Monday, February 25, 2013
I'll be giving a short talk at the Catholic Lawyers Guild of New York this Friday, March 1, at the kind invitation of Robert Crotty. Mass is at 7:45, there is a little light breakfast thereafter, and then I'll offer some thoughts about the HHS contraceptives mandate, after which we'll talk together.
The location is the Church of Our Saviour, 59 Park Avenue (Park Avenue at 38th Street). Please stop in and say hello.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Speaking of Supreme Court precedent and the cause of human life in the courts, the meaningful success of the Pro-Life movement since the darkest days of Roe v. Wade is now confirmed out of the mouth of one of its strongest adversaries. In a January issue of The National Law Journal, Roger Evans who has been lead counsel or co-counsel for Planned Parenthood in many of the leading Supreme Court cases explains how much the jurisprudential landscape has changed –- against the abortion provider position -– in the decades since Roe v. Wade:
I think it clear that the courts have weakened the doctrinal protections of this right. Indeed, outside the political context, I think we can no longer refer just to Roe, but must refer to Roe/Casey, recognizing that Planned Parenthood v. Casey changed significantly the judicial analysis applicable to this area of the law. Roe/Casey is characterized by increasing deference to so-called state interests at the expense both of the woman's individual liberty interests and of the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship at least in the context of abortion care.
As Time magazine has recently reported (here), “abortion-rights activists” have been slowly and steadily but almost always losing ever since their victory in Roe v. Wade some forty years ago. Now is not the time for Pro-Life advocates to lose heart, heed the nay-sayers, and withdraw from the battle, lest we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
According to this editorial in the Virginia Pilot, a bill that would prohibit (more here, at Religion Clause) public institutions, that recognize student organizations generally, to discriminate against groups that exercise their right to "determine that ordering the organization's internal affairs, selecting the organization's leaders and members, defining the organization's doctrines, and resolving the organization's disputes are in furtherance of the organization's religious or political mission and that only persons committed to that mission should conduct such activities" is itself "discriminatory" and should be rejected. According to the Pilot, "[t]axpayers should not be required to support groups that don't open membership to all classes of taxpayers. Such groups are permitted to exist, but if the groups demand purity through exclusivity, they should do so on their members' own dimes."
In my view, the expressed concern about "taxpayers" is something of a red herring. The issue here (as in the Christian Legal Society case) is one of recognition and equal access; any financial "subsidization" is almost certainly de minimis. The bigger problem with the Pilot's complaint -- as I try to explain in this paper -- is that there isn't necessarily anything wrong (there isn't necessarily any reason for "taxpayers" to worry) with groups "discriminating" or being "exclusive" in their membership.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
George Weigel writes, in the Wall Street Journal, about what we should hope the Holy Spirit gives us with the next Pope:
A radically converted Christian disciple who believes that Jesus Christ really is the answer to the question that is every human life. An experienced pastor with the courage to be Catholic and the winsomeness to make robust orthodoxy exciting. A leader who is not afraid to straighten out the disastrous condition of the Roman Curia, so that the Vatican bureaucracy becomes an instrument of the New Evangelization, not an impediment to it.
The shoes of the fisherman are large shoes to fill.
Large indeed!
That noted bleeding-heart-lefty, George Will, has a very powerful column today, challenging the widespread practice of solitary confinement in America's prisons:
In 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court said of solitary confinement essentially what Dickens had said: “A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide.” Americans should be roused against this by decency — and prudence.
Mass incarceration is expensive (California spends almost twice as much on prisons as on universities) and solitary confinement costs, on average, three times as much per inmate as in normal prisons. And remember: Most persons now in solitary confinement will someday be back on America’s streets, some of them rendered psychotic by what are called correctional institutions.
It appears that a bill to repeal the death penalty in Maryland is advancing, and is likely to -- eventually -- be enacted into law. Good. The death penalty is constitutionally permissible, and it is not the job of judges to abolish or undermine it. But, it should be rejected, by us, for the reasons set out by Archbishop William Lori (you know, that "conservative" who, some imagine, has been speaking out forcefully about the importance of religious freedom for merely "partisan" reasons):
There are many worthy arguments against the death penalty regarding bias in
its application, its ineffectiveness as a deterrent, its costliness, and the
emotional toll of death penalty proceedings on victims. As a faith community,
however, our perspective goes beyond these issues. While those who have done
terrible harm to others deserve punishment, we urge a response that meets evil
with a justice worthy of our best nature as human beings, enlightened by faith
in the possibility of redemption and forgiveness.
As the bishops of the United States have consistently said, “We oppose
capital punishment not just for what it does to those guilty of horrible crimes,
but for what it does to all of us as a society. … We cannot overcome crime by
simply executing criminals, nor can we restore the lives of the innocent by
ending the lives of those convicted of their murders. The death penalty offers
the tragic illusion that we can defend life by taking life.”
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