CBS is taking heat from women's groups for agreeing to run an ad from Focus on the Family featuring Tim Tebow, whose mother rejected her doctors' advice that he be aborted:
“An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year—an event designed to bring Americans together,” said Jemhu Greene, president of the New York-based Women’s Media Center.
This is depressing on several levels:
First, from what I understand, the ad will not advocate any particular legal response to abortion; it simply will celebrate life and the personal choices that make life possible. If a message like that is too "divisive" to be expressed on a grand cultural stage, then we have a serious problem. For those who insist that the concept of the common good has become so thin that a meaningful conversation on the subject is impossible, this might be Exhibit A.
Second, the logic underlying an argument that messages encouraging others to "choose life" are "demeaning" makes me want to poke myself in the eye with a sharp object. It is a message aimed at hearts and minds; it is not (as far as I know) aimed at persuading the state to criminalize abortion (I'm not saying that those messages have no place in the public square, just that those message are understandably more controversial.) But to insist that a mother telling her story of being blessed by her choice for life is "not being respectful of other people's lives" (according to Terry O'Neill, president of NOW) is to twist the concept of "respect" beyond recognition.
Third, the nature of the protest -- don't taint the sacred ground of the Super Bowl! -- speaks loudly about our society's rush to embrace events that give us a sense of community (and even transcendence), and how silly we sometimes look as a result. Perhaps at one time those events were religious, but now we're left with the Super Bowl (and maybe American Idol). As sports columnist Gregg Doyel wrote, “If you’re a sports fan, and I am, that’s the holiest day of the year. It’s not a day to discuss abortion."
I've opened comments.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Last week Amy kicked off our discussion of John Allen's important new book, The Future Church, with Allen's first trend ("A World Church"), and this week I'm going to continue the conversation by focusing on his second trend: "Evangelical Catholicism." I'll lay out the basics of Allen's thesis, then raise some questions about what the trend could mean for Catholic legal education.
Continue reading
I do not have a strong opinion on Citizens First v. FEC, and I'm inclined agree with Kevin's assertion that the range of goods corporations are likely to pursue in their political speech are "material, consumerist, and sensuous goods, ones fit for economic growth, but not fit for living authentic, effective human lives." But is this limited range of goods intrinsic to the nature of the corporation, or does it also reflect our limited understanding of the corporation's potential? Even under the "nexus of contracts" conception, there is no reason why corporations cannot stake out more distinctive roles as venues through which the values necessary for "authentic, effective human lives" can be pursued and expressed. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, we discover the common good -- and even our individual goods -- not through theoretical reflection, but through "everyday shared activities." Can corporations be one type of venue in which those shared activities occur? I've tried to develop the argument further in this paper.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Cornell law prof Annelise Riles has posted a new paper, Is the Law Hopeful? Here's the abstract:
This essay asks what legal studies can contribute to the now vigorous debates in economics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, literary studies and anthropology about the nature and sources of hope in personal and social life. What does the law contribute to hope? Is there anything hopeful about law? Rather than focus on the ends of law (social justice, economic efficiency, etc.) this essay focuses instead on the means (or techniques of the law). Through a critical engagement with the work of Hans Vaihinger, Morris Cohen and Pierre Schlag on legal fictions and legal technicalities, the essay argues that what is “hopeful” about law is its “As If” quality.
As Christians, we have a "living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 1:3), and I know that any hopefulness found in the civil law -- particularly the techniques, rather than the ends, of civil law -- is going to pale in comparison. Still, hopeful law is better than the alternative, I guess. (I know, I need to stop speculating about the paper and just read it.)
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Thanks to an MoJ reader for passing along this post from a doctoral candidate in Caribbean history providing background on the Pat Robertson "pact with the devil" quote. (For earlier MoJ posts on the matter, see here, here, or here.)
Friday, January 15, 2010
Kenneth Anderson and Peter Spiro raise a good question that should be of interest to Catholic legal theory. In a humanitarian crisis, what role should citizenship play? Specifically, why exactly should the U.S. government place a higher priority on evacuating an uninjured American than on evacuating a critically injured Haitian?
Martha Fineman has posted her new paper, Taking Children's Interests Seriously. Predictably, she laments our society's preoccupation with parental rights, particularly in the area of education. She argues that "public education should be mandatory and universal." What exactly is the problem with allowing home schooling and private schools? She makes a lot of arguments, mostly unsubstantiated. She argues that allowing families to opt out of public schools is reinstituting segregation in urban areas. I could be mistaken, but I think that's a function of segregated neighborhoods more than public school opt outs, and I believe that urban Catholic schools have a pretty good record on integration.
Fineman concedes that parents know their children better than the state does, but suggests that the knowledge relates to matters such as whether the child likes to eat carrots, or whether the child prefers the color red to the color blue. On more fundamental matters, we should defer to the"experts" -- i.e., the professional educators. Most parents, I'm guessing, do not share Fineman's view of the parent-child relationship.
Among the many eyebrow-raising assertions in the paper, there is one jaw-dropper:
[S]tate policies favoring parental choice in home schooling children have resulted in several egregious instances of parental neglect and abuse. Just this year, two home schooled children in Washington, D.C. were brutally murdered by their own mother, yet their decomposing bodies were not discovered until well after their deaths. The mother’s ability to home school her children without any state oversight arguably enabled her to repeatedly torture and ultimately murder her children without anyone noticing.
End violence against children by making sure they're all in public schools? Right.
