Over at Public Discourse, Ana Samuel provides a helpful summary of the recent family structure study comparing parenting outcomes of same-sex couples and intact biological families. I'm impressed by Dr. Samuel's restrained conclusions and measured tone. Though the outcomes for children raised by parents engaged in same-sex relationships were worse than for children raised within intact biological families, she readily acknowledges the significant differences between the sample populations:
The study found that the children who were raised by a gay or lesbian parent as little as 15 years ago were usually conceived within a heterosexual marriage, which then underwent divorce or separation, leaving the child with a single parent. That parent then had at least one same-sex romantic relationship, sometimes outside of the child's home, sometimes within it. To be more specific, among the respondents who said their mother had a same-sex romantic relationship, a minority, 23%, said they had spent at least three years living in the same household with both their mother and her romantic partner. Only 2 out of the 15,000 screened spent a span of 18 years with the same two mothers. Among those who said their father had had a same-sex relationship, no children reported spending at least three years together with both men.
It's not surprising, then, that children raised by the same two parents over the course of their childhoods fared better than children raised by a single parent with different partners. Critics readily point out that the relevant comparison should be between parenting by an intact opposite-sex couple and parenting by an intact same-sex couple. The study's defenders will explain that couples remaining intact over the course of an entire childhood do not reflect the reality of today's same-sex parenting. Proponents of same-sex marriage will jump in at this point and say, "See? That's why same-sex marriage is so important if we care about supporting same-sex relationships over time and lending stability to families headed by same-sex couples." Opponents will respond that there is something inherently suboptimal about the parenting provided by same-sex couples (as well as, on average, single parents, divorced parents, cohabiting parents, and step-parents) compared to still-married biological parents, and the law cannot overcome that gap. In other words, the study is not a conversation-stopper, but it is a helpful contribution to an important debate and well worth reading.
Yesterday the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) released the 9-month employment data for the class of 2011. Only 65% of graduates obtained a job for which bar passage is required. Fewer than half of the graduates obtained a job in private practice. (Paul Campos estimates that the real numbers are much lower once we subtract law school-funded jobs and other temporary positions.) Salary data will be released in August, but I'm guessing that won't be a pretty picture either, as the restructuring of the legal services market continues to put downward pressure on salaries. Along with the bleak jobs picture, the class of 2011 emerged with a mountain of debt. The debt is every bit as high at Catholic law schools as anywhere else. Here is the average debt for 2011 graduates of Catholic law schools:
Catholic U ($142,000)
St. Thomas (FL) ($137,000)
San Francisco ($137,000)
Loyola (LA) ($132,000)
Georgetown ($132,000)
Fordham ($131,000)
DePaul ($126,000)
St. John's ($126,000)
Detroit Mercy ($124,000)
Villanova ($122,000)
St. Louis University ($120,000)
Marquette ($117,000)
Santa Clara ($117,000)
Creighton ($116,000)
Loyola (NO) ($115,000)
Seton Hall ($113,000)
Loyola (Chi) ($112,000)
San Diego ($110,000)
St. Mary's ($109,000)
Seattle Univ. ($109,000)
Ave Maria ($108,000)
Dayton ($107,000)
St. Thomas (MN) ($105,000)
Gonzaga ($104,000)
Boston College ($100,000)
Duquesne ($97,000)
Notre Dame ($94,000)
Barry ($41,000)
In many ways, we want to be like everyone else -- strong scholarly cultures, top professors, a full roster of clinical opportunities, top-of-the-line student services, etc. And of course, we want to be highly ranked, so we give scholarship aid to high-LSAT/high-GPA applicants -- subsidizing that aid with the the full tuition paid by students with weaker entering profiles and (on average) weaker job prospects coming out. The growing gap between the salary and debt of law school graduates is getting plenty of attentionnow, though Catholic law schools have hardly been models for charting a path forward. If Catholic legal education is designed to equip students to practice law as a vocation, serving God by serving others, the crippling effect of huge student debt should be even more painful for us than for our colleagues at secular schools.
John Breen and Lee Strang are exploring the history of Catholic legal education, noting the lost opportunities over the last century when Catholic law schools could have charted a distinct path in terms of the substantive education they provided. By working so hard to be like everyone else, much of our capacity to be salt and light to the world of legal education was lost. When future generations of scholars look back at our era, will they see a similar lost opportunity for Catholic law schools to bear witness to the injustice of how we finance legal education?
As a past critic of the Bush administration's approach to "enhanced interrogation techniques," I was hopeful that we would see a more robust commitment to human rights in the Obama administration's battle against terrorism. Well, one way to escape messy debates about what constitutes torture is to avoid the need for interrogations. Just kill suspected terrorists wherever you find them. Now the UN is raising the serious human rights implications of unchecked drone strikes.
Joseph Raz has posted the text of a lecture he gave recently, "Death in Our Life." The abstract:
[The lecture] examines a central aspect of the relations between duration and quality of life by considering the moral right to voluntary euthanasia, and some aspects of the moral case for a legal right to euthanasia. Would widespread acceptance of a right to voluntary euthanasia lead to widespread changes in attitude to life and death? Many of its advocates deny that seeing it as a narrow right enabling people to avoid ending their life in great pain or total dependence, or a vegetative state. I argue that the right cannot cogently be conceived as a narrow right, confined to very limited circumstances. It is based on the value of having the normative power to choose time and manner of one’s death. Its recognition will be accompanied by far reaching changes in culture and attitude, and these changes will enrich people’s life by enabling them to integrate their death as part of their lives.
I have not (yet) read the paper, but my reflexive reaction is to resist the presumption that bans on euthanasia preclude the integration of our deaths into our lives. Integrating the various components of my existence into a coherent life does not necessarily require me to choose the terms of each component. A natural death can be embraced as part of my life-narrative even if I cannot predict the circumstances or avoid the suffering that may accompany it. I'm not making a broader argument about euthanasia at this point, simply objecting to the tendency to equate integration with choice.
One additional point: Raz is undoubtedly correct that our society fails to support the integration of our deaths into our lives, but that may stem more from our efforts to avoid any meaningful contemplation of our mortality. A more powerful remedy, in my view, can be found in Ash Wednesday than in euthanasia.
We are told that today's GOP is becoming a whites-only affair. How did this come to pass? Well, according to Dana Millbank, it's due in part to Republicans' insistence on proposing legislation to ban sex-selection abortions. Such a law, in the view of Rep. Barbara Lee, would "lead to further stigmatization of women, especially Asian Pacific American women." Millbank writes that the problem "is that it's not entirely clear there is a problem" with sex-selection abortion in the U.S. He acknowledges that "[s]ex-selection abortion is a huge tragedy in parts of Asia, but to the extent it's happening in this country, it's mostly among Asian immigrants." I'm not sure I follow Millbank's logic. It's not clear it's a problem in this country, but (or because?) it's happening "mostly among Asian immigrants?" Or does the fact that the practice is concentrated among a particular minority group mean that legislation targeting the practice is inescapably discriminatory? As Millbank puts it, this is "paternalism toward minority groups," and may cause the GOP to "lose Asian Americans."
Perhaps there are other flaws in the proposed legislation (which apparently has little chance of passing the House), but I'm having a very hard time seeing the bill as anti-Asian. If the political community deems a practice morally odious and unacceptable, why does the prudence of its legal prohibition depend on the concentration of its practitioners within a particular racial or immigrant group? We would not hesitate to use law to try to prevent the custom of sati from taking root in the United States -- i.e., a widow throwing herself on her husband's funeral pyre -- even if practitioners tended to be concentrated within immigrant Hindu communities. So why does a bill banning sex-selection abortion automatically become part of the "GOP for whites only" narrative?
Get Religionanalyzes the media coverage of the lawsuit filed yesterday against HHS by a few dozen Catholic organizations. For example, here's an excerpt from the Tribune News Service:
The Catholic organizations, which filed the suits in federal courts across the country, argue that the federal mandate infringes on their religious freedom because it violates church teachings.
As Get Religion helpfully notes, "[T]he key to the religious liberty claims is not that these new federal rules violate church teachings. The problem is that the mandates require religious institutions to violate their own doctrines, traditions and teachings."
Jeremy Waldron has posted "What is Natural Law Like?" The abstract:
The State of Nature,” said John Locke, “has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one.” But what is “a law of nature”? How would we tell, in a state of nature, that there was a natural law as opposed to something else — like positive law, a set of customs, natural morality, natural ethics, a set of natural inclinations, the truth of certain prudential calculations, a widespread but perhaps false belief in some transcendent law, the voice of God, or just a natural disposition on the part of some pompous people to make sonorous objective-sounding pronouncements? What form should we expect natural law to take in our apprehension of it? This paper argues three things. (a) John Finnis’s work on natural law provides no answer to these questions; his “theory of natural law” is really just a theory of the necessary basis in ethics for evaluating positive law. (b) We need an answer to the question “What is natural law like” not just to evaluate the work of state-of-nature theorists like Locke, but also to explore the possibility that natural law might once have played the role now played by positive international law in regulating relations between sovereigns. And (c), an affirmative account of what natural law is like must pay attention to (1) its deontic character; (2) its enforceability; (3) the ancillary principles that have to be associated with its main normative requirements if it is to be operate as a system of law; (4) its separability form objective from ethics and morality, even from objective ethics and morality; and (5) the shared recognition on earth of its presence in the world. Some of these points — especially 3, 4, and 5 — sound like characteristics of positive law. But the paper argues that they are necessary nevertheless if it is going to be plausible to say that natural law has ever operated (or does still operate) as law in the world.
New York has become the first state to require lawyers to perform pro bono work as a condition of bar admission:
The approximately 10,000 lawyers who apply to the New York State Bar each year will have to demonstrate that they have performed 50 hours of pro bono work to be admitted, Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman said. He said the move was intended to provide about a half-million hours of badly needed legal services to those with urgent problems, like foreclosure and domestic violence.
I appreciate the intent behind this new rule, though I fear that it might lead to needy clients having to rely on lawyers who don't really want to help them and don't have the competence to do so effectively. Further, a new law school graduate struggling with debt and unable to find paying work may wonder why lawyers bear a burden that other professions do not. This is one of the reasons why our 50-hour public service graduation requirement at St. Thomas is not limited to legal work: we are not obliged to help our neighbor because we're lawyers, but because we are all children of God.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court has unanimously held that a proposed "personhood amendment," defining a person as "any human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being to natural death," is "clearly unconstitutional pursuant to Planned Parenthood v. Casey."
"Chinese dissident" Chen Guangcheng, aided by an "activist network" in escaping house arrest, isn't often referred to as a Christian pro-life advocate, but that's what he is. Get Religion reports.
