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.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Pres. Obama's "dramatic[] change[s]" to the faith-based office

By Rick Garnett

According to Dan Gilgoff, writing in the Washington Post, the President has "dramatically changed" the role of the faith-based office:

Six months after its rollout, Obama's office has dramatically shifted gears from the one that Bush started from scratch in 2001. Bush's office sought to "level the playing field" for faith-based and community groups seeking federal grants to deliver social services, like counseling drug addicts and mentoring at-risk youth. Obama, by contrast, has tasked his office with four broad policy goals: bringing faith groups into the recovery and fighting poverty, reducing demand for abortion, promoting responsible fatherhood, and facilitating global interfaith dialogue. "We're moving from a sole focus on leveling the playing field," says Joshua DuBois, the office's executive director, "to forming partnerships with faith-based and community groups to help solve specific policy challenges." . . .

Reinforcing its new policy role, Obama has brought his office under the purview of his Domestic Policy Council, delighting many faith leaders, particularly on the left. "The Bush office was totally disconnected from policy," says Wallis. "That White House was doing social policy that made poor people poorer, and the faith-based office would try to clean up the mess." The faith advisory council will submit first drafts of policy recommendations in October. "The council has access to experts, policymakers, and administrators [in the White House] at the levels we've asked for," says David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, who sits on the council.

Such access has upset some on the left, who say religious leaders shouldn't be shaping government policy, and some on the right, who say the work amounts to politically inspired religious outreach. "We would have gotten killed for doing that," says Jim Towey, who directed Bush's faith-based office and notes that religious outreach in the previous administration was handled by the White House Office of Public Liaison, which reported to Karl Rove. "It looks like a political office now."

Are these changes for the better?  Thoughts?

"A House Divided"

By Rick Garnett

Jody Bottum has a must-read post over at First Things, about a -- to me -- very disturbing family-law decision in New Hampshire.  (Eugene Volokh comments on the same case here.)  A "10-year-old daughter lives during the week with her mother, Ms. Voydatch, who homeschools her. The father, Mr. Kurowski, objected to the homeschooling, and the court adopted the father’s proposal that the girl be sent to public school.”  And the court said, among other things, that: 

The Guardian ad Litem . . . concluded that the daughter would be best served by exposure to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior and cooperation in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs. . . .

[T]he Court is guided by the premise that education is by its nature an exploration and examination of new things, and by the premise that a child requires academic, social, cultural, and physical interaction with a variety of experiences, people, concepts, and surroundings in order to grow to an adult who can make intelligent decisions about how to achieve a productive and satisfying life.

The parties do not debate the relative academic merits of home schooling and public school: it is clear that the home schooling Ms. Voydatch has provided has more than kept up with the academic requirements of the [local] public school system. Instead, the debate centers on whether enrollment in public school will provide [the daughter] with an increased opportunity for group learning, group interaction, social problem solving, and exposure to a variety of points of view. . . . [T]he Court concludes that it would be in [the daughter’s] best interests to attend public school. . . .

As Prof. Volokh observes, "the decision [is] constitutionally troublesome, whether implemented in broken families or in intact families. It may well be in the child's best interests to be exposed to more views in public school — or it may well be in the child's best interests to avoid the views that public school will expose her to. Those are not judgments that courts should generally make given the First Amendment."

One suspects that this particular court would not conclude, in a similar case, that a child's best interests would be served by removing her from the public school, and sending her to a Catholic school, given that the Catholic school provides exposure to new points of view and a fuller account of life and living.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Tattooing and cannibalism

By Rob Vischer

I'm reading Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) for the first time, and my favorite quote thus far is one I'll throw out there for my friends and family members (and perhaps MoJers?) who have tattoos:

Gambling is the vice of the savage.  True civilization ought to outgrow it, as it has outgrown tattooing and cannibalism.

(For a more optimistic view of the tattoo craze, read R.R. Reno's thoughtful essay from last year.)

Welcome Home Ali O'Grady: Muhammad Ali made freeman of his ancestral home in Ireland

By Michael Perry

Read about it ... here.

What does this have to do with Catholic legal theory, you ask.

I won't stoop to dignify such an ignorant question with an answer.

(But I wil tell you that Muhammad Ali, John Breen, and I share something important in common!)

I didn't know that Michael S. was an Ayn-Randian!

By Michael Perry

Here.  The old, the young, the sick, the poor--in short, "the least of these sisters and brothers of mine"--might have a hard time earning a place on the Holtz-Scaperlanda team ... 

Obama & Berlusconi ... and the Vatican and the local episcopal conferences

By Michael Perry

Interesting piece here, sent to us by MOJ friend Gerry Whyte of the law faculty at Trinity College Dublin.

A long newsmagazine story about Ave Maria School of Law

By Rick Garnett

Is here, in the Washington Monthly.  What can one say?  It's all very sad.

Of Football and Politics

By Michael Scaperlanda

As the liturgical calendar turns from Ordinary Time to College Football Time (has the Vatican approved this change yet?), I thought some of our readers might be interested in this WSJ article "Why Your Coach Votes Republican."

Here is a snippet:

Mr. Holtz, who coached Notre Dame to its last national championship in 1988, draws a parallel between the standards and rules that most coaches set for their players and the Republican vision of how American society ought to operate.

"You aren't entitled to anything. ... You get what you earn—your position on the team," Mr. Holtz said. "You're treated like everybody else. You're held accountable for your actions. You understand that your decisions affect other people on that team…There's winners, there's losers, and there's competitiveness."

Hook 'Em Horns!  Go Irish!  Rock Chalk Jayhawk!

Winters on SSM in DC

By Rick Garnett

Over at the America blog, Michael Sean Winters has a useful post up regarding the same-sex-marriage debate in Washington, D.C., and on Archbishop Wuerl's recent statements regarding the Church's teaching, and the traditional understanding, of marriage.  Particularly important, I think, is Winters's response to the canard that such statements, in the context of such a debate, threaten (or, indeed, have anything to do with) the "separation of church and state":

[T]he opposition has begun to throw out straw men and other obfuscations. "I respect the bishop for his view…but we live in a representative democracy where there is a separation of church and state. We do not live in a theocracy," councilman David Catania told the Washington Post. True enough, but no one suggested that we do transform our constitutional arrangements in a theocratic direction. Indeed, Catania’s comments are carefully chosen – and especially galling - because he and his allies are trying to prevent a referendum on the issue. Ours is a representative democracy, and Catania is a representative, but he should not so scorn the demos, the people, as to deny us a vote on the definition of an institution so central to our lives and society.

Winters's point here is consistent, I think, with the claim (which I *think* all of us here at MOJ would endorse) that there are "moral limits to morals legislation" (as our colleague Fr. Greg Kalscheur has written) and that Christians will often have good (and Christian) reasons for refusing to "legislate [Christian] morality" (as Michael Perry has written). 

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Prof. Stone (again) on "our six Catholic justices"

By Rick Garnett

Prof. Geoffrey Stone returns, here, to the phenomenon of "our . . . Catholic justices."  A few years ago, after the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to the federal ban on partial-birth abortions, Prof. Stone had caused some controversy with his assertion that the justices in the majority -- all Catholic -- had "failed to respect the fundamental difference between religious belief and morality", a distinction that "[t]o be sure, . . can be an elusive distinction, but in a society that values the separation of church and state, . . . is fundamental."

I responded, here (see also this), and disagreed.  I thought, and think, that the majority was both reasonable and correct in concluding that the Constitution permits Congress to regulate abortion in the way that it did, and that their decision did not involve the imposition of specifically Catholic "religious belief."

In his latest piece on the subject, Prof. Stone's presentation is (I think) less (to use his word) "inflammatory", and more measured, than was his earlier one.  He proposes a number of arguments, grounded in data about justices' voting in abortion-related cases, intended to support, if not to "prove[]", his initial assertion that the Catholic justices' religion best explains their vote to uphold Congress's enactment. 

I'll leave it to readers, for the most part, to assess these arguments, but would suggest that Prof. Stone's claims seem at least as consistent with the hypothesis that "non-Catholic justices are more likely than Catholic justices, in abortion-related cases, to give in to the temptation to impose their policy preferences and disable politically accountable actors through implausible readings of the Constitution" as with the hypothesis that "Catholic justices, in abortion cases, tend to rely on specifically Catholic beliefs and morality rather than on the Constitution's meaning."  That is, the observation that Catholic justices tend to vote against the constitutionalization or expansion of abortion rights should raise not only the (in Prof. Stone's words) "awkward" question whether they are imposing their religious beliefs, but also the question, "why are the non-Catholic justices more likely to get it wrong, when it comes to abortion?"

UPDATE:  Geof Stone and I have had some conversation about our respective posts, and he kindly agreed to let me share the substance of this conversation with MOJ.  See below the jump . . .

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