My colleague and MoJ-er Greg Sisk is interviewed by Christianity Today regarding his empirical work on the success rates of religious liberty litigants.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Sisk on Religious Liberty
What Should the Law Be for a Case Like This?
New York Times
December 20, 2006
A Poet Crusades for the Right to Die His Way
ROME, Dec. 19 — Many patients on respirators are not conscious and so cannot say whether they want to live or die. But Piergiorgio Welby is still full of words, hard and touching ones, that may be changing the way Italy thinks about euthanasia and other choices for the sick to end their own lives.
“I love life, Mr. President,” Mr. Welby, 60, who has battled muscular dystrophy for 40 years, wrote to Italy’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, in September. “Life is the woman who loves you, the wind through your hair, the sun on your face, an evening stroll with a friend.
“Life is also a woman who leaves you, a rainy day, a friend who deceives you. I am neither melancholic nor manic-depressive. I find the idea of dying horrible. But what is left to me is no longer a life.”
Now Mr. Welby’s long drama appears to be nearing its final act. Last weekend, an Italian court denied legal permission for a doctor to sedate him and remove him from his respirator. Fully lucid but losing his capacity to speak and eat, he is deciding whether to appeal or to perform an act of civil disobedience that will kill him.
He is doing so in a very public way. Until a recent steep decline in his condition, he used a little stick to rapidly peck out blog entries with one hand. His book, “Let Me Die,” was just released. Near daily front-page stories chronicle the political, ethical and, with the Catholic Church a vital force here, religious issues his case presents.
“Dear Welby: Wait Before Taking Yourself Off” the respirator, read a front-page headline on Tuesday in La Repubblica, written by a top Italian surgeon, Dr. Ignazio Marino, who is also a senator for the Democrats of the Left. He had visited Mr. Welby the day before.
What has given the case a particular political twist is that Mr. Welby, attached to a respirator for nine years, has long been a spokesman for euthanasia and is a central part of the Radical Party’s effort to have it legalized. In fact, members of the Radical Party have offered to personally remove his respirator if asked — and may do so any day now in a frontal challenge to Italian law.
But the Catholic Church and many of this traditionally minded nation’s politicians on the left and the right not only oppose euthanasia generally but are also not entirely sure what to do about Mr. Welby’s case. He says he is not seeking to commit suicide but to remove himself from medical treatment he does not want.
“It is an unbearable torture,” he wrote two weeks ago.
To decline forced medical treatment is allowed under Italian law, experts say, but Italy has another law that makes it a crime to assist in a death, even with consent. So a doctor could not detach the respirator without risking prosecution.
The church, too, has conflicting teachings about what to do in this case, and what the Vatican thinks has a deep impact not only on the nation’s political class but also on doctors tied to the scores of Catholic-run hospitals around Italy.
The defense of life is central to the social doctrine of the church, and so it opposes abortion and capital punishment. Only last week Pope Benedict XVI reaffirmed his opposition to euthanasia, saying governments should find ways to let the terminally ill “face death with dignity.”
The church also opposes medical treatments to artificially prolong life, but several church officials have worried recently that ending artificial life support could result in de facto euthanasia.
“The problem is to know if we find ourselves truly in front of a case of an artificial prolonging of life,” Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, the Vatican’s top official for health, said in a recent interview with La Repubblica.
Seeing the church as one major obstacle to dying as he wants to, Mr. Welby, a poet and prolific writer, has had little patience with the Vatican’s argument for a “natural end” to life.
“What is natural about a hole in the belly and a pump that fills it with fats and proteins?” he wrote in his letter to the president. The letter was delivered with a video of Mr. Welby in his bed at his home in Rome attached in silence to the respirator, with a laptop at his bedside reading his words in a spooky synthesized voice.
“What is natural about a hole in the windpipe and a pump that blows air into the lungs?” he wrote. “What is natural about a body kept biologically functional with the help of artificial respirators, artificial feed, artificial hydration, artificial intestinal emptying, of death artificially postponed?”
{There is more. To read on, click here.]
Harsh words against tradition and morality
Today's Washington Post carries a highly charged critique against Christians who hold and express traditional moral views especially on sexual matters HERE. The article, entitled "Episcopalians Against Equality" written by Mr. Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post staff, presents a curious view of equality in support of his position. Moreover, his assertions identify as bigots those who disagree with his views. But, his harsh words are not restricted to Episcopalians for he speaks of the Catholic Church's "inimitable backwardness" on matters that are dear to him. In short, his rhetoric should be a source of concern for those who cherish religious liberty in this country and elsewhere. RJA sj
Access v. Excellence
Today's New York Times reports on public universities raising tuition in their quest to be ranked among the elite. To what extent are Catholic universities (and law schools) sacrificing access in order to achieve excellence? And does our conception of excellence make room for our provision of access?
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
PGD with a twist
Now here's a perverse twist on the pro-life news front, from Lifenews.com. On the one hand, I applaud this heartfelt respect for the diversity of the types of lives God offers us as examples of his image. On the other hand, though, I mourn for the selected-out non-disabled embryos presumably not being welcomed by these couples.
Baltimore, MD (LifeNews.com) -- Genetic screening has come under fire from pro-life advocates because parents can use the process to destroy human embryos who carry any disability traits. However, a new study shows that a handful of parents use the screening process to purposefully give birth to children who have disabilities similar to their own.
Scientists at the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University are set to publish an article in an upcoming issue of the journal Fertility and Sterility on the subject.
Their publication will discuss how some parents use pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, to screen for human embryos who have the same flawed genes.
Susannah Baruch and her colleagues, according to a New York Times report, surveyed 190 American PGD clinics and found that three percent of parents intentionally used PGD "to select an embryo for the presence of a disability."
Baruch says some parents don't see the conditions as disabilities or want their children to have an appreciation of the kind of disabilities they endure.
While critics may deride such decisions as intentionally trying to cripple children, it's nothing new.
The Washington Post in 2002 profiled a deaf lesbian couple who set out to have a deaf child by purposefully soliciting a deaf sperm donor.
"A hearing baby would be a blessing," Sharon Duchesneau told the newspaper at the time. "A deaf baby would be a special blessing."
However, some fertility clinics told the Times they find such practices unacceptable.
Robert Stillman of the Shady Grove Fertility Center in Rockville, Maryland, denies allowing parents to screen specifically for deafness or dwarfism.
"In general, one of the prime dictates of parenting is to make a better world for our children," he said. "Dwarfism and deafness are not the norm."
Yury Verlinsky of the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago also refuses such requests and told the newspaper, "If we make a diagnostic tool, the purpose is to avoid disease."
Lisa
Monday, December 18, 2006
The Work of Prophets
From "The Prison Meditations of Father Delp":
"Advent is the time for rousing. Man is shaken to the very depths, so that he may wake up to the truth of himself. The primary condition for a fruitful and rewarding Advent is renunciation, surrender... A shattering awakening; that is the necessary preliminary. Life only begins when the whole framework is shaken.
"...May the Advent figure of St. John the Baptist, the incorruptible herald and teacher in God's name, be no longer a stranger in our own wilderness. Much depends on such symbolic figures in our lives. For how shall we hear if there are none to cry out, none whose voice can rise above the tumult of violence and destruction, the false clamor that deafens us to reality?
"...There is so much despair that cries out for comfort; there is so much faint courage that needs to be reinforced; there is so much perplexity that yearns for reasons and meanings. God's messengers, who have themselvs reaped the fruits of divine seeds even in the darkest hours, know how to wait for the fulness of harvest."
As we continue through this Advent season, let us pray that we recognize God's messengers when they appear to us, and that we be that messenger to others.
Amen!
"Make School Choice a Factor in 2008," writes Edwin Fuelner:
. . . If politicians really want to improve lives, they'll expand -- not shut down -- the school-choice programs that are already helping students from poor families.
Apparently it's never too early to start campaigning, so let's make school choice a critical factor in the 2008 elections.
Robert George on Public Morality
Many of us have blogged and written about the question, "to what extent should the law embody and enforce morality?" Now available over at First Things is Robert George's recent essay, "Public Morality, Public Reason." (This might be worth reading in conjunction with the recent Skeel / Stuntz paper on legal moralism, "Christianity and the (Modest) Rule of Law.) The conclusion:
[F]rom the Catholic vantage point, there is something scandalous in the effort of theorists such as Rawls and Habermas to remove such issues from public debate by arbitrarily restricting reasons on one side of the debate over the nature, dignity, and destiny of the human person. There is nothing “liberal,” “democratic,” “reasonable,” “moral,” or “ethical” about that.
Pope Benedict on secularism and symbols
Catholics cannot accept a vision of secularism "as an exclusion of religion from various society environments and as its exile in the framework of the individual conscience." Benedetto XVI wanted to clarify this in a speech addressed today to the Union of Italian Catholic Law Experts. According to a certain vision, he explained, "secularism would be expressed in the total separation between the Church and State, and the Church would not any role of intervening on topics relating to the life and behaviour of citizens." Plus, he added, "secularism would even bring the exclusion of religious symbols from public places for the carrying out of the political community's functions: from offices, schools, courts, hospitals, prisons." The Pontiff stated, "Today there is talk of secular thought, secular morality, secular science, secular politics." A concept that must be rejected because it is based on "an unreligious vision of life, thought and morality: in other words a vision in which there is no room for God, for a Mystery that transcends pure reason, for a moral law of absolute value that is in effect all the time and in every situation." According to Benedetto XVI, "it is the task of all believers, in particular followers of Christ, to contribute to elaborating a concept of secularism that, on one side, acknowledges to God and its moral law, to Christ and to his Church their place in human life, individual and community, and on the other side, affirms and respects the autonomous legitimacy of worldly situations" that represent "a legitimate need, that not only is postulated by the men of our times, but is also conforming to the wishes of the Creator. In fact, from their condition as creatures, everything receives their consistency, truth, goodness, their own laws and their own order: and everything that men is obligated to respect, by acknowledging the needs of the methods of every single science or art." Ratzinger underlined, "Only if we realize this, we can measure the weight of the problems coming from a term like secularism, which seems to have become almost the qualifying emblem of post-modernity, in particular for modern democracy." To distinguish between secularism and laicism is for Benedetto XVI particularly necessary in "a historic time that is exciting because of the progress that humanity has carried out in many fields of law, culture, communication, sciences and technology. Some people attempt to exclude God from every part of life, presenting him as an antagonist of man." And it is up to Christians "to demonstrate that instead God is love and wants the goodness and happiness of all men," in other words, "to make people understand that the moral law given by God, and that comes to us with the voice of conscience, has the goal of liberating us from evil and making us happy, not to oppress us." The Pope concluded, "We must demonstrate that without God man is lost and that the exclusion of religion from social life, in particular the marginalization of Christianity, ruins the foundations of human coexistence," that "before having a social and political nature it has a moral nature."
Yup.
Perry on Human Rights
Professor Solum has named Michael P's new book, "Toward a Theory of Human Rights," his "Legal Theory Bookworm" download-of-the-week. Congrats to Michael.
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