Yet another excellent conference taking place in what appears to be the busiest week of MOJ-interest-related conferences in history was the one organized at Georgetown Law School by the Progressive Alliance for Life and the Law Students for Reproductive Justice: A New Abortion Debate: Emerging Perspectives on Choice, Life and Law.
The program got off to an exceptionally strong start despite the fact that the flu had bested two of the planned speakers on the first panel on the topic: "Beyond Roe: The Costs of Constitutionalizing the Right to Abortion." The last minute substitutes were fantastic. One was our very own Susan Stabile, who previewed the talk she'll be presenting next week at the Murphy Institute's Christian Realism conference, "An Effort to Articulate a Catholic Realist Approach to Abortion." It's an extremely thoughtful piece that ought to help all of us think through more clearly how we are called to engage the abortion debate. I hope it will be ready for posting soon.
Another last minute substitute was one of the Georgetown faculty members instrumental in putting the conference together, the brilliant and always thoughtful Dean Robin West. She presented her recent Yale Law Journal Article "From Choice to Reproductive Justice: De-Constitutionalizing Abortion Rights", 118 Yale L.J. 1394 (2009). Key quote:
. . . constitutionalizing this . . . right to choose . . . legitimates . . . the lack of public support given parents in fulfiling their caregiving obligations. By giving pregnant women the choice to opt out of parenting by purchasing an abortion, we render parenting a market commodity, and thereby systematically legitmate the various baselines to which she agrees when she opts in : an almost entirely privatized system of childcare, a mixed private and public but prohibitively expensive healthcare system, and a publicly provided education system that delivers a product, the quality of which is spotty at best and disastrously inadequate at worst. Narrowly, by giving her a choice, her consent legitimates the parental burden to which she has consented. . . . The choice-based argumnts for abortion rights strengthen the impulse to simply leave her with the consequences of her bargain. She has chosen this route, so it is hers to travel alone. To presume otherwise would be paternalistic. The woman's 'choice' mutes any attempt to make her claims for assistance cognizable.
I moderated a panel on "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Abortion, Reproduction and Human Rights," in which Shari Motro from the University of Richmond School of Law presented an article that will soon be appearing in Northwestern L. Rev., "The Price of Pleasure." She argues for a need to reconceptualize the legal relationship between unmarried lovers who conceive a child, giving the mother the obligation to notify the father, and giving the father an obligation to share in the costs of the pregnancy. Key quote from a draft of that article:
treating lovers who have conceived as strangers is wrong because treating all human beings as strangers is wrong. Pregancy and the act of love that brings it about are the ultimate embodiment of our essential connectedness, of our vulnerability at the hands of another, of our lack of control in relationship. What do men and women want when we conceive? The first, the most important thing we want is not necessarily automony or equality or privacy. We value all of these, but as importantly many of us want also not to be left alone.
Why do I single those two quotes as "key quotes"? I saw both as striking examples of the natural law written on all of our hearts. Both of these articles are written by women committed to defending the right to abortion. Yet both are critiques of some aspects of contemporary feminist theory based on the same insights being articulated by the most died-in-the-wool, "conservative", Catholic JP2 "new feminists." There are so many fronts on which the "culture of death" needs to be engaged, in addition to front of the legalization of abortion. It is heartening to know that we have such strong allies on some of these other fronts.
The conference also had superb presentations by people who were committed pro-lifers, such as Patrick Lee from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Rev. Joseph Isanga of Ave Maria, Pedro Pallares of the Universidad Panamericana in Guadalajara, Mexico (who was stopping here on his way to present at Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture Conference), Charles Lugosi, and Kristen Day, of Democrats for Life. From the dialogue at the conference and informal conversations during breaks, it was clear to me that the tone of the conference was succeeding in creating a space for more openness to the arguments being made by these panelists among the "pro-choicers." If we can create the trust to work together on areas of common agreement -- like the need for more social support for parenting, and (to give another example from a presentation by Malika Saada Saar, founder of the Rebecca Project) the need to stop shackling women prisoners during childbirth -- we can't help but be more persuasive, in the long run.
(Ironically, I thought that the least "successful" panel in that regard was the panel directly addressing "Finding Common Ground in the Abortion Debate", because the majority of those panelists had been directly involved in the health care proposal debate, and tempers on both sides were still a bit raw.)
The day ended with serious discussions on putting together a book on the conference. Stay tuned...
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
John Allen recently published an interesting article called "The Next Generation of Catholic Leaders", on a topic that we've addressed on MOJ in the past -- the nature of a perceived generational shift in attitudes toward the Church. He writes:
Most empirical data has pegged this cohort of young priests, religious and lay activists as more "conservative," and there's a good deal of truth to that claim. In general, they're more attracted to traditional modes of devotion and prayer, less resistant to ecclesiastical authority, and less inclined to challenge church teaching and discipline.
Yet, I argued, slapping the label "conservative" on all this is potentially misleading, because it assumes an ideological frame of reference, as if younger Catholics are picking one side or the other in the church's version of the culture wars. My sense is that these young people are not so much reacting to (or against) anything in the church, but rather secular culture. In a nutshell, they're seeking identity and stability in a world that seems to offer neither.
Proof of the point comes when you drill with these young Catholics. You'll find they often hold views on a wide variety of issues -- such as the environment, war and peace, the defense of the poor and of immigrants, and the death penalty -- which don't really fit the ideological stereotype.
These observations are hardly unique to me, of course, but I included them because I wanted to issue a plea to Catholics my age and older.
This new generation seems ideally positioned to address the lamentable tendency in American Catholic life to drive a wedge between the church's pro-life message and its peace-and-justice commitments. More generally, they can help us find the sane middle between two extremes: What George Weigel correctly calls "Catholicism lite," meaning a form of the faith sold out to secularism; and what I've termed "Taliban Catholicism," meaning an angry expression of Catholicism that knows only how to excoriate and condemn. Both are real dangers, and the next generation seems well-equipped to steer a middle course, embracing a robust sense of Catholic identity without carrying a chip on their shoulder.
The students at Georgetown Law Center offer an example that demonstrates that this interest in breaking down "ideological stereotypes" is not necessarily limited to Catholic youths. The Georgetown Progressive Alliance for Life and the Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice are co-hosting a symposium on Friday, November 13, titled: "A New Abortion Debate: Emerging Perspectives on Choice, Life, and Law." Both Susan Stabile and I will be moderating panels at this program. Here's the description:
The long-standing debate over the legality of abortion in the United States can often be politically divisive and can drain resources and attention from other issues that affect the health and well-being of women and families. The goal of this symposium is to bring together pro-choice and pro-life scholars and activists who are interested in new and emerging ideas about the abortion debate, and the role that it plays in the U.S. and abroad. This includes both scholars working on "common ground" policy or philosophical scholarship, as well as other individuals who are seeking to broaden the scope of the abortion debate to non-legal and non-constitutional themes.
Monday, October 12, 2009
The Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy at the University of St. Thomas invites all readers to a lecture by MOJ's own Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and founder and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, next Wednesday, October 21. The lecture, entitled "Natural Law, God and Human Dignity" will be at 4:00 in the Moot Courtroom, University of St. Thomas School of Law, 1000 LaSalle Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Professor George will be presented at that time with the University of St. Thomas School of Law's Dignitatis Humanae Award. RSVP by e-mail to [email protected].
This lecture launches an ongoing series of lectures sponsored by the Murphy Institute to examine the meaning of human dignity. The next lecture in the series, in the fall of 2010, will be by David J. Luban, Fredrick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy, Georgetown University Law Center, whose publications include "Legal Ethics and Human Dignity" (Cambridge 2007).
Friday, October 9, 2009
In addition to Steve and Amy's reassurances, another thing that should help me sleep easier is my conviction that the Church has for decades been way ahead of most feminist legal theorists in recognizing that the urgency in issues related to workplace restructuring to accomodate family life does NOT arise from the situations for whom decisions about working or parenting are truly a matter of choice, but rather the situations of those without choices.
Among the "revelations" in an op ed by Judith Warner in today's New York Times called "The Choice Myth":
Last week, The Washington Post ran a front-page story that said most stay-at-home moms aren’t S.U.V.-driving, daily yoga-doing, latte-drinking white, upper-middle-class women who choose to leave their high-powered careers to answer the call to motherhood. Instead, they are disproportionately low-income, non-college educated, young and Hispanic or foreign-born; in other words, they are women whose horizons are greatly limited and for whom the cost of child care, very often, makes work not a workable choice at all.
These findings, drawn from a new report by the Census Bureau, really ought to lead us to reframe our public conversations about who mothers are and why they do what they do. It should lead us away from all the moralistic bombast about mothers’ “choices” and “priorities.” It should get us thinking less about choice, in fact, and make us focus more on contingencies — the objective conditions that drive women’s lives. And they should propel us to think about the choices that we as a society must make to guarantee that the best possible opportunities are available for all families.
. . .
Why this matters — and why opening this topic up for discussion is important — is very clear: because our public policy continues to rest upon a fictitious idea, eternally recycled in the media, of mothers’ free choices, and not upon the constraints that truly drive their behavior. “If journalism repeatedly frames the wrong problem, then the folks who make public policy may very well deliver the wrong solution,” is how E. J. Graff, the associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism once put it in the Columbia Journalism Review. “If women are happily choosing to stay home with their babies, that’s a private decision. But … [i]t’s a public policy issue if schools, jobs and other American institutions are structured in ways that make it frustratingly difficult, and sometimes impossible, for parents to manage both their jobs and family responsibilities.”
It looked, not so long ago, as though things were going to change. Barack Obama made increasing women’s work/life choices and providing more supports for working families a cornerstone of his campaign. All those lofty ideals, though, seem to have been forgotten in the realities of this recession, where plans to expand universal pre-K, paid family leave and subsidies for child care have gone the way of state budget revenues. Even workfare, The Times reported this week, is being scrapped in California in favor of old-style no-work welfare, because it’s been deemed too costly to give poor mothers job skills while providing decent child care.
In Fresno County, one of the first places in California where welfare recipients are being told about the policy change, which is voluntary for now, the new regulations aren’t being viewed as good news.
“Especially when you have kids, you can’t just sit around and collect checks,” one mother told The Times. For now, 90 percent of beneficiaries in Fresno County are choosing to keep working and receiving child care subsidies.
When mothers can choose, they choose self-empowerment. Because they know that there is no true difference between their advancement and the advancement of their children. Why do we so enduringly deny them the dignity of choice?
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
One of the most disturbing and unpleasant things I've had to do in a long time was to spend three hours on a Monday evening at a training program for volunteers at our parish school. This training program is mandated by our Archdiocese -- along with a criminal background check -- for anyone who wants to volunteer at the school, even parents like me whose volunteering is limited to two or three stints a year as recess monitor, field trip chaperone, or helper at a school party. For three hours, I watched videos in which victims of child sexual abuse talked about the experience of being abused, abusers described about their techniques for getting children into situations in which they could be abused, and experts told me how to protect my child, and all children, from such abuse.
Now, I'm going to describe my reaction to this experience, not because I think my reaction is necessarily a justified reaction, but rather because my reaction causes me to wonder whether we need to seriously question the extent to which the Church -- and its lawyers (our students?) -- are contributing to the sexualization of children. Can all of the blame for the sexualization of children can be placed on those who it's always easiest to blame -- in the words of Robby's recent post: "mainstream advertisers, . . .the entertainment industry, and . . . sex "educators."" ?
For three hours, I was forced to think about my child -- indeed, all children -- as sexual objects. Of the many emotions evoked by that experience -- disgust, sadness, pity, fear, hopelessness, horror -- the overwhelming emotion I felt was anger. But, quite honestly (and again, I freely admit this may not be justified, but it's what I honestly felt), it wasn't anger at the abusers. It seems to me that people with tendencies to abuse children have always been around and will always be around in our fallen world. I was mostly angry at the Church, which by its initial mismanagment of the sexual abuse crisis, got us to the point where parents have to be forced to sexualize their children before they can volunteer in their children's schools. I understand the "lawyering perspective" here -- the Church has been financially devasted by these lawsuits and has a financial incentive to build as strong a buffer as possible against future legal liability. But these attempts at insulation from future lawsuits come at a significant cost. Some parents will simply not volunteer. Those who do are forced to do so with the mandate (the strong message from the training session) that we should be constantly aware of our children's identities as sexual objects, because we are all responsible for making sure no child is sexually exploited on our watch.
Is that really what's necessary to protect our chldren? Or is it overkill by a Church that's being over-protected by its lawyers? I honestly, truly, do not know the answer to that question. Any thoughts on this? If increasing the awareness of our children as sexual objects is, indeed, necessary to protect them, then I frankly think we're going to have a tough time with any larger social campaign against the sexualization of children.
On the topic of the sexualization of children, one particularly passionate and articulate defender of children, Mary Leary at Catholic, has just posted a new paper: "Death to 'Child Erotica'". From the abstract:
The world of child sexual exploitation is a complex one including many crimes. Research and caselaw indicate that child pornography often is found intertwined with other sexual material demonstrating a sexual interest in children. Such material includes, but is not limited to, sexualized pictures of nude or semi-nude children; surreptitiously recorded videos of children focusing on their breasts or genitals; writings on the most successful methods of facilitating child molestation, etc. That child pornography producers and collectors can often possess some such material is perhaps of no surprise. That criminal courts are referring to such material with the artistic term of “child erotica,” suggesting validation, is problematic. Its use must cease.
Within the last decade there has been a significant international movement to replace the term “child pornography” with the label “child abuse images.” This change is motivated by a realization that the latter term more clearly identifies the content of the material, and avoids the suggestion that such victimization is analogous to possessing adult pornography. This paper proposes a second step to this movement, removing from our language the term “child erotica” and replacing it with descriptive norms or, when labels are necessary, the more precise terms of “child exploitation images” and “child exploitation paraphernalia.”
Just as the term “child pornography” has been replaced in research and legal circles,” the use of the term “child erotica” should be reclaimed and replaced. The term is troubling for three main reasons. First, linking the words “child” and “erotica” is misleading. Using an artistic label incorrectly suggests it references a genre of art. Second, it validates the material to which it refers. Such a term contributes to the social phenomenon known as the normalization of the sexual objectification of children, as it suggests there are circumstances when the sexual objectification of children by adults is appropriate and socially valued. Third, that the misnomer is emerging in legal opinions compounds the problem. The term has been improperly incorporated by the criminal courts. Divorced from its roots in art and literature, it claims to reference anything, no matter if sexually exploitive or truly artistic, that fails to meet the legal definition of child pornography or child abuse images. When courts are reviewing evidence, they need precise labels to most effectively make determinations. By grouping all legal material together under one inaccurate label: “child erotica,” courts can miss the relevance of some of the evidence, thereby risking improper outcomes. . . .
Language matters. Labels matter. Socially, language and labels matter because they can reflect cultural norms and values. In criminal litigation, labels matter because inaccurate labels can contribute to inaccurate assessment of evidence which can cause inaccurate results. At times, terms are so inaccurate and misleading, they become damaging. “Child erotica” is such a term and it must be replaced.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Here's some interesting background on this issue from a reader (who incidently has an interesting post on the geographical distribution of the 7 deadly sins at his blog):
I have had some experience as a lay brother in a clerical religious order, and can perhaps provide some insight into the dynamics of lay leadership and priestly leadership.
First, the fact that a lay brother is being cassated as a major superior of a clerical congregation (Maryknoll is, at root, an association of priests) has nothing to do with the broader governing authority of the laity. It simply means that, in a society whose mission is clerical the governing authority should be held by a cleric. Now, in other congregations and orders, such as monasteries in the Benedictine tradition, or the various Franciscan orders, the mission of the order is not clerical and ordination is not (theoretically) the norm; so a non-ordained members have and continue to be made superiors and major superiors. Further, there are no requirements for lay associations, such as the Legion of Mary, to have clerics involved in governance. For organs of the Church whose mission is essentially lay in character, the governing authority is appropriately held by (and sometimes restricted to) the laity.
Now, perhaps the Maryknoll Missioners should re-write their foundational documents to reflect the changes in their membership and sense of mission; but unless they do so, they remain essentially a clerical congregation, and appropriately require major superiors to be clerics.
I would note that this also extends to the office of Pastor in a parish. The purpose of the parish is essentially a clerical one: to unite the faithful in the sacramental presence of Christ. So an ordained person is rightly required as the highest authority in the parish. But, in this country, we have tended to associate the parish (or the diocese) with the whole of the Church. There are many acts of the Church, works of charity and service and education and so on, which are not properly the acts of a parish. These are, appropriately, led by lay persons or non-ordained religious.
Moreover, the entire governance of the secular sphere is the appropriate realm of the laity. To this end, ordained clerics are forbidden to hold secular political office.
In short, the question is not one of a "restrictive view of the role of lay persons," but one of the nature of the governance required by a given organization.
I'm not sure that this explanation of the governance documents answers some of the larger questions Susan and I have about Church attitudes toward the role of the laity, but it does help explain this particular situation.
A reader had these comments on the lay leadership discussion:
Like yourself, and Prof. Stabile, I'm puzzled by the
lack of support for lay leadership of religious institutes that have
established lay membership. I find it particularly puzzling in light
of the attention paid in recent pontificates to how the laity can lead
lives of heroic virtue (see Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, St. Joseph
Moscati, St. Gianna Beretta Molla). Presumably if you can do that, you
can lead. So I put the question to a seminarian friend of mine, who
attributed it to, at least in part, the formation of those presently in
leadership roles. He noted that this is likely to change (I think
JPII's reflections on the laity will help), and pointed to the
increasing use of laity (both men and women) as chancellors of dioceses
as evidence that the shift was already occurring.
