Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Monday, December 9, 2019

Wilson & Drakeman's Church-State Reader

By Marc DeGirolami

I’m delighted to notice this new church-state reader put together by John F. Wilson and my friend, Donald L. Drakeman, Church and State in American History: Key Documents, Decisions, and Commentary from Five Centuries (4th edition, Routledge). Don kindly informs me that what is new about this edition of the reader is a greatly expanded historical section before the American founding, beginning with the Biblical texts and proceeding through the early Christian and medieval era. It also has the American context, the big Supreme Court cases, and so on.

Every time I teach a church-state course of any kind, I cobble together material from a number of different sources as a kind of rapid introduction for students to this area of the law (John Witte's fine and helpful work figures prominently). This book looks like a handy solution. And I’m sure it’s written with Don’s typical flair and panache.

Here is the description from Routledge:

Church and State in American History illuminates the complex relationships among the political and religious authority structures of American society, and illustrates why church-state issues have remained controversial since our nation’s founding. It has been in classroom use for over 50 years.

John Wilson and Donald Drakeman explore the notion of America as “One Nation Under God” by examining the ongoing debate over the relationship of church and state in the United States. Prayers and religious symbols in schools and other public spaces, school vouchers and tax support for faith-based social initiatives continue to be controversial, as are arguments among advocates of pro-choice and pro-life positions. The updated 4th edition includes selections from colonial charters, Supreme Court decisions, and federal legislation, along with contemporary commentary and incisive interpretations by modern scholars. Figures as divergent as John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, James Madison, John F. Kennedy, and Sandra Day O’Connor speak from these pages, as do Robert Bellah, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

The continuing public and scholarly interest in this field, as well as a significant evolution in the Supreme Court’s church-state jurisprudence, renders this timely re-edition as essential reading for students of law, American History, Religion, and Politics.

Friday, December 6, 2019

Fairness for All Legislation; Religious Liberty Scholars' Supporting Letter

By Thomas Berg

Today the federal "Fairness for All" bill was introduced; it aims to give significant protection to both LGBT nondiscrimination rights and traditional believers' religious-freedom rights.  Full information about the bill here. It is already being attacked from both sides of the ongoing, polarizing culture war for which this issue provides such fuel. For reasons I and others have long articulated, neither side is going to prevail in without protracted conflict that will continue to harm (1) the cause of traditional religious faith, (2) LGBT people's basic  equal treatment in significant parts of the country, and (3) the bonds that keep America together.

The bill is not perfect, but it would be a major step forward. Carl Esbeck, Doug Laycock, Robin Wilson, and I have joined a letter supporting the bill. Here is the text of our letter. (Update: It's also available on the FFA coalition's website and here.)

+++++++++++

December 6, 2019

We are constitutional law scholars who have studied, taught, and written about the law of religious liberty for decades. All of us have persistently argued for religious liberty in legislatures and in the courts. Most of us have also argued for LGBTQ rights in legislatures, the courts, or both.

We have long been concerned about legal clashes between those who cherish the fundamental right to religious liberty and those who advocate new legal protections for the civil rights of LGBTQ people. These conflicts have led to increasingly polarized positions in which progress is blocked for both sides. Many Americans think that traditional believers seek a general “license to discriminate” and that hostility to the LGBTQ community is the public face of Christianity. Many traditional believers think that the LGBTQ community and its supporters are determined to destroy their institutions, deprive them of their rights, and confine them to hidden and wholly private corners of the society.

Neither side’s perception of the other is accurate, but the perceptions are real, and they have done much damage to traditional believers, to the LGBTQ community, and to the larger society. Same-sex marriage is protected from interference by government, but in about half the states, same-sex couples can still get married on Saturday and discover that one or both of them has been fired on Monday. Believers with conscientious objections to assisting with same-sex weddings still fear being forced to surrender their consciences or close their businesses in the other half of the states, and churches and other religious organizations fear intrusive regulation or loss of tax exemptions everywhere, whether from blue states or federal agencies.

There is a better way. The proposed Fairness for All Act is balanced civil rights legislation that equitably protects the rights of both communities. It broadly protects LGBTQ persons in employment, housing, credit, public accommodations, federally assisted programs, public facilities, jury service, refugee resettlement, and marriage recognition, and it offers protection against bullying and retaliation. It broadly protects religious institutions and individual believers in practice, doctrine, conscience, and institutional integrity. It protects tax exemptions; it protects small businesses and medical professionals; it greatly strengthens accommodations for religious employees. It protects free speech in the workplace for both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage.

Both traditional believers and the LGBTQ population would have far more protection under this bill than they have under existing law, and far more protection than they have any reasonable prospect of enacting without this bill or some similar negotiated solution. The experience in Indiana with attempts to enact a state Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and less publicized failures in Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia, show that except possibly in the reddest states, the religious community cannot pass additional religious liberty legislation without making adequate provision for LGBTQ rights. It is equally clear that LGBTQ advocates cannot pass gay-rights legislation in Congress or in red states without making adequate provision for religious liberty. No state has enacted a new statewide law against sexual-orientation discrimination since Colorado in 2007—with one telling exception. The deep red state of Utah was able to enact statewide protections for sexual orientation and gender identity in housing and employment, but only because it protected religious liberty in those domains in the same bill.

LGBTQ people still face discrimination and need protection now, not after some imagined political realignment far in the future. Many of these cases arise in secular and nonsexual contexts where there is no plausible claim that religious faith is the reason for discriminating. Few Americans, if any, sincerely believe that God wants LGBTQ persons to be unemployed, homeless, or without access to basic goods and services. But all kinds of discrimination against LGBTQ people are entirely legal under federal law and in about half the states.

More than half of Americans live in jurisdictions where state or local laws already protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. But these laws do not strike an adequate balance with religious liberty. Most state-law protections were enacted before the Supreme Court’s marriage decisions and therefore do not address the most religiously sensitive conflicts. This bill addresses some of those conflicts; it leaves others to state law.

Some traditional religious believers would rely on protections in regulations recently issued by the Trump Administration. But these regulations offer no protection for LGBTQ rights, some of them are subject to challenge as lacking statutory authority, and all of them will likely be withdrawn by the next Democratic President as quickly and easily as they were issued. Legislation can also be amended, but doing so is far more difficult, requires a far more elaborate process, and usually requires at least some votes from both political parties. Reliance on the courts is deeply uncertain for everyone involved, but for the foreseeable future the courts are especially unpromising for advocates of LGBTQ rights.

The Fairness for All Act has been carefully negotiated by representatives of the traditional religious community and of the LGBTQ community. It comprehensively addresses the issues, and it addresses them in the context of current law. No negotiated solution is perfect from the perspective of either side. But the negotiated solutions in this bill are well thought out and carefully drafted, and as we said, they would make both the LGBTQ community and traditional faith communities far better off than they are today. In putting together complex legislation, there will always be provisions we might do a little differently, but the interested groups should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The nation’s deep division on these issues is aggravating polarization and contributing to gridlock more generally, and it is making lasting progress impossible for either side. We urge Americans of good will and of all views on these issues to support a negotiated solution. It would be a huge advance for both sides.

Of course we write in our individual capacities as scholars; none of our institutions takes any position on the bill or the issues discussed in this letter.

 

                                                                                          Thomas C. Berg

                                                                                          James L. Oberstar Professor of Law and Public Policy

                                                                                          University of St. Thomas (Minnesota)

 

                                                                                          Carl H. Esbeck

                                                                                          R.B. Price Professor Emeritus of Law and

       Isabelle Wade and Paul C. Lyda Professor Emeritus of Law

​                                                      University of Missouri

 

                                                                                          Douglas Laycock

                                                                                          Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law

                                                                                          University of Virginia

                                                                                                      and

                                                                                          Alice McKean Young Regents Chair in Law Emeritus

                                                                                          University of Texas

 

                                           Robin Fretwell Wilson

                                                                                          Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law

                                                                                          University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

 

 

Smith's "Sacred Project of American Sociology" . . . and moral anthropology

By Rick Garnett

For many (Ed.:  Many!) years, we at MOJ have highlighted the importance for law and legal theory of attention to philosophical and moral anthropology -- that is, to an understanding of what human persons really are and are for.  It's about five years old now, but my friend and colleague Christian Smith's The Sacred Project of American Sociology is a great way to enter the conversation on this crucial subject (especially his appendix on "critical realist personalism").

New poll shows strong support for school-choice

By Rick Garnett

Meaningful school choice is endorsed clearly in the Church's social teachings.  And, it enjoys strong public support, according to a new poll.

Particularly striking is the fact that large numbers of Democratic voters -- indeed, pretty much the same numbers as on the Republican side -- express support for school choice.  And yet, it is a near article-of-faith among the Democrats' leadership and activists (in particular, the public-employee-union-members base) that choice-and-opportunity-enhancing measures must be opposed and resisted.  A political-market failure, it appears.

Monday, December 2, 2019

International Center for Law and Religion Studies Oxford Experience

By Jon Hannah

Designed primarily for early-career academics interested in the field of religion and the rule of law from an international and human rights perspective, the Program has a legal focus, but applicants need not have a background in law.

The application period for this summer has just opened. More information can be found here.

Saturday, November 30, 2019

Foreword to Rabbi Dovid Cohen's book of Jewish Wisdom: *We're Almost There*

By Robert George

I'm posting here the text of my Foreword to Rabbi Dovid M. Cohen's excellent book We're Almost There: Living with Patience, Perseverance & Pupose (Mosaica press, 2016).

Foreword

Jews often teach by telling stories and learn by listening to them.  The best stories for teaching and learning are not parables—though there are many wonderful parables.  Rather, they are true stories—stories of the lived experience of men and women.  The book you hold in your hands is a collection of such stories.  From them, you will derive wisdom, though I must warn you that you will shed a tear or two along the way.  (Don’t worry, however, for you will also be rewarded by a chuckle now and then.)

Rabbi Dovid Cohen teaches us by sharing the stories of his life.  He does more, however, than merely recount the facts. He interprets them and shares with us his reflections—invariably thoughtful and instructive—on their meaning.  In doing so, he gives us a window into his life and, indeed, into his soul.  But his stories are not just about him. They are about a people—his people, the Jewish people—a people whose rich traditions and deep spirituality, whose ancient books and modern sages, have shaped him from top to bottom. They give us a window into Jewishness.

Are these stories just for Jews, then?

No. Any gentile—at least any gentile who, like me, is willing to look up unfamiliar Yiddish or Hebrew words—has much to learn from Rabbi Dovid’s stories.  And that is because the Jewish people, though “a people set apart,” are a people with a mission in the world—a divine mission.  They are a people who are called to be “a light unto the nations.”  And, true to that mission, Rabbi Dovid offers enlightenment—wisdom—to anyone who reads his stories thoughtfully and with a desire to learn.

Gentiles and Jews alike face the ordinary and sometimes extraordinary challenges that are the essence of leading a human life.  We come into the world as children, full of wonder and needful of years of attentive care and nurturance. We are rational creatures, yet we have feelings and emotions.  We experience joy and anger, happiness and hurt, affection and pain.  We are required to earn our daily bread. We fall in love, marry, and have children of our own.  As we watch with joy our sons and daughters grow into fine men and women, we watch with sadness our beloved parents grow frail with age.  We have in laws.  And neighbors.  And friends. And people with whom we are not so friendly.  We are, in a sense, locked into our own subjectivity, yet we can share our thoughts and feelings with others.  We are individuals, yet members of communities.  We are material beings, yet also spiritual beings to whom the Almighty has given a share of the divine powers of reason and freedom of the will.  As the Bible says, “we are made in the image and likeness of God.”  Yet unlike God, we are mortal—mere “dust of the earth.” And we live our lives in contemplation of our deaths.

These are, as I say, challenges common to all people in all times and at all places.  Many traditions offer insights into them.  But there is a special perspective—offering a unique body of wisdom—rooted in the experience of the Jews as God’s chosen people.

The great pagan philosopher Plato taught that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” Rabbi Dovid teaches through his stories that it is worth living an examined life.  He has encountered life’s challenges—everything from changing professions to bringing up a disabled child—reflectively, looking for meaning, and finding it.  How is it that he finds it, when so many others say they look for meaning yet find only meaninglessness?  It is because Rabbi Dovid does not stumble around in the dark.  He has a light.  It is the light of faith.  It is in the light of faith that what is invisible in the darkness becomes clear.

Yet the Rabbi’s faith is not an uncritical faith.  Nor does it make all the answers to life’s challenges obvious or easy.  It doesn’t solve the great and sometimes painful mysteries, such as why the beautiful and brilliant daughter of a neighbor suddenly dies at the age of eighteen.  But faith sustains him—and, he teaches, faith can sustain us—in hope and in the redeeming power of the God for whom we, as spiritual creatures, long.  As we come to terms with life’s challenges, seeking meaning in the light of faith, we find ourselves, in a sense, cooperating with God—praying, studying, following His commandments in caring not only for ourselves but for others.  And in this cooperation, we experience not slavery, but rather freedom, the freedom that faith-sustaining hope alone can make possible.

Robert P. George,  Princeton University

Universalism, means-testing, the "Nordic model" . . . and school choice

By Rick Garnett

A recent issue of Commonweal includes a short piece by Max Foley-Keene called "Equality Isn't Cheap."  Among other things, the author compares the "Nordic Welfare Model" to the "basic-security" model and argues that:

[a] welfare regime based on means-testing and income targeting . . . necessarily divides those who receive benefits from those who don’t. That leads non-recipients to grumble about having to subsidize an underclass of moochers, while recipients are subject to dehumanizing stigma. Such programs tend to be socially divisive and politically unstable. In contrast, universal programs promise to transcend existing economic cleavages and create broad social solidarity, because everyone benefits; this solidarity, in turn, helps protect universal programs from political attack.

He concludes by calling for "a politics that recognizes the satisfaction of social needs as a communal responsibility, that builds broad solidarity around preserving public goods, and that doesn’t fret over spending some cash."

Readers can decide for themselves whether the model Foley-Keene discusses is (in the United States) feasible or morally attractive.  I did want to note, though, that from a Catholic perspective -- and notwithstanding the common view that the model or something like it is consistent with, or even supported by, the Church's social teachings -- it cannot be that the state assumes for itself the provision, and "crowd[s] out" non-state providers, the "basic necessity" or "social benefit" of "education."  This is because parents have the moral, and in justice the legal, right to direct and control the education of their children and religious communities have the right to operate schools.  As is stated in Dignitatis humanae:

Government, in consequence, must acknowledge the right of parents to make a genuinely free choice of schools and of other means of education, and the use of this freedom of choice is not to be made a reason for imposing unjust burdens on parents, whether directly or indirectly. Besides, the right of parents are violated, if their children are forced to attend lessons or instructions which are not in agreement with their religious beliefs, or if a single system of education, from which all religious formation is excluded, is imposed upon all.

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Further to "Honest Journalism?" (correspondence)

By Robert George


Further to my post "Honest Journalism?" here is my correspondence with Thomas Edsall, beginning with his message requesting a transcript of my Catholic Information Center speech. (Update and correction: My reference to a paper of mine in the Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Law should have been to the Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Jurisprudence.)

-----------------

From: Thomas Byrne Edsall 
Sent: Wednesday, November 6, 2019 4:31 PM
To: Robert P. George
Subject: Request for speech transcript NYT

Dear Professor George

Could you possibly send me a transcript of your speech:

“Robert P. George Keynote Remarks | 2019 John Paul II New Evangelization Award Dinner”

Thanks.

Tom Edsall

New York Times Columnist

https://www.nytimes.com/column/thomas-b-edsall

Columbia Graduate School of Journalism

https://journalism.columbia.edu/faculty/tom-edsall

------------------

From: Robert P. George 
Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2019 4:47 PM
To: Thomas Byrne Edsall
Subject: RE: Request for speech transcript NYT

Dear Mr. Edsall:

Here is a link to my remarks, which were posted at the Catholic law professors blog “Mirror of Justice”:  https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2019/10/remarks-at-the-2019-catholic-information-center-annual-dinner.html

I’m taking the liberty of attaching a paper I have some years ago at a conference at the Vatican. It provides background for the after-dinner remarks I made at the event at the Mayflower Hotel.

It has been some years since we’ve been in touch. I hope you are doing well.

Sincerely,

Robert George

_____________

From: Thomas Byrne Edsall 
Sent: Thursday, November 7, 2019 2:19 PM
To: Robert P. George 
Subject: RE: Request for speech transcript NYT

Dear Professor George

Thanks very much for sending the speech and the earlier Vatican conference paper. Both are very interesting and raise a series of questions. I don’t pose these questions to dispute your statements; instead, I think your views need further explication.

You argue the faithful must have the courage to “boldly bear witness to truths that are unpopular among those controlling the levers of cultural, political, and economic power” and that they must have the courage to engage the battle.

First question: Can you be more specific about how to go about engaging the battle? Through some sort of dissent, or confrontation? Is persuasion adequate? How forceful do the faithful need to be? How do you win when you are outnumbered and in the minority?

Second, who are your adversaries? The overwhelming take-over of much of corporate America, including most especially the entertainment media, suggests that there is money to be made by accomodation to and promotion of a libertine culture. Is the free market and capitalism your enemy?

If you want to do battle with paganism, isn’t your primary opponent Donald Trump, who, more than any Democrat, would appear to personify paganism? If that is the case, how do you deal with evangelical protestants and many if their leaders who have abandoned many previously held moral standards for politicians and fallen overwhelmingly in line behind Trump.

Probably the most secular and non-believing constituency is made up of well-educated whites, including many Princeton students. A high percentage, if not a strong majority, support views on sexual behavior that you consider anathema. In terms of actual behavior, however, this group has shown a decline in divorce and out of wedlock childbearing, a goal I think you support, while these dysfunctional behaviors are now growing in the white working class, which is at least nominally more socially conservative. How do you explain this?

I would be grateful for you thoughts,

Best

Tom Edsall

Thomas B. Edsall

New York Times Columnist

https://www.nytimes.com/column/thomas-b-edsall

Columbia Graduate School of Journalism

https://journalism.columbia.edu/faculty/tom-edsall


----------------------

Dear Mr. Edsall:

I’m returning from London and Oxford to the U.S. and I’ve taken a few minutes on the flight to reflect on your questions. What I can offer are reflections prompted by them, rather than answers to them. That’s because in most cases I don’t know the answers.

What I’m asking people—my fellow Catholics and others—to do is to think more deeply than ever before about what they believe and why they believe it so that they can go out into the world and give the reasons for their beliefs, especially those beliefs that are unfashionable and even reviled in the most affluent and influential sectors of society.  That’s what I mean by “boldly bearing witness to truths that are unpopular among those controlling the levers of cultural, political, and economic power.” I conceive the “battle” as a war of ideas—ideas about what is right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. I believe in the luminosity and power of truth—I completely buy what Pope John Paul II said in his encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor—but truth does not go out and state itself. If it is to be heard, someone’s got to speak it. And where it is unpopular, where people can suffer adverse personal or professional consequences for speaking it, that takes courage. Some Catholics seem to think they are entitled to stay silent about such truths; they suppose it’s the task of the bishops to speak it to the culture. This reflects the sort of clericalism that the Second Vatican Council tried finally to shake off. It has done a lot of harm to the Christian religion (especially among the Catholics and Eastern Orthodox) historically and, as Protestants have long rightly pointed out, is unbiblical. Truth-speaking is every Christian’s job. (I actually think it’s every person’s job.)

How forceful am I asking people to be? Well, I don’t think we need a lot of screaming and shouting and I’m certainly against any form of intimidation or violence. Period. Because I believe in the luminosity and power of truth, I don’t mind people speaking it gently—and I think it should always be spoken lovingly. On my understanding (and the historic Christian understanding—shaped not only by the Bible but profoundly by Aristotelian philosophy mediated especially through the great medieval Christian philosophers and theologians) moral truth is what it is because human nature and the human good are constituted in a particular way. Moral norms are shaped by the requirements of human flourishing (what Greeks like Aristotle had in mind in speaking of eudaimonia). Even those truths that strike people in a given set of cultural circumstances as challenging truths, hard truths, demanding truths—if they be truths at all—are, from the point of view of the tradition(s) of thought from which I speak, grounded in humanistic ideals—the desire for people to flourish. It is important to see that on this account (whether in its Christian or Greek articulations) flourishing is not a matter of doing what one wants, or getting what one desires, or even being whom one chooses to be (in the modern quasi-existentialist or contemporary identitarian senses). There is an objective standard of flourishing (because there is a determinate human nature and, correspondingly, human good). At the same time, within a broad range, individual lives (and communities) reasonably differ because the human good, though determinate is variegated. Most of our choices are among reasonable, morally upright options—and in making them each of us fashions a life, and we human beings taken altogether fashion billions of interestingly different human lives (and we create very different cultures). But some of the choices we face are between what is morally right and what is morally wrong.  I’ll attach a paper of mine from the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy of Law that expands on what I’m saying here.

Of course, there are reasonable people of goodwill who disagree with the Catholic/biblical/natural-law understanding of morality, and they should be engaged in respectful dialogue and civil debate. I’ve written about this and done a great deal of speaking about it (both in formal classroom settings and at public events) with Cornel West. I’m against treating intellectual opponents as enemies. I regard them as partners in the truth-seeking project. One of the questions you asked was “Who are your adversaries?” Well, as I suggested in my CIC remarks, quoting at length Professor Mark Tushnet of Harvard, they are people who, for example, want to treat devout Catholics and Evangelicals, observant Jews, faithful Mormons, Muslims, and other believers in traditional moral norms “the way we treated the defeated Japanese and Germans after World War II.” They are people who join Beto O’Rourke in wanting to selectively yank the tax-exempt status of churches who refuse to conform to secular progressive ideology on questions related to marriage, sexual morality, and the sanctity of human life. They are the woke (of whom President Obama recently and rightly complained) who want to shut down dissenting speech on the campuses of colleges and universities that advertise themselves as non-sectarian and open to the full and free range and exchange of ideas, and turn these institutions into engines of indoctrination that would embarrass even most religiously-affiliated colleges and universities. They are people who want to bully dissenters into silence or acquiescence, and who smear decent, honorable people as the equivalent of racists. They are people who put words like religious liberty and conscience in quotation marks (“religious liberty,” “conscience”) and who would force decent, honorable Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others to choose between violating their consciences (no quotation marks) and giving up their businesses or professions. They are people like the mayor of Atlanta who fired Kelvin Cochran and the people at Mozilla who did in Brendan Eich. They are people like those who concussed the liberal international relations scholar Allison Stanger at Middlebury or those who threatened the Bernie Sanders-supporting Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying, eventually driving them out of Evergreen State, because they were not woke enough.

Your question about capitalism is, of course, an old one, but remains a good one. The concern you mention was among the considerations at the heart of Catholicism’s historic wariness about capitalism. And it is famously why Irving Kristol gave capitalism (only) two cheers. This is a question I need to give a good deal more thought to, but I’m inclined to think Kristol got it right. The market is a good thing, but it is not good-in-itself. It is a means, not an end. It can lift people out of poverty (good!) and it can generate trade in drugs, porn, and even human beings (very bad!). The market itself must be regulated, and moral considerations need to be among those taken into account in deciding what regulations are reasonable and desirable. Here’s how I put it in the attached paper on “Constitutional Structures”:

Surely a conception of the common good that is serious about the principle of subsidiarity will respect private property and take care to maintain a reasonably free system of economic exchange—that is to say, a market economy, though it will not suppose that nothing should be publicly owned (think of public highways, for example, or municipal buildings, parks, prisons, public schools, and the like) or that the market may not legitimately be regulated to protect public health, safety, and morals (to again use the classic common law formulation of the purposes of law and government), prevent exploitation and abuse, monopolization and the restraint of trade, price gouging, predatory lending, and other unfair practices, and so forth. We should not suppose that socialism and laissez-faire are the only, or only principled, options.

You asked about Donald Trump and paganism. I’ve never bought the argument that many Evangelicals and conservative Catholics make for supporting Trump. I understand it, I think. And I don’t think that people who make it are idiots. (A lot of my relatives and friends where I grew up in West Virginia support Trump—and they are decent, intelligent people.) My own judgment, though, is that it’s unsound. The essence of the argument is that Trump is King Cyrus: “Yes, he’s a pagan; but God is nevertheless using him to protect us against the hegemonic forces that seek our destruction.” Trump is transactional. That’s it. As far as I can tell, he has no very firm convictions (except perhaps that free trade is bad). Whatever the ultra-embarrassing Paula White (“the President’s pastor”) may say, he’s the same Donald Trump who used to proclaim his allegiance to “New York values” and support dilation and extraction (“partial-birth”) abortion. Was it Palmerston who said, “countries don’t have permanent friends, they only have interests”? Well, President Trump doesn’t have permanent beliefs, he only has interests. And for now it is in his interest to fulfill many of his promises to social conservatives (no public funding of abortion or abortion advocacy; conscience protection; judges). But the deal seems to be that social conservatives, in return, go silent on policies (and other things about him) that they in fact don’t (or at least shouldn’t) like. I agree with the Trump supporters that, with the Democrats moving further and further leftward (beyond Obama and way beyond Clinton), the election of a Democratic President and Congress would have catastrophic consequences for religious conservatives and things we deeply believe in. My long-term (or perhaps even medium-term) worry, though, is that the things we believe in will be discredited by the taint of association with the President. Here are a couple of items pertaining to my own attitude towards President Trump:   https://www.newsmax.com/Headline/catholic-leaders-oppose-trump/2016/03/07/id/717955/ and https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2016/06/20/evangelicals-meeting-with-trump-brothers-and-sisters-what-else-do-you-need-to-know/ (please see the quotation of me in the article).

You asked about who I regard as my adversaries and I offered some thoughts about that. It might help to illuminate things if I said who I regard as my allies: certain Evangelical thinkers and leaders, including white Evangelicals like Russell Moore and African-American Evangelicals like Rev. Eugene Rivers; Jewish thinkers and leaders like Rabbi Meir Soloveichik (who spoke at the CIC dinner: https://cicdc.org/video/rabbi-dr-meir-soloveichik-remarks-2019-john-paul-ii-new-evangelization-award-dinner/?fbclid=IwAR2wriam0TUxCbBDLmRh0b628bQa6nHJneoZ1XKKodfU-6As-Ettgn-pfks) and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks; Mormons like Katrina Lantos Swett and Matthew Holland; Muslims like Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and Ismail Royer; and fellow Catholics like Mary Ann Glendon and Archbishop Charles Chaput. These are people who share my view that we are in a tragic dilemma politically and the most important thing any of us can do is try to keep our wits about us, and to quote myself (but I think they’d all agree), “bear faithful witness”—which means openly speaking the truth as best we understand it no matter whether the ox being gored is Democratic of Trumpian.

You asked about Belmont and Fishtown. I’m far from entirely sure what to make of it. The only thing I’m confident about is that Murray is right that we need the folks in Fishtown to practice what many preach (but fail to practice) and we need the folks in Belmont to preach what many practice (but fail to preach—and sometimes even preach against). As early as 1965 Moynihan saw that the material consequences of sexual anarchy and the fatherlessness that comes in its train (as family breakdown and the failure of family formation become more common) would bear down hardest on the poorest and therefore most vulnerable sectors of the community. What he didn’t foresee, I think, was that what began in largely minority sectors would be replicated in white rural and working class communities. But it’s scarcely a surprise that it did. Anyway, people in Hollywood and other celebrities can, in a sense, afford to live the lives I read about on the covers of People magazine when I’m in the check-out line at the grocery store. People in Watts—or in West Virginia—can’t.  And yet, as you say, and as Murray, Brad Wilcox, David and Amber Lapp, and other sociologists have shown, the recent trends are for the affluent to lead more conventional lives—with even the divorce rate for them (after rising for many years) now falling. Are these the children of divorce, who want to make sure their children do not go through the same trauma? Are they people who have figured out that divorce, out-of-wedlock child bearing, etc. tend, even among the well-off, to damage people’s financial standing and even lower their standard of living? Is there some other explanation? (Typically in these matters the explanations are “multi-factorial”.) The sociologists will have to figure it out and let us know.

Well, those are my thoughts. As I said, they are necessarily more in the mode of reflections than answers. The older I get, the odder, or at least more complicated, the world seems to get, and the more impervious it seems to become to being figured out—at least by me.

Best wishes,

Robert George

Honest Journalism?

By Robert George

I know that some people believe that "honest journalist" is a contradiction in terms, but I personally know lots of honest journalists. They tell the truth. When they quote people, they do it accurately and provide the context of the quoted words so that no false impression of what was said will be created. When they quote someone quoting someone else, they make that clear, too. When someone is responding to something someone else is saying, they also make that clear.

I point these things out in order to invite readers to look at this column by veteran New York Times writer Thomas Edsall. It is mainly an attack on Attorney General William Barr for the controversial speech he recently gave at the University of Notre Dame. But he also takes shots at two other conservative Catholic writers, Mary Eberstadt and me. Here's what he says in reference to me:

"Not to be outdone, Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton, declared in a speech at the Catholic Information Center’s annual dinner on Oct. 23 that the sexual revolution has produced a paganism reminiscent of pre-Christian Rome: “The neo-pagans are in no mood to be accommodating,” George said:  "Christians and others who dissent from progressive orthodoxy can expect 'the hard line approach'. We are to be treated like the defeated Germans and Japanese after World War II."

Well, yes, I did say that "we are to be treated like the defeated Germans and Japanese after World War II."  But I was expressly quoting a respected and influential mainstream left-wing scholar at Harvard Law School: Mark Tushnet. And it was Tushnet who explicitly called for treating social and religious conservatives with a "hard line" like the defeated Germans and Japanese were treated by the victorious allies after the Second World War.

Here are Tushnet's words (which I quoted--expressly noting that I was quoting them--in the speech to which Edsall refers):

"The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. … For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War … (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won." (Mark Tushnet, blog post, "Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism, May 6, 2016)

Edsall's omitting the fact that I was quoting Tushnet (and taking him at his word) was deeply dishonest. It's the kind of conduct that gives journalists and journalism a bad name, and gives conservatives good reason to doubt the honesty of outfits like the New York Times.

Here's Edsall's column:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/27/opinion/barr-liberals-family.html

Nothing would please me more that for readers to read the column, my speech, and Tushnet's blog post and judge for yourselves. 

 

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Christ the King and "Quas Primas"

By Rick Garnett

Re-upping this, from 8 years ago:

In my experience, preachers in Catholic parishes don't know quite what to do with the Feast of Christ the King[.]  Usually, the day's "message" or "theme" has been (again, in my experience) something to the effect that we should ask if we are "putting Jesus first in our lives" (and, certainly, we should). 

And yet . . . especially in light of the emerging (and much needed) focus in the Church on religious liberty and the realities of both aggressive secularism and persecution, it's worth (re-)reading Quas Primas, the encyclical of Pope Pius XI that instituted the feast day in 1925, and remembering that this institution's purpose sounded more in political theology than in personal piety and devotion.  This feast -- which we celebrate, again, this Sunday -- is a reminder that government is not all, that there are things which are not Caesar's, and that everything, in the end, is "under God."

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