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, June 1, 2009

Christian Century Piece on Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty

By Thomas Berg

I have an article up on same-sex marriage and religious liberty in the online version of The Christian Century, the moderate-to-liberal Christian magazine.  Sample paragraph, for the argument that exemptions should extend to religious organizations broadly and to small businesspeople who would personally have to faciliate a same-sex marriage to which they conscientiously object:

Protecting objectors generously is consistent with America's long tradition of free exercise of religion. People from many perspectives—religious progressives as well as traditionalists—should affirm the principle that the exercise of religion does not stop at the church door, but carries over into organizational works of charity and justice motivated by faith. Religious exercise also extends into the workplace. The argument "Don't impose your personal moral beliefs when you enter the commercial world" should ring especially false in the wake of recent financial scandals. Legal rules should not discourage people from relating their conscientious beliefs to their business, even if others disagree with the beliefs.

Consistent Life statement on Tiller

By rstith

I did not draft this statement, but as someone on the Consistent Life national board, I voted for it.
Richard

Consistent Life, an international network of 200 groups and many individuals for peace, justice and life, condemns the assassination of Dr. George R. Tiller.  Responding to violence with violence only furthers the cycle of violence, which harms all human society.  We urge opposition to all forms of violence through creative nonviolent means.  Killing people does not demonstrate that killing people is wrong.  Executions, whether by governments or private parties, represent moral failures.  We hope that people reflecting on the tragedy in Wichita on May 31 will re-examine and reject the idea that violence is an acceptable "solution" to problems, perceived or real.

Contact:  Bill Samuel, President, Consistent Life (http://www.consistent-life.org/),
301-943-6406 or [email protected]

Consistent Life mission statement:
We are committed to the protection of life, which is threatened in today's world by war, abortion, poverty, racism, capital punishment and euthanasia. We believe that these issues are linked under a 'consistent ethic of life'. We challenge those working on all or some of these issues to maintain a cooperative spirit of peace, reconciliation, and respect in protecting the unprotected.

Martin Marty on "Supreme Court Catholics"

By Michael Perry

Sightings

6/1/09

Supreme Court Catholics

-- Martin E. Marty

If/when Judge Sonia Sotomayor is sworn in as a member of the United States Supreme Court, there would/will be six Roman Catholics on it. My trained and focused eye -- trained to do "sightings" of public religion in the various media, including the internet, and focused on the chosen subject of the week -- has been seeking evidence of anti-Catholicism among mainline Protestant and Evangelical leaders, in the form of expressions of worry and prejudice. Unless between Saturday (when I write) and Monday (when readers read) some surprise occurs, public controversies over her appointment will not yet have attracted the voice of any non-Catholic bishops, moderators, denominational presidents, church-body newspapers, or representative columnists.

Why is this remarkable? This week I reread Philip Hamburger’s Separation of Church and State, a five-hundred-page examination of the subject. His thesis is the partly substantiated claim -- here’s the dust jacket speaking -- that "separation became a constitutional freedom largely through fear and prejudice" voiced by militants who "adopted the principle of separation to restrict the role of Catholics in public life." They were Know Nothings, members of the KKK, and eventually "theologically liberal, anti-Christian secularists." Hamburger offers abundant sad and scary quotations from olden days, from sad and scared Protestants and non-Catholic religionists.

Alas for their heirs: Pope John XXIII and President John F. Kennedy, as well as vast cultural and churchly changes, ended the olden days and ruined the old show. If mainline Protestants, who make up one-fifth of the populace, and evangelical Protestants, who make up at least a third, want to make a point of being anti-Catholic and showing it by commenting on this appointment, they surely are stealthy attackers. Mainline Protestants turned "ecumenical" two-score years ago, as they and most Catholics became buddies. Evangelical Protestants, who decades ago called the Pope the Antichrist foretold in the Book of Revelation, now link with his successors on selected social issues which are in contention. Were it not for professional Catholic defense organizations which are ready to pop up to represent their interests on cable TV, we would find that Catholics and non-Catholics pick and choose whom and what they will support or reject in public life.

Wait a minute!  What about the blogs? Yes, they reveal an underground of anti-Catholics, including many ex-Catholics. The Washington Post "On Faith" column, edited by Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn and crafted by David Waters, which includes a stable of diverse characters, I among them, stimulated discussion of the "Six Catholics on the Supreme Court" issue, referenced below. Waters first deals with the comment by Catholic editors left and right, and then turns it over to the bloggers. "On Faith" screens out the vile kind of bloggers who invent new variations on obscenity, blasphemy, and, well, bad manners. Still, along with good stuff, there is some venom.

What strikes me is how unrepresentative the self-named angry Christians in the string of commentators are, if measured against the wider church bodies and leadership. Some simple, raw, old-fashioned anti-Catholicism is present, but it has to share space with Catholics who argue how Catholic someone has to be to be Catholic, and all the rest. At the end, such blogs give us a license to yawn when the Catholic defense people rise to complain and rage about anti-Catholicism. We have instead important things to discuss. One hopes they can be argued amid the noisy and predictable debate this season.

References:

For the Washington Post "On Faith" blog, see: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2009/05/is_she_catholic_does_it_matter.html?hpid=talkbox1

Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Harvard, 2002).

----------

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Meilaender on stem-cell research and torture

By Rick Garnett

This essay is long, but well worth the time.  I particularly liked this:

If human beings were simply members of our species, it might sometimes make sense to sacrifice one or another of them for the sake of the species as a whole. But human beings are not just members of the species or parts of a whole. Each human being is a "someone" who belongs to no earthly community to the whole extent of his being. That is why we are not interchangeable. The "value" of one thousand people may be more than that of one, but the thousand are not more than one in personal dignity.

More from Robert George, regarding science and the abortion debate

By Rick Garnett

Responding to Michael Sean Winters's review of his recent National Press Club conversation with Doug Kmiec, Prof. George writes:

. . . [Mr. Winters] attribute[s] to me the very reverse of what I hold about whether science can resolve the abortion debate.  I believe science cannot resolve it.  Modern embryology and developmental biology can show, and have shown, that the human embryo or fetus is a living individual of the species Homo sapiens---a human being in the earliest stages of his or her natural development.  And that is important,  But I agree with Peter Singer (and just about everybody else who knows anything about the science) that the question of the morality of abortion is not about when the life of a human being begins---the answer to that is clear enough---it is about whether and, if so, when a human being's life has value and dignity---in other words, it is about whether all human beings are persons (i.e., possessors of dignity and a right to life), or whether some human beings (e.g., those at the earliest developmental stages) lack the attribute or attributes of "personhood," and may therefore be killed if they are unwanted or perceived as burdensome.  I believe in the fundamental equality of all human beings.  I believe that on the basis of philosophical arguments that I have advanced in various writings, including my book Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (with moral philosopher Christopher Tollefsen), and my article "Embryo Ethics" (pdf attached) in the 2008 issue of Daedalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In defending my position, I engage the arguments advanced by Singer, Jeffrey McMahon, Michael Tooley, and others who believe that some human beings are not yet persons (i.e., those in the embryonic, fetal, and early infant stages of development); others are no longer persons (i.e., those in irreversible comas or minimally conscious states and those suffering from severe dementias); and some are not now, have never been, and never will be persons (i.e., the severely mentally retarded or disabled).  Sophisticated pro-choice advocates such as Singer, McMahon, and Tooley, do not suppose or claim that the being killed in an abortion is something other than human.  (Singer, in a letter published by the New York Times, quite properly reprimanded Mario Cuomo for claiming that the debate about abortion reflects doubts or differences of opinion about whether the fetus killed in an abortion is a human being.)  Their claim is that the human being killed in abortion is not a person.  There is agreement on the science---the feuts is a human being.  The disagreement is philosophical---are human beings in the fetal stage of development "persons"?   I hold that every member of the human family, irrespective not only of race, sex, and ethnicity, but also of ages, size, location, stage of development, and condition of dependency, possess inherent and equal dignity; it is precisely this claim that serious and sophisticated pro-choice people deny.  As I've said in dozens of places, science can show only that the developing child is a human being.  It cannot resolve the question of whether all human beings or, indeed, any human being possesses worth and dignity.  Science cannot prove that it is wrong to kill a five month old fetus.  By the same token, science cannot show that it is wrong to kill a two-year old child or a healthy fifty-three year old professor.  Science cannot tell us whether the death penalty, or genocide, or killing in war is right or wrong.  Science can tell us whether a creature is human; it cannot tell us whether deliberately killing humans (be it by abortion or in embryo-destructive research, or in war or as a punishment) is justified or unjustified.

Conference of interest at Baylor

By Rick Garnett

Click here to learn more about the "Third Annual Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture."  This year's theme is "Secularization and Revival:  The Fate of Religion in Modern Intellectual History".  Check it out.  The speaker lineup is fantastic.

Arbp. Chaput's Canterbury Award remarks

By Rick Garnett

This year's recipient of the Canterbury Award, given out by my friends at the Becket Fund (go here and give them money) is Archbishop Charles Chaput.  His remarks on the occasion are here.  A taste:

My job tonight is to talk about the importance of religious freedom, and our need to protect that freedom. More than any other country in the world, the United States is a nation that only really makes sense in a religion-friendly context. The writer Robert D. Kaplan, who has little use for soft-minded moralizing, once said that America has done so well for so long because her Founders had a tragic sense of history. They had few illusions about human perfectibility.  And they got that spirit from the world of faith that shaped their experience.  

The Founders certainly had hope in their ability to build a “new order of things” -- but only under the judgment of a Creator. In other words, they had a sane kind of hope; the biblical kind that’s grounded in realism, because they also believed in sin. They had an unsentimental grasp of human nature as a mix of nobility, weakness and flaws that need to be constrained. And that kind of thinking had very practical, political results. American ideals require a certain kind of citizen to make them work. That’s why John Adams said that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” . . .

Linker's Question for George, and Dreher's answer

By Rick Garnett

It comes as no surprise, of course, that some are seizing on the murder of Dr. Tiller as an occasion to either blame those who insist on reminding the world that our legal regime does not treat unborn children justly for their reckless and enabling speech or to play, yet again, the "you guys don't really believe what you say, because if you did, you'd be killing abortion providers, too" card.  Again, no surprise.

It seems to me (judging from my in-box) that every pro-life organization in the country is issuing press releases denouncing categorically (as they should) the murder.  (Click here for some links.)  Here, for example, is Robert George's statement (here):  

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing.  The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands.  No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him.  We are a nation of laws.  Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence.  Rightly or wrongly, George Tiller was acquitted by a jury of his peers.  "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord." For the sake of justice and right, the perpetrator of this evil deed must be prosecuted, convicted, and punished.  By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion.  Every human life is precious.  George Tiller's life was precious.  We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life.  Let our "weapons" in the fight to defend the lives of abortion's tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit. 

To which Damon Linker responds:

If abortion truly is what the pro-life movement says it is -- if it is the infliction of deadly violence against an innocent and defenseless human being -- then doesn't morality demand that pro-lifers act in any way they can to stop this violence? I mean, if I believed that a guy working in an office down the street was murdering innocent and defenseless human beings every day, and the governing authorities repeatedly refused to intervene on behalf of the victims, I might feel compelled to do something about it, perhaps even something unreasonable and irresponsible. Wouldn't you?

This is the radicalizing logic of pro-life rhetoric. Which brings me to my question for pro-lifers: Who is the better, truer member of your movement? The man who murdered serial "baby killer" George Tiller? Or Robert George and other (comparative) moderates, who reject the use of violence to save the innocent?

I suspect, given Linker's past writings and interventions, that this question is rhetorical.  Certainly, it has been answered many times.  To be clear:  there *are* reasonable and important questions to be raised about the kind of language used in identifying, condemning, and fighting against injustice -- and not, remember, just the injustice of abortion.   

A recent response, specifically to Linker, is provided here by Rod Dreher.  See also, here, Michael Sean Winters's comments. 

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Murder in Kansas

By Rick Garnett

George Tiller, one of the country's more well-known performers of late-term abortions, has -- it is being reported -- been murdered, at his church, in Wichita.  This is horrible.

George, Glendon, and Kmiec at the Nat'l Press Club

By Rick Garnett

Last Thursday, the Catholic University of America sponsored an event which involved a discussion, moderated by Mary Ann Glendon, between Robert George and Doug Kmiec, on "life issues" and the Obama Administration.  A version of Professor George's statement is available at Public Discourse, here.  You can watch video of the event, here.

I have heard reports from several people who were present, and it sounds to me like it was an outstanding event.  And, I watched the entire video.  My own impression -- and this will not, I expect, come as a surprise to MOJ readers -- is that Prof. George's remarks were powerful and convincing, and that Prof. Kmiec was not able to provide a plausible counter-account.   

Michael Sean Winters, at America, in this account (and also here), reports his very different impressions.  As much as I usually appreciate his reporting, though, I think his suggestions that Prof. George had "ranted" and that he "provided a series of assertions, unsupported by argument" were deeply disappointing and are entirely without foundation.  Watch the video, and decide for yourselves.  (Also read this (yet another) correction of the still-often-repeated-and-still-not-right claim that abortions increased under President Bush.  And then also remember that, even if the claim were true, that would not make just our current unjust legal regime regarding abortion.)

Here, for good measure, is another report, which includes this summary of the disagreement:  "Kmiec treats the personhood of the unborn as a matter of faith rather than a matter of natural law therefore feels it cannot be imposed on those with whom we disagree. Professor George claims that it is a matter of justice to recognize the personhood of the unborn from the moment of conception."

Mr. Winters also reported, by the way, in the same post, on a presentation by our own Patrick Brennan on the freedom of the Church.  According to Mr. Winters, Patrick "gave a somewhat bizarre presentation on how the Church as Church should have certain constitutional protections different from that enumerated in the First Amendment."  But there is nothing remotely "bizarre" about the idea that the Church-as-Church does and should enjoy constitutional protection, or about the claim that the protection currently provided by the Court's doctrine.  Patrick's work on church-autonomy, subsidiarity, sovereignty, and religious freedom is some of the best stuff out there, and I hope that Mr. Winters will revisit and revise his report.

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