Mirror of Justice

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Health Care Reform (2): Yes, Virginia, This Really is the Gateway to a Government Take-over of Health Care

[This is the second post in a series. The first post is here.]

Among other defenses of the health care legislation and responses to supposed exaggerations by its opponents, President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress insist that the now-enacted plan is not radical, not “socialistic,” not the introduction to a new era of big government. They emphasize that the bill not only does not create a single-payer government system for all, but that the final version does not even include the controversial public option of a government-created insurance company to compete with private health insurers.

On closer examination of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, however, President Obama and the Democratic leadership have greatly expanded the size and power of the government, turned aside alternatives measures that would have harnessed the private sector and limited government, and implemented a heavy-handed and bureaucratic regulatory regime that pushes the country well down the slippery slope toward that all-government plan.

Consider four prominent elements of the 2010 health care legislation that take a major step in the direction of a government take-over of more than 17 percent of our national economy:

Government Coverage of the Uninsured: Of the 32 million more Americans to be covered under this legislation, the assumption is that well more than half of them (which is probably a gross under-estimate) will be folded into the already out-of-control Medicaid program. Now Medicaid (a financial partnership between the federal government and the states) is a government-run health program, no ifs, and, or buts about it. Thus, deliberate expansion of Medicaid — rather than greater use of market incentives and tax cuts — unavoidably counts as a “big government” initiative.

Government Mandate of Individual Purchase of Insurance: The Democratic health insurance legislation requires every adult American to purchase health insurance, starting in 2014, whether he or she wants to or not. In and of itself, this government command is a heavy-handed intrusion of government into our private lives. Not incidentally, this part of the law is to be enforced by the hiring of tens of thousands more Internal Revenue Service agents. I don’t want to overstate the coercive nature of the individual mandate provision, because I’ll describe tomorrow how soft and vulnerable it is which thus makes it highly unlikely to achieve the economic benefits assumed by the bill drafters. Nonetheless, the growth in government employment accompanying this measure is manifestly a boost in the size of the federal government.

Government Regulation of Employers: By 2014, every employer with more than 50 employees must offer health insurance or pay penalties. Rather than looking for a private market mechanism, combined with tax credits and incentives, to free health care provision from a connection with employment and give all us portable coverage, President Obama and the Democratic leadership preferred to impose the burden through greater mandates on and regulation of private employers. Even aside from the likely slow down in hiring as employers worry about the costs of providing health care coverage (even with partial tax credits to certain employer), this provision also requires new troops of government employees to monitor employer’s provision of health care, evaluate whether the coverage meets guidelines, and mete out penalties.

Government Regulation of Insurance: While public attention primarily has been drawn to those provisions that regulate health insurance providers by requiring coverage of preexisting conditions or allowing adult children to remain on parents’ coverage until age 26, the legislation imposes a far more pervasive regulatory scheme than is generally realized. Under the health care legislation, health insurance providers that participate in the planned “exchanges” as a one-stop shopping center for consumers will be required to satisfy certain federal law standards for platinum, gold, silver, and bronze packages, thus greatly restricting the diversity of coverage options now available to consumers and likely increasing premiums as well. Here too, greater government oversight means more federal government operations.

This regulatory scheme will foster the growth of government in two ways, one immediate and the other likely in the future: First, as noted, regulation requires regulators, which again means hiring more federal government employees.

Second, because of the increase in expensive requirements for health insurance coverage — in health care, as in the rest of economic life, there is no such thing as a free lunch — and the failure of the bill to include meaningful health care cost containment measures, private insurance carriers may be pushed to the breaking point. While President Obama and the Democratic leadership demonized the insurance companies for cynical political gain during this debate, the reality is that most health insurance companies realize a profit margin under five percent (here and here). That’s not an unhealthy margin (I know, it’s a pun), but neither is it a margin that can sustain major additional burdens without a reversal.

Especially if the mandate for every individual to buy insurance and thus expand the insurance pool proves inadequate (a point I’ll address tomorrow), the 2010 health insurance coverage may force private health insurance companies out of business or necessitate that they hike premiums. The public reaction may be to call for a government-run plan as a more palatable alternative. And I don’t believe for a moment that the negative incentives of the legislation that would prompt a future push toward a government system went unnoticed by President Obama and the Democratic leadership in crafting this particular legislation.

My opposition to the unwarranted emphasis on big government solutions in the 2010 health care legislation goes beyond prudential concerns about efficiency and cost to the public, although those factors obviously are important and contribute to the lack of economic viability for the plan (as I’ll discuss tomorrow). As a matter of principle, grounded in Catholic teaching about liberty, human dignity, and human thriving, I regard this plan as dangerously fostering dependency on government, as suppressing our liberties in making economic and health care choices independent of government guidelines, and as enhancing the power of government employee unions that convert government itself into a special interest contrary to the common good.

Those who dismiss complaints about a loss of liberty through a new government initiative often assume such objections are nothing more than the tired repetition of the old Barry Goldwater aphorism: “The Government that big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.” While one ought be cautious before assuming that expansion of government power never creates risks of tyranny, my fears are more pragmatic and cultural in nature. Rather than a reign of terror by a totalitarian regime enforced by secret police, I fear instead that our economic prosperity and individual liberty may be smothered under a suffocating blanket of law, regulation, and bureaucratic oversight.

Nonetheless, the objection still might be raised to my complaints, whatever the health care legislation may mean with respect to the growth of government and bureaucracy, it simply did not impose a national government-run health system or public option insurance plan. But that this health care legislation could have been even worse is not a point in its favor.

A disabling blow to the body may not always be exhibited by a gaping wound and a hemorrhagic rush of blood. When I worry about the injury to the body politic posed by the health care bill expansion of government, I am reminded of Mercutio’s dying words in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “No, ‘tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but ‘tis enough,’twill serve.”

[Tomorrow: Fantasies about government spending, revenues, and economic forecasts]

Greg Sisk

Read this! (Lifted from dotCommonweal)

By Michael Perry

Democrats and the Pro-Life Movement

March 24, 2010, 2:00 pm

Posted by John Schwenkler

Ross Douthat has written an honest, charitable post that is the most thoughtful contribution I’ve so far seen a conservative commentator make to the debate over Bart Stupak’s stance on health care reform. Ross takes issue with certain of Stupak’s critics from the left and remains skeptical about the compromise he ended up striking, but he goes on to articulate many things that pro-life critics of the reform bill have been unwilling to acknowledge: that there is a reason why there are pro-life liberals; that Stupak’s failure to pass his amendment does not mean the end of such a bloc; that many of the pro-life conservatives who cheered Stupak on were secretly hoping that he’d fail in his efforts and drag the bill down with him; and that those very same conservatives have failed miserably in the task of proposing constructive alternatives to solve the very real problems that motivated the reform agenda they so enthusiastically opposed.

As a pro-life, pro-Stupak, anti-Obamacare conservative (yes, there is at least one of us here!) I agree with pretty much all of this. Whatever one’s opinions about the merits and demerits of the reform bill itself and the complicated moral and legal issues about federal (and non-federal) funding of abortion, there was always something deeply, darkly cynical about the ways that many pro-life conservatives were cheering Stupak along. (Full disclosure: I know this in part because I far too frequently went in for this sort of thing myself.) What the Stupak controversy had the chance to do was to make the pro-life movement into something more than an appendage of a political party, and while I’ve no doubt that some of Stupak’s pro-life supporters would have been genuinely happy if the reform bill had passed with his amendment attached, it’s hard to shake the sense that many of the loudest critics of Stupak’s eventual compromise originally viewed him as a useful idiot whom they could use to bring down a bill that was just a piece of evil Marxist redistributionism, anyway. In the present political climate, the pro-life movement needs Democrats every bit as much as Democrats need the pro-life movement, and if representatives of that movement insist on narrating Stupak’s story as a farce rather than – as Ross views it – a tragedy, it’s highly unlikely that Democrats like Stupak will want anything to do with them the next time around.

Meanwhile, and this is once again a point that Ross’s post helpfully emphasizes, the other strand in this tale of wasted opportunity arises from conservatives’ stunning inability to propose a coherent and forward-looking agenda of their own to address this country’s very real need for serious health care reform. Claiming the banner of church teaching when it comes to the protection of the unborn while ignoring the demands of that very same church concerning the adequate provision of health care is a gross moral incoherence; and until pro-life conservatives begin devoting more energies to improving the quality of those lives that they – we – are so intent to save, policy compromises like the one that Stupak struck with Obama are pretty much guaranteed to be the best we’re going to get.

As Ross puts it, these problems are not about to go away.

[Original post, with comments, here.]

hope and cultural devastation

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

Among the many outstanding teachers I had in college, Jonathan Lear was one of the most interesting and intellectually exciting -- you never knew what he was going to say, but you knew you wanted to hear it. He made Aristotle come alive for sophomores, in ways that readers of his Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988) will, well, understand. Lear has written many books over the two decades since the Aristotle book, and I now see, thanks to a recent review by Charles Taylor in the New York Review of Books, that he has published Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Here is how the review opens:

"Radical Hope is first of all an analysis of what is involved when a culture dies. This has been the fate of many aboriginal peoples in the last couple of centuries. Jonathan Lear takes as the main subject of his study the Crow tribe of the western US, who were more or less pressured to give up their hunting way of life and enter a reservation near the end of the nineteenth century.

"The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone. Lear takes as his basic text a statement by the tribe's great chief, Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened."

Lear concentrates on those last four words. What can they mean?"

And here is how the glowing review ends:

"But the fact that there are no general rules for these transitions, just as there are no rules for coming back from cultural near-death, doesn't mean that we have nothing to gain from such careful studies of particular societies as Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope. On the contrary, the wider the range of cases we are familiar with, the more likely we are to find features that may be relevant to a new case and suggest new lines of thought.

This is what makes Lear's well-written and philosophically sophisticated book so valuable. As a story of courage and moral imagination, it is very powerful and moving. But it also offers the kind of insights that would-be builders of "new world order" desperately need."

Tolle lege.

Oscar Romero

By Susan Stabile

Today is the 30th anniversary of the murder of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. On March 24, 1980, Romeo presided at a special evening mass. That evening he proclaimed from the Gospel of John that “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains only a grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” As he concluded his sermon, which preached the need to give one’s life for others as Christ did, he was shot in the heart and died almost immediately.

Romero was tireless in his call for solidarity with the poor and oppressed, a voice for those who had no voice. He was strident in his denunciation of violence and called for a culture of peace and an end to the killings that were destroying his country.

He was criticized by many for being too political in his sermons. But that was a criticism he would not hear, believing that it was the mission of the Church to “save the world in its totality and to save it in history, here and now.” He exhorted that “We cannot segregate God’s word from the historical reality in which it is proclaimed. That would not be God’s word… It is God’s word because it enlightens, contrasts with, repudiates, or praises what is going on today in this society.” His duty, he believed, was to help people to apply the Gospel to their own lives and to the reality of the world in which he lived. “We turn the gospel’s light onto the political scene, but the main thing for us is to light the lamp of the gospel in our communities.”

Today we remember Oscar Romero, martyr, friend to the poor and prophet of justice. May we remember him by heeding his call.

[Cross-posted from my personal blog, Creo en Dios!]

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Catholic film maker ridicules "fertilized egg police," calls for repeal of Hyde Amendment

By Robert George

The leftist film maker Michael Moore advertises himself as a Catholic. He makes rather a big deal out of it. Yesterday in an open letter congratulating himself for Bart Stupak's capitulation, he revealed with clarity his contempt for the sanctity of human life and the inherent and equal dignity of every member of the human family. Some Catholic. I suppose we should be grateful that at least he doesn't repesent himself as a "pro-life Catholic" (or even a "pro-life Democrat"). I'll paste in the letter below. (P.S. It's worth noting that Moore sees Stupak's action for what it was---a capitulation, not a victory for unborn children, a/k/a "fertilized eggs.")

Michael Moore | How the People in My District Got Stupak to Change His Mind -- and Thus Saved the Health Care Bill

Published on Mar 22, 2010 - 2:49:51 PM

By: Michael Moore

Friends,

Well, our full court press on my congressman, Bart Stupak worked! Hundreds of my neighbors here in his Michigan district spent the weekend organizing thousands of voters to get busy and save the health care bill. We called Stupak's congressional office non-stop and we got thousands of people up here to flood his email box.

And then a rare thing happened: An elected representative did what the people told him to do. It was nothing short of amazing.

Stupak, and his seven "right to life" Democrats who had said they would vote against the bill, reversed themselves after what Stupak said Sunday afternoon was a week of his staff having "really taken a pounding." Hey, all we did here in northern Michigan was let him know that we would be unceremoniously tossing him out of Congress in this August's Democratic primary. One of our group announced she would oppose him in the Dem primary. That seemed to register with him.

All of this made Stupak look pretty worn down at his press conference yesterday, pleading with people like us to stop calling his house and waking his wife "at two or three in the morning." Hey! That's not us. We never call during Carson Daly!

Obama needed 216 votes in the House last night -- and he barely got them (219 was the final number). Had Stupak not done a 180 in the last 24 hours, the health care bill would have gone down in flames. Thank you, to all of you here in northern Michigan who did what had to be done. You and you alone saved this bill in the final moments.

Stupak stood on the floor of the House last night and, in a surreal moment, spoke against the "Stupak Amendment"! Once he got through his medieval meanderings about where babies come from, he gave one helluva speech.

And, that's when Republican congressman Randy Neugebauer of Texas shouted out: "Baby killer!" Wow. I guess the fertilized egg police felt betrayed by Bart.

Those of us here in Michigan will now decide what to do about our misguided congressman. We're a forgiving lot, but maybe not this time. We shall see.

Bart, I'm glad you discovered you didn't have a uterus. And, like the scarecrow, I'm glad you found a bit of your brain.

A good night it was -- important little steps were taken to bring our country into the civilized world.

Now, we have some real work to do if we really want to say we have universal health care. The sharks who run the insurance companies have every intention of turning this lemon into some very profitable lemonade.

Yours,
Michael Moore
[email protected]
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. Someday, the Hyde Amendment is going to have to go. No Democratic president should ever agree to anything that discriminates against women.

Now, Germany ...

By Michael Perry

Op-Ed: Benedict’s Fragile Church

Can Germany’s Catholic Church survive its sex abuse scandal?

Health Care Reform: Not the Time for a Victory Lap

By Greg Sisk

President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, the Democratic Party, and our friends on the left side of the Mirror of Justice community understandably are in a celebratory mood. I wish that I could join them. As the House of Representatives enacted his health care agenda by a thin margin, President Obama said: “In the end, what this day represents is another stone firmly laid in the foundation of the American dream.” Oh, would that it were so!

I instead find myself deeply depressed about the lost opportunity to establish access to quality health care on a stable foundation, about the considered drag on a weakened economy imposed by a government- and regulatory-heavy bill, about the huge debt burden that will be left to our children by a fiscally reckless approach, about the impoverished economic opportunities and the decline in health care choices that will be available to my daughter and future generations of Americans, and about the uncertain future for genuine health care reform.

For those who have supported this legislation on the Mirror of Justice, I recognize that they admirably see in it the promise of greater access to health care for millions of Americans presently unable to afford health insurance and greater security in health care coverage for those who presently have health insurance. With our shared Catholic commitment to the human dignity of every person as created in the image of God, we all earnestly hope for the availability of quality health care for everyone in our society.

But, sadly, I conclude that the flawed and precarious legislation enacted this past weekend turns the promise of quality health care for all into a hollow hope. I fear that the prospect for sustainable health care reform is even more fragile than it was last week. My hope now is that, as the weaknesses in this bill become manifest over the next few years and as the reckless risks taken by this irresponsible approach begin to be realized, we will find a way to salvage the promise of genuine health care reform. My fear is that we are more likely to simply abandon the effort out of exhaustion.

After staying up past midnight on Sunday to hear some of the debate and watch the final vote tallies in the House of Representatives) , I confess to feeling fatigued and saddened (and not just because it was past my bed-time on a school night).

I was astounded that the party which calls itself “Democratic” was so intent, indeed openly proud, to ram through a narrow partisan approach to a major social problem without any hesitation or reconsideration and over the opposition of nearly 60 percent of Americans (CNN poll pdf here).

I was disappointed that President Obama and Speaker Pelosi made the audacious determination to enact the most liberal (that is, the biggest government) health care bill for which they could assemble a slender majority through party pressure, cajoling, and back-room deals (here and here). In so doing, President Obama squandered the unusual opportunity offered by the political upset in the Massachusetts Senate race to instead frame a stable, fiscally responsible, and politically inclusive set of policies with a better chance to succeed in the long-run.

Over the past few weeks, we have had a robust debate on the Mirror of Justice about the meaning of the health care legislation for the sanctity of unborn human life. In my view, aside from the doubtful protection against use of taxpayer funds directly or indirectly for abortion, there is only one other thing wrong with the Democratic health care legislation — just about everything else in the bill.

To continue this debate, to ward off the fatigue, and to invite responses arguing that I am wrong, I plan to offer a series of posts over the new few days, with comments turned on starting with tomorrow’s dispatch. In these posts, I will submit that the enactment of Obamacare by the Democratic majority in Congress was not a promising beginning to health care reform.

Having said that, I understand the reaction of many readers of Mirror of Justice exclaims: “Arghh!!! What do you mean by the ‘beginning’ for health care reform?” Aren’t we finally at the end of the partisan wrangling, procedural gamesmanship, and mind-numbing debate? Can’t we finally move on to other public business?

To be sure, President Obama and Speaker Pelosi triumphantly announced Sunday’s vote in the House of Representative as culmination of a century of efforts to enshrine quality health care coverage as a basic right for all Americans. In his typically self-reverential and rhetorical excess, President Obama declared last September to a joint session of Congress: “I am not the first president to take up [the health care] cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

What nonsense. There never was any chance that the complex and constantly evolving set of policy, political, economic, and technical issues surrounding access to health care could be magically resolved for all time by a single piece of legislation enacted by any political party in any particular year. In fact, the legislation enacted by the Democratic Congress on Sunday and signed into law today by President Obama is so defective that it guarantees that the health care mess will be passed on to the next Congress and the next President and the next generation (here).

Speaker Pelosi admonished the American people that “ we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it” (video here) We have arrived at that day. And, as the attentive knew in advance, the most significant elements of this legislation do not take effect for months or years and remain contingent on a series of future actions (read: yet more political votes) by Congress over the next several years.

Consider just a couple of examples: The extension of government-run health care to millions more Americans does not go into effect until 2013 and assumes that future Congresses facing unpredictable political and economic circumstances will carry through on appropriations bills to fund the program. Likewise, the half-a-trillion dollars in cuts from Medicare that are to be used to subsidize universal health care coverage will have to be sustained by future Congresses, a prospect that is dicey at best.

Moreover, public opposition to this health care legislation — which was at a two-to-one margin on the day of enactment — is likely to grow as the regulatory impact of the bill begins to hit home with increased premiums for health insurance, as employment numbers continue to be sluggish because employers are worried about the additional costs of new government edicts, as higher taxes on investment slow the economic recovery, and as the specter unfolds in the news media of tens of thousands of newly-hired Internal Revenue Service investigators trying to impose thousands of dollars in fines on mostly young adults who fail to obey the federal mandate to buy health insurance. As the outcry rises, elected politicians are likely to respond by trimming back, postponing, creating exemptions, etc.

And thus the house-of-cards known as Obamacare may collapse.

So, yes, we are at the beginning of health care reform, and the time for a victory lap is not yet arrived. Sadly, I believe this beginning step was so poorly-designed and economically and politically unrealistic that genuine health care reform may be smothered by future events and contingencies.

As I’ll suggest in a series of posts over the next few days , I submit there are three basic and fatal flaws in the Obamacare legislation:

First, the program and policy choices made by President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress, focused as they are on government as the primary actor to offer and manage health care and failing as they do to address the most pressing problem of rising costs, were foolish, slanted, and imprudent.

Second, because the fiscal implications of the health care legislation depend on future difficult actions that Congress is unlikely to take and because the legislation recklessly and needlessly sinks the nation deeper into national debt, the legislation will not prove economically viable.

Third, because President Obama and the Democratic leadership forced their preferred legislative vehicle through on a party-line vote and over the opposition of a majority of citizens, the health care legislation will not be politically sustainable in the difficult years to come.

For this exchange, I'll turn on the comments. At the least, through this exchange, maybe we'll all be better informed about why we celebrate or mourn. And maybe I’m wrong so that other members of the Mirror of Justice or readers will give me reason to turn my frown into a smile.

As Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times (here):

[The liberals who supported this bill make] an assumption straight out of the golden age of ’60’s liberalism — that a bill this costly, this complicated and this risky can be made to work, so long as the right people are in charge of implementing it.

As a conservative, I suspect they’re wrong. But now that the bill has passed, as a citizen of the United States, I dearly hope they’re right. Indeed, I hope that 20 years from now, in an America that’s healthier, richer and more solvent than today, a liberal can brandish this column and say “I told you so.” Because the alternative would mean that we’re all about to be very sorry, and for a very long time to come.

“Experience keeps a dear school,” Ben Franklin said, “but fools will learn in no other.” Whether liberals or conservatives are the fools in this story remains to be seen. But school will be in session soon enough.

Greg Sisk

Fr. Hesburgh, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Donnelly, and school choice

By Rick Garnett

The news reports have it that Rep. Pelosi showed her political savvy by putting in a call to Fr. Hesburgh, asking him to deliver a "yes" vote by (my) Congressman, Joe Donnelly, a pro-life Democrat who had been, along with Rep. Stupak and a few others, indicating a willingness to vote "no", on pro-life grounds. Now, I have *not* seen any reports that confirm either that Fr. Hesburgh took the call, or that he actually spoke with Rep. Donnelly. (I'd welcome updates.) I wonder, though -- *if* they did speak, did Fr. Hesburgh mention to Rep. Pelosi his concerns -- which he expressed in this op-ed the other day -- about the Democrats' strange, but unwavering, hostility to the small school-choice program in Washington, D.C. As he wrote:

I have devoted my life to equal opportunity for all Americans, regardless of skin color. I don't pretend that this one program is the answer to all the injustices in our education system. But it is hard to see why a program that has proved successful shouldn't have the support of our lawmakers. The end of Opportunity Scholarships represents more than the demise of a relatively small federal program. It will help write the end of more than a half-century of quality education at Catholic schools serving some of the most at-risk African-American children in the District.

I cannot believe that a Democratic administration will let this injustice stand.

One would have hoped that the Administration would have listened to Fr. Hesburgh before, regarding this injustice. After all, the University gave the President a wonderful platform at its Commencement last year, and the University's President praised him warmly. Now, Fr. Hesburgh may well have played an important role in securing passage of the President's signature legislative agenda-item. Surely, it's not too much to ask, in the world of politics, that the Administration and the Speaker now support the use of a few dollars to provide hope to low-income children in D.C.?

Pope Benedict's Letter to the Church in Ireland

By Rob Vischer

Given the understandable attention paid to the health care debate, we have not had any conversations (of the MoJ sort, at least) about what appears to be another wave of scandal in the Church's seemingly never-ending struggle with the fallout from the sexual abuse of children by priests and some bishops' apparent faciltitation of that abuse. I found Pope Benedict's letter to the Church in Ireland to be a powerful reaffirmation of hope in Christ in the midst of heart-breaking human failings. E.g.:

We are all scandalized by the sins and failures of some of the Church's members, particularly those who were chosen especially to guide and serve young people. But it is in the Church that you will find Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and for ever (cf. Heb 13:8). He loves you and he has offered himself on the cross for you. Seek a personal relationship with him within the communion of his Church, for he will never betray your trust! He alone can satisfy your deepest longings and give your lives their fullest meaning by directing them to the service of others. Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus and his goodness, and shelter the flame of faith in your heart.

And I understand (I think) the urge to focus the letter specifically on the Church in Ireland, since attention to "the local" matters greatly in Church teaching, both practically and aspirationally. At the same time, I wonder if "the local" matters as much in this context, or to put it differently, I wonder if the Church needs to spend more time acknowledging and articulating the reality that this is not just a local problem, and that many of the same institutional tendencies that exacerbated the problem were the same in Ireland, the United States, Germany, and elsewhere. Pope Benedict writes that "the problem of child abuse is peculiar neither to Ireland nor to the Church," but I wonder whether it would be helpful to speak more forcefully and more deliberately about child abuse as a problem within the global Church, rather than focusing case by case by case. The Church's witness could benefit, I think, by more and deeper conversations about how an unhealthy emphasis by some (many?) Church leaders on secrecy, power, and a desire to maintain a public perception of clerical infallibility may have contributed to these problems. Should we expect, or hope for, a letter on this subject addressed to all men and women of good will?

Monday, March 22, 2010

Two upcoming lectures of interest in the Oklahoma City-Norman area

By Michael Scaperlanda

On Thursday, March 25 (7:30pm in the Dick Bell Courtroom, OU College of Law), Notre Dame Political Science Professor, Daniel Philpott, will present a lecture entitled "Justice After Evil: A Catholic Ethic of Political Reconcialition."

On Thursday, April 8 (5pm in the Homsey Moot Courtroom, OCU Law School), Notre Dame Law Professor, Nicole Garnett, will deliver the Brennnan Lecture. The lecture's title: "Restoring Lost Connections: Land Use, Policing, and Urban Vitality."