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.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

A Different Boycott

By Elizabeth Schiltz

Related to my earlier post on the movie "Tropic Thunder," I just got this e-mail from the advocacy group The Arc.  Special Olympics, the Down Sydrome Association of America, and the National Down Syndrome Congress are among the others joining this call for a boycott.  The "Blueberryshoes" 60-second video is powerful (and short).

Arc members and friends,

The movie "Tropic Thunder" opens nationwide this week and reportedly contains many offensive uses of the word "retard" and a negative portrayal of a character with an intellectual disability named "Simple Jack." You may have received other e-mails and links about this.

Being called "retarded" is painful to persons with intellectual disabilities. Language matters; it can cut human beings down or build them up. Here's what we’d like people to do:

  • Boycott the movie and if you can, donate the dollars you would have spent to a disability organization you support.
  • Instead of seeing the movie, take a minute to watch this short :60 second public service announcement made for the Arc of Northern Virginia. www.blueberryshoes.com There is much more power in this "R" word. Send this link to everyone you know!
  • Take time to talk with others about why language matters. You can use the "Hate Speech" flyer prepared by The Arc of the U.S. [here].

Thank you!

UPDATE:  The legitimacy of this boycott has been the matter of intense debate within my own household, with about an even split between those who think that it's a perfectly legitimate occasion to take a public stand on behalf of the most vulnerable population in our society today, and others who think that the film seems to be making fun of the vanity and shallowness of actors, rather than people with disabilities.  Those in the latter camp argue you can't judge without seeing the movie.  But that defeats the whole purpose of the boycott.  It's a quandary.......

Individualism, collectivism, and . . .

By Rick Garnett

In the New York Times, David Brooks has this op-ed about China, America, and competing world-views.  A bit:

The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

It seems to me that a "Catholic" way of seeing the world might complicate, or at least diversify, Brooks's taxonomy.  A "Catholic" view, one might think, is "individualist", in the sense that it emphasizes, and has as its focus, the worth of each and every human person.  At the same time, a "Catholic" view -- while not "collectivist" (or statist) -- also sees the person in "context" and appreciates the role of societies (again, not merely "the state", but societies).   

Liberal Feminism, Muslim Women, and the Pope

By Elizabeth Schiltz

Cyra Akila Choudhury has posted a very interesting paper on SSRN entitled:  "Empowerment or Estrangement?  Liberal Feminism's Visions of the "Progress" of Muslim Women."

I haven't read it all yet, but the introduction sets forth her concern about the current feminist discourse about how to "help" Muslim women.  In this discourse, she writes

. . . there is an expectation that Muslims, particularly women, will eventually value the same rights and social orderings as those of their benefactors in the West.  Yet when Muslim women consistently articulate a different vision for themselves, it is a source of concern and puzzlement that can only be resolved through judgments about the 'progress' of thier consciousness, education, and/or experience relative to 'Western' women.  This article seeks to challenge those judgments.  To do so, I examine the Liberal theoretical underpinnings of these scholarly and activist projects to reveal how they advance a particular idea of human flourishing that seeks to ultimately 'reform' or extinguish those life forms (including traditional Islam) which do not comport with it.

In the first section of the article, I examine how Liberalism's justification for colonialism has been sublimated in Liberal (legal) feminism which subconsciously continues traditional Liberal political theory's judgments about the "East."  I suggest that most Liberal feminists also have a specific idea of women's flourishing that prevents it from fully comprehending Muslim women who choose to adhere to Islam, which is, in their view, a hopelessly patriarchal and gender oppressive religions.  Liberal notions of flourishing require progress towards a Liberal society.  As such, "reform" is used to further this vision.  I argue that Liberal feminism also shares this 'narrative progress' that reduces non-Liberal societies to "developing" and, consequently, global southern women to victims.

Yet, many women in the global south reject this characterization of their existence.  In the second part of the article, I offer some examples of Muslim women's visions of flourishing that show both overlap with Liberal values and, more importantly, divergence.  I propose that Muslim women's adherence to religion must be accepted as legitimate expressions of flourishing even if we, as Western feminists, are skeptical about the freedom of their choice.  I urge feminists who have continued to be extremely incredulous about Muslim women's choices to live according to Islam, to re-evaluate and see these women as exerting power in their own lives.

It struck me reading this that Choudhury is engaged in precisely the type of work that Pope Benedict is challenging us all to engage in -- broadening the discussion about how to engage modernity from the largely Western concerns about secular vs. Christian viewpoints to include the rest of the world.  That was certainly one of the major thrusts of his Regensburg address.  He also urged that same larger focus in one of the most interesting books I read the past year, the dialogue between Jurgen Habermas and then-Cardinal Ratzinger, reprinted in Dialectics of Secularization:  On Reason and Religion.  In that book, Ratzinger wrote:

. . . although the two great cultures of the West, that is, the culture of the Christian faith and that of secular rationality, are an important contributory factor (each in its own way) throughout the world and in all cultures, nevertheless they are de facto not universal.   This means that the question put by Jurgen Habermas' colleague in Teheran seems to be not devoid of significance -- namely, the question of whether a comparative study of cultures and the sociology of religion suggest that Europan secularization is an exceptional development and one that needs to be corrected. . . .

At any rate, it is a fact that our secular rationality may seem very obvious to our reason, which has been formed in the West; but qua rationality, it comes up against its limitations when it attempts to demonstrate itself.  The proof for it is in reality linked to specific cultural contexts, and it must acknowledge that it cannot as such be reproduced in the whole of mankind.  This also means that it cannot be completely operative in the whole of mankind.  In other words, the rational or ethical or religious formula that would embrace the whole world and unite all persons does not exist; or, at least, it is unattainable at the present moment.  This is why the so-called 'world ethos' remains an abstraction.

And, yes, this does mean that Ratzinger has to conclude, as he does in this same talk:

The natural law has remained (especially in the Catholic Church) the key issue in dialogues with the secular society and with other communities of faith in order to appeal to the reason we share in common and to seek the basis for a consensus about the ethical principles of law in a secular, pluralistic society.  Unfortunately, this instrument has become blunt.

Interesting challenges.  It's very exciting to see them being approached from the non-Christian perspective.

"We're not Catholic, we're Jesuit!"

By Rick Garnett

From the "stuff Catholics might think is funny" file:  For more on the proposed AALS boycott (discussed in several earlier MOJ posts), try this (from Concurring Opinions) and this, by San Diego's Prof. Tom Smith.  There are some (I think) funny back-and-forths in the comments about whether Jesuit schools (like those at which some calling for the boycott teach) are really Catholic schools (and therefore also deserving of boycotts, given the Church's teachings on marriage and sexuality).  (To my Jesuit friends . . . I kid! I kid!)

Dante and Homophobia

By Rob Vischer

You should check out Rick Hills' post over at PrawfsBlawg on the possibility of non-homophobic opposition to same-sex relationships, as seen through the lens offered by Dante.  Here's the opening:

A conservative friend of mine protested my recent post that used the term “homophobia” to refer to persons who disapprove of same-sex sexual relationships. He noted that such disapproval is not necessarily “phobic”: It could simply be based on some perfectly rational theory of sexual morality. As a theoretical matter, I tend to think that my friend is correct: Disapproval of homosexuality is not necessarily phobic, as a matter of logical necessity. But much –- probably most -- modern disapproval is, in my view, probably phobic as a matter of fact.

UPDATE: To be clear, while Hills' post is worth reading, his reasoning is, in my view, far from air-tight, as I've tried to indicate in the comments.

The Death of the Mainline (and Why It Matters)

By Rob Vischer

I just returned from a week at Lake Okoboji in northwest Iowa, where, since my birth, I have gathered with my extended family for an old-fashioned evangelical Bible conference every August.  This sort of gathering used to be found all over the place, but it's a dying breed.  The Okoboji Conference (founded by my great-grandfather in 1935) is still vibrant, attracting roughly 2000 people each year for morning classes and evening services.  This year I co-taught a class with my brother Phil, titled Christ and Culture: Christian Perspectives on Law, Entertainment, and Business.  While my brother handled the entertainment and business sides, I spent three days exploring modern law with 160 evangelicals.  It was challenging for me, and undoubtedly jolting for them, in part because I encouraged them to look beyond scriptural texts to find intellectual resources for engaging our culture on issues like human dignity, the family, and economic justice.  (At a minimum, I guarantee that there is a deeper working knowledge of "subsidiarity" today among northwest Iowa's evangelicals than at any time in history.)

So engagement between Catholics and evangelicals is on my mind, and that might explain why I found Joseph Bottum's The Death of Protestant America so interesting.  Bottum places Mainline Protestantism's decline in a broader cultural context, focusing on Mainline denominations' abandonment of any serious theological work and capitulation to secular trends.  An excerpt:

[T]he denominations were often engaged in what later generations would scorn as narrow sectarian debates: infant baptism, the consequences of the Fall, the saving significance of good works, the real presence of the Eucharist, the role of bishops. And yet, somehow, the more their concerns were narrow, the more their effects were broad. Perhaps precisely because they were aimed inward, the Protestant churches were able to radiate outward, giving a characteristic shape to the nation: the centrality of families, the pattern of marriages and funerals, the vague but widespread patriotism, the strong localism, and the ongoing sense of some providential purpose at work in the existence of the United States.

Which makes it all the stranger that, somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, ­soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.

And that leaves us in an odd situation, unlike any before. The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other ­period in American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: The Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.

Can Catholics and/or evangelicals fill the void?  Bottum has his doubts:

The evangelicals may have too little church organization, and the Catholics may have too much. Besides, both are minorities in the nation’s population, and they arrive at our current moment with a history of being outsiders—the objects of a long record of American suspicion, which hasn’t gone away despite the decline of the churches that gave the suspicion its modern form.

Perhaps some joining of Catholics and evangelicals, in morals and manners, could achieve the social unity in theological difference that characterized the old Mainline. But the vast intellectual resources of Catholicism still sound a little odd in the American ear, just as the enormous reservoir of evangelical faith has been unable, thus far, to provide a widely accepted moral rhetoric.

Monday, August 11, 2008

California homeschooling decision

By Richard Myers

On Friday August 8, 2008, the California Court of Appeals issued its decision in the home-schooling case. Here. The court removed the cloud over home-schooling by interpreting California law to permit home-schooling as a form of private school education. The court also made it clear that the decision of parents to home-school could be overridden (without violating the Constitution) to protect the safety of the children involved.

The decision seems a laudable effort to resolve, at least temporarily, the crisis in California that the earlier decison had threatened. Although I'd like to think about this a bit more, the constitutional discussion also seems sound, despite a few statements in the opinion that give a bit too much deference to state power. Even the strongest advocates of parental rights agree that the state may step in to protect the health and safety of children. Here, the parents who were carrying the banner of parental rights had been found, according to the published opinions, guilty of physical abuse and of a failure to protect one of the children from sexual abuse. The court of appeals ended up remanding the case and asked the lower court to consider whether the safety of the children required removing them from home schooling.

Richard M.

Obama's "Messiah Complex" (Or is it Bush's?)

By Rob Vischer

Over at Beliefnet, Steven Waldman critiques efforts by the conservative media (and the McCain campaign) to create evidence of Obama granting himself Savior-like significance.  They do so, according to Waldman, by taking statements wildly out of context.  For example:

The line used in the McCain ad, a campaign memo, and on just about every conservative blog in America is Obama's quote: "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions."

Witnesses who attended the closed-door talk at which Obama suposedly said this have claimed that Obama's actual words were:

"It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign -- that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It's about America. I have just become a symbol. I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions."

Waldman also compares the current rhetoric with the 2004 Bush campaign's efforts to signal that God had orchestrated Bush's election in 2000.

"Tropic Thunder" and People with Intellectual Disabilities

By Elizabeth Schiltz

Timothy Shriver has a great op ed piece in the Washington Post about the portrayal of people with intellectual disabilities in the film due out this week, "Tropic Thunder."  This film has been vaguely on my radar screen as containing potentially offensive racial characterizations, but what sounds like some truly offensive characterizations of people with intellectual disabilities doesn't appear to be raising much objection.  Shriver's piece includes this heart-breakingly realistic description of the continuing systemic discrimination against people with intellectual disabilities in our society:

People with intellectual disabilities are routinely abused, neglected, insulted, institutionalized and even killed around the world. Their parents are told to give up, that their children are worthless. Schools turn them away. Doctors refuse to treat them. Employers won't hire them. None of this is funny.

For centuries, they have been the exception to the most basic spiritual principle: that we are each equal in spirit, capable of reflecting the goodness of the divine, carriers of love. But not people with intellectual disabilities. What's a word commonly applied to them? Hopeless.

Let's consider where we are in 2008. Our politics are about overcoming division, our social movements are about ending intolerance, our great philanthropists promote ending poverty and disease among the world's poor. Are people with intellectual disabilities included in the mainstream of these movements? For the most part, no.

Why? Because they're different. Their joy doesn't fit on magazine covers. Their spirituality doesn't come in self-help television. Their kind of wealth doesn't command political attention. (The best of the spirit never does.)

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Kmiec's question, and other things . . .

By Rick Garnett

At Michael P.'s suggestion, I surfed over to the Commonweal blog for David Gibson's post on "abortion and the Catholic voter".  I have to admit, I'm not sure there's all that much to be said or done, or much movement to be expected, on the "Catholic voter" question.  We are where we are, and that's where I expect we'll stay.  Still . . .

It seems to be a premise of many of these "for whom should Catholics vote?" discussions that "on every issue that matters, other than abortion, the election of Sen. Obama will actually yield meaningful policy actions that are edifyingly in concert with the Church's social teaching, while the election of Sen. McCain will actually yield meaningful policy actions that are distressingly in conflict with the Church's social teaching."  But, this premise is false. 

It is false because it ignores, or at least downplays, the political, social, cultural and economic realities that will almost certainly prevent dramatic changes with respect to most matters, and so it overestimates the "good" stuff about an Obama administration that, it is proposed, outweighs the "bad" stuff.  It is also false because Sen. McCain's views (or, more precisely, the policies likely to be pursued by his administration) on a number of matters -- not just abortion -- are, in terms of consonance with the Church's social teaching, preferable to Sen. Obama's.  Or, so a faithful, reasonable, informed, non-duped, non-Republican-hack, Commonweal-and-First Things-reading Catholic could conclude.  It's a sad thought, but . . . I'm not sure that productive conversations -- even among friends -- are possible so long as this false premise is assumed.

David Gibson's post is a discussion of this New York Times piece -- read my colleague Gerry Bradley's analysis of the piece, here -- which quotes my longtime friend Doug Kmiec as urging Catholics to ask, "not ‘Can I vote for him?’ but ‘Why shouldn’t I vote for the candidate who feels more passionately and speaks more credibly about economic fairness for the average family, who will be a true steward of the environment, and who will treat the immigrant family with respect?’”?  (I assume Doug is not talking here about Gov. Romney, the previous object of his enthusiasm?  Sorry.  Couldn't resist.)  Put aside, but just for now, the facts that it is not at all obvious that Sen. Obama's "feel[ings]" -- on anything -- are more admirable than Sen. McCain's, that Sen. McCain's record on environmental "stewardship" is a responsible and reasonable one, and that Sen. McCain -- who has taken real political risks supporting fairness for immigrants, while Sen. Obama (feelings and all) has not yet served out a full term in the Senate -- would not "treat the immigrant family with respect".  For what it's worth, here's a possible answer to Doug's question:  Because Sen. Obama voted against a law banning the killing of infants that survive abortions, he voted to filibuster Justice Alito (in a context where the leading arguments against the nominee involved his vote upholding abortion regulations) and would probably nominate judges and justices who, though entirely competent and decent, would have misguided views on religious-freedom and church-state matters, he opposes school choice, he would roll back the faith-based initiative, and his election means the certain passage into law of the awful Freedom of Choice Act.  He looks great when he raises his chin, and some of what he says -- when he is not thundering in support of abortion rights -- sounds nice, but that's just not enough.  For me.  For what it's worth. . . .

On an entirely different matter . . .   I've been vacationing in the Pacific Northwest, am returning to "Michiana" tomorrow, and can report that (a) Whistler is beautiful and (b) the Kautz route up Mt. Rainier was -- for this aging law prof, anyway -- too hard.  Back to the drawing board . . . .

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