I should have been more precise in my earlier post about the flag-burning amendment, and Rick's skepticism underscores my lack of clarity. I can envision a prudent role for the expressive function of the law in articulating, or even facilitating, the society's collective embrace of a certain symbol -- e.g., a law describing the official flag of the United States and recommending a certain course of treatment (disposal, folding, etc.) by citizens. I would separate the expressive component from the coercive component. If the law, understood as representing the coercive power of the state, mandated particular treatment of a class of objects (rather than a specific irreplaceable object, such as a flag sewn by Betsy Ross) solely because of the objects' symbolic value, I would object.
My question to Rick (and others): can you think of an example where state power could prudently be brought to bear to mandate certain treatment of a class of objects that are valuable solely because of their symbolism? When it comes to symbols, shouldn't the state act like the Church: willing to propose, but not to impose?
Rob
I'm aware of the long-running debate over whether pornography is causally linked to violence against women; I was not familiar with this perspective on what that causal link might be, as set out by Steve Chapman in today's Chicago Tribune:
One theory about the causes of rape . . . has been thoroughly demolished. Among religious conservatives and left-wing feminists, it's an article of faith that pornography leads inexorably to sexual abuse of women and children. But while hard-core raunch has proliferated, sexual assaults have not. Could it be that pornography prevents rape?
In fact, our changing attitudes about erotica are part of a generally more open and honest approach to matters involving sex. And one vital product of that openness has been a willingness to confront questions that were often avoided in the past. Today, kids grow up being taught that "no means no," rapists can't be excused because their victims were dressed provocatively, and adults are never allowed to touch children in certain ways.
Those themes have hardly eradicated this scourge, but they have worked to discourage predators and embolden potential victims. Maybe the main lesson from the decline of sexual assault is an old one: Knowledge is power.
Rob
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Pepperdine law prof (and friend of many MoJ-ers) Bob Cochran has an essay in the new issue of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity titled "The Catholic Court Appeal." Here's the intro:
The Supreme Court has been dominated since the founding of our country by mainline Protestants, but with Samuel Alito joining Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts, five of the nine justices are now Catholics. All five have been appointed in the last 20 years. In the previous 200 years, only seven Catholics have served on the Court.
There may be political explanations for the attractiveness of Catholic justices, but I think three Catholic doctrines—natural law, subsidiarity, and religious freedom—help to explain why a majority of the justices are now Catholic. My argument is not that citizens who support, presidents who appoint, and senators who confirm these justices consciously do so because they want Catholic religious beliefs on the Court, but that these doctrines yield habits of thinking that make Catholics attractive candidates to the broad range of the American people.
I write as an Evangelical, but one who has come to share a commitment to the Catholic doctrines that I will mention
Rob
Yes, symbols are important. But symbols are important, in large part, because they are accessible and interpretable in ways that transcend collective edicts. Using the law to express the non-negotiable sanctity of the physical embodiment of national identity strikes me as an understandable, but ultimately absurd, endeavor. Further, given that Catholic legal theory is operating in the "reality-based world," I'll go ahead and open the MoJ debate on the flag-burning amendment with the (entirely unoriginal) observation that it seems like a colossal waste of time. As Dana Milbank observed today:
The chamber has scheduled up to four days of debate on the flag-burning amendment this week. If that formula -- one day of Senate debate for each incident of flag burning this year -- were to be applied to other matters, the Senate would need to schedule 12 days of debate to contemplate the number of years before Medicare goes broke, 335 days of debate for each service member killed in Iraq this year and 11 million days of debate on the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the country.
Am I missing something? Are we all agreed that this is straightforward election-year posturing?
Rob
. . . is profiled in the new Chronicle of Higher Education. (HT: Open Book)
Rob
Here's a preview for a genre-defying new movie that promises to bring timeless scriptural truth to today's hip-hop masses. (Warning to sensitive ears.)
Rob
