Tom
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
The reduction in abortions that was reported by the Guttmacher Institute, and Rick's and Eduardo's posts on it, bring me back to the question whether a strengthened social safety net on matters relating to pregnancy, child care and raising, etc., is likely to contribute to reductions in abortions. John Breen's article, "Modesty and Moralism: Justice, Prudence, and Abortion -- A Reply to Skeel and Stuntz," which was noted here a while back, argues that safety-net measures don't help much. John's is a really fine article that thoroughly undermines the claims that prohibitions on abortion won't reduce the numbers and rates. And John supports safety-net measures in themselves, as a matter of justice and solidarity with those in need: but he doubts they will have much effect on abortions.
On the last score, I think that there is a flaw in John's argument. He bases the argument on the fact that although Western European nations have more developed safety nets than America, abortion ratios -- abortions per 100 pregnancies -- are not much lower in Western Europe (although they are somewhat lower). But the argument doesn't take into account the fact that belief in the immorality of abortion appears to be significantly less widespread or deep in Western Europe than in America. In that context it seems to me striking that European abortion ratios are nevertheless lower at all than America's, and that the stronger European safety nets could be having a significant effect.
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