I know a bit about the liberty of conscience, but I don't know much about how health insurance works, and I know even less about how health insurance will work under the new federal health care law. Assuming that HHS adopts the Institute of Medicine's recommendations regarding mandatory coverage of contraceptives, what will that mean for a religious entity's ability to withhold coverage of contraceptives? I know that most health plans will eventually fall under the requirements of the health care law, but will there be any sort of opt-out provision by which Catholic Charities could cover its employees with a plan that is exempt from the federal requirements, or are we now basically confronted with the same regime that California and Massachusetts imposed on Catholic Charities several years ago?
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Will Catholic Charities have to cover contraceptives in all 50 states?
Monday, July 18, 2011
West on judicial empathy
Robin West's new article, The Anti-Empathic Turn, looks fascinating. A bit from the abstract:
Justice, according to a broad consensus of our greatest twentieth century judges, requires a particular kind of moral judgment, and that moral judgment requires, among much else, empathy - the ability to understand not just the situation but also the perspective of litigants on warring sides of a lawsuit.
Excellent judging requires empathic excellence. Empathic understanding is, in some measure, an acquired skill as well as, in part, a natural ability. Some people do it well; some, not so well. Again, this has long been understood, and has been long argued, particularly, although not exclusively, by some of our most admired judges and justices.
Somehow, however, this idea, viewed as so utterly mainstream for much of the last century’s worth of writing about judging, has, in the first decade of the twenty first century, become positively toxic, at least in the context of confirmation battles to the Supreme Court. What was once regarded as non-problematically central to good judging is now regarded as antithetical to it. No one challenged this claimed antipathy between empathy and judicial excellence. How did that happen?
She sees a broader move from moral judging to scientific judging, which is itself a topic that warrants sustained conversation. I don't agree with Prof. West on all of the issues, but I have found her to be insightful even where we disagree.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Do extremely obese kids belong in foster care?
I don't think this debate will be going away anytime soon. I can't categorically rule out the removal of kids from their parents on these grounds, but I hope we're only talking about state intervention in very extreme cases -- extreme in terms of the reasonably certain negative health effects and in terms of parental unwillingness to take affirmative steps toward remedying the situation.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Prayer breakfast heresies
Over at the Huffington Post, my colleague Mark Osler laments the sorry state of "prayer breakfasts." A snippet:
What fascinates me about these events is that they drape themselves in the faith, yet create a scene that Christ himself would (and did) directly condemn. They are the epitome of a culture that celebrates itself, rather than embracing what Jesus actually taught.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Conscience claims coming to NY
A New York town clerk takes her stand, though perhaps she should have waited until she had an actual case before her. I consider myself to be a strong advocate for rights of conscience, but I think those rights are much more difficult to defend for state actors (not necessarily impossible, but much more difficult).
Douthat vs. Hvistendahl on sex-selective abortion
Earlier this week, Ross Douthat wrote a column lamenting sex-selective abortion based on Mara Hvistendahl's new book, "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men." He concluded:
[T]he sense of outrage that pervades her story seems to have been inspired by the missing girls themselves, not the consequences of their absence.
Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright what’s implied on every page of “Unnatural Selection,” even if the author can’t quite bring herself around.
The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead.
Hvistendahl now responds, and wisely (in my view) points out that "[r]eproductive rights in the United States have been positioned around the notion of absolute choice, and facing advances in reproductive technology like early and easy sex determination involves addressing the question of whether there may in fact be some limits to the reach of choice." Prochoice advocates have been unwilling to tackle that question, and thus prolife advocates have an advantage in the debate because sex-selective abortions are so morally troubling to most Americans. But that's as far as the prolife advantage goes, according to Hvistendahl. After all,
Women make the decision to abort because women know best how difficult it is to be female. Further reducing a woman's rights would only make her more wary of having a daughter.
Hmmm . . . we face a pressing problem of girls being targeted for abortion, but we should not use the law to curtail abortion rights because that will just make women more likely to target their daughters for abortion, knowing how much more difficult life will be without a robust set of abortion rights? I agree that a person can oppose a right to sex-selective abortions without necessarily opposing a right to abortion more broadly, but Hvistendahl's logic is a bit of a stretch, it seems to me.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Desire vs. convention
There has been lots of debate within the gay and lesbian community about whether the embrace of marriage represents a loss of something significant for the community. One article on the debate contained a quote from Laurie Essig that concisely captures the sentiment:
"In the past, we queers have had to beg, cheat, steal and lie in order to create our families. But it's exactly this lack of state and societal recognition that gave us the freedom to organize our lives according to desire rather than convention."
Social convention may not always provide the best framework for organizing one's life, but I'm pretty sure that desire is an even more dangerous candidate for that function.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Fetal pain laws
The New York Times ran a story today on new state fetal pain laws banning abortion after 20 weeks. My colleague Teresa Collett comments here.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Hosanna-Tabor
MoJ-ers Tom Berg and Rick Garnett have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor (the ministerial exception case) on behalf of the Christian Legal Society, the Baptist Joint Comittee, the National Association of Evangelicals, and others. This is an important case, and whether or not you have followed the proceedings, the brief is well worth your time.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Abp. Nienstedt embraces socialism
Like many states, Minnesota is having a major political brawl over the budget. Archbishop Nienstedt, who has spent most of his time here taking heat from the left over his views on marriage, is now getting some heat from the right for advocating "socialist" policies. GOP state senator David Hann accused the Archbishop of endorsing "the socialist fiction that it is a moral necessity to take the property of the 'wealthy' under the assumption that those resources are better used by politicians and bureaucrats than by the individuals who earn them." For good measure, Sen. Hann threw a quote from R.R. Reno at the Archbishop proposing that the problem with the American poor is primarily moral, not financial. Despite our ongoing efforts, Church teaching continues to defy easy political categorization!
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