A few days ago, Robby George challenged Herman Cain to renounce his stated position on Muslims. Will Saletan expands on the problem with Cain's position.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Saletan on Cain on Muslims
Health effects of legal recognition of same-sex couples
Holning Lau and Charles Strohm examine the empirical evidence regarding the health effects of legally recognizing same-sex couples:
This Article presents a literature review of empirical studies concerning the ways in which legal recognition of same-sex relationships impacts individuals’ health and well-being. We discuss the studies’ methodologies, findings, limitations, and implications for the debate on reforming marriage laws.
The recent research on same-sex couples is consistent with what some legal commentators have previously inferred from earlier research on different-sex couples. Such commentators have inferred that legally recognizing same-sex couples generally improves those couples’ health and well-being by promoting care between the couple and enhancing support for the couple from third parties such as family and friends. By synthesizing and presenting recent research that focuses on same-sex couples directly, this Article helps to bridge the inferential gap.
Bankruptcy judges challenge DOMA
An unexpected front opens up in the DOMA battles.
Should a libertarian support parental rights?
Eugene Volokh offers a tentative "yes."
Monday, June 13, 2011
The Family's End?
Scott Yenor has posted "The Family's End" at Public Discourse, tracing the various intellectual threads in the family's demise. An excerpt:
These profound intellectual trends have affected how men and women view themselves and view children and childbearing. The logic of contract has culminated in a triumph of autonomy. The movement to conquer nature promotes greater gender equality as an exercise in autonomy. Institutions buckle things together, suggesting that they have a necessary or salutary relation to one another, and both these trends reflect the modern penchant for separating what institutions once united. Marriage and family life had, among other things, buckled love and marriage, marriage and parenthood, parenthood and sex, marriage and sex, and sex and procreation together. Every modern defender of some family form ends up defending, in one way or another, various connections among these goods; the more radical the critics of the family are, the more buckles they seek to loosen.
Today we face the possibility of the family’s end, in part because of the attractive promise to free us from the buckles that nature seems to place on our freedom. The erosion of these buckles explains, in no small part, the amazing decline in birth rates seen across the Western world. Encapsulating all of these separations in one fell swoop is the move for public recognition for same-sex marriage, as it is the victory of the adult-centered marriage contract to secure whatever goods the adults choose, and is the final detachment of marriage and family life from nature.
I agree that we should be troubled by many aspects of the move from status to contract in family law, and I have argued as much in print (see chapter 9). For a similar argument, you should also check out Mitt Regan's wonderful Alone Together. Though I agree with much of what Yenor writes, the difficulty is trying to explain why and how the marriage and procreation buckle matters. Same-sex marriage keeps the love and marriage, marriage and parenthood, marriage and sex, and parenthood and sex buckles together. Unless it can be shown that same-sex marriages detrimentally impact the quality of the caregiving function, it's hard to make a convincing argument that the loss of the marriage-procreation buckle, standing alone, should determine the public definition of marriage. I'm not addressing all arguments against same-sex marriage; I'm just adopting Yenor's framework and speculating that, of all the buckles that the public seems to care about, the marriage-procreation buckle would appear fairly far down on the list.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Is this billboard a legitimate form of pro-life advocacy?
A court has ordered the removal of a billboard put up by a man proclaiming, "This would have been a picture of my two-month old baby if the mother had decided not to kill our child!" Given the man's photo, it was not difficult for town residents to figure out the woman he was talking about. I'm not a constitutional law expert (though Eugene Volokh is, and he comments on the case here), but just as I'm leery of publicly shaming groups and individuals who contribute money to oppose same-sex marriage, for example, I'm leery of public shaming in this context as well.
Berg on school prayer decisions
Our own Tom Berg has posted a new paper, "The Story of the School Prayer Decisions: Civil Religion Under Assault." The abstract:
This chapter, from Foundation Press's forthcoming "First Amendment Stories" volume, traces the background, resolution, and impact of the Supreme Court's first school prayer decisions, Engel v. Vitale and Abington School Dist. v. Schempp. Among other things, the chapter traces the relation of the Regents' Prayer, struck down in Engel, to the nondenominational theistic civil religion of the 1950s, and the relation of constitutional attacks on the prayer to various criticisms of that civil religion from both religious and nonreligious quarters.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Institutional conscience protection at Princeton
I'm currently at Princeton, where the Witherspoon Institute is hosting a roundtable discussion on the protection of institutional religious conscience. The papers have been thoughtful and provocative, and the accompanying discussion very rich. A couple of examples:
Christopher Tollefsen and Daniel Sulmasy both presented papers arguing that associations have consciences based on the reality of collective intent embodied in associational life. I'm sympathetic to any effort to protect associational freedom, but I'm not persuaded on the merits or as to the necessity of making the argument. I think it's enough to say that associations are essential venues for the formation, expression, and living out of conscience, and that failing to defend the freedom of associations effectively cuts conscience off at the knees. My concern with making the stronger claim -- that associations should be viewed as having consciences -- is that it will weaken the argument that conscience is ontologically real and a core anthropological truth. Conscience is not just a convenient construct or instrumental device for capturing important human values; conscience is a real facet of the human person, and I don't want to weaken that perception by stretching it to cover non-human entities. Both Christopher and Daniel will deny that associational conscience weakens the human reality of conscience, but I have my doubts. I think some of the negative reaction to Citizens United illustrates the discomfort folks have with attributing human qualities to non-human entities, and I'm not sure why we need to go down that path.
Gerry Bradley presented a paper defending the value of institutional ministry, arguing that "the religious act of charity is much richer than its secular counterpart." He compared a religious charity's work to that of a family farm, and a secular social services provider's work to that of agribusiness -- both the family farm and agribusiness provide the same product, but there is a web of relational goods that permits us to value the family farm differently. My question is whether the difference in "richness" between religious and non-religious charities can be expressed in terms accessible to the state. I believe that the state can recognize the value of religious charities as being different -- especially to participants -- than the value of secular charities, but I'm not sure that the state can recognize the difference in a comparative way. I understood Gerry as making the claim that the state can actually recognize the religious charities as being better / richer than the secular counterparts, and that's where I'm still not quite persuaded.
In any event, these are just some of the great conversations on important topics that have occurred. More to come.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Peter Singer embracing moral objectivity?
I recently mentioned a conference at Oxford designed to cultivate a dialogue between Peter Singer and Christian ethicists. Here is the Guardian's coverage, which is fascinating and, dare I say, promising:
[Singer] described his current position as being in a state of flux. But he is leaning towards accepting moral objectivity because he now rejects Hume's view that practical reasoning is always subject to desire. Instead, he inclines towards the view of Henry Sidgwick, the Victorian theist whom he has called the greatest utilitarian, which is that there are moral assertions that we recognise intuitively as true. At the conference, he offered two possible examples, that suffering is intrinsically bad, and that people's preferences should be satisfied. He has not yet given up on preference utilitarianism. Neither is he any more inclined to belief in God, though he did admit that there is a sense in which he "regrets" not doing so, as that is the only way to provide a complete answer to the question, why act morally? Only faith in a good God finally secures the conviction that living morally coincides with living well.
What difference does this make to climate change? Tim Mulgan, professor of moral and political philosophy at the University of St Andrews, explained why ethical objectivism may be vital to making a robust ethical case against environmental degradation. Only a doctrine of creation can affirm that we are fundamentally linked to the natural order manifest on Earth. The fantasy of fleeing this planet, or disappearing into virtual reality, won't actually do. Our island home matters because the lives of human beings go well only when her natural systems go well too.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Freeing one's child from the shackles of gender
Sometimes I fear that parental rights opponents may have a point.
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