Kevin Doyle lost his job as head of NY state's capital defense office for a really good reason: the state abolished the death penalty. Here is a wonderful interview with him that ranges over many important topics, including (briefly) his own reflections on fighting lymphoma. Kevin spoke and wrote for the St. Thomas Law Journal's symposium several years ago on "The Future of Pro-Life Progressivism." You can download his remarks here. They were witty, tough-minded, compassionate, and wholly and deeply Catholic (his first category of advice: "Don't burn your bridges, but make damn sure you char them"). The same features come through in this interview. Read it for an uplifting reminder, amid all the bickering these days, how many people are out there living the faith powerfully. Thanks and prayers for Kevin.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Former NY Capital Defender Kevin Doyle
O'Callaghan on "Pentecost and the Mandate"
My friend and colleague, John O'Callaghan (Philosophy) has a guest-post up at America called "Pentecost and the Mandate" that is, I think, really good. A bit:
Pentecost reminds us that it is the task of all Christians to leave the rooms in which they huddle in fear of others' thoughts and actions, and despite their failings make manifest the gift that is offered to us all. Today in the United States the freedom to give that gift as the church understands it—a vision of how human life flourishes in caring for the sick, educating the young, feeding the hungry, comforting the dying, and so on—is threatened by those who hold the political and legal power to coerce the lives of citizens and the institutions within which they assemble. The HHS Mandate requires church institutions of any sort, not just Catholic, to act in ways contrary to what they believe is part of that gift they would offer the world. It claims the authority to coerce the lives of Christians precisely as Christians, if they dare to act beyond the walls of their church buildings in concert with and for people who do not share their faith.
Winters responds to Garnett
Here, Michael Sean Winters responds to a recent post of mine about the Smith case. At the end of the day (putting aside the question of how to read Dignitatis humanae), I think the disagreement between Winters and I comes down to (i) whether it is true that it was Justice Scalia, rather than those who ratified the First and Fourteenth Amendments, who is responsible for the rule in Smith and (ii) as a general matter, do we think that the challenging project of accommodating religious objectors to the community's generally applicable laws is one that is best assigned to politically accountable legislatures (who are probably better situated than courts to collect the information necessary for cost-benefit judgments) or to constitutional courts. And, in my view (and in Justice Scalia's), to opt for the former is not, in any way, to disdain religious freedom.
Thanks, of course, to Winters for the detailed response.
McGinnis on Berman
Have a look at John McGinnis's short introductory post on a planned multi-part series on the work of the late great Harold Berman. I had not known that Professor Berman was an expert in the law of the former Soviet Union. Professor McGinnis connects that expertise to Berman's larger historical project.
Bishop Wester responds to Dowd
Here. (HT: Distinctly Catholic.)
In an age of sound-bite journalism, the Catholic Church’s positions on complex issues are often relegated to simplified remarks. While we respect the opinions of others, it is essential to avoid simplifying the current religious liberty debate to the point of distortion, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, unfortunately, did in her May 24 column in The Tribune ("Father doesn’t know best," Opinion).
In an effort to make a case against the church’s objection to the Health and Human Services mandate requiring most religious institutions to offer contraception within their health insurance policies, Dowd ignores complicated First Amendment issues and church teaching to try to paint the Catholic Church as anti-women and abusive. Unfortunately, a column that was ostensibly about a relevant issue ended up as nothing more than a rambling attack on the Catholic Church. . . .
Well said.
Sex-selection abortion ban = anti-Asian?
We are told that today's GOP is becoming a whites-only affair. How did this come to pass? Well, according to Dana Millbank, it's due in part to Republicans' insistence on proposing legislation to ban sex-selection abortions. Such a law, in the view of Rep. Barbara Lee, would "lead to further stigmatization of women, especially Asian Pacific American women." Millbank writes that the problem "is that it's not entirely clear there is a problem" with sex-selection abortion in the U.S. He acknowledges that "[s]ex-selection abortion is a huge tragedy in parts of Asia, but to the extent it's happening in this country, it's mostly among Asian immigrants." I'm not sure I follow Millbank's logic. It's not clear it's a problem in this country, but (or because?) it's happening "mostly among Asian immigrants?" Or does the fact that the practice is concentrated among a particular minority group mean that legislation targeting the practice is inescapably discriminatory? As Millbank puts it, this is "paternalism toward minority groups," and may cause the GOP to "lose Asian Americans."
Perhaps there are other flaws in the proposed legislation (which apparently has little chance of passing the House), but I'm having a very hard time seeing the bill as anti-Asian. If the political community deems a practice morally odious and unacceptable, why does the prudence of its legal prohibition depend on the concentration of its practitioners within a particular racial or immigrant group? We would not hesitate to use law to try to prevent the custom of sati from taking root in the United States -- i.e., a widow throwing herself on her husband's funeral pyre -- even if practitioners tended to be concentrated within immigrant Hindu communities. So why does a bill banning sex-selection abortion automatically become part of the "GOP for whites only" narrative?
Steinfels on "The Bishops and Religious Liberty"
Commonweal is hosting a symposium on the current religious freedom / HHS mandate / lawsuits / Bishops' statement cluster of issues, here. Our own Michael Moreland will be contributing.
Peter Steinfels' opening statement is, as one would expect, thoughtful. The concerns he expresses are, I think, reasonable, even if I do not, in the end, share all of them. I think it is worth noting that, despite his judgment that the Bishops' "campaign is poorly conceived and runs a high risk of harming the very causes it would defend", he acknowledges several times that the "religious employer" exemption contained in the preventive-services mandate is troubling and that the Bishops were and are right to protest it. This exemption is, at present, the law, and there has been no indication that it is going to be changed. It remains as troubling as it was, when it -- for a time -- united "progressive" and "conservative" Catholics in opposition. This exemption is a key target of the recently filed lawsuits, and so I continue to not understand the criticisms -- especially when they come from Catholics and others who see, or at least saw, the objectionable nature of this narrow exemption -- of the recent lawsuits, which were -- as Fr. Jenkins made clear -- filed with regret and only after careful consideration.
I look forward to the other contributions. Given the authors, I expect that they will avoid what I regard as the mistake of presuming partisan aims on the part of those of us who oppose the mandate, agree with the Bishops that religious-freedom is vulnerable and in need of renewed defense at present, and who believe that (unfortunately) this administration's insensitivity to religious freedom has made political and legal responses necessary. I am confident that they, unlike some, will avoid the unhelpful and unfair charge that we are somehow unable to distinguish between real and imaginary threats, or that we fail to appreciate the important distinctions that exist between, say, requirements that one act immorally and requirements that one pay taxes. And, I believe they will resist any temptation to imagine that our concerns about religious liberty generally, or the HHS mandate in particular, reflect an unsophisticated or unthinking failure to appreciate the realities of political life in a pluralistic society.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
From Judge to Priest: A story made for MOJ
A friend passed on this piece , about former judge and now Fr. Tim Corcoran. A really nice read:
. . . He's had a colorful adult life. A stint in the Navy that included combat duty in Vietnam at the same time his career-Marine father served. And his distinguished legal career included a law practice, a 14-year judgeship on the federal bench for the Middle District of Florida and service as a certified mediator.
At age 62, with retirement within his grasp, and the chance to golf and sail and play bridge to his heart's content, he did something most men of a certain age would never consider.
He entered the seminary to become a priest. . . .
Teaching Feminist Legal Theory with a Faith Perspective -- and a free book offer!
This past semester I taught, for the first time, a course in Feminist Legal Theory. I supplemented one of the standard feminist legal theory casebooks with a number of essays by women taking various faith perspectives – Catholic, Lutheran, Muslim, and Jewish -- on feminist issues, including a couple of chapters from Erika Bachichio's edited collection, Women, Sex, and the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching. I also used the draft of a Teaching Guide that the Murphy Institute commissioned from Erika, which keys the relevant chapters of that book to some of the standard feminist jurisprudence casebooks.
I wasn't sure how my class (13 women, 4 men, probably about 1/3 Catholic) would react to the faith perspectives, or how well they would fit a legal theory class. Based both on reactions from my students, and my own observations about the class, the experiment was a great success. As a teacher, the most interested thing I learned was how important it was to have on the table for discussion in class some alternative visions of: (1) what a family is or should be; and (2) what relations between men and women should ideally look like. The perspectives of religious feminists provided some alternatives that could be presented as comparison to the visions presented in the standard texts. Most often, in our classroom discussions focused on what my students personally wanted as an ideal of the family or the type of relationship, what they wanted was something very close to the Catholic vision, no matter where their theoretical commitments might be leading them.
As a scholar interested in feminist legal theory, the most interesting thing I thing I learned from this semester was how often the religious feminists made arguments that sounded an awful lot like the arguments of the Dominance Feminists. I expected to see a lot of convergence with Relational and Care Feminists, and I did see those, but the convergence with Dominance Feminists like Catherine MacKinnon really surprised me.
Erika's Teaching Guide is available for free at the Murphy Institute website, here. It provides some truly meaty background for anyone wishing to provide a Catholic perspective on a multitude of issues addressed not just in feminist legal theory courses, but many course in the law school curriculum: abortion, contraception, marriage, work-life balance, even priesthood. And if you look at the ad on p. 14 of the June/July issue of First Things, you'll see that we're even able to offer a limited number of review copies of the book itself for professors teaching related courses. Contact [email protected] for more information about the free book!
(By the way, the Murphy Institute is planning on commissioning more of these sorts of guides for professors interested in supplementing law school courses with a Catholic perspective, and offering them for free on our web site. If you are interested in writing one on any legal topic, please contact me.)
Religious Freedom Debate in North Dakota
They're really at the cutting edge In North Dakota now: they're awash not only in oil, but also in controversy over religious freedom. A proposed state constitutional amendment, on the ballot for June 12, would adopt for the state the "burden on religious exercise/compelling interest" test already applicable to the federal government through RFRA and to 27 states through statutes or constitutional rules. But the proposal has come under attack from a variety of groups. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which reaches much of the state, suggested in an editorial that the amendment was merely the handiwork, and for the benefit, of Catholic bishops and religious-right activists. So I published this op-ed response in the paper arguing that such measures protect religious liberty even-handedly, and with reasonable limits, for all.
As I've said here before, a great challenge today is to convince citizens of all political stripes that vigorous religious freedom is not just a ploy for the right--because more and more people dismiss it as that--but an inheritance of all Americans and a treasure of our society.
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