Friday, September 3, 2010
Torture and littering
David Luban reminds us of what is at stake when judges find a word's meaning to be clear (or not so clear).
Where's the love?
Wheaton College prof Alan Jacobs has a thoughtful reflection on the righteous indignation that pervades the Internet:
A now-famous cartoon on the xkcd “webcomics” site shows a stick figure typing away at his computer keyboard as a voice from outside the frame says, “Are you coming to bed?” The figure replies: “I can’t. This is important. . . . Someone is wrong on the Internet.” I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues. . . .
[A]s we have come to focus our attention ever more on politics and the arts of public justice, we have increasingly defined our private, familial, and communal lives in similar terms. The pursuit of justice has come to define acts and experiences that once were governed largely by other virtues. It is this particular transformation that Wendell Berry was lamenting when he wrote, “Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.” That is, it has become a matter of justice rather than of love, an assertion of rights rather than a self-giving.
This same logic governs our responses to one another on the Internet. We clothe ourselves in the manifest justice of our favorite causes, and so clothed we cannot help being righteous (“Someone is wrong on the Internet”). In our online debates, we not only fail to cultivate charity and humility, we come to think of them as vices: forms of weakness that compromise our advocacy. And so we go forth to war with one another.
Comments are open. Let the love flow!
Amazing Grace
I am at the Political Science conference. I attended a panel on a forthcoming book on the sociology of religion by Robert Putnam and Robert Campbell called American Grace. Suffice it to say it will be a must read for us all: a long book packed with findings and insight about religion in America. One of the disturbing findings (at least to me) is that politics determines one’s religious beliefs, not the other way around. I wondered if a primary conception of God as loving or one of judgment (of course, the two are not mutually exclusive could explain a significant portion of the difference in attitudes). Putnam said they asked and it explained very little (though I think those differences might be important factors in people’s minds with different views as to what it means to be a God of love).
Putnam did say that the love/judgment attitude about God is related to trust. If you regard God primarily as a God of love, you are more likely to trust people; less so if you regard God primarily as a God of judgment.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Save the Date - Sixth Annual Conference on Catholic Legal Thought
Mark your calendars! The Sixth Annual Conference on Catholic Legal Thought will be held at the University of Oklahoma College of Law May 17-19, 2011. I am pleased to announce that Paul Griffiths, Warren Professor of Catholic Thought at Duke University and Steven Smith, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego are confirmed as the two featured speakers.
The conference is designed primarily for those faculty who currently teach or have an interest in teaching courses in Catholic Social Thought or Catholic Legal Theory as well as those whose scholarly work involves a direct engagement with the Catholic and more broadly Christian intellectual tradition.
More details will follow as we get closer to the time of the conference.
In the meantime, if you have questions, I can be reached at [email protected]
Sex and the Dodd-Frank Act
A commentary by Margaret Brooks in today's Chronicle of Higher Education, "Sex Week" Should Arouse Caution Most of All, points out the most powerful cultural force promulgating the permissive sexual norms that concern Rob and Bob -- the sex industry. And this force isn't contained by controlling our kids' access to cable and MTV. Here's her description of what's happening on our college campuses:
In recent years, weeklong programs dubbed Sex Week were held at institutions including Brown, Northwestern, and Yale Universities and the University of Kentucky. Student groups, not administrators, organized the programs. The events, billed as educational, used the universities' names and facilities. They were open to everyone, including the outside community. . . . Judging from the program descriptions, the emphasis of most Sex Week programming seems to be more on providing entertainment and promoting pleasure, rather than teaching students about sexual health and safety. While some sessions covered topics like women's health and sex trafficking, others featured such offerings as pornographic-film screenings; a lingerie show using college students as models; and a topless porn star demonstrating bondage, discipline, dominance, and submission to a student audience.
And here's her description of whose backing up the 'student organizers':
Sex-industry representatives were significantly involved in many of the programs and sponsorships, along with contributions from nonprofit groups such as the Kinsey Institute and Planned Parenthood. . . .
Make no mistake about it—adult stores and sex-toy companies are actively seeking access to students through campus resources. Not only do such academic connections boost their corporate credibility, they also provide opportunities for sex-toy companies to market to young people through raffle donations and direct financial sponsorship. Some companies seek direct opportunities for their representatives to teach sex-toy workshops on campuses. Many event promoters working for such companies are using social media like Twitter and Facebook to communicate directly with student leaders, negotiate sponsorship deals, and advertise scheduled events.
Now, here's my question -- and bear with me, it's sort of a twist away from porn, but I've spent much of my summer reading through the 100s of pages of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It's so easy for society to identify and condemn the profit motives underlying the role of the "big banks" in the current financial crisis, and to rally behind legislative reforms aimed at curbing the profits of the banking industry in order to protect the "little guys" -- the citizens, the consumers. How does the sex industry get away with hiding its profit motives behind screens like "health concerns", "privacy", "autonomy", and obscuring the role of its own profit motives in the social crisis that Rob and Bob identify?
By the way, there's a new book just out by Pauline Books and Media, Women, Sex, and the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching (ed. Erika Bachiochi) with two extremely strong chapters presenting the strong positive, feminist case against the currently prevailing norms of promiscuity: Cassandra Hough's "The Fullness of Sexuality: Church Teaching on Premarital Sex", and Jennifer Roback Morse's "The Liberation of Lifelong Love: Church Teaching on Marriage." (Full disclosure: it also includes a chapter by me: "Dueling Vocations: Managing the Tensions between our Private and Public Callings", which you can read for free here.)
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Religious-freedom-in-hiring update
An excerpt from this story:
"More than 100 religious organizations are urging members of Congress to reject pending legislation that would prohibit them from considering religion when hiring . . .
"The law has long protected the religious freedom of both the people who receive government-funded services, and the groups that provide the services – long before President Obama, and long before President Bush," said Anthony R. Picarello Jr., general counsel of USCCB, in a statement. "Stripping away the religious hiring rights of religious service providers violates the principle of religious freedom, and represents bad practice in the delivery of social services."
The groups are protesting a provision in HR 5466 – a bill introduce in the House in May that would reauthorize federal substance abuse treatment funding that is administered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. . . .
Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Michigan law school and a constitutional scholar, reiterated those rights in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., on behalf of the religious groups.
"Does government substantially burden the exercise of religion, within the meaning of RFRA, when it offers monetary grants on condition that a religious organization abandon one of its religious practices?" Laycock wrote. "Yes it does."
Notably, most of the organizations represented in the letter to members of Congress do not accept federal grants. But they contend that the legislation could affect their continued ability to be able to hire people of like-minded faith.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The development of norms that promote the virtuous person
Thanks to Rob for his posting entitled “The disappearing social stigma of STDs.” Like Rob, I am astounded by the attitudes that accept the practices regarding not only our children, but adults, and the surrounding culture in which we live.
Some might say that I am arguing from a particular moral—and perhaps antiquated—perspective. Sin involving sexual activity has been around for a long time. But something new is added to the mix when a major voice in contemporary culture offers rewards for that which physically and morally endangers every member of our society who lives the life that the culture exhorts.
Does the law have a role in any of this? More relevant to the project of this group, does Catholic legal theory have a part to play? My brief answer today to both of these questions is in the affirmative. Does it mean one could pursue what others might consider draconian, puritanical measures and have them incorporated into the civil law? Perhaps, but at this point I think something far more enduring and far more Christ-like is in order.
Rob concludes his post with a critical comment about the presence and wide acceptance of “increasingly permissive sexual norms.” Well, there it is: there are norms regarding the attitudes about casual sex amongst youth and adults alike. So, if there are permissive norms, could alternative norms be proposed as an antidote? It think so, and I suggest that this is where Catholic legal theory plays a role.
I submit that an alternative to increasingly permissive norms that accentuate the exaggerated autonomy of persons that can quickly lead to their harm, i.e., sexually transmitted diseases, have existed and still exist today. These norms are neither punitive nor draconian. Rather, on the other hand, they are designed to cultivate the virtuous person who can be a role model for others. I have been thinking hard about what are role models the contemporary culture presents to youth and adults alike. Are there any? It seems that the role model is the individual of any person—famous or otherwise—whose portrait can nicely fit into the “model” of the anti-hero who is restrained by nothing when it comes to sexual activity. But what if the society and its laws were to cultivate a counterpoint to this? Let’s say that there were social and legal norms cultivated by families, schools, cities, states, and the nation that substituted the model of exaggerated autonomy with that of the noble person who understands the significance of and practices forbearance or temperance, prudence, and fortitude regarding promiscuous sex. What would the existing popular culture say to that? Well, one thing is certain: it would have to acknowledge in some fashion that there is competition for what the contemporary culture can promote. And, I would say that this competition would be most welcome for us and for our posterity.
RJA sj
The disappearing social stigma of STDs
I am not at all opposed to sexually active teenagers getting tested for STDs. (I'm pretty sure that sentence has never begun a post on MoJ.) I am troubled, though, that casual sex is such an accepted part of our youth culture -- a youth culture that is shaped in many ways by adults -- that MTV is running a sweepstakes in which prizes are given for announcing your presence at an STD clinic to all your social media contacts on Foursquare. Much of the social stigma associated with STDs, I have always assumed, is not just that you contracted one, but that you were engaged in behavior that potentially exposed you to one. Even accounting for the different social expectations of young men and young women when it comes to sexual "conquests," I would find it jolting to find a teenager who considered it a badge of honor worthy of proclamation to the world that he finds himself in the position of needing to visit the clinic. I find this development to be a fascinating (in a car-crash sort of way) snapshot into the confluence of diminishing private/public boundaries and increasingly permissive sexual norms.
Retribution and Capital Punishment
Thom Brooks has posted a short paper laying out a retributivist argument for rejecting the retributivist justification of the death penalty. His argument is epistemological; it does not rely on the notion that capital punishment is not proportionate to murder or that it constitutes cruel or unusual punishment. Here's an excerpt:
A determination of punishable desert may be substantially a determination concerning the state of mind of another. We cannot read the minds of others, but we can bear witness to their actions against an explanatory narrative that may give us some insight into why another did what they did. The claim here is not that we can never grasp guilt, but that our certainty is always in doubt. This does not mean that retributivism cannot justify punishment because it can offer us ‘no perfectly just judgements’. However, it would mean that capital punishment is especially problematic. When we impose capital punishment on a convicted murderer, there cannot be room for error as the murderer can never be brought back to life afterwards. If there remains a substantial risk of error demonstrated by advances in scientific testing in cases where a person has been sentenced in a fair trial beyond reasonable doubt, then we have good reason on retributivist grounds to reject capital punishment in favour of an alternative sanction.
Should Sarah Palin thank Ruth Bader Ginsburg? (And can CLT help her do so?)
I don't always agree with Dahlia Lithwick, but I do appreciate this short essay on the feminism of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and how her contributions to the law helped make the public and professional careers of women like Sarah Palin more feasible. Can Palin express appreciation for Ginsburg's achievements without endorsing the entire legacy of those achievements? Maybe Palin has, in fact; I don't know, but I do know that there is a tendency to demonize categorically entire worldviews and the folks who hold them, whether they be labeled "radical feminists" or "the religious right." It seems to me that one valuable contribution of Catholic legal theory is its embrace of nuance and complexity; in its refusal to be captured by any particular ideological or partisan political position, CLT should have the capacity to stand back and applaud figures coming from a wide array of perspectives, even while speaking out about where those figures have lost sight of foundational values and/or the fundamental reality of the human person. In other words, what can make CLT seem frustratingly elusive equips it to reach across today's sharply drawn lines and affirm the good, wherever it is found.
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