Over at Opinio Juris, Roger Alford looks at the day's wartime roots.
Rob
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Saint Valentine's Day
Challenging Catholic Hospitals' Morality . . .
. . . is not particularly noteworthy, but it is when the challenge has nothing to do with reproductive rights. The Chicago Sun-Times reports on a new advertising campaign in Illinois attacking Catholic hospitals for failing to earn their tax-exempt status:
The radio and television ads, paid for by Indiana-based non-profit Fairness Foundation.org, chastise Catholic hospitals, alleging they're falling short on meeting the obligations required to maintain their tax-exempt status.
"It's a sad day when the Illinois attorney general has to tell not-for-profit Catholic hospitals, among others, they aren't doing enough to earn their tax- exempt status," says the ad. It concludes: "but as with other immoral actions, apparently the church needs to be forced by lawyers to do the right thing, to be moral. How sad."
(HT: Open Book)
Rob
The Pharmacist Wars
Here is my op-ed on why the movement to pass laws protecting a pharmacist's right of conscience is misguided.
Rob
Monday, February 13, 2006
The Award for Worst Argument Defending the Budget . . .
. . . goes to Rep. Jeb Hensarling for his astounding claim on the Christian wisdom of cutting programs for the poor:
[M]any Republicans in Congress with ties to religious conservatives voted for the spending cuts and disagreed that the government should prioritize aiding the poor and marginalized.
"I believe the 'least of these' is my daughter, who's 4 years old, and my son, who's 2 years old, and all of those not born," Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, said. "I believe it's unfair to saddle them with debt way into the future."
Aside from the dubious proposition that the children of a congressman should be treated as "the least of these," it's a bit misleading to suggest that generously funding programs for the poor and maintaining fiscal responsibility are mutually exclusive public policies.
Rob
Saturday, February 11, 2006
More on Presidential Power and Original Sin
Sorry it's taken me a while to return to this topic, but I want to clarify an issue raised by Rick's response to my post about the implications of original sin for the President's domestic surveillance program. I don't presume the insight necessary to pronounce the surveillance program as categorically un-Christian; rather, I object to Christians' failure even to engage publicly the tension between this Administration's security-driven consolidation of authority and a non-negotiable belief in the fallen nature of those doing the consolidating. Maybe the threat of terrorism is so pressing that the present course is prudent. But Christians' foundational conception of human nature should at least be part of the conversation.
Rob
Friday, February 10, 2006
Noll Crosses the Tiber (to South Bend, anyway)
The fact that the most prominent member of Wheaton College's faculty is leaving for an institution that in previous generations was the object of evangelicals' scorn as the intellectual headquarters of American Catholics adds a bit of irony to the Hochschild controversy. My past criticism of Wheaton is not grounded in any desire for the school to disregard or minimize the centrality of its mission in faculty hiring, but simply to recognize that the presence of a professor who is devoted to following Christ and is Catholic does not pose a serious threat to the continued viability of that mission. Professor Noll, I would guess, would not view his departure to Notre Dame as an abdication of the calling that kept him at Wheaton for so many years. The venue changes, as do particular priorities and opportunities in terms of scholarship, teaching, mentoring, etc. But the foundational academic mission of bringing Christ's light to the world of ideas remains, even in South Bend.
Rob
Thursday, February 9, 2006
Marriage and the Genus of Illicit Sex
In an article appearing in the newest issue of the Yale Law Journal, Ariela Dubler portrays Lawrence as the culmination of a key historical development. Here is the conclusion:
In Lawrence v. Texas the Supreme Court situates its opinion within a particular historical narrative: the history of the enactment and repudiation of laws banning sodomy. Lawrence, however, is part of another body of legal history as well. It is part of the history of attempts by federal lawmakers and judges to define the respective genera of licit and illicit sex. Viewed from this perspective, Lawrence marks the latest intervention in a legal conversation that began when Congress enacted the 1907 Immigration Act and the 1910 Mann Act, each of which prohibited the movement of women across borders for “immoral purposes.” Situating the case in this context makes sense of the role played by marriage in all three of the major opinions in Lawrence—a case in which no party made any legal claim to marriage, but Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, and Scalia all understood marriage to be implicated. The Lawrence Court, like the legislators and judges who crafted and interpreted the “immoral purpose” provisions, uses marriage to police the line between illicit and licit sex.
One hundred years ago, however, lawmakers and judges constructed an isomorphic relationship between marriage/nonmarriage and licit sex/illicit sex. The “marriage cure” transported sex across the illicit-licit divide. Lawrence marks the final repudiation of this logic: The Court moved a sexual relationship from the genus of illicit sex into the genus of licit sex noting precisely that the relationship made no claim to marriage. As was the case historically, this judicial move reflects the persistent status of marriage in the American sociolegal order as a legal institution understood to be simultaneously tremendously powerful and powerless. Marriage is at once powerful to confer legal privileges and to shield people from the dangers of sexual illicitness, and powerless to protect itself from the taint of those very practices.
Rob
The culture of little girls: from Barbie to Bratz
I'm not sure how this advances the Catholic legal theory project, but there is a cultural milestone that cannot go unnoticed (at least by the father of three young girls). I am no fan of Barbie and the messages she pushes on girls. But I would gladly buy 100 Barbies before buying a single "Bratz" doll, which can be best described as resembling a Goth-inspired prostitute. I now learn that over this past holiday season, Bratz overtook Barbie as the top-selling doll. If toys are a window to the culture, we should be concerned.
Rob
UPDATE: Perhaps the prostitute image is the one constant in our nation's doll preferences, and Bratz dolls have simply updated that image. My colleague Elizabeth Brown informs me that:
Barbie is a ripoff of a German doll named Lilli, who was, in fact, a prostitute. Barbie was created by Ruth Handler for her daughter Barbara. Ruth and Barbara took a trip to Europe and Ruth bought a German doll named Lilli for Barbara. Lilli was based on the character of a prostitute in a comic strip drawn by Reinhard Beuthin for die Bild Zietung. The first Lilli dolls were sold in Germany in 1955. The Lilli dolls were marketed to adult men in bars and tobacco shops, not to children. MG Lord, in her Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, characterized the Lilli doll as a "gag gift for men, a pornographic character."
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
Evangelicals Find Their Voice
I've often criticized evangelicals' political priorities as being largely indistinguishable from the GOP platform. (And to be fair, many mainline denominations' priorities are curiously coextensive with the Dems' platform.) At least on the issue of global warming, that may be changing. Even aside from the substance of the global warming debate, we should welcome this development if it proves to be a harbinger of evangelicals' rediscovery of their prophetic role in American politics.
Rob
Tuesday, February 7, 2006
Wanted: Manly Men
A couple of weeks ago I posted Richard John Neuhaus's stark portrayal of what is at stake in the Church's enforcement of the ban on gay priests. The editors of Commonweal have now responded:
[L]ike many Catholics, Commonweal is engaged in the difficult task of discerning whether new understandings of homosexuality are compatible with the gospel and the church’s moral tradition. We look first to the church for guidance and instruction. But since God’s presence in the world is not confined to the church, we also look to the lives and testimony of our friends and neighbors. No one should pretend that reconciling homosexual love with the church’s teaching is easy or perhaps even likely; and no one should assume it is impossible. God, we are convinced, is both faithful and known to confound expectations. Neuhaus, on the other hand, argues that the church’s teaching about homosexuality is not open to debate or evidently to any further development. The debate, however, is taking place, and Catholics betray no disloyalty or impiety by participating in it.
In the end, the “crisis of authority” in the church and cause of confusion among the faithful come from the unpersuasive reasoning given by those who advocate banning all homosexuals from the priesthood. The Vatican statement, as the commentary on it has suggested, remains ambiguous on this point, while the Catechism instructs us to avoid “every sign of unjust discrimination” against homosexuals. Cardinals and bishops, not just the Jesuits, have offered varying interpretations of what compliance with the Instruction requires. Yet Neuhaus insists that those who disagree with his interpretation of the document are “imperiling their souls and the souls of others.” The moral danger, however, is quite the other way around: souls would be imperiled if honest doubts were not voiced and questions not asked. As the gospel says, sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do.
Rob
Recent Posts
Categories
Monthly Archive
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
