http://universityofnotredame.cmail20.com/t/ViewEmail/i/66382942F6F0BB46/6F8708E91B762A132540EF23F30FEDED
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Congratulations (and thanks) to Carter Snead
Catholic Thinkers' Statement against Trump
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/catholic-thinkers-urge-don-t-vote-trump-n533561
Sunday, March 6, 2016
Canada's Catholic hospitals should facilitate assisted suicide or lose government funding?
From the Orwellian "assisted death" in the headline to the national civil liberties group arguing for government power to force violations of religious conscience, this article from The Globe and Mail shows that there is nothing exceptionally American about the impulse to use the spending power of government to impose an orthodoxy of "assisted autonomy."
Friday, March 4, 2016
"Harvard’s role in the movement was in many ways not surprising."
A powerful theme in contemporary constitutional law is the idea of progress. Catholic legal theory both cautions and confounds when one considers what counts as progress in our constitutional order.
Here's one measure of how far we've progressed. A toxic brew of ideas about race, immigration, and crime once held by upper-class Harvard types is now standard fare served up by the presently leading candidate for the Republican nomination. (HT: How Appealing)
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
An opportunity in religious-freedom: Project Manager for "Under Caesar's Sword" at Notre Dame
More information here.
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Statement of Robert P. George and Cornel West on Genocide Against Christians
In the name of decency, humanity, and truth, we call on President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and all members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives to recognize and give public expression to the fact that Christians in Iraq and Syria—along with Yazidis, Turkmen, Shabak, and Shi’a Muslims—are victims of a campaign of genocide being waged against them by ISIS. In pleading that this genocide be recognized and called by its name, we join by Pope Francis, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the European Parliament, and many others. We urge our fellow Americans and all men and women of goodwill everywhere to join us in prayer for those of all faiths who are victims, and in determination to act in the humanitarian and political spheres to aid them and put an end to their victimization.
Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University
Cornel West, Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary and Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies, Emeritus, Princeton University
Troubling report on assisted-suicide in Canada
See the full story here. A bit:
It’s more than a year since the Supreme Court of Canada decided that Canadians have a right under our Charter of Rights and Freedoms to receive physician assistance in dying. Effective June 6, physician-assisted death will be a funded part of medicare. Parliament has until that date to decide precisely who will be eligible, and what safeguards should be in place. The court foresaw it enacting a “complex regulatory regime” of “carefully designed and monitored safeguards.” Unfortunately, the federal report released yesterday recommends exactly the opposite, and proposes the world’s most open-ended regime with arguably the lowest safeguards. . . .
I've long believed that that assisted suicide would fairly quickly move from being permitted, to being encouraged and incentivized, to being (for some) effectively required.
My critique of dignity as autonomy in abortion cases at NRO today
As we await oral argument in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt tomorrow, here are some thoughts on how the Supreme Court (i.e., Justice Kennedy) has made use of the concept of "dignity" as synonymous for autonomy and why it's particularly inapt when it comes to abortion. Here's a bit:
In the abortion context, dignity as autonomy is particularly troublesome. In point of scientific fact, the pregnant woman is simply not autonomous, whatever legal fictions (e.g., “potential life”) the Supreme Court may have conjured up to justify its claims. Indeed, the vulnerability and dependency of another human being weigh on her; this may well be inconvenient and even personally quite burdensome, but were we honest, we would call her to an affirmative duty of care to protect the intrinsic dignity of her developing child. Dignity as autonomy would give way, as it certainly must in this case, to dignity as solidarity, our personal and communal responsibility to care for the vulnerable persons entrusted to us. This is how dignity is best understood in international contexts, and this is how parent–child relationships are best understood in all other contexts of U.S. family law, save abortion. Vulnerability begets responsibility.
And further down:
Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, smitten with Justice Kennedy over the Obergefell decision, recently suggested that the Court’s jurisprudence of dignity is best understood as the weaving together of fundamental-rights due-process jurisprudence with an anti-subordination equal-protection principle — voila, “equal dignity” — ensuring, Tribe hopes, the ultimate “solicitude for vulnerable groups.” Putting aside the obvious application of this putative principle of constitutional law for the most vulnerable of vulnerable groups, unborn human beings, we can see that its alternative application in support of women as a subordinate group would vitiate against abortion as well. If women with children are indeed socially subordinate, which arguably they are, the response of a civilized society ought not be to cast aside the source of the vulnerability when, as here, that source is nothing less than a developing child. It ought instead be to deliberate intelligently about how, on the one hand, to increase cultural esteem and support for care work undertaken disproportionately by women while, on the other hand, not pigeonholing women into that work, since they are capable of that and more. A delicate deliberation, to be sure, but not one facilitated by the judiciary’s dominion over abortion in the past four decades.
Read all of it here.
Monday, February 29, 2016
With Donald Trump, The Wolf Comes as a Wolf
“For some of us, principle and country still matter.”
These words are from Hewlett-Packard chief executive Meg Whitman (Chair of the Finance Committee for Chris Christie for President), when she denounced New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s “astonishing display of political opportunism” in endorsing Donald Trump, a “dishonest demagogue” who “would take America on a dangerous journey.”
The Trump steamroller moves on to Super Tuesday tomorrow. The increasingly desperate campaign to deny Donald Trump the Republican nomination for President has belatedly targeted his scandalous habit of taking unfair advantage of people in his questionable business dealings.
The list of transgressions runs long. Trump tried to use eminent domain and employed construction crews who smashed her windows and set fire to the roof, all in an attempt to bully an elderly woman who refused to surrender her house. Trump wanted to pave the land over for a limousine parking lot alongside his casino. Trump charged students tens of thousands of dollars in “tuition” to a Trump University, while promising students they would have the best professors “handpicked by me” and would learn his secrets to getting rich with real estate. Instead, they got little more than a photo opportunity with a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump.
Moreover, Trump has built much of his financial empire taking advantage of human fallibility, reaping hundreds of millions from lower- and middle-income people who have lost money and sometimes their livelihoods gambling at his network of casinos. Trump commented on his casinos in one of his books: “I’ve never gambled in my life. To me, a gambler is someone who plays slot machines. I prefer to own slot machines. It’s a very good business being the house.” As he later said on his television show: “How much have I made off the casinos? Off the record, a lot.”
And, of course, there is the Trump sleaze. Consider the women exploited at Trump casino strip clubs.
But there are still bigger reasons to fear the prospect of a Trump Presidency:
- Praising and Quoting Dictators: When asked about Russian Dictator Vladimir Putin jailing of his opponents and reporters, Trump says: “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.” Quoting World War II Fascist Dictator Mussolini, Trump tweeted just yesterday “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” When asked about it, Trump insists: “It’s a very good quote. I didn’t know who said it, but what difference does it make if it was Mussolini or somebody else — it’s a very good quote.”
- Creating an Enemies List: Of the Washington Post and New York Times for publishing unfavorable news about him, Trump says only a few days ago: “And believe me, if I become president, oh, do they have problems, they’re gonna have such problems!” Saying of the owner of the Chicago Cubs: “I hear the Rickets family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $’s against me. They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!”
- Promising War Crimes and Torture: During his campaign Trump says: “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.” And to interrogate persons suspected of terrorist acts, Trump says he would “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”
- Advocating a Philosophy of Vengeance: Trump writes in one of his books: “For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back. When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can.”
- Repealing Free Speech Protections for the Press: Trump says: “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”
- Denying Religious Freedom to Minority Religions: While he claims to support religious liberty, Trump does not include everyone. Most notable was his “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” He flirted with requiring Muslim Americans to register with the government.
- Hesitating to Disavow White Supremacists: When asked about the endorsement of him by David Duke, former leader of the KKK just yesterday, Trump responded: “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. If you would send me a list of the groups, I will do research on them and certainly I would disavow if I thought there was something wrong.”
In one of the late Justice Scalia’s most famous passages from his decades on the Supreme Court, he drew upon Christ’s warning in Matthew 7:15 about false prophets who “come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” In this dissenting opinion, Justice Scalia observed that threats to the constitutional separation of powers frequently appear before the Court “clad, so to speak, in sheep’s clothing.” In other words, the potential “to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis.”
Justice Scalia closed with these haunting words: “But this wolf comes as a wolf.”
[Note: I’d prepared this post over the weekend, before Rick Garnett’s response to inquiries from a longtime MoJ reader. For an earlier MoJ post on Trump, see here. Also, in the initial post, I confused the “Whitmans”; Meg Whitman is the one quoted above, while former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whiteman has also said she is “ashamed” of Governor Christie’s endorsement of Trump.]
Robert Maloney on "The Social Nature of Property"
In America, here. Worth a read, though I would have added something about the role that "property" places as a kind of "mediating institution" that can play the important structural role in the social order that other such institutions also play.
Recent Posts
Categories
Monthly Archive
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
