Mirror of Justice

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

The March for Life

Yesterday several hundred thousand Americans Marched for Life in Washington, DC to mark the 38th anniversary of the Supreme Court's tragic rulings in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. I attended the March with a delegation of Princeton students and recent alumni. There were fifty of us this year---our number depressed a bit by the fact that our campus Evangelical fellowships were holding their annual religious retreats this week (which happens to be the break between semesters at Princeton). Still, we were pleased to join with so many of our fellow citizens to bear witness to the sanctity of human life and to peaceably assemble to petition the (judicial branch of) government for the redress of grievances.

Among the many heartening features of the March was the tremendous number of young people who participated. The crowd was filled with high school and college students. Many of them wore a button saying: "I'm pro-life. Ask me why?" They were ready, willing, and able to make the argument for honoring the dignity and right to life of human beings at every stage of development and in every condition. It was impossible for me not to think back to the mid-1970s, when we were told that the full acceptance of abortion was 'inevitable.' Young people, pro-choice activists said, don't share the old "hang ups" about abortion---they will grow up taking abortion for granted as a great boon for society and as essential to women's equality and freedom.

Well, things didn't turn out that way.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Garnett at the University of Virginia on "Positive Secularism"

By Rick Garnett

An update from the shamelessness desk: On February 4, I'll be giving a lecture at the University of Virginia's St. Anselm Institute called "Positive Secularism: Understanding the Separation of Church and State." More here, and here:

Prof. Garnett's public lecture will develop the idea of "positive secularism" as a lens for viewing the customary separation of church and state in the United States. Pope Benedict XVI and others have expressed their admiration for the "American model" of religious freedom and church-state relations in which government respects both the role of religious arguments and commitments in the public square and the important distinction between religious and political authorities. This model is "secular" in the sense that laws and policies are not supplied or implemented directly by religious authority; it is "positive" in that the understanding of human flourishing it is designed to promote protects the freedoms of religious practice, the search for religious truth, and the sanctity of religious conscience. The American experiment in religious liberty and the principle of church-state "separation" should, therefore, be seen and celebrated as part of an attempt to secure religious liberty and authentic human flourishing through constitutional limits on governmental interference and constitutional protection of the profession and practice of faith.

Proximity and Political Community

By Rob Vischer

Jeremy Waldron's new paper, The Principle of Proximity, might be of interest to MoJers. He argues that physical proximity should be the basis of political community, rather than other shared cultural or historical attributes. I haven't read the paper, but it seems to thin out the notion of community, or at least cleanly separate political community from other more culturally rooted dimensions of community. The Church has spoken of the need to respect the judgments and traditions of political communities, but I seem to recall that those discussions are usually wrapped up with thicker senses of community, no? I'm not sure if the level of respect or deference changes if it's all about physical proximity in the end. In any event, here's the abstract:

How should we think about, how should we model the basis of political community. To the extent that it is a matter of choice, what should be the basis on which the people of the world divide themselves up into distinct political communities. This paper seeks to cast doubt on the proposition that it is a good idea for people to form a political community exclusively with those who share with them some affinity or trust based on culture, language, religion, or ethnicity. I want to cast doubt on that proposition by articulating an alternative approach to the formation of political communities, which I shall call the principle of proximity. People should form political communities with those who are close to them in physical space, particularly those close to them whom they are otherwise like to fight or to be at odds with. This principle is rooted in the political philosophies of Hobbes and Kant. The suggestion is that we are likely to have our most frequent and most densely variegated conflicts with those with whom we are (in Kant’s words) “unavoidably side by side”, and the management of those conflicts requires not just law (which in principle can regulate even distant conflicts) but law organized densely and with great complexity under the auspices of a state. The paper outlines and discusses the proximity principle, and the conception of law and state that it involves, and defends it against the criticism that it underestimates the importance of pre-existing trust in the formation of political communities.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Obama on . . . um . . . what shall we call it? Oh yes, let's say "reproductive choice"

By Robert George

It is hard to say what was worst about President Obama's statement on the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Was it his silence on the plight of the tiny victim whose limbs are torn off, or whose skin is burned off, or the base of whose skull is pierced and whose brain is suctioned out, with the precise of objective of ending his or her life? Was it his reliance on tired (and increasingly futile) euphemisms such as "reproductive choice" to shuffle the victim out of view? Was it his glaring unwillingness even to say the word "abortion" -- a word not mentioned at all in his encomium to the Supreme Court decision that manufactured a constitutional right to it? Or was it--taking these things all together--President Obama's betrayal of his own call, at Notre Dame, for "open hearts, open minds, and fair-minded words" in the debate about abortion?

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Lest we forget...

By Robert John Araujo, SJ

Lest we forget, today is the thirty-eighth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Many Americans—as well as others—will commemorate in some fashion this landmark decision. Some will celebrate, but others will mourn. I find myself in the latter category. Why?

First of all as I reread the decision penned by Justice Blackmun, I realize that he did not, contrary to the opinion of others, answer the question he posed about the personhood and the humanity of the unborn. As lawyers, we know that the use of language is important to the position we argue and then seek to justify. In a manner of speaking, Justice Blackmun posed the question about the status of the unborn, but he dodged the bullet when the trigger was pulled when he said, “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” (Italics added)

In spite of the fact that there may not have been consensus in 1973, Justice Blackmun was in a position to answer the question then just as we are today. Consensus is not essential to answer any difficult issue. Facts and objective reason, on the other hand, are crucial to the task. And what do the facts state: that the fertilized ovum is a new human. On that point, it is worth reflecting that each one of us was in this precise state in the earliest moment of our human existence. While in our mother, we were not simply of our mother. We were us and no other. We were different. We were separate. We were human. We were new. Objective reason helps us to understand these facts and to comprehend their significance about the meaning of being human and being person.

If consensus was not essential to specify: why separate was not equal, viz. Justice Harlan in Plessy; why it was wrong to conclude that “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes...Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” viz. Justice Butler in Buck v. Bell, consensus is surely not needed to conclude that a child in utero is, in fact and in reason, a member of the human family, new and distinct from the mother and father—or the donors of genetic material, if you prefer.

Let us not forget this. Then we might be in a far better position to help not only the woman who finds herself pregnant and in some difficulty but also the child whom she carries in her womb whose continued existence is also at stake if arguments based on “privacy” or “equality” or something else lead some to justify that his or her life may be destroyed.

RJA sj

US Bishops to review implementation of Ex Corde

By Richard Myers

The US Bishops just announced a review of the implementation of Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Here. Ex Corde was promulgated in 1990 and then a mere 11 years later the "Application" became effective in the United States. The review will involve meetings between local bishops and the presidents of Catholic colleges and universities. These conversations will then provide the basis for further discussion among the US bishops towards the end of 2011.

It will be interesting to see if the recent action by Bishop Olmstead to remove the Catholc label from a Phoenix hospital that engaged in many practices inconsistent with Church teaching will spill over into the discussion of Ex Corde.

Richard M.

"Retributivism: Essays on Theory and Policy"

By Marc DeGirolami

Here's the Amazon page for a volume on retribution (edited by the generous Mark White) in criminal law that can be enjoyed by the voracious consumer of criminal theory and the curious dilettante alike. And here's the Oxford page -- contributions by important names in the theory of punishment (R.A. Duff, Jeffrie Murphy, Thom Brooks, Gerald Gaus, Dan Markel, and many other terrific people). And I've got a chapter in here too on retribution and the choice of evils!

Release date not until April, but you may want to pre-order, as nothing says Happy Easter like a volume on retribution. [Ok, maybe not the tightest fit, but, really, who doesn't get a warm feeling inside at the thought of retribution?]

The Moral "Meaning" of Literature: Or Of Oil and Water

By Marc DeGirolami

The New York Times has a review of this unusual book by philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, in which the argument seems to be made (I have not read the book entirely, only in fragments) that reading some of the great works of Western literature can help us "find meaning" in a post-monotheistic age.

Naturally, and as the review points up, that will mean that it will have little to say for those who haven't made this important advancement. And the review is also useful in describing what is a truly strange reading of Homer. The Greeks were "less reflective" than we are and so, without thinking deeply, they celebrated the "excellence" of war in exactly the same manner as they celebrated a really good tragedy. Odysseus "is a prototype of modern ambivalence" because just like modern man, apparently, he cheats on his wife but wants the home life too. If this is really the authors' interpretation of the Odyssey, one which the reviewer calls "incandescent," then I wonder how Dante, who gets tossed in there somewhere too, gets treated. Perhaps an analogy can be made to some sort of contemporary redemption story. Dante is just like Michael Downey, Jr. Dante is truly the forerunner of Ben Roethlisberger (from the review: the authors "repeatedly turn to mass sports events, which they see as providing a primary sense of community and meaning in contemporary America").

But the real problem with this sort of book may be neither the secular presumptions nor the crudely tendentious readings, but something much, much worse -- the idea that literature can be read as a unitary, one-thread story, and that it can be used to achieve or "recapture" some sort of mystical pomo ethic -- the call of the gods experienced as a rushing "whoosh" (the authors think that's what we feel when President Obama speaks) -- in our "nihilistic" world. Mon Dieu! "Moral" readings of literature are nothing new, and some philosophers are well known for the suggestion that literature can improve one's moral hygiene. I find those views deeply unpersuasive, but this seems to be a further step in the evolution of this view of literature. It's the view that literature has a unitary moral message to impart -- that the "meaning of it all" can be discerned from this reduction -- and that it can be used strategically to fill whatever void "secular" man needs filling.

As I said, I haven't read the book in its entirety, so perhaps these remarks are too strong. But, and setting aside the important and interesting field of aesthetics (philosophers, is it still going strong?), perhaps philosophy and literature would do better by mindfully keeping their mutual distance.

ADDENDUM: Since there was a bit of talk in the review about the authors' view that reading literature can be a way to overcome contemporary "alienation," this quote from a piece by Mark Lilla some time back is worth reproducing: "[T]he aim of any liberal education worthy of the name is to transport students out of the world they live in, making them less certain about what is valuable in life. It does not seek to overcome alienation, it tries to induce it."

Friday, January 21, 2011

A lesson from Philadelphia

By Robert George

Rick has called our attention to the case of Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who has been arrested and is facing prosecution for the murder of babies whom he delivered during the sixth, seventh, and eighth months of pregnancy then killed by a procedure he called "snipping": inserting scissors into the back of their necks and cutting their spinal cords.

Although Gosnell kept poor records, District Attorney Seth Williams estimates that he performed the procedure hundreds of times. Rather than dismembering the child in the womb and extracting his or her body parts, which is what is done in a typical abortion, Gosnell's procedure for late term babies was to induce delivery and then kill the children with a quick snip.

People seem to be shocked. One wonders why. For more than forty years, supporters of abortion (occupying the commanding heights of the culture and owning one of the two major political parties) have been promoting the idea that a "fetus" is not a human being with dignity or rights that anyone else need respect, and that a woman has a fundamental constitutional right to "choose" whether to terminate the life of a fetus she has conceived. They have praised abortionists and and abortion facilitators and providers such as Planned Parenthood for protecting women's freedom. They have virulently opposed legislation to protect developing human beings from abortion. President Obama, while serving in the Illinois state legislature, famously opposed legislation to protect children born alive after an attempted abortion, saying that it would "burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion." Is it really such a big surprise that a doctor who bought this line would set up shop as an abortionist and perform what have come to be known as "live birth abortions"? Is it unfathomable that he can't see the moral difference between killing a child in the womb and killing the same child at the same stage of development outside the womb? Hmmmm . . . . Come to think of it, just what is the difference?

When Jared Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the editors of the New York Times, and others were quick to lay the blame on a "climate of hostility" and on those (such as Sarah Palin) allegedly responsible for creating it. Their case fell apart as facts about Loughner, including his political opinions, came to light. As it happens, many of them ardently and outspokenly favor legal abortion and oppose meaningful restrictions at any point in gestation. One wonders how they would respond if those they attempted to smear turned the tables on them in light of the Gosnell case, saying something along the following lines:

"I blame Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Keith Olbermann, the editors of the New York Times, and others who have advanced the cause of abortion in our culture and politics. Their rhetoric ("fetus," "products of conception," etc.) callously denying the humanity of the child in the womb, and their fierce opposition to any sort of meaningful legal protection against abortion, are responsible for creating a climate of contempt for human life that made Gosnell's actions virtually inevitable. Tell me, when you heard the terrible news from Philadelphia, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen? Count me in the latter camp. And by the way, do you think we can guess whether the doctor is registered as a Democrat or Republican? I wonder how many times he has visited the website of the Daily Kos? Do you think he watches Fox News or MSNBC? Do you suppose he voted for McCain or Obama?"

Now, I don't want our political discourse to be conducted in this manner. It is not good for the health of our democracy. So I am not urging Sarah Palin or the conservative talk radio hosts who were smeared alongside her to turn the tables on their critics in this way. In fact, I urge them not to. (My advice to them is to condemn, not copy, their opponents' tactics.) My point is that those who seized on what happened in Arizona to attempt to smear their political opponents would scarcely be in a position to complain if their opponents now deployed their tactics against them. And there is a lesson for them, and for all of us, in that.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

On not "getting" Sargent Shriver

By Rick Garnett

A good post from the Get Religion blog on the unfortunate habit of those who write admiringly of Sargent Shriver to neglect his pro-life commitments. Ross Douthat, in his 2009 op-ed, "A Different Kind of Liberal", made a similar point (commenting on the death of Shriver's wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver):

Only 13 days separated the passing of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics, from the death of her brother Ted last week. But amid the wall-to-wall coverage and the stream of retrospectives for the senior senator from Massachusetts, it was easy to forget that he wasn’t the only famous Kennedy sibling to enter eternity this month.

Liberalism’s most important legislator probably merited a more extended send-off than his sister. But there’s a sense in which his life’s work and Eunice’s deserve to be remembered together — for what their legacies had in common, and for what ultimately separated them.

What the siblings shared — in addition to the grace, rare among Kennedys, of a ripe old age and a peaceful death — was a passionate liberalism and an abiding Roman Catholic faith. These two commitments were intertwined: Ted Kennedy’s tireless efforts on issues like health care, education and immigration were explicitly rooted in Catholic social teaching, and so was his sister’s lifelong labor on behalf of the physically and mentally impaired.

What separated them was abortion.

Along with her husband, Sargent Shriver, Eunice belonged to America’s dwindling population of outspoken pro-life liberals. Like her church, she saw a continuity, rather than a contradiction, between championing the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed and protecting unborn human life. . . .