Wednesday, October 19, 2005
An Alberta human rights tribunal is set to hear a complaint filed against a pastor who wrote, in a letter to an editor, that homosexual rights activists are as immoral as pedophiles, drug dealers, and pimps. One former legislator who supports the complaint commented that "It is never freedom of religion and freedom of speech when you use your religion as a guise to demean other people." (HT: Evangelical Outpost)
Rob
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
To deflect some of the heat she is going to take for her 1989 questionnaire answer vowing support for a pro-life constitutional amendment, Harriet Miers can point out that, a mere two years earlier, she served as chair of the advisory board of Girls Incorporated of Dallas. Girls Incorporated is the group currently at the center of various pro-life boycotts. As stated on the group's website,
Girls Incorporated affirms that girls and young women should make responsible decisions about sexuality, pregnancy and parenthood.
We recognize the right of all women to choose whether, when, and under what circumstances to bear children. Reproductive freedom and responsibility are essential to other rights and opportunities, including pursuit of education, employment, financial security and a stable and fulfilling family life. Restrictions of reproductive choice are especially burdensome for young women and poor women. Girls Incorporated supports a woman’s freedom of choice, a constitutional right established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 in Roe vs. Wade.
Perhaps this policy came about after 1987, or perhaps it has been openly defied by the Dallas chapter; if not, Miers' involvement with Girls Incorporated could certainly provide another interesting line of questioning at the confirmation hearings.
Rob
Evangelical human rights activist Gary Haugen takes President Bush's Christian supporters to task for not speaking up on the Administration's treatment of detainees. He asks, "Where are the voices of transcendent moral principle from the President's friends of faith?"
Rob
Monday, October 17, 2005
I never thought I'd have the occasion to use that headline, but Jonathan Watson has given me the perfect opportunity with his response to my earlier post on the Vikings' "love boat" exploits:
Natural law is ineradicable. The disgust and / or horror caused by descriptions of such events is an innate reaction, which I would argue is true to our status as created beings. It fades because individuals are taught in this culture that it is "natural" for people to engage in such actions, and proceed to argue themselves out of their own feelings on the matter. The media, sensing the loss of interest, quickly drops the topic and seeks other fascinations (the opposite of the early media's yellow journalism and muckraking, I would add).
The "poor role model for children" argument is consistently raised when public figures engage in sexual misconduct, and I suggest that it is through the inability to describe the reaction I previously noted. As you mentioned, religious, moral / theological, and / or philosophical language (in no particular order) provides the best mode to convey such feelings, and the majority of the public has lost the ability to communicate effectively in this manner. Therefore, "for the children" being a common argument for engaging in all sorts of activity (including, but by no means limited to, abortion), it seems to be used as the base mode of verbal expression.
Watson also recommends Kathryn Jean Lopez's timely article on Outrage on NRO.
Rob
Is it possible to have a scandal based on consensual sex in a culture where consensual sex is deemed inherently non-scandalous? Apparently it is, but it's not clear why. NFL fans have undoubtedly heard news of the Minnesota Vikings' recent "sex party." For those who live around the Twin Cities, the story has dominated local news for a full week. The public and media reactions to the party have been pure outrage -- how could these well-paid professionals engage in this sort of conduct?
What's intriguing to me is that no one really explains why this is so outrageous in today's culture. We know something is wrong with what happened, but it's difficult to put into words when those words have been largely jettisoned by society. A local columnist noticed today that "[e]veryone sputters with outrage, but no one really articulates why. When pressed, people generally mutter something about the Vikings being poor role models for our kids."
A group of professional football players chartered boats stocked with liquor and may have hired prostitutes for a party closed to the public. Laws may have been broken, but that has limited explanatory power, as athletes' drunk driving convictions and domestic violence arrests fall quickly off the media radar. No one was forced to engage in sexual conduct. No children were involved. Booze, sex, and consenting adults -- outside the Vikings' party boat, that's the recipe for success for many current cultural phenomena, ranging from hugely popular television shows to vacation destinations. Who are we to complain now? More particularly, what exactly are we complaining about?
Rob
Thursday, October 13, 2005
The national conversation over the Miers nomination is getting curiouser and curiouser. As Steve pointed out earlier, the Bush Administration is heading into some troubled waters by playing the faith card on Miers. Witness Bush's comments yesterday. More striking was a conversation I heard on the Focus on the Family radio program yesterday between James Dobson and Kenneth Starr. I can't find a written transcript, but I wrote down a rough transcript of some key excerpts:
Dobson: Do you believe [Miers] is pro-life and pro-family . . . ?
Starr: [She is] a person of very deep faith. She is an evangelical Christian. Her own faith journey is a very intriguing and revealing one, and that is a story that those in the Christian community should be comforted by. This is someone who as a mature adult -- not the way she was raised so that's the way I am -- this is a mature adult, a professional, who came to a very strong belief and commitment . . . this set of beliefs and committments means she is going to hold fast to traditional values.
Dobson: You are convinced she has a very personal faith in Jesus Christ?
Starr: I do . . . This should be a source I think of great comfort and assurance to people who are in the household of faith around the country.
(You can listen to the full conversation here by clicking on the Oct. 12 broadcast.)
Rob
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Albert J. Brooks asks some good questions about my subsidiarity-driven criticism of the American Academy of Pediatrics' condemnation of co-sleeping:
[G]iven that we are talking about a health and safety issue, I don't think the AAP is out of line in speaking to the subject. Is this much differently, qualitatively, than doctors counseling against smoking around children or recommending mandatory vaccinations? The best we can hope for is that competent experts will provide concerned parents with the best available and up-to-date information to permit us to make informed decisions. Remember, subidiarity is a two-way street. In that regard, the size of the organization can't work against the principle, as the larger the group, the more likely it is to be more competent and comprehensive to base its decision on a broader consensue of current medical opinion. I agree that simply providing information can actually further the cause of subsidiarity to the extent it empowers lower bodies to make informed choices. But the AAP may be crossing the line from acting as a resource to acting as an arbiter of acceptable practices. It's a tricky case assuming that the AAP does not act to legally enshrine their pronouncements, but I'm wondering whether, at some point, bright-line edicts on acceptable child care from a group of that stature unduly limits the practical autonomy of parents even absent the backing of the law's coercive power. As for other public health measures, we need to draw some distinctions. I see the co-sleeping issue differently than the smoking issue for two reasons. First, the evidence against smoking around children is much more compelling than the evidence against co-sleeping, as I understand it. Second -- and this relates more directly to subsidiarity -- instructing parents not to co-sleep with their kids intrudes much more directly on parental autonomy than instructing parents not to smoke around their kids. Deciding whether or not to sleep with one's children is at the core of the child-raising function; smoking around one's children is not. (Similarly, requiring everyone to wear seat belts is a minimal intrusion into the substantive life of the family even though it might be in tension with the preferences of some parents.) As for the AAP's large size, that poses its own subsidiarity problems. I'm not sure that more minds assembled in an organization produce more competence, but even so, subsidiarity is not concerned simply with reaching a "correct" result, but in reflecting lower bodies' values and priorities in the result and the process by which it is reached. The AAP's size means that it might be able to pour lots of resources into studies showing connections between co-sleeping and SIDS, but its size also means that the group's recommedations are unlikely to account for the divergent values of subcommunities. Maybe some parents co-sleep based only on their concern for the baby's physical well-being, but others might co-sleep because of concerns over emotional bonding, and these concerns might be grounded in particular cultural or religious worldviews. The size of the AAP makes it less able to respond to, much less reflect, those divergent values. Rob
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Yesterday the American Academy of Pediatrics issued new guidelines designed to cut the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome:
To minimize the risk of crib death, the nation's largest organization of pediatricians is recommending that babies be put to sleep with pacifiers and in their own beds, despite intense opposition from advocates of breast-feeding and the "family bed."
The American Academy of Pediatrics, hoping to settle some of the most hotly debated and emotional issues related to the care of newborns, is for the first time endorsing routine pacifier use and explicitly advocating a ban on babies sleeping with their parents.
As a parent of three daughters who have slept in our bed as babies and were never fond of pacifiers, I approach these new guidelines with a certain degree of skepticism. But as someone interested in Catholic legal theory, I'm wondering how these guidelines comport with subsidiarity. Assuming that the AAP is not really going to try and criminalize parent and baby co-sleeping, does advocacy by a non-state organization with this much influence still qualify as a higher body taking decision-making authority from the lower body? Critics of the new policy claim that:
The evidence that pacifiers are helpful and bed sharing is dangerous is far from conclusive . . .adding that the recommendations will hinder breast-feeding and mother-child bonding, which are clearly beneficial.
"I'm very disappointed," said James J. McKenna, director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. "I really fear this is just another step of inappropriately medicalizing decisions that are best made within the home."
So I guess my subsidiarity-driven skepticism is twofold. First, even though the AAP policy does not amount to legal coercion, the group's stature and the bright-line confidence with which they paint the issue as a non-negotiable element of baby safety may effectively negate the decision-making authority of many parents. Second, while 2000 SIDS deaths a year are a tragedy, I'm not sure the possibility of harm warrants the absolute condemnation of co-sleeping and nursing at bedtime, both of which function as fundamental building blocks of many parent-child relationships. That said, would my opinion change if 10,000 babies died each year from SIDS and the deaths were directly linked to co-sleeping? 50,000 deaths? At what point does the harm warrant AAP's condemnation? At what point would it warrant state intervention?
I don't have easy answers to these questions, but I do know that when groups like AAP pronounce a one-size-fits-all approach to intimate family practices, it's not just a matter of public health; it's also a question of subsidiarity.
Rob
The ongoing dispute over practices at the Air Force Academy offers a valuable lesson on how not to engage the surrounding culture with the Gospel. But it's not all that simple. One thing the Air Force is taking heat for is a (now withdrawn) chaplains' code of ethics that included the statement "I will not proselytize from other religious bodies, but I retain the right to evangelize those who are not affiliated." I'm not entirely comfortable with government employees evangelizing military personnel, but I'm not sure how a chaplain can refrain from evangelizing without rendering her professional calling unrecognizable. It's one thing to ask chaplains not to preach the gospel through a megaphone in the campus cafeteria, but what happens when an "unaffiliated" individual asks to talk to the chaplain about spiritual matters? Or what if an individual attends chapel services, then doesn't show up for a few weeks -- can the chaplain visit the person to inquire why, or has the person then become "unaffiliated?" And does an individual's affiliation remain fixed? Indeed, should the Air Force ban ecumenical gatherings given the likelihood that otherwise affiliated individuals wil be exposed to the messages of other chaplains? Maybe this shows the inherent difficulty with the position of military chaplain, but I'm troubled by the implicit assumption that "evangelism" is an activity readily segregated from other dimensions of Christian ministry.
Rob
Friday, October 7, 2005
Here's an intriguing interview with evangelical leader Richard Cizik on the importance of environmental protection to a biblical worldview. (HT: Evangelical Outpost)
Rob
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