My understanding is that the Catholic Church opposes employment discrimination against gays and lesbians unless there is some specific reason why sexual orientation is relevant to a particular position (e.g., priests, in the Church's view). If I'm mistaken as to this premise, please let me know in the comments. If I'm correct, then I'd welcome feedback on this short hypo:
Suppose that the U.S. military, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had a policy permitting Catholics to serve, but forbidding them from revealing their identity as Catholics. If their identity became known, they were discharged. The rationale for the policy is hard to pin down, but usually it centered on the belief that Catholics' presence would undermine morale and compromise military functions because of non-Catholics' reaction to Catholics, particularly in the close quarters of combat. In other words, the policy was justified based on soldiers' current views of Catholics, even if those views were prejudiced. Catholics would (and should) have opposed such a policy, even if the open admission of Catholics into the military would have caused some soldiers to react negatively. Catholics could have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the effective function of other nations' militaries that were open to Catholics. In time, the inclusion of Catholics would reveal how unnecessary the exclusionary policy was, reducing harmful social prejudice in the process.
Is the current military policy on gays and lesbians different than this hypo? If so, how? Should Catholics react to current military policy differently? If so, why?
The same-sex marriage controversy in Iowa has spilled into the judicial retention system, where there is an active campaign to remove the supreme court justices who voted to strike down the state statute limiting marriage to a man and a woman. Let's assume for the sake of this argument that the court's ruling was an example of judicial "activism" unmoored from the rule of law. Still, I submit that the broader move toward judicial elections -- including the need to raise gobs of cash from interested parties and the reliance on ads deploying scare tactics about unpopular decisions that a judge may or may not reach -- is a bigger threat to the rule of law than any particular decision that has been handed down in recent years. Thoughts?
Stephen Macedo has posted his new paper, Why Public Reason? The abstract:
Some have recently argued that the ideal of public reason not only accords insufficient respect or freedom to some citizens, including some religious citizens, but in addition, it is superfluous. It is enough, according to Jeffrey Stout, Gerald Gaus, and others, if citizens converge on shared principles of justice. No practical purpose is served by the project of seeking to secure consensus on a common, public justification for such principles (what Rawls would call a shared “political conception”). This paper seeks to make the case that seeking to secure a common justification for our most basic principles does serve a variety of practical imperatives. These include greater guidance for public officials charged with interpreting and applying the principles, and greater stability based on deeper mutual assurance of our shared moral commitment to principles of justice. In addition, a shared moral justification can be expected to play an educative role over the course of time. I argue that all of these consequences are most important for the least well off (and most vulnerable) in society, who benefit most from the greater assurance that their fellow citizens are committed to justice.
Reports show that income equality in this country has increased dramatically. I know that MoJers disagree as to how much of a problem this is; at these extremes, I do believe that it is a problem of social justice -- not just in the traditional sense of distributive justice, but in the sort of participatory social justice of which John Paul II spoke regularly. Income inequality also has a significant political dimension and far-reaching political implications, as Frank Pasquale argues.
I was pleased to see that religious leaders (including Cardinal McCarrick) gathered to raise concerns about a perceived growing anti-Muslim sentiment in this country. (I'm not sure if it's actually growing or whether it's just become more apparent in recent weeks given current events.) As for the Koran burning planned for September 11th, I don't think there's much to say that hasn't already been said about the sheer stupidity and decidedly un-Christian hatred that motivate it. I will say, though, that I'm taken aback by how the pastor of a 50-person congregation can attract the entire world's attention by such a stunt. I'm guessing that the Koran has been burned in this country before at some point, but in the age of social media, everything is a globally significant event. I heard an interview with the pastor (Terry Jones), and he defended the burning as sending a message only to Muslim "extremists," not to peaceful Muslims. That sort of targeted message probably has a similar likelihood of success as a Bible-burning aimed only at Christian killers of abortion providers, not at peaceful Christians. Though Pastor Jones is embarking on a wildly destructive course of action that bears no comparison with the (often good faith) disagreement over the location of the mosque near Ground Zero, I do see a common underlying question that cannot be avoided: to what extent should we allow the most radical elements of Islam define our relationship with Islam?
Russell Moore, dean of the school of theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has taken American Christians to task for falling under the spell of Glenn Beck. It's an interesting snapshot into some of the internal debates going on within conservative (particularly evangelical Protestant) Christianity today. An excerpt:
Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah
Wheaton College prof Alan Jacobs has a thoughtful reflection on the righteous indignation that pervades the Internet:
A now-famous cartoon on the xkcd “webcomics” site shows a stick figure typing away at his computer keyboard as a voice from outside the frame says, “Are you coming to bed?” The figure replies: “I can’t. This is important. . . . Someone is wrong on the Internet.” I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues. . . .
[A]s we have come to focus our attention ever more on politics and the arts of public justice, we have increasingly defined our private, familial, and communal lives in similar terms. The pursuit of justice has come to define acts and experiences that once were governed largely by other virtues. It is this particular transformation that Wendell Berry was lamenting when he wrote, “Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.” That is, it has become a matter of justice rather than of love, an assertion of rights rather than a self-giving.
This same logic governs our responses to one another on the Internet. We clothe ourselves in the manifest justice of our favorite causes, and so clothed we cannot help being righteous (“Someone is wrong on the Internet”). In our online debates, we not only fail to cultivate charity and humility, we come to think of them as vices: forms of weakness that compromise our advocacy. And so we go forth to war with one another.
I am not at all opposed to sexually active teenagers getting tested for STDs. (I'm pretty sure that sentence has never begun a post on MoJ.) I am troubled, though, that casual sex is such an accepted part of our youth culture -- a youth culture that is shaped in many ways by adults -- that MTV is running a sweepstakes in which prizes are given for announcing your presence at an STD clinic to all your social media contacts on Foursquare. Much of the social stigma associated with STDs, I have always assumed, is not just that you contracted one, but that you were engaged in behavior that potentially exposed you to one. Even accounting for the different social expectations of young men and young women when it comes to sexual "conquests," I would find it jolting to find a teenager who considered it a badge of honor worthy of proclamation to the world that he finds himself in the position of needing to visit the clinic. I find this development to be a fascinating (in a car-crash sort of way) snapshot into the confluence of diminishing private/public boundaries and increasingly permissive sexual norms.
