Louisville Courier-Journal
December 8, 2006
Catholic bishops: Health care a 'moral right'
By Peter Smith
Kentucky and the nation have a moral obligation to improve a situation
in which millions of people lack health care and many more face cuts in
Medicaid services, the state's Roman Catholic bishops said yesterday.
The four bishops issued a seven-page document citing the "moral right" to affordable and quality health care.
"Access to adequate health care (is) a basic human right,
necessary for the development and maintenance of life and for the
ability of human beings to realize the fullness of their dignity,"
Louisville Archbishop Thomas C. Kelly, chairman of the Catholic
Conference of Kentucky, wrote in a statement accompanying the document.
"A just society is one that protects and promotes the
fundamental rights of its members with special attention to meeting the
basic needs of the poor and underserved, including the need for
affordable health care," Kelly wrote.
The joint statement comes as Kentucky officials plan to raise
costs and cut some services, changes that would affect nearly 700,000
state residents who receive some form of Medicaid.
The state, facing a $425 million Medicaid shortfall in its current budget year, is seeking federal approval for the actions.
More than 500,000 Kentuckians, or one in eight residents, lack
health insurance, according to statistics from the Census Bureau and
the Kaiser Family Foundation. The foundation estimates that more than
45 million people are uninsured nationally.
"Affordable and accessible health care for those not covered by
Medicaid is an essential safeguard of human life, a fundamental human
right, and an urgent state and national priority," the bishops said in
their statement.
"Reform of the state's and nation's health-care system, rooted in values that respect human dignity … is a moral imperative."
In addition to Kelly, the statement was signed by Covington
Bishop Roger J. Foys, Lexington Bishop Ronald W. Gainer and Owensboro
Bishop John J. McRaith.
[To read the Kentucky Bishops' statement, click here.]
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Tuesday, January 3, 2006
Sightings 1/2/06
Predictions and Predicaments
-- Martin E. Marty
Predicting Religion is a book comprising papers by sociologists of religion who were asked to predict "Christian, Secular and Alternative Futures." Grace Davie, Paul Heelas, and Linda Woodhead edited chapters, many of them growing out of a 2001 conference. I finally had a chance to read the book during a quiet week, late enough in the game that the outcome of some of the predictions might be testable already! The notable authors disagree with each other as to whether we will see more secular or more religious, more Christian or more other-than-Christian futures in various places.
Europeans are bemused when they confront the many evidences of "salvational" Christian vitality in the U.S. -- and U.S. citizens, upon visiting Europe, come back with reports of empty chapels and cathedrals, casual participation by the few, and indifference and even disdain for faith communities.
When I read about or visit Europe, I come back to reality with this question: Can it happen here? Christian decline in Britain was a long, slow process, followed by sudden downturns. I used to teach about Irish Catholic history and about times when the seminary at Maynooth had many hundreds of seminarians. Today almost none graduate and proceed to ordination. (Closer to home, visitors to Quebec used to find full churches and huge outdoor festivals. Now decline is precipitous.) Why the European fate? Some blame tired and corrupt establishments, clerical sexual scandals, or new prosperity and materialism in Ireland as distractions. But why does consumerism boost American religious institutions -- and more? To the point:
Steve Bruce writes on "The Demise [not decline] of Christianity in Britain." Church attendance saw decline to 8 percent by 1999; in the 1980s the Church of England lost one-fourth of its attenders. The over-65 set makes up about one-fifth of Anglican attendance figures, and other churches run toward 40 percent. Membership? About 10 percent remain "members." In 1900, half of British kids were in Sunday school; now it is less than 4 percent. And in 1900 there were 45,400 clerics but, while population has since doubled, clerical numbers have fallen over 25 percent. Beliefs? Most serious decline is in "belief in a personal God and belief in Jesus as the Son of God." Politics: very little, very residual influence. Indifference reigns.
Liberal Christians used to trade on those persons shaped by intense religion but who rejected much of it as they grew. Today there is too little intensity left for adults to use to help shape the young. Bruce predicts: 1) "The church form of religion cannot return"; 2) "The sect form ... will decline slowly"; 3) "The cultic religion of New Age Spirituality will become ever more diffuse and ever less significant"; 4) "Three decades from now, Christianity in Britain will have largely disappeared." If help is to come, it has to be of a trickle-up sort, in which vitalities of sub-Saharan, Latin American, and Asian Christianity "go north." The Christianity that "went south" prospers, and selectively influences Christianity "up north."
Were this weekly electronic op-ed based in Europe, Sightings would have to be called Squintings. Are the predictors using the wrong spectacles, or is their vision clear? Again, regarding demise: Can it happen here?
Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Monday, January 2, 2006
The Fiesta Bowl:
Ohio State 34, Notre Dame 20.
As we Cubs fans are used to saying: 'Wait until next year!"
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[This an op-ed will be of interest to MOJ-readers.]
New York Times
January 2, 2006
Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P.
By JOSEPH LOCONTE
NANCY PELOSI, the Democratic leader in the House, sounded like an Old Testament prophet recently when she denounced the Republican budget for its "injustice and immorality" and urged her colleagues to cast their no votes "as an act of worship" during this religious season.
This, apparently, is what the Democrats had in mind when they vowed after President Bush's re-election to reclaim religious voters for their party. In the House, they set up a Democratic Faith Working Group. Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, created a Web site called Word to the Faithful. And Democratic officials began holding conferences with religious progressives. All of this was with the intention of learning how to link faith with public policy. An event for liberal politicians and advocates at the University of California at Berkeley in July even offered a seminar titled "I Don't Believe in God, but I Know America Needs a Spiritual Left."
A look at the tactics and theology of the religious left, however, suggests that this is exactly what American politics does not need. If Democrats give religious progressives a stronger voice, they'll only replicate the misdeeds of the religious right.
For starters, we'll see more attempts to draw a direct line from the Bible to a political agenda. The Rev. Jim Wallis, a popular adviser to leading Democrats and an organizer of the Berkeley meeting, routinely engages in this kind of Bible-thumping. In his book "God's Politics," Mr. Wallis insists that his faith-based platform transcends partisan categories.
"We affirm God's vision of a good society offered to us by the prophet Isaiah," he writes. Yet Isaiah, an agent of divine judgment living in a theocratic state, conveniently affirms every spending scheme of the Democratic Party. This is no different than the fundamentalist impulse to cite the book of Leviticus to justify laws against homosexuality.
When Christians - liberal or conservative - invoke a biblical theocracy as a handy guide to contemporary politics, they threaten our democratic discourse. Numerous "policy papers" from liberal churches and activist groups employ the same approach: they're awash in scriptural references to justice, poverty and peace, stacked alongside claims about global warming, debt relief and the United Nations Security Council.
Christians are right to argue that the Bible is a priceless source of moral and spiritual insight. But they're wrong to treat it as a substitute for a coherent political philosophy.
There is another worrisome trait shared by religious liberals and many conservatives: the tendency to moralize in the most extreme terms. William Sloane Coffin of the Clergy Leadership Network was typical in his denunciation of the Bush tax cuts: "I think he should remember that it was the devil who tempted Jesus with unparalleled wealth and power."
This trend is at its worst in the misplaced outrage in the war against Islamic terrorism. It's true that in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, some Christian conservatives shamed themselves by blaming the horror on feminists and gays, who allegedly incited God's wrath. But such nonsense is echoed by liberals like the theologian Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University.
"The price that Americans are going to have to pay for the kind of arrogance that we are operating out of right now is going to be terrible indeed," he said of the United States' response to the Qaeda attacks. "People will exact some very strong judgments against America - and I think we will well deserve it." Professor Hauerwas joins a chorus of left-wing clerics and religious scholars who compare the United States to Imperial Rome and Nazi Germany.
Democrats who want religious values to play a greater role in their party might take a cue from the human-rights agenda of religious conservatives. Evangelicals begin with the Bible's account of the God-given dignity of every person. And they've joined hands with liberal and secular groups to defend the rights of the vulnerable and oppressed, be it through prison programs for offenders and their families, laws against the trafficking of women and children, or an American-brokered peace plan for Sudan. In each case believers have applied their religious ideals with a strong dose of realism and generosity.
A completely secular public square is neither possible nor desirable; democracy needs the moral ballast of religion. But a partisan campaign to enlist the sacred is equally wrongheaded. When people of faith join political debates, they must welcome those democratic virtues that promote the common good: prudence, reason, compromise - and a realization that politics can't usher in the kingdom of heaven.
Joseph Loconte, a research fellow in religion at the Heritage Foundation and a commentator for National Public Radio, is the editor of "The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm."
Monday, December 26, 2005
For those of you interested in the discussion about whether capital punishment deters murder (here and here), Becker-Posner continue to opine ... though it seems to me from reading their interesting Christmas Day posting (here) that they still have not read the Donohue-Wolfers paper (here). Well, once the paper is published (as soon it will be) in the Stanford Law Review, few lawyer-economists will not have read it.
Just to be clear: The Donohue-Wolfers paper doesn't argue that capital punishment does not deter; rather, it argues that econometricians cannot say, based on the data that is available or is likely to become available, that capital punishment reduces the incidence of murder ... or that it increases the incidence of murder ("the brutalization effect"). According to Donohue-Wolfers, econometricians *can* say that whether capital punishment reduces the incidence of murder or, instead, increases it, the effect is very small.
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Saturday, December 24, 2005
I read the Posner & Becker postings on capital punishment and deterrence (to which Rick called our attention this morning, here) shortly after reading the Donohue-Wolfers paper (about which I posted this morning, here) that will soon appear in the Stanford Law Review. It seems clear that Becker and Posner posted before reading the Donohue-Wolfers paper. It will be interesting to see what they say after they've read the paper. The Donohue-Wolfers paper mounts a powerful econometric argument that there is no empirical basis for "believing" (as Becker says he does) that the capital punishment has a deterrent effect. (In the same issue of the Stanford Law Review, Carol Steiker of Harvard argues a "moral" case--as distinct from Donohue-Wolfers's '"economic" case--against capital punishment. For Steiker's paper, click here.)
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A profoundly important issue for those of us who contribute to and/or read this blog is the (im)morality of capital punishment. One cannot fully address that issue without attending to the question whether capital punishment has a deterrent effect. The following paper, recently posted on SSRN, addresses just that question.
Uses and Abuses of Empirical Evidence in the Death Penalty Debate
JOHN J. DONOHUE III
Yale Law School; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
JUSTIN WOLFERS
University of Pennsylvania - Business & Public Policy Department ; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) ; Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) ; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) ; Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Stanford Law Review, Vol. 58, December 2005
Abstract:
Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers that purport to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing the robustness of these inferences. Specifically, we start by assessing the time series evidence, comparing the history of executions and homicides in the United States and Canada, and within the United States, between executing and non-executing states. We analyze the effects of the judicial experiments provided by the 1972 Furman and 1976 Gregg decisions and assess the relationship between execution and homicide rates in state panel data since 1934. We then revisit the existing instrumental variables approaches and assess two recent state-specific execution moratoria. In each case, we find that previous inferences of large deterrent effects based upon specific samples, functional forms, control variables, comparison groups, or IV strategies are extremely fragile and that even small changes in specifications yield dramatically different results. The fundamental difficulty facing the econometrician is that the death penalty - at least as it has been implemented in the United States - is applied so rarely that the number of homicides that it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot be reliably disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors. As such, short samples and particular specifications may yield large but spurious correlations. We conclude that existing estimates appear to reflect a small and unrepresentative sample of the estimates that arise from alternative approaches. Sampling from the broader universe of plausible approaches suggests not just reasonable doubt about whether there is any deterrent effect of the death penalty, but profound uncertainty.
To download the paper, click here.
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