I had the extraordinary privilege of spending a few days with the Holy See's Delegation to the High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS at the United Nations last week. (In the category of examples of the truth of the adage, "Men plan, God laughs": When I entered Columbia Law School decades ago, I had dreams of a career in international diplomacy, leading to some sort of work at the U.N. I certainly could never have imagined the convoluted career trajectory that started me off as a corporate lawyer lobbying for banks in D.C., to an academic career teaching Contracts and Sales in Minneapolis, and only then actually took me to the U.N. -- as an Advisor to the Holy See.)
Despite my official title, I was doing more observing than advising. One thing that I observed was the tremendous courage of H.E. Archbishop Francis Chullikatt, the Apostolic Nuncio, Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the U.N., and his talented staff, and advisors like Jane Adolphe from Ave Maria School of Law. The constant criticism of the Catholic Church for its position on the use of condoms tends to obscure the fact that the Church provides 25% of the world's care of people living with HIV/AIDS. When you compare the breadth and scope of the Church's position on the needs of people living with HIV/AIDS with the more narrowly-focused, intensely political statements of most of the participants in the conference, the wisdom gained from that hands-on experience is clearly evident. But, still, statements like Archbishop Chullikatt's here, and other similar statements by Professor Adolphe, are often greeted with derision (and even boo's) in this "most civilized" forum for debate.
Here's a taste of some of the battles that the Holy See's delegation has to fight. The earliest drafts of the Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS that was being negotiated at this Meeting referred consistently to "evidence informed" approaches to addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis. The Holy See negotiators consistently recommended changing this to "evidence-based." What's the difference? Take a look at this explanation from UNAIDS' "Terminology Guidelines" (Jan. 2011):
"In the context of research, treatment, and prevention, evidence usually refers to
qualitative and/or quantitative results that have been published in a peer-reviewed
journal. The term ‘evidence-informed’ is preferred to ‘evidence-based’ in recognition of
the fact that several elements may play a role in decision-making, only one of which may
be scientific evidence. Other elements may include cultural appropriateness, concerns
about equity and human rights, feasibility, opportunity costs, etc."
What's at stake? Perhaps the fact that scientific evidence seems to be providing more and more validation of the effectiveness in HIV/AIDS prevention of programs stressing behaviorial changes such as abstinence and fidelity, and the ineffectiveness of prgrams stressing use of condoms? (See, e.g., the work of Edward C. Green, former director of the Harvard AIDS Prevention Project, here and here.)
As I flew home after a couple of days of observing this sort of debate, I felt I really ought to reread Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Thanks to Rick for his recent post highlighting John Breen's fine talk at this last weekend's University Faculty for Life (UFL) conference. The conference was supported by a generous grant from Our Sunday Visitor Institute, and hosted by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, Notre Dame's chapter of University Faculty for Life, and the Notre Dame Fund to Protect Human Life. After all lhe recent controversies concerning Notre Dame and the life issues, it was good to be at Notre Dame with the many members of that community who support the pro-life cause in so many ways.
In addition to John's talk, the conference featured an interesting discussion of the Phoenix abortion case with Father Kevin Flannery SJ and Father Tom Berg, and talks by individuals such as Sam Calhoun, Tom Cavanuagh, Michael New, Teresa Collett, Clarke Forsythe, Mark Rienzi, Bill Saunders, Chris Kaczor, Richard Stith, Gerry Bradley, and John Keown. David Solomon of Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture also gave a wondeful talk when he received UFL's Smith Award for distinguished contributions to pro-life scholarship.
Next year's UFL conference will be on June 1-2, 2012 at BYU.
Richard M.
Scott Yenor has posted "The Family's End" at Public Discourse, tracing the various intellectual threads in the family's demise. An excerpt:
These profound intellectual trends have affected how men and women view themselves and view children and childbearing. The logic of contract has culminated in a triumph of autonomy. The movement to conquer nature promotes greater gender equality as an exercise in autonomy. Institutions buckle things together, suggesting that they have a necessary or salutary relation to one another, and both these trends reflect the modern penchant for separating what institutions once united. Marriage and family life had, among other things, buckled love and marriage, marriage and parenthood, parenthood and sex, marriage and sex, and sex and procreation together. Every modern defender of some family form ends up defending, in one way or another, various connections among these goods; the more radical the critics of the family are, the more buckles they seek to loosen.
Today we face the possibility of the family’s end, in part because of the attractive promise to free us from the buckles that nature seems to place on our freedom. The erosion of these buckles explains, in no small part, the amazing decline in birth rates seen across the Western world. Encapsulating all of these separations in one fell swoop is the move for public recognition for same-sex marriage, as it is the victory of the adult-centered marriage contract to secure whatever goods the adults choose, and is the final detachment of marriage and family life from nature.
I agree that we should be troubled by many aspects of the move from status to contract in family law, and I have argued as much in print (see chapter 9). For a similar argument, you should also check out Mitt Regan's wonderful Alone Together. Though I agree with much of what Yenor writes, the difficulty is trying to explain why and how the marriage and procreation buckle matters. Same-sex marriage keeps the love and marriage, marriage and parenthood, marriage and sex, and parenthood and sex buckles together. Unless it can be shown that same-sex marriages detrimentally impact the quality of the caregiving function, it's hard to make a convincing argument that the loss of the marriage-procreation buckle, standing alone, should determine the public definition of marriage. I'm not addressing all arguments against same-sex marriage; I'm just adopting Yenor's framework and speculating that, of all the buckles that the public seems to care about, the marriage-procreation buckle would appear fairly far down on the list.
Via Larry Solum, I see that John Stinneford has posted a new version of his terrific piece on the issue of excessiveness of punishment as part of the original meaning of the Eighth Amendment. John also discusses the theoretical nature of proportionality as exclusively retributivist (see note 32 and the section beginning at page 961 for John's position w/r/t utilitarian aims -- he basically stakes out a negative retributivist place for proportionality).
For those that do not know John's excellent and interesting work on originalism and the Eighth Amendment, may I also recommend his The Original Meaning of Unusual and his piece on chemical castration, which a couple of my students this last year found helpful as we talked about various kinds of punishment practices -- the possibility of physical castration as punishment is (incredibly, to me) a live one in some states in this country.
Matthew O'Brien and Robert Koons have an interesting and provocative series of posts at Public Discourse on, among other things, natural law, metaphysics, social practices, moral absolutes, and the history of twentieth century Anglo-American moral philosophy that MOJ readers will want to check out (here, here, and here).
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Katherine Stewart writes in today's New York Times that she's terribly upset that the public school (with a red door, no less) she can see from her Upper East Side apartment is hosting Christian worship services on Sundays. Ms. Stewart writes that Good News Club v. Milford Central School "appeared to suggest that keeping religious groups out of schools after hours amounted to discrimination against their religious views." Indeed, Good News Club (and Rosenberger, and Lamb's Chapel) stands for the proposition that where the government maintains a "limited public forum" (such as after-hours use of public school facilities), it cannot single out religion for special disfavor and discrimination. I gather Ms. Stewart disagrees with that line of cases, or at least she agrees with the recent Second Circuit decision that "worship" (because that's an "activity") is readily distinguishable from other forms of speech, which just goes to show that the distinctions among belief-speech-conduct-activity (and "worship") are often arbitrarily drawn in such a way as to favor whomever is making them at the time.
I'm also puzzled by her grievance that the PTA spent $100,000 last year renovating the school building's restrooms, since "my P.T.A. donations should not be used to supply furniture for a religious group that thinks I am bound for hell." This is merely anecdotal, but, as the parent of children in a local public school, it never crossed my mind to wonder whether my donations to the PTA were an endorsement of the views, religious or otherwise, of whatever groups use the public school facilities after my kids come home (and, even if I were as bothered as Ms. Stewart seems to be, I'd worry that such a complaint would pose a state action or standing problem).
