Chuck Colson devotes his latest column to the case of Isabella Miller-Jenkins, a case in which "a judge will soon decide whether a woman with no biological or adoptive ties to Isabella can legally be declared her mother." The case is a thorny custody dispute stemming from the break-up of a civil union, which Colson uses to make a broader point:
How is it possible that laws and court procedures could have become so dangerously fantasy-based? Actually, we should not be surprised. Many modern parents have unwittingly been collaborating with the process for years. The Washington Post tells us how Judge Cohen explained it: "[C]onsider the situation of a heterosexual couple in which an infertile husband agrees for his wife to be artificially inseminated with donor sperm." In such a case, the judge stated, the husband would be presumed to have parental rights even though someone else had actually fathered the child.
It all ties together. Heterosexual couples have tacitly approved this practice of including a silent third partner in a marriage to produce a child. And then it makes it very difficult to cry foul when homosexuals do the same thing.
Isabella’s plight shows us the tragic consequences of rejecting the biblical view of marriage, which provides for one man and one woman in the union to raise the child. Sure, there are extraordinary circumstances, and adoption is possible. But the norm is the norm, and the law has always recognized the natural moral order.
How did this supposedly religiously motivated fixation on the child's biological relatedness to both parents come about? Does the Bible indeed somewhere condemn, explicitly or by strong implication, the use of donated sperm? I know the stories of Hagar and Tamar in the Old Testament discuss what some people do when they can't have children naturally with their spouses (because of the wife's infertility, the husband's death, or the husband's refusal to impregnate the wife); but I take it that the moral message of the stories is not necessarily clear.
Is there something elsewhere that takes such a biologically essentialist view, to the point of prohibiting the use of donated sperm, and treating adoption as grudgingly tolerated in "extraordinary" cases? (I'm not speaking just of Catholic natural law reasoning; Colson is a Protestant who, I take it, focuses much more on the words of the Bible.)
As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away from marriage, while living together and bearing children out of wedlock.
As we enter our fourth year at MoJ, we haven't devoted a lot of time to developing a Catholic legal theory of labor relations. Over at Commonweal, Eduardo brings the issue to the foreground. Does our lack of attention to this issue reflect our diminishing confidence in the continued relevance of the Church's teaching on labor unions, or does it mean that we've been captured by our culture and have lost sight of the Church's still-vital teaching?
If you haven't read it yet, check out the cover story from the New York Times Magazine exploring the relationship between evolution and belief in God:
Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God — evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there?
In posting a thoughtful op-ed by Maryland's governor on the morality of the death penalty, Rick suggests that the governor's analysis seems to have been informed by Catholic teaching. That may be right, but one central feature of the analysis struck me as quite un-Catholic: Governor O'Malley appears to place a lot of weight (as Rick notes) on the deterrent effect of the death penalty as an indication of its moral status. I'm not any sort of expert on this issue, but I would think that questions of deterrence are irrelevant to the Church's moral analysis of the death penalty because deterrence-based justifications adopt an instrumentalist view of human life -- i.e., we can kill him because that will convince other people not to kill. Am I wrong -- is deterrence a relevant consideration?
Last night San Diego became the largest diocese (so far) to declare bankruptcy. (HT: Open Book) The first trial of 150 lawsuits alleging abuse by 60 priests was set to begin today. San Diego joins Tucson, Spokane, Portland (Ore.), and Davenport (Iowa).
A bill has been introduced in the California legislature that "would authorize an adult who meets certain qualifications, and who has been determined by his or her attending physician to be suffering from a terminal disease, as defined, to make a request for medication prescribed pursuant to this bill to provide comfort with an assurance of peaceful dying if suffering becomes unbearable." Does this sound suspiciously like assisted suicide? Not so fast. The bill provides:
The patient must self-administer the medication provided under this chapter. Actions taken in accordance with this chapter shall not, for any purpose, constitute suicide, assisted suicide, mercy killing, or homicide, under the law. Every state agency, department, or office that prepares or issues a document or report that describes or refers to the medical practice described in this chapter shall use the phrase "aid in dying" to describe or reference the medical practice in the document or report.
Whatever it's called, Wesley Smith argues that the bill would require Catholic nursing homes and hospices to permit this practice in their facilities.
UPDATE: I just noticed that Steve Bainbridge also weighed in on this today.
In the current issue of America, I review Lew Daly's God and the Welfare State. Here's the opening:
A wave of recent books has left the distinct impression that the harnessing of religious ideals to political power has ushered in a new Dark Ages in American public life. In God and the Welfare State, Lew Daly departs from the trend of near-hysterical claims by exploring the religious underpinnings of President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative in terms that actually shed more light than heat. The book does not read as an indictment of Bush’s purported theocratic agenda for making it easier for religious organizations to secure public funding for social services. Rather, the book illuminates the gap between political rhetoric and policy reality. Religious leaders routinely (and rightfully) accuse Bush of failing to embody the prophetic concern for the poor that is found in his own faith tradition. Daly, who has studied religious ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, offers nothing novel in this regard. What he does offer is a nuanced tracing of the two closely related Christian principles that are most clearly reflected in the president’s approach to poverty.
Civil society is built on the right of association, which is inseparable from the right to exclude. Sometimes the decision to exclude is based on high-minded ideals and core moral convictions; sometimes it's not.
It's no simple task to link Catholic legal theory and Anna Nicole Smith, but here goes: Legal Realism has helped us discern the human dimension of a judge's decision-making, and at least one thoughtful scholar has recently called for judges' own values to "reenchant" the law. Can we all agree that Judge Larry Seidlin's handling of the Anna Nicole case provides the most compelling case yet for a return to formalism?
