Kim Daniels of the Thomas More Law Center offers this response to my question on the right to privacy:
To my mind, after Eisenstadt the Court’s privacy jurisprudence can no longer be considered consistent with Catholic social thought. The Griswold court explicitly places the institution of marriage at the center of its holding, calling marriage “a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the point of being sacred .... an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions.” 381 U.S. 479, 486. Justice Harlan’s Griswold concurrence is even more “Catholic” in its language: “Adultery, homosexuality and the like are sexual intimacies which the state forbids altogether, but the intimacy of the husband and wife is necessarily an essential and accepted feature of the institution of marriage, an institution which the State must not only allow, but which it has always fostered and encouraged.” Id. at 553. A right to privacy so conceived is not only consistent with Catholic teaching, in the American context it’s essential to it, protecting the institutions of marriage and the family from unwarranted state intrusion.
In Eisenstadt, however, the Court explicitly moves away from such language; marriage becomes “an association of two individuals”, and “if the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” 405 U.S. 438, 453. From there it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to Roe, Casey’s mystery passage, and the untethered right to privacy that exists today.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
This semester I'm teaching Family Law, and today I devoted the first class to tracing the development of the right to privacy in the context of human relationships. When viewed as a seamless line of cases (Meyer - Pierce - Griswold - Eisenstadt - Roe - Lawrence, among others) it becomes tempting to embrace the development as a logical unfolding of family and individual autonomy. I assume that most champions of the moral anthropology applaud the holdings of Meyer (state can't forbid teaching of foreign language) and Pierce (state can't require public education), especially their framing of parental obligations and duties in terms of natural rights. Even Griswold is grounded in a conception of the marital relationship as sacred, requiring its own sphere of autonomy against state interference. The right to privacy, in many respects, is entirely consistent with the system of limited government / mediating structures envisioned by Catholic social thought.
So I have a question for co-bloggers and readers who may have devoted more thought to this area than I have: where exactly does the right to privacy's development deviate from the Catholic worldview? Is it Eisenstadt's disconnect of privacy from traditional family relationships? Or is it not until Roe elevates privacy over competing claims of personhood from another living being? Or is there a problem with the right to privacy itself?
Rob
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Back in October I posted a short tribute to my stepfather; the conclusion mentioned a sign he had made:
A couple of days after Bob died, I was cleaning out his truck and found his old, beat-up lunch cooler. Inside the cooler's lid, he had taped a piece of paper on which he had written the word "PRAY" in big letters. Whenever he opened the cooler, he saw that sign. Bob would not have had much to add to the discussions on Mirror of Justice, but his hand-lettered sign looms large as I contemplate the integration of faith with my intellectual pursuits. If I'm simply trying to sound more clever than the next person or using my God-given ability to grasp for more and more academic prestige, I've missed the point. The intellectual exploration of faith cannot be mistaken for the life of faith. Thanks, Bob.
A reader requested a copy of the sign. As we begin a new year on Mirror of Justice, I figure it wouldn't hurt to have a visible reminder of Bob's lesson:
Monday, January 10, 2005
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Fish has an essay titled "One University Under God?" Here's the thrust of the piece:
When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion.
(Thanks to CT for the lead.)
Rob
I'm not ambitious enough to venture a comprehensive answer to Michael Scaperlanda's query regarding the pope's vision of national vocation -- i.e., the "unique gifts" the United States can offer the "world community in building a civilization of love." I will say, however, that many of our actions in the war against terrorism seem to be entirely disconnected from such a venture. Instead, we appear willing to bring about considerable suffering outside of our borders in order to decrease the likelihood of suffering within our borders. As President Bush said in justifying the invasion of Iraq, "I'm not willing to stake one American life on trusting Saddam Hussein."
(Read the full speech here.) Nations of course should take actions to defend their borders and maintain their viability -- otherwise they would be unable to participate in the broader task outlined by the pope. But it seems that this task is turned upside down when a nation uses the mere possibility (however remote) of a future terrorist attack as a justification for conduct that knocks out the pillars on which the world community has been formed.
This is not to suggest that the pursuit of democracy is inconsistent with the pope's vision of national purpose; but a self-serving, violent pursuit of democracy in which potential threats to one nation's citizens are used as trumps against the claims to life and dignity voiced by other nations' citizens cannot seriously be considered a sincere effort to build a "civilization of love."
Rob
Friday, January 7, 2005
The Wall Street Journal has a review of God on the Quad, a new book tracing the rising popularity and quality of religiously affiliated colleges and universities.
Rob
Thursday, January 6, 2005
William Schweiker, professor of theological ethics at the University of Chicago, has contributed a thoughtful essay to Michael Marty's Sightings series regarding British philosopher Anthony Flew's apparent conversion from outspoken atheist to (theoretical) theist, noting its likely impact on "the cottage industry of religion and science." Eric Weislogel of the Metanexus Institute has taken issue with Schweiker's language, responding with a powerful portrayal of the religion-and-science dialogue as a movement "attempting to mitigate the deleterious effects of our 'analytic obsession' in our pursuit of knowledge. While respecting the power and success of our methodology of breaking all of reality into smaller and smaller bits in order better to know it, the religion-and-science dialogue is attempting to provide a complementary mechanism for synthesis in thought and understanding."
Rob
Here's an interesting column in the London Times by Gerard Baker challenging the "the smug way the ubiquitous 'God is dead' crowd in the media have seized on the [tsunami] tragedy as some sort of vindication of its creed. It is unedifying to say the least to behold scientists and philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic waving the shrouds of hundreds of thousands of victims as a debating trophy." In addition to taking a swipe at the Archbishop of Canterbury's statement about the tsunamis understandably causing people to doubt God's existence ("Since the leadership of the Church of England has generally acted as though it did not really believe in God for most of the past 20 years, perhaps we should not be too disappointed."), Baker contends that a:
fair, challengeless world might be a wonderful place to live. But I don’t think that it would be recognisably human. If we have reason to doubt the point of our existence in this world, surely we would understand it even less in that one. And if I were God, and had created Man, I am not quite sure that I would see the point either.
(Thanks to the Paragraph Farmer for the lead.)
Rob
