ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Don't Ask/Don't Tell, Religious Groups, and the Republicans

The Pew Forum released a survey yesterday (see here) showing that 58% of Americans favor permitting gays to serve openly in the military. Only 27% are opposed. These figures are not surprising. Similar results have obtained in the last five years of polling. What I find interesting is the religious breakdown and the Republican reaction.

64% of White mainline Protestants favor gays serving openly; 52% of Black Protestants concur (only 29% are opposed despite the image of African Americans being conservative on social issues); 63% of Catholics favor gays serving openly (21% are opposed – I tried to search the U.S. Catholic Bishops site for a statement on the don’t ask don’t tell policy without success).

As might be expected only 34% of White Evangelicals support open service; 48% are opposed. Of regular churchgoers (I believe among Protestants and Catholics since the survey does not mention other faiths – though the unaffiliated overwhelmingly favor open service), the split is 40% to 40%. Regular churchgoers famously take more conservative positions. It is not clear whether regular churchgoers are more serious about religion, or whether religious non-churchgoers have been discouraged by the conservatism of religious leaders. I assume there is a mixture of both, and other factors as well.

Meanwhile, Senator Lindsay Graham maintains that there is no support on the Republican side of the aisle for repealing the current policy. It is not clear he is right about that (he might, for example, talk with Senators Snow and Murkowski), but right or wrong, as with tax cuts for the wealthy, the Republicans are siding with a small minority of the American people. Indeed, no religious group in the Pew Forum study musters a majority to oppose repeal, not even White Evangelicals. 

Same-Sex Marriage and "Legislating Morality"

Joe Carter has what seems to me an offensive post over on First Things titled Guess Who Thinks We Should Legislate Morality? consisting mainly of a quote from a post by Anthony Esolen. The answer to "guess who" is "male homosexuals arguing for the right to marry." As I said in a comment:

What a bizarre and offensive piece. Since neither Joe Carter nor Anthony Esolen apparently believes there would be anything moral about same-sex unions, or that legalizing and encouraging same-sex unions would have the effect of making anyone more virtuous, how can they claim advocates of same-sex unions are tacitly endorsing the idea that you can “legislate morality”? What morality are they talking about?

From Carter and Esolen’s point of view, legislation favoring same-sex unions would simply be official authorization of immoral behavior in a new, state-sanctioned form, and would not have any effect in encouraging virtue. This comes close in my book to gay baiting. “You folks are appallingly immoral, you ask for something (same-sex marriage) that is absurd, and by doing so you — the personification of immorality — prove our point that morality can be legislated. The joke is on you!”

It seems to me that the saying “You can’t legislate morality” can be interpreted in a number of different ways, none of them particularly important, and it’s a pointless endeavor to try to prove the statement true (or false, for that matter).

Barry Goldwater, voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, remarked, "You can't legislate morality." Here's what Martin Luther King, Jr., had to say:

Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you've got to change the heart and you can't change the heart through legislation. You can't legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion. Well, there's half-truth involved here. Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also. So there is a need for executive orders. There is a need for judicial decrees. There is a need for civil rights legislation on the local scale within states and on the national scale from the federal government.

The question isn't whether you can "legislate morality." It's whether legislation can change behavior. The obvious answer is that it can, at least sometimes. But sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it has unintended consequences. I don't think anyone nowadays would argue that Prohibition was a success. 

Secular winds

A couple of months ago, I read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," a post-apocalyptic story that manages to celebrate the possibility of goodness and the hope of redemption even in the midst of unremitting destruction and human depravity. The religious subtext in the novel is implicit but clear. One particular passage jumped out at me, though,

On Ethics, Economists, and Economics

Prompted by discussion of a recent film, the “Inside Job” (see here and here for reviews), John Steele of the Legal Ethics Forum asks, “Do Economists Need a Code of Ethics?” I give a brief reply in two comments (please bear in mind that these are blog comments, hence the subject is addressed in a somewhat cursory manner).

Update: I’ve responded in the comments section above to a question from Professor Mark D. White* of the Economics and Ethics blog asking what I think of the argument of Deirdre McCloskey and others “that markets are consistent with classical ideas of the good life, eudaimonia, etc.”

*My apologies to Mark for having earlier gotten his last name wrong.

Drilling for natural gas, law, and faith

               Ever since Steve Shifrin invited me to join this conversation a while back, I have been facing two obstacles.  First, I am not a blogger; I don’t even read blogs.  So I’ve had to start remembering to go online and check this one.  Second, I haven’t known how to jump into the conversation.  Now, at the time for giving thanks for the harvest (for me, it’s remembering all the wonderful fruits and vegetables produced over the season by the CSA to which my husband and I belong), I finally realized I was sitting on top of, and working daily on, a topic perfect for me: the struggle to ban hydrofracking in the Marcellus Shale.  The topic blends what has become a passion for me in the last two years with a current spiritual pursuit, as I study the Old Testament with a small EFM (Education for Ministry) group at a downtown Ithaca church.  For those who don’t know what hydrofracking is, it is a process, recently developed, to extract natural gas from the shale formations deep below the surface of our land.  It involves drilling 2,000-8,000 feet down and then horizontally into the shale as much as a mile, then injecting, under great pressure, vast amounts of water and chemicals (many of them toxic but the gas companies refuse to reveal the composition of the fracking fluids) to shatter the shale and release the gas.  Already undertaken in Texas and other states, the companies have turned to the deposits in what is called the Marcellus Shale, which underlies Pennsylvania and southern New York.  Pennsylvania caved under to the companies without a fight, and the results have been disastrous to the environment – swaths of forest denuded for huge drilling platforms and pipelines, beautiful countryside turned into an industrial site, and – most alarming – the pollution of the water supply in some localities, such as nearby Dimock, Pa.

               I moved back to this area of the country after spending most of my adult life in Chicago and found that my soul resonated to its hills and valleys.  I live out in the country on a dirt road surrounded by three acres of land and marvel daily at the beauty of God’s creation.  So quite selfishly, I don’t want this destroyed.  The key to recruiting me into the anti-drilling movement, however, was piquing my interest as a lawyer/law professor, when my husband asked me to review the astonishingly unconscionable leases the gas companies have signed with older farm families in this area, which is very depressed, a shadow of the place I grew up in many years ago.  Getting involved in my small town made me realize how useful my legal skills were and increased my sense of outrage at the injustices involved.  That led to my adding an “extra” class to my schedule, co-teaching a large clinic on water and land law each semester.  I spend a large amount of time on this battle, which has so far been successful in New York State, leading to a de facto moratorium on all drilling and a statement by the governor in his Thanksgiving message that the drilling opponents had convinced him that hydrofracking posed serious threats to the environment and that the vast revenues available from it were not worth the dangers to public safety and water quality.  It is far from over, though.

               This Fall I have been engaged in the scholarly study of the Old Testament for the first time in my life; it has been a source of incredible insights.  Freed from childish images of the creation to exodus story, the messages emerged.  Far from a directive to exploit the whole earth for mankind’s use, I saw the themes of stewardship of God’s creation.  Already a vegetarian (well, I still eat fish), I read in the creation myth the message that humans were only permitted to kill animals for food only at the time of Noah, that is, when the existence of sin had caused God to accept man for what he was – free and inclined to sin.  (Did everyone see the wonderful cartoon story in a recent New Yorker about Noah, with God depicted holding his head in his hands looking down at the violence in the world and saying “Gheesh”?)  This added an important spiritual dimension to the political outrage I was experiencing over the huge corporations preparing to reap profits without thought for the huge and lasting destruction their actions would cause to the environment on which we all depend.

               So I find myself at age 65 learning about the environment (there’s a lot of science to learn) and becoming an environmental activist, after having spent my youth involved in socialist groups and anti-imperialist work, thinking those who were spending their time on the incipient environmental movement were somehow self-indulgent and distracting from the goals of improving the material lives of the world’s people.  Just as I had no trouble at that time reconciling my activism with my Christianity, now it’s all coming together: the same corporations, the same profit motive, the corrupt political structures that allow them to call the shots (does everyone know that drilling of this sort is exempt from the Clean Water Act thanks to Dick Cheney?), the sin that threatens to destroy us all.  In short, I have come to see that environmentalism is just another form of the struggle for social justice.

               Surely this will offer some topics for discussion.  I threw a lot of themes into it because I’ve been struggling with them all in the last few years.  To what should the religious lawyer-academic (this one a feminist scholar to boot) be devoting her energies?  If an activity holds out hope of economic development for this depressed area where I grew up, as the gas companies promise, should I be opposing it in order to keep the bucolic setting in which I have chosen to age?  What is one’s responsibility of witness in the face of such corporate greed and destruction of the earth of which we are the stewards?  Are socialism and religious faith – in my case, Christianity -- and environmentalism all consistent?  Is it moral to kill in order to eat?  And what about these unholy wars in which we as a society are engaged, at least in part to protect foreign sources of fossil energy?  How does that interact with a determination not to exploit allegedly enormous supplies of natural gas at home?

Obama's Imperial Adventure in Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan is a disaster. We are killing civilians, losing the war, and undermining our economy – all at the same time. For what? Surely not for the Afghan people. Perhaps for the imperial privilege of having bases there. Perhaps so that Obama can appear as the patriotic war mongering Commander in Chief at the next election so that the defense establishment need not rush to support the Republicans.

Recall that Obama promised we would be withdrawing combat troops in 2011. No longer so. Now the date is late 2014 and perhaps not then. I told Republicans that if they voted for John McCain we would be bogged down in Afghanistan. And I was right. They voted for McCain and we are bogged down in Afghanistan. For a sobering assessment of the possibilities of our withdrawal from this quagmire, see here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Auspicious Wish (Buddhism)—

At this very moment, for the peoples and the nations of the earth, may not even the names disease, famine, war and suffering be heard. Rather, may their moral conduct, merit, wealth and prosperity increase, and may supreme good fortune and well-being always arise for them.

 

From the Daodejing (51)—

 

The Way [Dao] produces them;

Virtue [de] rears them;

Things shape them;

Circumstances perfect them.

This is why the myriad creatures all revere the Way and

                        honor Virtue.

The Way is revered and Virtue honored not because this is

                        decreed,

            but because it is natural.

And so the Way produces them and Virtue rears them;

            Raises and nurtures them;

            Settles and confirms them;

            Nourishes and shelters them.

To produce without possessing;

To act with no expectation of reward;

To lead without lording over;

Such is Enigmatic Virtue!

 

[Philip J. Ivanhoe, tr.]

 

Toward Consideration of the Constraints on Empirical Research in the Law and Elsewhere

In a rather skeptical if not cynical discussion of “empirical research and law schools” over at MoneyLaw, Jeffrey Harrison concludes, first, that law professors resist acquaintance with or themselves resorting to empirical research “for two reasons: [they] are threatened by what they do not know and law professors [are (I’ve changed the verb tense)] concerned about what the numbers would show.” At least that’s been the case up until now. And that seems true enough.

But more interestingly, he also believes “the future is ‘brighter.’ Well maybe not brighter but different. Law professors are likely to embrace empirical efforts as long as the results are the “right” ones and some empirical work will be valued.”

In response, I wrote (slightly edited):

If we’re not inclined to think that certain cognitive biases: confirmation, expectation, focusing and framing effects, etc. (apart from, in addition to, or in conjuction with more obvious ideological prejudices and distortions), are wholly determinative in the case of empirical research, as the post appears to argue or insinuate, then we are still faced with other issues and problems worthy of our attention. Put differently, even a less skeptical or cynical take on matters leaves us with much to think about when it comes to the place and value of empirical research in legal studies.

I think many of the problems associated with the current condition of empirical research in the law (and in some measure elsewhere in the academy) also arise from uncritical adoption of the methods found in contemporary economics by Law & Economics devotees, a problem not wholly transcended by the recent turn to behavioral economics among some in the profession. People writing in this genre often seem wholly unaware of critiques of the methods of these economists by S.M. Amadae, Deirdre McCloskey, Philip Mirowski, Amartya Sen, Daniel Hausman, Michael S. Mcpherson, Ian Shapiro, and Elizabeth Anderson, among others.

And there’s not enough appreciation of philosophy of science (of both the natural and social sciences) for thinking through empirical questions, hence little appreciation of the meanings of induction (see here especially the work of the philosopher of science, John D. Norton), the use of models, the role of analogical and metaphorical reasoning, hermeneutics, debates surrounding methodological individualism, and so forth and so on.

Relatedly, there’s often uncritical adoption of the latest fad or fashion in the sciences (or latest fashionable science), be it from neuroscience (cf. the recent compelling critiques by Michael S. Pardo and Dennis Patterson), cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, what have you. The nascent character of such sciences should give one pause but....

It perhaps goes without saying that one of the more recalcitrant issues here revolves around the belief that the natural sciences are the repository for the kinds of models and standards, the analytical “robustness” and “rigor,” that we should imitate in the social sciences. Now we need not draw hard and fast boundaries between these two basic kinds of science (after all, we have sufficient reason to label them both ‘science’), but I think there are a host of reasons that we should take care not to elide the very real distinctions here between natural and social science.

For example, when folks hear the word “empirical” in this context they often call to mind “quantitative social science,” of which, after Elster, there are three principal varieties: measurement, data analysis (i.e., statistical analysis), and modeling. Such social science is often oversold if only because it trades too heavily on the mantle and mitre of “hard” science (i.e., the epistemic authority of the natural sciences). Elster himself discusses many of the neglected problems of such science in his book, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (2007). Elster avers, “An interesting question in the psychology and sociology of science is how many *secret practitioners* there are of economic science fiction—hiding either from themselves or from others the fact that this is indeed what they are practicing.” Here, what counts for epistemic rigor or robustness has to do with “numbers” or mathematics, specifically, “ingenious mathematical models” that have little or no anchor in everyday “reality” (as is often the case in economics) and thus are utterly irrelevant with respect to social policy (cf. several books by Deirdre McCloskey, critiques by Nicholas Rescher in his works on epistemology and objectivity, as well as Theodore M. Porter’s Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, 1995). Of course there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being attracted to the elegance and parsimony exemplified in mathematics and mathematical modeling, but one has to make an argument for its relevance or significance in place of, or as a complement to, other methods in the social sciences.

In addition to the authors and titles mentioned above, I would recommend (in no particular order) the following by way of reflecting on the virtues and vices of current empirical practices in legal research, in other words, by way of thinking of its possible constraints: the considerable literature on hermeneutics commencing with works by Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer (and the subsequent debate between Gadamer and Habermas), Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (1991), John Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (2001), Richard W. Miller, Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences (1987), Harold Kincaid, Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences (1996), Martin Warner, Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persuasion (1989), Steven Horst, Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science (2007), Daniel D. Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons (2008), Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds., Problems and Method in the Study of Politics (2004), Daniel D. Hutto, ed., Narrative and Understanding Persons (2007), and, last but not least, Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (2002). 

Addendum: My friend Jeff Lipshaw (of the Legal Profession Blog) made the following (and typically) sensible remarks as part of a larger comment thread on a post at The Faculty Lounge by John Inazu (in response to some reflections by Brian Leiter on Empirical Legal Studies):

“Personally, I welcome the fact that people like Bill Henderson have made themselves experts on statistical and empirical techniques; like all interdisciplinary inquiry, however, the trick is to know enough about it to ask the right questions, but remain distant enough to supply competing concepts or questions. As in all disciplines, that distance may be tough once you’ve co-opted yourself into the discipline. I do think that complex empirical modeling can mask a lot of questionable analysis. I posted a blog note a few years back after reading the fine print in Bebchuk’s ‘Lucky Directors’ and ‘Lucky CEOs’ that purported to show they had to be manipulating or backdating option issuance. I thought that the assumptions the authors made about what constituted normal or recurring option grants was simply inaccurate. But one had to dig extensively to get there. I’ve also encountered the empirical equivalent of the joke about somebody searching under a streetlight for a lost piece of jewelry. An observer [asks], ‘why are you looking there? You lost it across the street.’ To which the searcher replies, ‘yes, but there’s no light over there.’ You hear from time to time this response to the complaint that the data is not very robust: ‘yes, but it’s all we have.’”

[Apologies to those who may have read these or similar comments on this subject by me elsewhere in the legal blogosphere.]

The Gift of Years: So You're Getting Older

Yesterday, Susan Stabile in reflecting on the End Times observed that one problem with predictions about the end of the world (aside from their unreliability) is that they encourage people to stop pressing for the Kingdom of God on earth. Her post reminded me of  Joan Chittister’s outstanding book The Gift of Years: Growing Old Gracefully. Chittister speaks to many groups in this book, but she particularly addresses the old person who has retired, who has lost identity and tight connections to the workplace, who is painfully aware that death is much closer than she would like it to be, and who thinks that her real life is over. Chittister regards this as dying in spirit while physically alive. She maintains that old age should be a time of adventure, a time to do things you never have done before, a time of responsibility, a time to help others in ways you could not do before and a time to share the wisdom gathered by so many years of experience, a time of wonder and thanksgiving, a time to appreciate the beauty of creation and the gift of life left to be lived. Chittister argues that old age is special not only as a new stage in life, but also because there is no escaping the need to confront the meaning of life by being caught up in the competitive distractions of the drive for money, status, and power in the workaday world. Old age is a time to deepen the spirituality developed or ill-developed over a lifetime.

The book also speaks to those who are not yet old. It has wise things to say about the preparation for old age, about the meaning of life and spiritual depth, and, although she does not mention it, I think that it has something to say about how a Christian should approach the Sabbath. But this is not a Christian book in its focus. As Tikkun editor, Michael Lerner writes, “The Gift of Years is an amazing compendium of wisdom not only for people facing aging or providing support, but for everyone who wants to live a spiritually centered and balanced life.”   

Did the Pope Answer the Questions He Was Asked?

Dr. Janet E. Smith has an interesting and, I think, helpful article on The Catholic World Report web site titled What Does the Holy Father Really Say About Condoms in the New Book? I will not attempt to summarize it here, since I recommend reading the whole piece. However, she makes this interesting observation:

We can say that the Holy Father clearly did not want to make a point about condoms, but wants to talk about growth in a moral sense, which should be a growth towards Jesus.

Since the questions were very specifically about the use of condoms, Dr. Smith's observation suggests to me that the pope did not answer the question he was asked. I think that may be the case, and it would explain why so many people are trying to figure out what the answer actually is.

 

Is Dissent to Health Care Legislation a Case of Political Bad Manners?

Last week Patrick O’Donnell referred to Jeremy Waldron’s contention that the dignity of legislation demands that we not immediately disparage it after its passage. Patrick observes that conservatives and libertarians have not lived up to this demand in connection with health care legislation. See here.  And I agree. But I think Waldron's demand is politically unreasonable.

I have long thought that the supposition that we are the authors of our own laws or that we engage in self-government is a fiction in a land of hundreds of millions of people and a legislature responsive to monied interests. The legislature at its best may act for the people, but its actions are not by the people. Of course, in a society marked by pluralistic disagreement, the legislature is entitled to and must make decisions, but this does not entitle its decisions to be immune from immediate claims of injustice.

In a society marked by corporate capture of the legislative process (not to mention numerous other features of the process denying equality of political participation), we should discourage people from thinking they are implicated in self-government or that they need to treat injustice with respect, or that they should confuse toleration with a need for political quiescence.  Instead we should encourage dissent. In my view the problem with conservatives and libertarians regarding health care is not that they dare to dissent, but that their dissent is marked by fear mongering and moral insensitivity.

I think the most serious obection to my position is well argued by Patrick - the concern that it plays into the hands of conservatives who claim that the government is the enemy (unless it fights wars or subsidizes the rich). I certainly do not think government is the enemy. But I do think that what emerges from the market or the legislature is best not trusted. Neither should be given an undeserved dignity.

Choice of law, natural law, and interreligious love

Some readers of this blog might be interested in an article I recently posted on the "Natural Law Challenge to Choice of Law."

Would a jurisdiction supremely confident that some or all of its own municipal law rests on natural law and universal legal truth ever have a good, purely principled, reason to look to ordinary choice of law principles and apply the substantive law of another place in a case involving foreign elements? This essay, a chapter in an upcoming volume on “The Role of Ethics in International Law,” suggests several such reasons, some of them grounded in the natural law tradition itself and in sustained analysis of the relationship between natural law (if such a thing exists) and positive law. The essay also suggests at least a rough analogy between the jurisprudential challenges of choice of law and the theological challenges of interreligious encounter. It ends with a short effort apply the general argument to the specific question of the inter-jurisdictional recognition of same-sex marriages.

Kumbaya

Take a look at Samuel G. Freedman's article on a song whose history illustrates the often-complicated relation of religion, culture, race, and politics.

Update on Pope Benedict XVI's"Say[ing] Health Care an 'Inalienable Right'"

RLL readers may be interested in this post, and the attendant links and comments, over at dotCommonweal.

Obama Turns to the Business Community Instead of His Base

Representative Alan Grayson, a Democrat from Florida, has observed that extending the Bush tax cuts to the top 1% of the country would give an average of $83,000 enabling its members to "buy an $83,000 Mercedes Benz E-Class car, not just once, but every single year for the next decade," he said. "And each year, when they get tired of their brand new Mercedes Benz E-Class car, they can just give it to somebody 'cause they can afford another one. They can give it to a spouse, a sister, a son, a daughter -- anybody. Every single year for the next 10 years, the Republican tax plan is to give millionaires enough money for a Mercedes Benz." President Obama apparently is prepared to give the rich enough to buy only two Mercedes because he has signaled a willingness to limit the extension for only two years. Of course, if the wealthy would spend the money that, at least, would create jobs, but the overwhelming likelihood is that the wealthy would store the money in ways that would be far less productive for our slumping economy.

One might write off Obama’s capitulation to his inability to negotiate as I have done. See http://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2010/11/obama-negotiating-strategy-and-the-bush-tax-cuts-for-the-rich.html. But there is a more disturbing possibility. It is possible that Obama is folding his cards not merely out of a perceived need to get the middle class tax cuts passed, but in part because he has decided to mend his fences with the business community. This is the same President Obama who brought Larry Summers and the like into the White House and the same President Obama who is looking for a Summers clone to replace him. See here. This sounds like an Obama not looking to act on the progressive principles of his campaign and his base, but the Obama, who after regulating Wall Street, is trying to make at least partial amends.

The World of Work & Labor Law: A Bibliography

 

My bibliography for “The World of Work and Labor Law” is now available for download at LaborNet.org: here. I hope to make it available at Ratio Juris soon as well.

I’m most grateful to the labor law professors who contributed some of their favorite titles to this compilation: Joseph E. Slater, Eric M. Fink, and Marcia McCormick. And thanks as well to those who looked over a draft or two and offered kind words and support: Charles A. Sullivan, Paul Secunda, Daniel Ernst, Richard Bales, and William Forbath.

Update: There’s a wonderful site missing from the links listed at the end of the above bibliography everyone should know about, namely, Labor History Links, by Rosemary Feurer—author of Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950 (2006)—developed for the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). As noted at her site, it is “the most comprehensive…[source] of information, documents, and links of U.S. labor history sites on the internet.” Her “Booklist,” while lacking complete bibliographic details on the titles (sans place of publication and publisher), is nonetheless quite thorough and thus very helpful otherwise, being divided up into topical and chronological categories.

Further Update: Nelson Lichtenstein has reminded me that my alma mater hosts the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy (Professor Lichtenstein is its director). 

Image: Fruits of Labor (1932), Diego Rivera (1886-1957). Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1933 (33.26.8) © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Pope Calls Access to Health Care an "Inalienable Right"

From the National Catholic Reporter: 

VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict XVI and other church leaders said it was the moral responsibility of nations to guarantee access to health care for all of their citizens, regardless of social and economic status or their ability to pay.

 Access to adequate medical attention, the pope said in a written message Nov. 18, was one of the "inalienable rights" of man.

Full story here.

 

Creating Jobs or Extending Tax Breaks for the Rich?

Any extension of tax breaks for the wealthy is opposed by the general public and is also contrary to President Obama’s campaign pledges and wise policy. Yet Obama seems prepared to extend all of the tax breaks for two years. The Democratic legislators should (but probably will not) ignore the President if he persists in behaving like a Republican despite current urgings from his party to change course.

The Democrats need not only to oppose tax breaks for the wealthy, but stand for something positive. It seems to me that the Senate should tie the extension of the middle class tax breaks to a jobs bill, a bill that will use the money saved by not extending the tax breaks of the wealthy. For example, Robert Reich argues that the money saved by refusing to extend the tax breaks to those who earn $500,000 or more would pay the rehiring of “every teacher, firefighter, and police officer laid off over the last two years and save the jobs of all of them now on the chopping block.” See http://robertreich.org/ But the Democrats should also refuse to extend the Bush tax cuts to those who earn $250,000 to $500,000 as well and use the money for additional jobs. Those jobs could come in the form of direct funding for additional needed government jobs (for infrastructure and the like) and possibly tailored tax breaks for small businesses in ways that would promote jobs that advance the public interest.

This is good politics. The Republicans can hardly complain that this will expand the deficit at the same time they are arguing for the wealthy to have tax breaks adding up to the same sums. The Republicans can resort to the argument that giving money to the rich will create more jobs, but that is also an argument that the public rightly does not believe.   

This is not just good politics. In a time of high employment, it is a moral imperative.

Raising the Retirement Age: Bad Idea

According to a report from the Associated Press, a GAO study found that "raising the retirement age for Social Security would disproportionately hurt low-income workers and minorities, and increase disability claims by older people unable to work." Further, while raising the age at which a worker receives full benefits would reduce costs, "raising the age when workers can get early benefits would hurt the program's finances because of the expected increase in disability claims."

In a recent column, Paul Kruggman pointed out that "working until you’re 69, which may sound doable for people with desk jobs, is a lot harder for the many Americans who still do physical labor." He also notes the following:

[W]hile average life expectancy is indeed rising, it’s doing so mainly for high earners, precisely the people who need Social Security least. Life expectancy in the bottom half of the income distribution has barely inched up over the past three decades. So the Bowles-Simpson [National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform] proposal is basically saying that janitors should be forced to work longer because these days corporate lawyers live to a ripe old age.

Left

I'm grateful to the ReligiousLeftLaw gang, particularly Steve Shiffrin, for inviting me to join. 

When Steve e-mailed me with the invitation, one of the first questions I asked myself was whether ReligiousLeftLaw was mainly aimed at politically leftoid folks with a religious bent or religiously left folks with a political bent.  It turns out that Steve sort of addressed the issue in his introductory post on the blog.  In any event, I quickly decided that my question was itself sort of silly and anal. 

More interesting, though, is this related question:  Let's define the religious left, very roughly and tentatively, as tending toward some sort of religious universalism, comfort with freedom of inquiry and with self-consciously non-literal or non-absolute readings of sacred texts, aversion to very rigid doctrinal formulations, and a positive engagement with both secular culture and other religious traditions.  Let's define the political left, again very roughly and tentatively, as tending toward a commitment to individual and collective rights (or at least many types of individual and collective rights) along with a strong dose of social and economic egalitarianism and real skepticism about the power of the unfettered market to meet basic human needs.  What is the relation between the two?  And what, for that matter, is the relation between religious conservatism and political conservatism?

"... the voting practices of younger evangelicals have been shifting steadily to the left."

[From Sightings, 11/18/2010:]

The Emerging Evangelicals
- Jenny Rae Armstrong

The recent GOP rebound has been regarded by many as a victory belonging to rifle-toting, SUV driving, born-again Christians. But to oversimplify evangelicals in this manner is to ignore a growing rift within their ranks. Few mainstream evangelicals have attempted to link laissez-faire capitalism with the teachings of Jesus. Even though some claim to base their vote on issues such as abortion, single-issue voting doesn’t seem to be enough to keep younger evangelicals within the Republican fold.

Dubbed “The Joshua Generation” by the Obama campaigners who courted them vigorously, the voting practices of younger evangelicals have been shifting steadily to the left. One third of white evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 29 supported Obama in the 2008 elections, compared to the 16 percent who voted for John Kerry four years earlier, according to a Newsweek article published on January 17, 2009. Increased evangelical concern for social justice, coupled with growing discomfort with the “anti-gay, anti-poor, and anti-environment” stance of the religious right described by progressive Christian leader Tony Campolo, spurred many of them to vote for a democrat for the first time in their lives. Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine and author of the book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, expressed the growing discontent among his fellow evangelicals: “Many of us feel that our faith has been stolen (by the religious right), and it’s time to get it back… How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war, and pro-American?”

Self-described “Red Letter Christians” (social activists who take Jesus’s teachings on poverty, mercy, and justice literally) such as Campolo and Wallis have been making an impact, not just on evangelicals’ voting habits, but on their very self-image. A decade ago, if you asked an evangelical to sum up her faith, she likely would have quoted Romans 10:9: “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Nowadays, if you ask the same question, you would be more likely to hear Micah 6:8: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

This cultural shift is well-illustrated by the recent publication of the book Radical: Taking Back your Faith from the American Dream by David Platt. Social justice manifestos penned from the fringes of evangelicalism are hardly new fare for the Christian publishing industry (think Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution), but Platt is pastor of a Southern Baptist mega-church in Birmingham, Alabama. As unappealing as his hellfire-and-brimstone views may be to the less “radical,” it is difficult for even the most conservative Christians to brush off his equally fiery insistence on “taking up the cross” of sacrificial living and concern for the poor as bleeding-heart liberalism. Social justice has become a centerpiece of mainstream evangelicalism.

Ironically, the high-profile rise of economically-focused groups such as the Tea Party could drive an even greater wedge between the GOP and evangelicals, who were drawn to the Republican Party more as a reaction against legalized abortion than an affinity for libertarianism. In fact, evangelicals have always expressed concern for the less fortunate, and are among America’s most generous givers, with almost 24 percent of them donating at least 10 percent of their income to charity, according to the Barna Group. But a growing number of young evangelicals are coming to the conclusion that it is going to take more than a carefully calculated tithe dropped into an offering plate to effect real, positive change for the poor and oppressed, and are willing to think, act, and vote accordingly. 

References

Tony Dokoupil, “Faith Beyond His Father’s,” Newsweek, January 17,2009.

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/01/16/faith-beyond-his-father-s.html

Barna Group, “Americans Donate Billions to Charity, but Giving to Churches has Declined,” April 25, 2005.

http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/5-barna-update/180-americans-donate-billions-to-charity-but-giving-to-churches-has-declined

David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook Multnomah, 2010).

Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: How the Right Gets it Wrong, and the Left Doesn’t Get It (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005).

[Jenny Rae Armstrong is a freelance writer who writes about faith and social justice for a variety of evangelical publications.]

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Baptists and Church-State Separation

The Baptists, certainly those in the Southern Baptist Convention, are associated with efforts to forge tight connections between church and state. But it is sometimes forgotten that the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment would not have been adopted without the support of Baptists who were concerned that tight connections between church and state would hurt religion. Such Baptists survive to this day. They, for example, are represented in the American Baptist Church which is explicitly committed to separation of church and state and celebrates Roger Williams as a founder of the of the First Baptist Church in Rhode Island in 1638. See here. Similarly, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which broke away from the Southern Baptist Convention, is committed to separation church and state. See here.

Such Baptists also survive in the Baptist General Association in Virginia, the home of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Fundamentalists may control the Southern Baptist Convention, but they have not succeeded in Virginia. Last week the Virginia Baptists reaffirmed their commitment to church-state separation in the process of condemning the attempts in Texas to rewrite the social science textbooks in ways that would “minimize or downplay the role of church state separation in American history.” See here. These Baptists understand that our historical memory shapes our values and our national identity. History books cannot be written in a value free way. But the writing of history is not just an exercise in power. And the Baptists in Virginia rightly sense that the attempts in Texas to rewrite our history are a naked power grab.

Free Speech and Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers

The New York City Council is on the verge of passing legislation that would require pro-life pregnancy centers to post signs on their premises and include in their advertising statements that they do "not provide abortion or FDA-approved contraceptive drugs and devices" and they do not "provide referrals to individuals or organizations that provide abortion or FDA-approved contraceptive drugs and devices." Penalties are a $250-to-$1000 fine for the first violation and $500-to-$2500 fines for succeeding violations. Facilities with three violations in a two-year period could be sealed for five days, and noncompliance after orders to seal a facility could incur additional fines and imprisonment. 

The American Center for Law and Justice is opposing the legislation on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment, and NYCLU Director Donna Lieberman, while supporting the purpose of the bill, "urged the Council to revise the draft legislation so centers weren't targeted solely because they don't provide abortions." Chris Slattery, the president of E.M.C. Pregnancy Centers, was quoted in an article in the New York Times last month as saying, “They [Planned Parenthood] don’t do pro-life counseling. Why don’t we have on Planned Parenthood’s door ‘No pro-life counseling, only pro-abortion counseling’ — O.K.? Let’s just have a level playing field.”

What if you died right now?

If we internalized that we might die at any moment, what impact would that have on our behavior? Would you change your behavior if you knew that what you were doing could be the last thing you ever did?  For a reflection on that growing out of the Buddhist and Christian faith traditions, see Susan Stabile's Creo en Dios!

Abortion; Capitalism: Two New Readings

RLL readers may be interested:

On abortion:  this review of a new book that defends "the Catholic view, ... not a religious view [but instead] a natural law argument", in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Nov. 10, 2010:  here.

On capitalism:  this piece on eminent moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's views on global capitalism and the economic crisis, in the British magazine Prospect, Oct. 20, 2010:  here.

Law & Disagreement

 

I am reading once more Jeremy Waldron’s wonderful book, Law and Disagreement (1999), the complementary volume to his equally worthy Seeley Lectures, published as The Dignity of Legislation (1999) (for the record, I don’t share Waldron’s thoughts—or those of Larry Kramer or Mark Tushnet for that matter—on judicial review), which is relevant to several things I’m working on, but especially toward completing a couple of reviews of recent books treating Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy. The passage below struck me as relevant to the Republican Party and Tea Party movement’s implacable, intransigent, and vociferous opposition to the recent health care reform legislation signed into law by President Obama in March of this year: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Reconciliation Act of 2010. Even before the ink was dry on the bill, state attorneys general in thirteen states were filing suits challenging the constitutionality of the legislation, despite the fact that some of our best constitutional law scholars publicly proclaimed its constitutional integrity.

Consider the following from Waldron’s supplement to Raz’s “normal justification thesis”—distilled from The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (1979) and The Morality of Freedom (1986)—wherein the main demand law makes on us as subjects is that we comply with it.* In addition to or apart from this demand, writes Waldron,

“[C]onstitutions, statutes, and judicial decisions and opinions make additional demands on us as lawyers, jurists, politicians, and active, opinionated citizens. When something is enacted as law or as a source of law, I believe it makes on us a demand not to immediately disparage it, or think of ways of nullifying it or getting around it, or mobilizing the immune system of corpus juris so as to resist  its incorporation. This must be stated carefully, for systems like ours also make available generous structures like appeal, constitutional amendment, legislative reversal, judicial review, periodic elections, and so on; so, in a sense, no one is ever required to accept a political or legal defeat as final or irreversible. However, the demand that interests me operates in the logical space between denying or ignoring a statute or other legal decision and working responsibly for its repeal or reversal. It is a demand for a certain sort of recognition and…respect—that this, for the time being, is what the community has come up with and that it should not be ignored or disparaged simply because some of us propose, when we can, to repeal it.” (p. 100)

Conservatives and libertarians (recalling that not a few Democrats voted against the bill) have, I think, failed to live up to the basic demand Waldron describes here as a respect for the “dignity of legislation” and other sources of law. They’ve conspicuously displayed a disconcerting failure to accord the Health Reform Acts the recognition and respect due them, a respect that is, “in part the tribute we should pay to the achievement of concerted, cooperative, coordinated, or collective action in the circumstances of modern life” (p. 101). The authority and respect due such legislation occurs in the context of what Waldron terms the “circumstances of politics” (analogous to the Humean and Rawlsian ‘circumstances of justice’), “including the circumstance of disagreement as to whether it is even a step in the right direction.” The sundry corrosive effects of this failure are of a piece with the vague and generalized disaffection with government that’s reached a feverish pitch in some quarters and is being dangerously exploited by demagogic politicians, irresponsible pundits and other public celebrities.

*The thesis claims, in particular, “that the normal way to establish that a person has authority over another person involves showing that the alleged subject is likely better to comply with reasons which apply to him (other than the alleged authoritative directives) if he accepts the directives as authoritatively binding and tries to follow them, rather than by trying to follow the reasons which apply to him directly.” 

Taryn Mattice

I am pleased to announce that Taryn Mattice has agreed to be a contributor to our blog. Welcome!

Who Gets to Define Tolerance?

Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of the diocese of New Hampshire, in a blog for the Center for American Progress, has recently led the charge: "How Religion is Killing our Most Vulnerable Youth" where he laments how religion in American culture has been generally destructive to LGBT youth. Religious conservatives he argues are to be blamed for their public attitudes in creating a culture in which increasing numbers of LGBT youth feel threatened and are at greater risk for attempting suicide then their straight identified peers. Robinson is equally alarmed by the absence of a strong public voice from religious liberals  that would expose and challenge the wide-scale religiously sanctioned anti-gay bullying that many teens experience.

"Despite the progress we're making on achieving equality under the law and acceptance in society for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, why this rash of bullying, paired with self-loathing, ending in suicide? With humility and heartfelt repentance I assert that religion—and its general rejection of homosexuality—plays a crucial role in this crisis.

On the one hand, Religious Right hatemongers and crazies are spewing all sorts of venom and condemnation, all in the name of a loving God. The second-highest-ranking Mormon leader, Boyd K. Packer, recently called same-sex attraction "impure and unnatural" in an act of unspeakable insensitivity at the height of this rash of teen suicides. He declared that it can be cured, and that same-sex unions are morally repugnant and "against God's law and nature."

...It is not enough for good people—religious or otherwise—to simply be feeling more positive toward gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Tolerance and a live-and-let-live attitude beats discrimination and abuse by a mile. But it's not enough. Tolerant people, especially tolerant religious people, need to get over their squeamishness about being vocal advocates and unapologetic supporters of LGBT people. It really is a matter of life and death, as we've seen."

Each semester at Cornell, the LGBT Resource Center along with the chaplains office sponsor Interfaith dinners, seeking to create a supportive space for LGBT students and their allies to explore issues and concerns that lie at the intersection between sexuality and religion. I have attended dinners of this nature for over 15 years and have begun to experience something quite curious about the changing composition of the groups of students who gather. I would venture to say that even five years ago, the dinners were almost entirely subscribed to by LGBT students and allies but that seems to be changing. In a recent dinner, I estimated that there was a sizable minority of religious conservatives present.( primarily Evangelical Christian students and two chaplains from two separate Evangelical fellowships on campus). On the surface of things, there was nothing controversial about the mix of people present. Infact, at my table, I would say that the religious conservatives took special effort to state that their fellowships not only do not actively condemn but are in fact, welcoming communities for all students.  It was clear that the students speaking in this way, along with their chaplains were entirely sincere in their advocating for greater tolerance of gays and lesbians.  I must confess however, that my head felt like it was full of cotton balls-- since when do religious conservatives, in all due respect, get to carry the banner of "tolerance" in relation to the LGBT community and how shall religious progressives understand and respond to this shift in political expression?

I was interested to read that Robert Moore, in 2007 presented a paper to the Annual Meeting of the The Mid West Political Science Association entitled:  "Political Participation and Tolerance: American Evangelicals in Transition". His survey indicated that increasing numbers of younger Christian Evangelicals, who were broadly politically involved (i.e., participating in voting) are expressing increased tolerance of civil liberties for gays and lesbians while maintaining their historic views of the immorality of homosexuality.   He writes, "this ability to embrace civil liberties while at the same time showing increading acceptance of homosexual morality suggests a very complicated balancing of moral values and civil norms taking root in the Evangelical tradition."

This slippery slope is made particularly dangerous when accompanied by rhetoric from Tony Perkins, President of The Conservative Family Research Council, who has said in a variety of interviews, including this one on NPR: "These young people who identify as gay or lesbian, we know from the social science that they have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict," he says. Homosexuality is "abnormal," he says, and kids know it, which leads them to despair. That's why he wants to confront gay activism in public schools."

I can imagine well intentioned Evangelical Christian students wanting to support their LGBT peers to avoid the despair that Tony Perkins speaks of.  There is a predatory element to this discourse that I find particularly troubling.  It is akin to being hit over the head with a two by four that has been carefully padded beforehand. The damage is hard to account for even as you feel as if you are getting slammed!

And even when the discourse is not overtly predatory, I have certainly witnessed the damagine impact of evasive posturing (i.e., "It is not up to me to judge, I leave that to God." ) And while I know genuine conservative dialogue partners for whom this position allows them to challenge those who would quietly or otherwise condemn LGBT persons, within their own ranks. This position in and of itself renders little to no mercy to those suffering under the weight of religious sanctioned hate speech and bullying.  

Sadly, even within Christian communities where there are progressive religious voices, I fear too many of them have privileged their attempts at maintaining civil discourse between themselves and their religiously moderate and conservative peers at the expense of speaking prophetically in a time in which especially our youth need to hear clear affirming messages.  We are going to have to keep out eye on the ball for God's sake!

Count me in among those who feel very challenged by Bishop Robinson. This is a time for clear speech. No more hesitation, it's time to hear many more of us speaking openly about our passion for full inclusion of LGBT community members as a matter of religious principle.  I thank Bishop Robinson for calling us on the carpet!

"Global Warming and American Christianity" --Martin Marty

Sightings  11/15/2010

Those who long recognized that the public has to take a long view, should it wish to address global warming, learned in the recent election that they have to take a longer view. The Tea Party, which makes its first appearance in Sightings today, massively opposes small measures and even serious attempts to bring up the topic. Not a few Tea Partiers undergird their opposition with theology of the biblical sort. Last October 20 in The New York Times, John M. Broder did a close-up of typical action in campaigns at Jasper, Indiana. Global warming? “It’s a flat-out lie!” shouted the founder of the local T.P., basing his view on theologian Rush Limbaugh and “the teaching of Scripture. ‘I read my Bible. . . [God] made this earth for us to utilize.’” Lisa Deaton, a founder of Tea Partyish “We the People Indiana,” added gloss: “Being a strong Christian, I cannot help believe the Lord placed a lot of minerals in our country, and it’s not there to destroy us.”

It would be easy to refute and dismiss such proclamations, but they are generously backed. Broden: “Those views in general align with those of the fossil fuel industries,” which subsidize—at the rate of [by now well over] $500 million in the last two years—lobbying against legislation that would help postpone The End. Such industries can always find some dissenter against the overwhelming scientific consensus which warns against the destruction of the planet. Ron Johnson, the new senator from Wisconsin, settles it all scientifically. Climate change? “It’s far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity.” Or part of an every ten-thousand year cycle. Wait and see.

Bill McKibben, whom the utilities lobbyists and the Tea Partiers most hate, is an advocate of measures to confront climate change. In The New Republic, he writes: “On what is quite possibly the single biggest issue the planet has faced, American conservatism has reached a near-unanimous position, and that position is: pay no attention to all those scientists.” He skewers the “tiny bunch of skeptics being quoted by right-wing blogs.” McKibben, who includes churches as he rides the speaking circuit to awaken publics, is not a total pessimist. He thinks true conservatives, who would like to conserve the earth, will come to see through the conspiracy theorists, utilities lobbyists, and beyond the crack-pots—and help make sacrifices to bring about change.

McKibben, long a favorite of readers of The Christian Century, has begun to get support from editors who know what real conservatism means. So it was cheering to see LaVonne Neff commenting in Christianity Today on McKibben’s Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. She quoted stories identifying the author as “probably the nation’s leading environmentalist” and “the world’s best green journalist.” He is also, she notes, “a churchgoing, Sunday-school teaching Methodist, who wants to see Christians leading the environmental movement,” and makes a theological case for their doing so. McKibben argues for “small and local” ways to help confront the issue. Ms. Neff, contra Mr. Limbaugh and other theologians on the far right, argues that McKibben’s recommendations “fit well with Scripture’s respect for creation” and “its requirement to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

Many Catholics, Jews, and Mainline Protestants, who have worked this theme in their “social justice” preaching, rejoice to hear such evangelical voices. Neff writes, “McKibben is not a doomsday prophet,” but he is a prophet crying in our heating-up wilderness.

References

“Local is beautiful: Bill McKibben believes we can thrive on a planet that will never be the same,” Christianity Today, November, 2010.

John M. Broder, “Climate Change Doubt Is Tea Party Article of Faith,” New York Times, October 20.

Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by (New York: Times Books, 2010).

---, “Hot Mess: Why Are Conservatives So Radical about the Climate?” The New Republic, October 6, 2010.

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Obama Negotiating "Strategy" and the Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich

The Republicans say that there will be no negotiations. They say that the Bush tax cuts must be extended for all income classes and many of them are pushing for the idea that the extension must be permanent. One might think that the President on behalf of the Democratic Party would insist on tax cuts for the middle class, but no tax cuts for those who earn more than $250,000. That after all is what he campaigned for and that has been a central argument of the Democratic Party: that is, the Republicans are shills for the rich.

Indeed moderate and liberal Democrats have been spoiling for precisely this fight. Instead of drawing a line in the sand, however, President Obama in an all too typical way has signalled his willingness to compromise creating the impression that he is wishy washy, that he is oblivious to the wishes of the American people (who overwhelmingly oppose extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich), that he fails to understand the necessity of strongly distinguishing the Democrats from the Republicans on this issue, and that he is prepared to join the Republicans in implementing enormously bad public policy. As has been much discussed, extending tax breaks for the wealthy will add approximately $200 billion over the next two years to the national debt and putting the money in their hands will do little to stimulate the national economy (since the wealthy unlike the middle class will not turn the money back into the consumer economy). Obama maintains that the Republicans will have to explain where the money will come from to fund this. It is hard to understand how this can possibly make sense. We redistribute wealth to the rich and cut $200 billion from the budget at a point when we badly need to creat jobs. No wonder moderate and liberal members of Congress are furious with the President.

Meanwhile Obama has spurred speculation about what his position will ultimately be. The initial speculation was that he will push to extend the tax cuts for two years. And Democrats are engaged in public negotiating with themselves. Senator Schumer, the representative from Wall Street (and the Senator from New York) suggests that the tax cuts be extended to all but those who make $1 million per year. Robert Reich suggests that the compromise should be at $500,000 per year (they are the top 1% of the wealthy; those who earn $250,00 are the next 1%). See here. If there must be a compromise, it seems to me that Reich's position is the next best place to draw a line in the sand. But Obama really should learn the basic negotiations principle that you do not negotiate with your self.

I voted for Obama and there were reasons to believe that he had a better chance of winning than Hilary Clinton. But is there anyone who thinks that she would have been such a weak-kneed negotiator. Not me.

Pilgrimages

For a characteristically wise discussion of pilgrimages by Susan Stabile, see here.

Book Review: The Confession by John Grisham

Nine years ago in the small town of Sloan, Texas, Donté Drumm, a black high school football star, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the murder of a white cheerleader –- a crime he confessed to but did not commit. The victim's body was never found, the jury was all white, the confession was coerced, the judge was having an extramarital affair with the prosecutor, the victim's boyfriend and a jailhouse snitch both provided perjured testimony against the defendant, and one of the key witnesses for the prosecution was a dog. Despite all this, and the tireless efforts of Drumm's crusading defense attorney Robbie Flak, the execution is only days away. There appears to be no hope. But meanwhile, in Topeka, Kansas, a just-paroled convict named Travis Boyette, dying (or so he says) of a brain tumor and not wanting to see the innocent Drumm die, confesses to the murder to Lutheran pastor Keith Schroeder, and they rush to Texas in an attempt to prevent the execution. Will they succeed, or will a demonstrably innocent man be executed?

The fact that the question is answered two-thirds of the way through The Confession, John Grisham's latest bestseller, and we slog through to the end demonstrates yet again that Grisham can keep us turning the pages no matter what. The book is just too long and too unfocused. Although at first glance The Confession appears to be an anti-death-penalty novel, the injustices heaped up against Drumm by all involved -- from the small-town police department, prosecutor, judge, and white citizenry, to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the Texas governor, all the way to the District Courts and the United States Supreme Court –- are so egregious that Grisham makes little or no case against capital punishment itself. One does not need to be a death-penalty opponent to find repugnant the blatant railroading of someone so clearly innocent. Those who oppose the death penalty need to make a case against executing those who are clearly guilty, and The Confession is no help in this regard.

Obama, Big Money Donors, Political Advertising

Republican supporters outspent Democratic supporters by a margin of two to one in the last election. No surprise. Republicans always have had a money advantage. Most business corporations armed with substantial treasuries have vested interests in opposing Democrats. But President Obama aggravated the Republican advantage by discouraging big donors from giving money to outside groups. See Politico. Apparently Obama did this in part in order to show his opposition to the Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend unlimited sums on political advertising. This was the shoot yourself - and the Democrats - in the foot strategy (as opposed to the Dick Cheney strategy of shooting someone else with a shotgun in the neck).

In the 2008 campaign Obama was influenced by the view that he did not need the outside advertising and that he did not want to risk that his message would get blurred. This was the arrogant strategy. As Paul Miller a Communications Strategist at Cornell observes, in the age of the internet, it is Communications 101 that you cannot control the message. All you can do is try to influence the message. Whatever the merits of the Obama strategy during the 2008 election, it was political madness in 2010.

As Politico reports, Obama has changed his strategy. He is now encouraging big donors to begin the planning for a major outside advertising offensive. But, the report continues, it may be too little too late. The big donors were already miffed that they were not invited enough to the White House, and Obama is giving them permission to do what they may not want to do. It would be human, but politically crazy for Democratic donors not to give for these reasons. Republicans will always have the money advantage and they have won the gerrymandering advantage many important states. Two years is an eternity in American politics, but one thing is certain: in our corrupt system of campaign finance, the Democratic Party will need all the help it can get from its traditional donors. 

"... the gulf that divides liberal and conservative Catholics ..."

The Tablet, Nov. 13, 2010

Church of two halves

Michael Sean Winters

The old and new speakers of the American House of Representatives are both Catholic, but there the resemblance ends. What happened to these two politicians in the midterm elections shows the gulf that divides liberal and conservative Catholics, and by extension the US Church itself

Janet Shortall

I am pleased to report that Janet Shortall has agreed to be a contributor to our blog. Welcome to religiousleftlaw!

Russell Powell

I am pleased to report that Russell Powell has agreed to be a contributor for us. Welcome to religiousleftlaw!

The Unpopularity of the Republican Agenda

I have a friend who used to be an editor for the New York Times. He said that every year at the beginning of the election season, the editors would agree that this time they would focus on the issues rather than the horse race, and every year they would focus on the horse race. So this time we were told again and again that the polls showed the Republicans were going to win the election. We were not much told what the polls disclosed about the voters' positions on the issues. We were left free to think that the voters wanted smaller government, lower taxes for all, and an emphasis on reducing the budget.

That, after all, is what the Republican were preaching. But it turns out that the voters do not favor the Republican agenda as Katrina vanden Heuvel makes clear in a wonderful column in the Washington Post.

Only 37% of the American people favor extending the Bush tax cuts to those making $250,000 or more. The voters are almost evenly divided on the relative merits of spending to create jobs versus reducing the deficit. When voters were asked to choose between “a jobs agenda including rebuilding infrastructure, extending middle-class tax cuts and investing in science and technology versus a program modeled on the Republican pledge of cutting spending, extending all tax cuts and providing small businesses with a tax cut, voters favored the jobs agenda over the Republican agenda by a 53% to 41% margin. And 80% favored the launching of a “five-year strategy to revive manufacturing in America," including "providing companies with incentives to make it in America, ending tax breaks that reward moving jobs abroad, enforcing 'buy America' provisions on government spending, countering unfair trade and currency practices by China and others, investing in research and technology to foster new products and markets."

This is a far cry from the Republicans trust the market approach. I must say that it is a little early to forecast an emerging Republican dynasty.

Law & Literature Bibliography

At The Literary Table blog I’ve posted the first draft of a basic bibliography (books only, in English) for “Law & Literature.”

JFK and Obama

James W. Douglass has written an important new book on JFK, Obama, and confrontations with the military industrial complex particularly the military. I have not read the book yet, but I have spoken with those who have, and they maintain that the evidence he provides on the assassination is disturbing. At a minimum, he provides fascinating material on JFK and Obama's relations with the military and their attempts to control the executive. For a sample, you can read this excerpt in the current issue of Tikkun. The excerpt does not discuss the role of Pope John XXIII, but the book does. He played a role as intermediary between JFK and Khruschev, who wanted to maintain a back channel for conversations about peace, without alerting the military of their respective countries. Douglass is a Catholic Worker so he has a particular interest in Dorothy Day who we learn met with the Kennedys and in Gandhi who plays an even larger role in the book. The book is definitely in my to read pile.

Two Cheers for Facebook

I just read an insightful and sometimes touching essay on the positive uses of Facebook in building relationships – particularly long-standing relationships - by Ellen Painter Dollar at the Episcopal Cafe. It is an essay that pointed me to uses of Facebook instead of simply being a passive presence. Dollar, however, recognizes the negative possibilities as well: “Allowing Facebook to be a tool for relationship-building instead of a distraction requires humility, self-discernment, and discretion—qualities that are fostered by spiritual disciplines, honest relationships, self-examination, and confession, not by spending hours in online conversations consisting solely of clever one-liners. . . . As with most human inventions, Facebook can foster intimacy or alienation, compassion or cruelty, substance or stupidity. The challenge is to use it for the former and avoid the temptation to participate in the latter. Facebook is no more to blame for Tyler Clementi’s suicide than the GW Bridge is. But we still have a responsibility to foster online communities marked by respect and appropriate boundaries, to use Facebook and other online tools as instruments of the light and not the dark.”

A Cheer for Some Charter Schools

I agree with Patrick that charter schools have been oversold. But I think it is important to stress that there is much to learn from those charter schools that have been successful (beyond the recognition that public schools need to be more fully funded).  The claim that public schools generally lack success is simply false. Certainly, suburban public schools have been highly successful. On the other hand, even otherwise very good school districts do not have a record of success with regard to students from poor backgrounds and racism persists in school districts that regard themselves as liberal.

I do not accept (and I do not believe that Patrick accepts)  the view that socio-economic background dooms students to failure. I think schools of education have done an exceedingly poor job of teaching teachers how to teach.

There are methods of inspiring students to learn while maintaining effective classroom discipline. Doug Lemov is the Founder of School Performance, an Albany-based non-profit that provides diagnostic assessments, performance data analysis, and academic consulting to high performing charter schools.  He has a new book called Teach Like a Champion that in my opinion should be required reading for all teachers in k-12 and all parents of young children. Before the book was published, a teacher I know, who as a part of Teach For America was teaching in a public school in the Mississippi Delta, heard a lecture by Lemov. Last year the lowest increase in reading levels of any of his students was a grade level and a half. That was the lowest. He credits Lemov for a significant part of his success and the success of other friends who adopted his techniques. Lemov’s techniques are increasingly being used in Teach for America and the Kipp schools. And I am happy to report that his book is currently being read by elementary school principals in Ithaca (though many of his techniques are applicable at higher levels).

I recently visited kindergarten classes at a Kipp school in Austin, Texas. One of the teachers teaches at different times in English to two groups of Spanish speaking children from low socio-economic backgrounds. Another teacher teaches the same groups of children at different times in Spanish.  One thing is obvious. Young children quickly pick up languages. These children will emerge as fully bilingual. When I was President of the Ithaca City School Board, I urged the Superintendent to try a similar program. She agreed to do so at one school, but worried that schools of education were not producing teachers who could do this. I am not sure how much training is needed, but our schools of education are not doing this and our schools are woefully weak in teaching languages.

Finally, Kipp schools (which by the way do not charge tuition) have very long school days. I, at least, am persuaded that longer school days are beneficial to the education of children. But selling that idea to the President of a teachers’ union would be extremely difficult particularly in a climate where the public is unwilling to support fair teachers salaries even in a district like Ithaca’s.

The Myth of Charter Schools

Central Los Angeles High School, #9

In The New York Review of Books (November 11, 2010), Diane Ravitch discusses Davis Guggenheim’s film, Waiting for ‘Superman’: The Myth of Charter Schools.

And from a profile of Ravitch by Emily Bazelon in The Atlantic  (November 2010):

When Diane Ravitch decided that reform ideas like robust testing, charter schools, and No Child Left Behind were imperiling rather than saving American education, she managed to break with her former Republican allies and start a fight with Obama Democrats, all at once. For Ravitch, this wasn’t merely a course correction, it was a complete turnaround: when she was an assistant secretary of education during George H. W. Bush’s administration, she was all for more standardized testing and for school choice. During the Bush II years, she cheered the passage of No Child Left Behind. But in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010), Ravitch says the evidence shows that vouchers and charters don’t actually serve kids better on average than regular public schools, and that testing has squeezed every creative drop out of the school day—who has time for art class when success depends on drilling students in math? Ravitch has also come to view the closing of “failing” schools that’s required by No Child Left Behind as an unfair attack on the teachers and principals who work with low-income students.

Teachers unions and some civil-rights groups sounded these alarms before Ravitch did. But her sharp writing and mastery of history (she’s an education professor and historian at New York University) mean that no one makes the case more forcefully. [….]

Perry Dane

I am pleased to announce that Perry Dane has agreed to join our site as a contributor. Welcome Perry.

Tikkun Olam

[From Sightings, 11/04/2010] 

Tikkun Olam: Jewish Sacred Repair, Secular Action or both?

- David Gottlieb

In an attempt to address the well-documented and growing gulf between the economic fortunes of the rich and poor--and almost in tandem with the onset of the recession and the collapse of the housing market--Rabbi Jill Jacobs published a book on the Jewish imperative to practice tikkun olam, or repairing the world, as seen through both rabbinic and contemporary activist perspectives. The book, There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law & Tradition, affords an intimate look at what Rabbi Jacobs calls “a de facto pillar of progressive Judaism.” In this book and other writings, by unfolding some of the phrase’s shades of meaning, Rabbi Jacobs works to reveal how tikkun olam refers not only to our relationship to the physical world but also to establishing an unceasing commitment to spiritual sensitivity and religiously-based moral and ethical development. Although it may be too late to rescue the term tikkun olam from overuse, it is still valuable to begin to understand its many and nuanced meanings.

Rabbi Jacobs is rabbi-in-residence at Jewish Funds for Justice (JFJ), a progressive organization dedicated to “build[ing] a resurgent movement for justice with a significant Jewish presence at its center.” JFJ is part of a broad movement in contemporary American Judaism, in which tikkun olam takes on the practical tasks and commitments of social action. The Jewish social justice movement, of which JFJ is at the vanguard, sees the pursuit of economic justice as a contemporary articulation of the rabbinic imperative to go beyond the letter of Choshen Mishpat, or Jewish civil law, in working in partnership with God to repair Creation. Jacobs believes that “Jews should openly bring Jewish text and experience into public policy discussions.” Doing so is a means of upholding a central covenantal commitment while expressing Jewish identity in a modern manner.

The term tikkun olam was used by the rabbis who compiled the Mishnah (the comprehensive compendium of rabbinic teaching compiled circa 200 C.E. and comprising a major portion of the Talmud). It refers to laws designed to afford extra protection to the disadvantaged. The term took on a different meaning in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah: the followers of the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria saw tikkun olam as a kind of cosmic repair of God’s fractured creation. In Lurianic Kabbalah, to which Rabbi Jacobs refers, the shards from shattered vessels of creation have trapped divine energy and human souls which must be restored to their divine Source through prescribed mystical and contemplative acts.

In its contemporary context, tikkun olam is often used as an umbrella term for any form of Jewish social action. The Kabbalistic imperative to address mystical imbalance is either folded into the work that seeks to address social imbalance, or elided altogether. This has led to a kind of "tikkun olam fatigue," tempting many Jews to retire the term from both the activist and mystical lexicons.

In an article on the history of the term, Rabbi Jacobs notes its ubiquity and its concomitant devaluation: “I have come across puzzling references to the ‘prophetic value of tikkun olam’ or ‘the commandment of tikkun olam.’ As a post-biblical term, tikkun olam neither appears in a prophetic book nor constitutes one of the mitzvot. However, as this concept has come to be equated both with a general call to justice, and with specific philanthropic and volunteer activities, the definition of tikkun olam has been merged with those of tzedakah (financial support of the poor), g’milut hasadim (acts of loving kindness), and tzedek (justice).”

Rather than advocating tikkun olam’s retirement, Rabbi Jacobs promotes a diverse and sustainable four-fold definition: “the anticipation of the divine kingdom in the Aleynu prayer; the midrashic (homiletic or interpretive) call to preserve the physical world; the rabbinic desire to sustain the social order; and the Lurianic belief in our power to restore divine perfection.” Such a definition would inform the Jewish social justice movement with both social and spiritual goals, encouraging the practice of world-healing in as inclusive and just a manner as possible.

References

Jill Jacobs, There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law & Tradition (Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Press, 2009).

---. “The History of ‘Tikkun Olam’,” Zeek, June 2007.

David Gottlieb is a PhD student in the History of Judaism at the Divinity School. He is also co-founder and executive director of Full Circle Communities, Inc., a philanthropic nonprofit developer of affordable housing and provider of supportive services.

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Research Bibliographies Online

 

Perhaps some RLL readers would be interested in one or more of the research bibliographies I have online at the Ratio Juris blog. These were originally put together as part of what was christened the Directed Reading series. They cover a variety of topics, some of them having to do with law (e.g., American Indian Law, Comparative Law, International Law), some with law and ethics (e.g., Health, Torture, Terror), others on major religious worldviews (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.), and still others on motley subjects that strike my fancy (e.g., Death & Dying, Emotions, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Marx and Marxism, Science and Technology). Most of the lists are books only, in English, somewhat arbitrary constraints but it helped keep them fairly manageable for the one composing them and thus assured they would remain a labor of love.

Two of the lists are, for now, available only at the webpage and not formatted for download:  “Torture: Moral, Political, and Legal Dimensions,” and “Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy, and Law.” However, they should soon appear for download as Word docs., as are all the other compilations.

Forthcoming shortly, a list for “Analogy and Metaphor,” and before year’s end (God willing, as they say), the compilation for “The World of Work and Labor Law.” Other planned bibliographies are listed under “Forthcoming” at the above link.

I plan to update all of these so I welcome comments and suggestions toward that end. I’ve added additional titles to some of them since they were posted so if you’d like the latest compilation just e-mail me and I’ll send the Word doc. version along.

A note of gratitude to Dean Jim Chen, who formats the bibliographies for download and first invited me to post them at his blog (indeed, brought me, kicking and screaming, into the blogosphere).

Should Obama Move to the Left?

The calls for Obama to move even further to the center given the new Republican House and the shrunken majority in the Democratic Senate have already begun. But Robert Reich argues that this would be a mistake. See here and here. The traditional wisdom is that Clinton won reelection by moving to the center, but Reich argues that Clinton won because the economy recovered. Reich maintains, however, that the economy will not recover in time for the next election.

Republicans will try to pin that on him as they did in this election. Obama could not win this argument by moving to Republican ground. According to Reich, “Obama’s best hope of reelection will be to reframe the debate, making the central issue the power of big businesses and Wall Street to gain economic advantage at the expense of the rest of us. This is the Democratic playing field, and it’s more relevant today than at any time since the 1930s.”

Reich’s contention makes a lot of sense to me. Although the unpopularity of health care and the debt played a role, the Democrats lost this election because of the economy and because of their inability to turn out significant parts of their base. (The percentage of the young as a portion of the electorate dropped from 18% in 2008 to 11% in 2010, see here). One question I have concerns the practicality of Reich’s suggestion. Democrats need to raise money to get elected and business has the bulk of the money. If Democrats govern in accord with their professed beliefs, how do they get the money to get reelected?

Colorado Personhood Amendment Voted Down

The proposed "personhood amendment" to the Colorado constitution was rejected by nearly a 3 to 1 margin yesterday. The amendment stated that "the term person shall apply to every human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being" for the following sections of the constitution, all from Article II:

Section 3. Inalienable rights. All persons have certain natural, essential and inalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; of acquiring, possessing and protecting property; and of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

Section 6. Equality of justice. Courts of justice shall be open to every person, and a speedy remedy afforded for every injury to person, property or character; and right and justice should be administered without sale, denial or delay.

Section 25. Due process of law. No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.

According to the Colorado Independent:

No on 62 campaign spokeswoman Cara DeGette lauded the overall campaign effort and the intelligence of Colorado voters: “The campaign was so strong; the win is huge. Voters aren’t stupid.”

She added the second try at the amendment proved once and for all how Coloradans feel on matters of choice.

However, since opponents argued the amendment could have affected not just abortion, but in vitro fertilization, stem cell research, and contraception, it might be difficult to interpret the resounding defeat purely to "pro-choice" sentiments. Nevertheless, the premise of many in the pro-life movement -- that personhood begins at conception -- seems to have been rejected by Colorado voters. 

HT: Rick Garnett, Mirror of Justice

Paradoxes--Confusion?--Galore

As a cradle Catholic--indeed, as a cradle *Irish* Catholic--I have always thought (i.e., since reaching "the age of reason") that it was, and is, more important to be a good Christian than a good Catholic, if one must choose.

And yet, I am sometimes tempted to describe myself as a post-Christian Catholic.  Now, what does that descriptor mean?  If you're interested, check this out:

Michel Rene Barnes, "Moral Narrative and Post-Christian Catholic Theology," Modern Theology 26:4, October 2010.

"Religion and the Liberal State Once Again"

Stanley Fish revisits some of the issues, and responds to commenters, here.

Welcome to New Commentators

I am pleased to announce that Cynthia Bowman, David Nickol, and Laura Underkuffler have each agreed to be contributors to our blog. As it has developed, religiousleftlaw.com features commentary on law, religion, politics and/or culture from people who inhabit a variety of different faith traditions.