A few days ago -- I have been vacationing in Alaska -- Professor Brian Leiter posted a long discussion of the some bloggers' responses to Professor Stone's post, "Religious Rights and Wrongs", about President Bush's stem-cell veto. My Prawfsblawg co-blogger Paul Horwitz and I (link) were among those to whom Professor Leiter responded. I agree with Michael P. that the Leiter post is well worth reading, though I think othershere at MOJ have highlighted some weaknesses or gaps in it.
Responding to my post, Professor Leiter writes:
"Public reasons" are, by hypothesis here, reasons that may properly ground legislation and exercises of state power. The argument that religious reasons are not "public reasons" isn't that they lack a certain kind of foundation that genuine "public reasons" have . . . ; the argument is that they aren't public, i.e., that they aren't the kinds of reasons acceptable to all reasonable people in a pluralistic society. Many "public reasons" in this sense may lack foundations of one kind or another, but that has no bearing on their public status. To put it (a bit too) crudely, reasons are "public" largely in virtue of a head count, not in virtue of their having more robust epistemic foundations. So, contra Professor Garnett, it is not apparent that the the foundations of the beliefs or reasons in question are at issue here.
It sounds to me (and, of course, I could be misunderstanding) that Professor Leiter is not ruling out the possibility that "public reasons" could have "religious" foundations (or, foundations that would widely be regarded as "religious"), or lack "robust epistemic foundations," so long as they were, in fact, widely accepted. Or, would Professor Leiter's view be that "religious" reasons simply are not -- cannot be -- "acceptable to all reasonable people in a pluralistic society," because, in such a society, "reasonable" people do not regard regard "religious" reasons as "acceptable"? Or, is it that a reason that is widely accepted by otherwise "reasonable" people is not, precisely for that reason, "religious"?
In addition, I am afraid it is still not clear to me what, exactly, are the markers of "religious" motivations and reasons. "The Bible says so" and "God told me last night" seem to be easy candidates. But what if my motivation for supporting Policy X is that I believe that Policy X will better secure and respect, say, the dignity and authentic flourishing of human beings? So phrased, this motivation would not, I suspect, be regarded by Professors Stone and Leiter as "religious." But why not? What if, behind this stated motivation, is a view that, really, the reason why "the dignity and authentic flourishing of human beings" is anything other than a fairy-tale construct is because human beings are made and loved by God?
If you have not been on the First Things blog lately, you might want to check it out. Among other things, there is an interesting conversation going on about just-war theory.
Flannery O'Connor died 42 years ago today. Amy Welborn has a post with lots of good links, etc. If you have not read her short stories, or the collection of her letters ("Habit of Being"), you're missing out.
Lisa's post quotes from an Logos article by Lemmons explaining that the masculinity of Christ is necessary, not for his humanitarian mission, but for his gender mission of restoring heterosexual unity. I don't have access to the entire piece, but confess that the quoted portion leaves me puzzled. I must be missing something, but even if original sin "deeply affected the unity of man and women," it is not clear to me why Christ had to be male to restore that unity. Why is it that "[t]he masculinity of Christ is crucial to his mission of remedying the effect of original sin"?
Of course a separate issue is: even if masculinity was crucial to Christ's mission, there is still a leap to saying that masculinity is crucial to a priest's role.
Philosopher R. Mary Hayden Lemmons wrote a very interesting a defense of the all-male priesthood in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, entitled "Equality, Gender, and John Paul II," Logos 5:3 (Summer 2002): 111-130. I don't believe it's available on-line except through "Project Muse", to which your libraries might have a subscription.
Professor Lemmons summarized her arguments a few years ago on the Godspy blog. She begins:
The refusal of the Catholic Church to ordain women as priests has left many feeling that the Church considers women to be inferior to men. They have difficulty reconciling the Church's proclamations of sexual equality with the 1994 papal argument of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. In that document, John Paul II reaffirmed the 1977 teaching of Inter Insigniores and proclaims that the Church lacks the authority to ordain women, since Christ did not appoint women as apostles and since the historical tradition has restricted priestly ordination to men.
These papal arguments have not been very persuasive due to the common conviction that equality requires gender neutrality—even within the ministries of Christ. If this were so, masculinity would be irrelevant for the mission of Christ. But this is not true. The masculinity of Christ is crucial to his mission of remedying the effects of original sin.
According to Genesis, original sin deprived the human race of its original unity with God and deeply affected the original unity of man and woman. As a result, Christ had an humanitarian mission to restore unity with God and a gender mission to restore heterosexual unity. The humanitarian mission required that Christ be fully human and fully God. Accordingly, since women are as human as men, God could have incarnated as a woman. A female Christ could have restored the human race to its original unity with God. It is not Christ's humanitarian mission that required Christ to be male.
Thanks to Larry Solum for his response on whether the secular state can forgive. Here's another response concerning another example of forgiveness in law, from Sam Morison of the Office of the Pardon Attorney at the US Department of Justice. He shares this abstract of his article "The Politics of Grace: On the Moral Justification of Executive Clemency" (on SSRN here):
The retributive critics of the pardon power typically maintain that the institution of executive clemency is little more than an archaic relic of our distant monarchical past, which functions at the mere political whim of the chief executive, and is thus without any substantial rational justification. For these reasons, they argue that it should either be abolished or reformed in order to comport more closely with the procedural requirements of due process and the substantive norms of justice. I argue, however, that the chief executive's discretionary prerogative to grant mercy is best understood, in broadly Kantian terms, as an imperfect duty, namely a duty that assigns to the president a moral end (i.e., to act mercifully by granting clemency in appropriate cases), but one that allows him wide latitude in the time and manner of its fulfillment. As such, he is not (as the critics suggest) under a moral obligation to grant clemency in any particular case or even in all relevantly similar cases, at least in the absence of a clear miscarriage of justice. At the same time, the clemency power is not for that reason beyond the reach of critical moral scrutiny, since it remains a duty that attaches to the office of the chief executive, and he is thus morally accountable for its use (or misuse). In particular, if a chief executive refuses to exercise the clemency power at all, perhaps to insulate himself from potential political criticism for being soft on crime, he would be properly subject to moral condemnation for being merciless.
Today’s Boston Globe had an editorial on Mel Gibson’s DUI and his unacceptable conduct. Here As many other commentators have recently suggested, many celebrities engage in conduct that is deplorable, and Mr. Gibson’s falls within that category. He has twice offered public apologies, the second of which resembles an act of contrition. The ADL has noted this and indicated that this is a step forward, and the ADL looks forward to other positive acts once Mr. Gibson has completed his alcohol rehabilitation. Here The Boston Globe did not offer such a conciliatory note as did the ADL.
After considering the Globe’s editorial for some time, I was curious to see if this paper has in the past scolded other celebrities for their bad behavior when it was directed against Catholics and the Church. While my search has not been completed, I decided to begin with a pursuit for Globe editorials critiquing Sir Elton John’s harsh remarks that he has offered about Catholics and the Church in the past. It appears that the Globe has not commented on his intemperate rhetoric. Perhaps it was because Sir Elton was sober when his remarks were made and Mr. Gibson was not. I wonder if that is the distinction in the Globe’s policy: only intoxicated celebrities who offer bigoted remarks need public chastisement by the Globe.
This raises for me a question about whether the Globe’s editorial was really about Mel Gibson or was it about and directed to something else. I shall continue to ponder this matter, but in the meantime, I resume my search for the Globe editorial(s) on Sir Elton.RJA sj
I may be opening up a hornet's nest here, but perhaps the summer doldrums need a bit of a shake-up. A reader emailed me John Paul II's apostolic letter on the ordination of women, in which he concludes that "in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."
John Paul II's statement appears, at least to my non-expert reading, to suggest that I am in a state of sin if I do not subjectively agree with the position that the Church has no authority to ordain women. This seems to go beyond a call for deference to Church authority, equating a contrary internal conviction on women priests with sin. (In which case, according to the Salon article, 60% of American Catholics are in a state of sin on this issue.) I'm new to this debate, and I still tend to carry a Protestant sensibility on matters of individual conscience, but is this what John Paul II is asserting, or am I misreading him? If I believe that women should be ordained -- or even the less confrontational claim that we should work toward the day when it is possible for women to be ordained -- does that belief itself constitute a sin?
