I just returned from Seattle, where Seattle University School of Law hosted a fine symposium yesterday: Pluralism, Religion & the Law: a conversation at the intersection of identity, faith and legal reasoning. Among the speakers were MOJ'ers Steve Shiffrin and myself and MOJ-friends Vince Rougeau and Russell Powell (who not only co-organized the conference, but jumped into the breach at the 11th hour when one scheduled speaker was prevented by weather from attending).
The day started with a panel on the role of religious morality in shaping legal freedoms. Although all three speakers were wonderfully thought-provoking, the highlight of the panel for me was Steven Hobbs' storytelling approach to the role of religion and religious institutiosn in helping slaves to freedom. In a spellbinding first person narrative, he told the story of one slave's journey to freedom and the help he received along the way. The other three panels were: Reimagining the Relationship between Religion and Law, Religous Pluralism, Critical Multiculturalism, and Liberal Political Theory, and Religious Influences on Ethics, Professionalism and the Practice of Law andthe papers on each panel offered much to think about. (I confess, I'm way too tired to start to summarize the papers now. I'm hoping Steve Shiffrin will jump in and say a little more about the day.)
One MOJ reader had this to say on my posts (here and here) about the goal of affordable access to healthcare and the question of republican commitment to that goal:
"With respect, I believe Republicans are making that argument but from a different perspective about what government's role is and should be. Except for the most radical libertarians, right-wingers in general know that government has a role in health care policy. However, that role is not active role in that it does not seek to displace the free-market but to protect it and help it grow and stay competitive. Indeed, Republicans argue that current government policy is at least partially to blame for the rising costs of health care. The tax code almost mandates coverage through one's employer which reduces the incentive for individuals to minimize costs because "someone else" is paying for it. Moreover, this depresses wages because employers "pay" through health benefits instead of through higher salaries. This is inefficient because if the employee had to purchase his or her own insurance through their weekly paycheck they'd have that incentive to keep costs low and avoid unnecessary procedures. Another area in which governmental policies hurts is that individuals are restricted to buying health insurance in their own state, thus reducing the competitive forces of the free market which help keep costs down and quality up.
"John McCain made this point in a short paragraph in his speech yesterday after locking up the Republican Nomination: 'I will leave it to my opponent to propose returning to the failed, big government mandates of the sixties and seventies to address problems such as the lack of health care insurance for some Americans. I will campaign to make health care more accessible to more Americans with reforms that will bring down costs in the health care industry down without ruining the quality of the world's best medical care.'
"I don't think its fair to fault Republicans for not addressing government's role in health care simply because most believe that role is as an enabler of the free-market and not as a single-payer system through a vast government bureaucracy.
"As a quick aside, I think your last emailer hit the nail on the head. We could have "affordable" health care for all tomorrow by simply reducing the quality of care to such levels that everyone, even the most indigent, could afford it. That is undesirable for obvious reasons. The trick is how do we maintain high-quality care while keeping costs down. Democratic proposals ignore this important distinction and focus on "coverage" for all as if "coverage" is the ultimate goal; it is not. The goal is quality care for as many people as is possible. Experiences in similarly-situated nations like Canada and England demonstrate that government-run health care is a nightmare and reduces the quality of coverage for everyone involved. In those cases, only the ultra-rich get good coverage because they can afford to go out of country or patronize the few private healthcare providers that still exist.
"Of course, there will always be a gap between the poorest in society and what the free-market can provide for. But addressing that small gap should not come through a "universal" plan; a 1% problem does not require a 100% solution. Instead, we should keep encouraging private charity (which does a lot of good in the health care realm already) and, if we must, use targeted government programs aimed at the truly needy who have fallen through the cracks of the good, but flawed system."
A couple of quick observations. First, I don't think comparisons to England and Canada are helpful because neither Clinton or Obama are proposing that kind of government health insurance. Second, I do think Obama, at least, is quite focused on the need to cut costs in order to improve access. Third, I don't think it can fairly be said that we have a 1% problem here. As I have explored at length in my writing, I think the system of voluntary employer-sponsored health care - very much a product of the tax code - is fundamentally a flawed system. Finally, if McCain's quoted statement is sincere, that is wonderful. My comment was based on the fact that I have not seen demontration of such a commitment by republicans. Nothing would delight me more than to discover that I am simply wrong in that conclusion.
One Mirror of Justice reader has this resonse to my post about access to health care:
"From my perspective as a Catholic physician, every person should have access to essential health care. The tricky part is defining "essential health care." It is easy to agree that childhool immunizations are essential. What about acne treatment? What about Viagra? If a less convenient therapy is as effective as the more expensive therapy, should everyone be entitled to the more convenient therapy? I have no doubt that if we move to a single payer system we will move to mediocrity for all and excellence for none. our current system is characterized by "Have's" and "Have-not's." I think an improvement would be to move to "Have's" and "Have-more's". Everyone shoudl have the bare bones essential coverage. (Defining what is bare bones essential will be a political nightmare!) Those who want to spend their discretionary income on bells and whistles for their health care should be free to do so."
I agree that reaching agreement on what constitutes essential health care will not be easy. However, we dont' even get to that question until we have universal agreement on the proposition that everyone should have affordable access to essential health care and that the government has some role in helping to achieve that. (I emphasize some role; as I've suggested in the past, there is plenty of room for debate about the precise nature of that role.) The thrust of my original post was that I don't see that commitment coming from the republicans.
Several people have responded to the query Michael P. posted from one of his students yesterday. What puzzled me about the student's query was that one of the issues on which she found herself leaning republican was health care. Clinton and Obama disagree about how to achieve universal access to health care, but at least they are both committed to the proposition that everyone should have access to affordable health care. I see no such commitment coming from the republicans.
As as I have argued in several pieces (most recently, "Poor" Coverage: The Preferential Option for the Poor and Access to Health Care, 5 Journal of Catholic Social Thought 125 (2008), posted on the sidebar), the common good requires that all individuals have access to affordable health care. In the words of Pope John XXIII, health care is among the basic righs that flow from the dignity of the human person. Access to affordable health care for all persons simply cannot be attained within the current structure of primarily employer-provided health care.
There is plenty of room for disagreement about how to provide affordable care (and I discuss the pros and cons of some of the major alternatives in the aforementioned article) and there can be disagreement about the precise role the federal government should play in ensuring the everyone has access to affordable care. But from a Catholic perspective, there can be no disagreement about the goal.
This Friday, March 7, Seattle University School of Law will be hosting a symposium entitled, Pluralism, Religion and the Law. Topics of discussion will include the role of religious morality in shaping legal freedoms, the freedom of religion and normative human rights, the intersection of religious pluralism, critical multiculturalism, and liberal political theory, and the influence of religion on ethics, professionalism, and the practice of law. My contribution to the symposium it titled The Practice of Law as a Response to God's Call. More conference information is available here.
In a post several weeks ago, I expressed concern about the development of an expectation among some medical personnel and others that pregnant women should abort in certain circumstances. Now we get a story of a biology professor at the University of North Carolina telling his students that "the moral thing" for older women who become pregnant is to have an amniocentesis and then abort the fetus if it has the Down Syndrome chromosome. If we continue along this path, who else will people decide doesn't have the right to live? If we can identify in utero that a fetus will be born with a below average intelligence, will women start being told it is immoral to bring the child into the world? What about indications that the fetus will be born with serious physical deformities?
Michael Simons, criminal law scholar at St. John's University School of Law, had this to say regarding some of the questions raised in Rob's post about the subjective experience of punishment:
"The main problem with considering subjective experiences of punishment (an idea to which I'm theoretically amenable) is that it tends to disadvantage the already disadvantaged. In other words, offenders whose lives already involve significant suffering (the poor, the homeless, the unemployed, the hungry) will need to be punished more to experience some predetermined level of suffering, while offenders whose lives involve substantial pleasure (the rich, the employed, the happily married) will need to be punished less to experience an equivalent level of suffering. Aside from the obvious injustice of a preferential option for the rich, differing punishments run counter to other instincts about retributive desert (e.g., that the rich offender is more culpable than the poor offender)."
The Vatican today released Pope Benedict’s Lenten message, the theme of which is “Christ Made Himself Poor for You.” The Holy Father focused his Lenten message on giving alms, "a specific way to assist those in need and, at the same time, an exercise in self-denial to free us from attachment to worldly goods." Read the text of the message here and the Zenit news account here.
I haven't read the book discussed at Vox Nova, to which Rick refers in his post, but have certainly read of, and am troubled by, the expectation on the part of some medical personnel and others that a women who discovers her child has a birth defect will abort. I thought of this issue earlier today as I read a post by David Cohen on the Feminist Law Professors blog commenting on the recent films in which women don't get abortions (Waitress, Knocked Up and Juno). What struck me was that, in describing the films, Cohen found it "troubling that the most common medical procedure for women (over 1.2 million per year) gets pushed aside in situations that clearly call for, at the very least, very serious consideration of it." So it is not just the mothers of disabled children who are somehow deficient if they don't abort their babies. In addition, women trying to get out of abusive marriages or otherwise suffering economic hardship or women who conceive after a one-night stand simply must give "very serious consideration" to abortion. And I take from his "at the very least" and from his (unsupported) statement that "many, if not most, women in those situations would opt to have a safe, legal abortion" that Cohen really means not just that such women should seriously consider the option, but that they ought to take that option. The idea that women are being told that there are circumstance in which they simply must abort is more than a little troubling.
Today is the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, who preached that "we must all learn to live together as brothers or we shall perish together as fools." If you get a chance sometime during the day, listen to hisI Have a Dream speech or the I have Been to the Mountaintop speech that he gave the day before his assassination.
