ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Ten Shocking Facts about Baltimore

Were you shocked at the disruption in Baltimore?  What is more shocking is daily life in Baltimore, a city of 622,000 which is 63 percent African American.  Here are ten numbers that tell some of the story.

 

5              Blacks in Baltimore are more than 5.6 times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than whites even though marijuana use among the races is similar.   In fact, Baltimore county has the fifth highest arrest rate for marijuana possessions in the USA.

5.7          Over $5.7 million has been paid out by Baltimore since 2011 in over 100 police brutality lawsuits.   Victims of severe police brutality were mostly people of color and included a pregnant woman, a 65 year old church deacon, children, and an 87 year old grandmother.

6              White babies born in Baltimore have six more years of life expectancy than African American babies in the city.

8              African Americans in Baltimore are eight times more likely to die from complications of HIV/AIDS than whites and twice as likely to die from diabetes related causes as whites.

8.4          Unemployment is 8.4 percent city wide.  Most estimates place the unemployment in the African American community at double that of the white community.  The national rate of unemployment for whites is 4.7 percent, for blacks it is 10.1. 

9              African American babies in Baltimore are nine times more likely to die before age one than white infants in the city.

20           There is a twenty year difference in life expectancy between those who live in the most affluent neighborhood in Baltimore versus those who live six miles away in the most impoverished.

23.8        148,000 people, or 23.8 percent of the people in Baltimore, live below the official poverty level.

56           56.4 percent of Baltimore students graduate from high school.  The national rate is about 80 percent.

92           92 percent of marijuana possession arrests in Baltimore were of African Americans, one of the highest racial disparities in the USA.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Non-Aligned Movement & the Non-Proliferation Treaty: Collective Withdrawal?

At the Arms Control Law blog, Dan Joyner blog provocatively proposes “a walkout from the NPT [Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons] en masse by the members of the NAM [Non-Aligned Movement]”:

[….] “The original idea of the NPT from the superpowers’ perspective, was to stop proliferation of nuclear weapons from spreading outside the five that had already tested at the time. This clearly didn’t work out well. At least five other states have manufactured nuclear weapons since 1968 (I’m counting South Africa), and four of these still have them. And I think one would be hard pressed to show that the NPT itself has actually proven to be a meaningful independent variable in stopping any country from developing nuclear weapons when they wanted to do so. This is going to be a difficult experiment without a control case, of course. But I think the ‘proliferation success stories’ that are usually pointed to, including South Africa and Brazil, would probably have happened in much the same way they did without the NPT in place, but rather simply with an international norm having been expressed in General Assembly resolutions and elsewhere against nuclear weapons proliferation. These success stories, as well as the failure stories (e.g. North Korea), have occurred mostly due to factors outside of any direct influence of the NPT itself. They have occurred because of the particular political, historical, and economic circumstances of the state(s) involved, combined with a general international norm against nuclear proliferation, which as I said earlier could have been accomplished without the conclusion of the NPT. [….]

I would say the current climate of international trade in nuclear materials and technologies doesn’t betray any sort of real meaningful effect of the Article IV right and obligation on supplier states. Nuclear supplier states trade with whomever they want to trade.  And if they don’t want to trade with a state, or allow their private parties to trade with that state, they simply won’t, with very little regard for the Article IV(2) obligation that they are presumably under. Trade in nuclear materials and technologies is, again, all about politics and economics. And again, I think that in the absence of the NPT, the landscape of international trade in nuclear technologies would look very much the same as it does now.

And what about Article VI? Well I think it’s pretty clear that no nuclear weapons possessing state has ever been significantly influenced by the obligation in Article VI to move towards disarmament in good faith [rather, they’re engaged in modernizing their nuclear arsenals]. After more than 45 years the nuclear weapons states do just exactly what they want to do with regard to nuclear disarmament [that is, engaging in what has been termed ‘symbolic reductions’] and no more. All of the changes that have been made would, I think, have been made in the absence of the NPT. The Cold War ramp up, the efforts of arms control during and after it, cuts over the past 25 years – none of these would have been any different had the NPT not been in place I suspect.

So if the NPT has failed in the ways I have described, why does every diplomat, from Russia to Nigeria, still pay lip service to the NPT as the cornerstone of the nonproliferation regime, and speak of it in hallowed terms? For the nuclear weapons states I think it’s clear why. They still benefit from having a treaty that allows them and no one else to have nuclear weapons, and that doesn’t seriously constrain them in any way. A treaty they can use as a normative cudgel against their enemies, but which carries very few costs for them and their friends.

But what about for developing non-nuclear weapon states? What do they get out of NPT membership? Again, the concessions they wanted out of the NPT have not been granted to them in the systematic and meaningful way they were promised in the NPT. They get nuclear supplies if and when they are on good enough political terms with supplier states. If not, they don’t. And 45+ years of waiting for the nuclear weapon states to disarm has yielded not one disarmed state among the NWS – and in fact it has produced a net addition of four more nuclear armed states outside of the treaty.

And yet in return for these promised but undelivered benefits, NNWS continue to submit to IAEA safeguards on their nuclear facilities, and to hypocritical critiques by nuclear weapon states of their failure to live up to their NPT and IAEA commitments. So I ask again, what are they getting out of NPT membership?” [….]

My bibliography, “Nuclear Weapons: Development, Detonation, Deterrence, and Disarmament,” his here.

[In photo (from left to right): Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein of Egypt, Sukharno of Indonesia, and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia.]

Race and the St. Louis Cardinals

Saturday, Neesa and I went to watch the St. Louis Cardinals play the Cincinnati Reds with our youngest son Jacob. Around the third inning Neesa turned to me and said: “I have never seen so many white people in one place.” There were many black employees, but it wasn’t until the sixth inning that I saw a single African-American fan. Of course, there were many more, but the largest racial group in St. Louis is African- American, and it was obvious that African-Americans are not supporting the team in the numbers one would expect or that one might see in Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles (the latter having I would argue the most racially diverse crowd in baseball).

So what is the problem? Until Neesa spoke, I did not notice what many African-Americans know very well. See here. In 2014 there were no African-American players on the Cardinal team (they were one of three in baseball – joined by Arizona and San Francisco). Kerry Robinson, a former Cardinal who in 2003 was the only Black player on the team, remarks that Black fans are frustrated because they are “not seeing someone they can identify with.”

This year they have one African-American player: Jason Heyward who was acquired in a trade from Atlanta. Heyward is a terrific athlete an outstanding defensive player who has the potential to breakout at the plate (Indeed, many observers expect a breakout). As it stands, without a breakout, he is no slouch at the plate. He should hit in the high .260’s to .270’s, with home runs in the teens and double digit steals perhaps in the low 20’s. There is no team in baseball that would not benefit from having Heyward on their roster.

I should emphasize we are not talking about the prejudicial days in which Jackie Robinson broke into the league. Heyward hit a home run on Saturday. The Cardinal crowd gave him a standing ovation (unlike the reaction to a rare home run from Cincy’s Zack Cozart – you could hear a pin drop) and the crowd would not stop applauding until Heyward came out of the dugout to take a bow. Moreover, he was greeted with enthusiasm in the dugout. He is a potential star – one with which (the Post Dispatch reports see link supra) African-Americans can identify. Moreover, he is the kind of person who feels an obligation to serve and connect with the Black community.

Heyward, however, will be a free agent at the end of the season and it is not clear the Cardinals will pay what it will take to keep him. This would be a shame. The Cardinals are a great franchise that sports many storied Black players including three in the Hall of Fame: Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Ozzie Smith. In fairness, the decline of African-American baseball players is a general phenomenon. At one point 25% of players on the 25 man baseball rosters were Black; it is down to 9%. But Cardinal Manager Mike Matheny deserves no awards for his clueless comment in a 2012 interview that it was the first time he had thought about it because it was all about merit. MLB and the Cardinals do have some outreach programs for Black youth (someone should tell Matheny), but they have an obligation to all of their fans, and they could start by signing Heyward. Many Blacks are holding off to see how the Cardinals handle this. We can hope for the day that the Black citizens of St. Louis return to Busch stadium. 

The Modern Papacy and War

It did not receive nearly the attention it should have. In the last five weeks, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, who is the Holy See's chief diplomatic representative to the United Nations, has issued calls for organized military responses against Boko Haram and against ISIS. In both cases, he spoke of the need to show compassion to the victims of these groups, insisting that mercy requires the protection of innocent life.

Thus in talking of Boko Haram, he denounced the group's "merciless acts."  They are committing "war crimes and crimes against humanity."  It is the responsibility of the "involved States" to act decisively against this threat and it is a duty of "the international community" to show "solidarity" against this criminal enterprise.

In early March, Archbishop Tomasi spoke with similar force against ISIS and called, once again, on the world community to halt the encroaching expansion of this group.  He described the actions of ISIS as "genocide" and emphasized that it was the world's responsibility "to stop this kind of genocide."  He insisted, moreover, that it was not the West's duty alone to act against ISIS and indicated that the Muslim nations of the Middle East should also become involved.  And, he stated, any armed response must finally be taken "under the aegis of the United Nations."

Archbishop Tomasi is an experienced diplomat, holding a high-level appointment.  He would not speak in this way without a clear mandate that extends to the Pope or at least to the papal Secretary of State.  The Archbishop's warnings, however, raise an important question:  Should the papacy encourage the use of force, no matter how compelling the morality of the cause?

There is good reason for the papacy to be very careful when making this case.  We might begin with the Crusades.  The Crusades were, after all, launched in the year 1095 in a sermon of Pope Urban II, who called on the Christian knights of Europe to "liberate" the Holy Land from Muslims.  The Pope assured his listeners: He was not the one actually calling for the Crusade.  It was Christ, speaking through him, who issued the summons.

Pope Urban's call was met with a rush of enthusiasm. But even before the crusading armies descended on the Middle East, they committed their share of crimes and depredations, including pogroms against Jewish communities in Europe. Between 1095 and 1291, an estimated seven to nine crusades were put in motion with the object of establishing Christian rule in the Middle East (historians differ on what military actions counted as crusades).

In the end, the Crusades not only failed in permanently establishing Christian rule in Palestine, but the whole idea of crusade was hijacked for truly tawdry political ends. In the early 13th century, Pope Innocent III launched a crusade against the Albigensian religious movement of southern France. In the 1240's, Pope Innocent IV declared a crusade against his political rival, Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor.

Popes also regularly fought wars in defense of the papal state. The papal state received its first territorial definition in the eighth century and encompassed, at its greatest extent, a substantial part of northern and central Italy.

Some of these papal conflicts are the stuff of legend. One thinks, for example, of Pope Julius II (1503-1513), who organized a military campaign against the Republic of Venice while simultaneously commencing the construction of St. Peter's Basilica.

One also thinks of Pope Pius IX (pope 1846 to 1878).  He was driven from Rome in 1848, during that year of European upheaval, and restored to the papal throne thanks to French military intervention. At its height, in the 1860's, the papal army under Pius' command might have numbered as many as 15,000 troops. And in 1870, it all came undone as Giuseppe Garibaldi's army defeated the papal forces and brought all of the Italian peninsula under secular rule.

I personally consider the loss of the papal states one of the great blessings to befall the Holy See, and the Catholic Church at large. It freed the popes from the messiness of day-to-day politics and allowed them to develop their modern role as voice of the world's conscience.

The papacy, acting as the world's conscience, has spoken out with particular force against war in the years since World War II. When Pope Paul VI visited the United Nations in 1965, he issued his famous call, "No more war, war never again!"  Pope John Paul II was similarly outspoken in his opposition to war. He opposed the 1991 Gulf War, waged against Iraq to free Kuwait. John Paul II genuinely believed that diplomacy and non-violent concerted action against Saddam Hussein's regime could have averted the bloodshed of war.

And 12 years later, in 2003, John Paul II brought the whole prestige of the papal office to bear against George W. Bush in the lead-up to that President's decision to invade Iraq. The Pope's diplomatic efforts even included sending a special emissary to meet with the President and encourage him not to follow through with the attack. John Paul II's efforts regrettably failed, George Bush launched his war, and catastrophe followed.

Pope Francis' early statements on war were consistent with those of his predecessors. In 2013, he opposed an American-led attack on Syria and even called for a world day of fasting and prayer in an effort to prevent bloodshed. This was a noble effort that did, in fact, succeed.  War was averted and lives were saved.

I can understand the impulse behind Archbishop Tomasi's summons to the world community.  Boko Haram and ISIS are truly nihilistic and blood-thirsty groups. And action against them is not like a war among states, which always poses the risk of recourse to disproportionate means and methods. Action against Boko Haram and ISIS would be more on the order of a police action, an effort to shut down bloody-minded bands of killers operating in a lawless corner of the world.

But even if action against these two groups does not rise to the level of a war among states, it is still a call to arms. Even if Archbishop Tomasi did not directly call for armed intervention, his well-crafted circumlocutions did the job nicely. His statements about ISIS appear under the headline "Vatican Backs Military Force to Stop ISIS." His call to move against Boko Haram bears a similar headline: "Holy See Calls For Swift Action Against Violent Extremism In Africa." These are not headlines which the Vatican has repudiated.

This development leaves me very uneasy. On the one hand, Boko Haram and ISIS are committing horrible crimes. They are burning people alive, selling persons into slavery, and killing groups of people -- Christians and Yazidis -- merely for their religious beliefs. These are outrageous deeds that must be stopped. But how should the Vatican state the case against these groups? I believe that it should confine itself to detailing the crimes these organizations are committing. That alone should be sufficient to arouse the conscience of the world. But that is as far as the summons should go. Leave it to the world to take the next step.

Cross-posted: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/the-modern-papacy-and-war_b_7037854.html 

Making Sense of Human Dignity

Charles White, “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep,” 1956 

“The roots of the cosmopolitanism I am defending are liberal: and they are responsive to liberalism’s insistence on human dignity. It has never been easy to say what this entails, and indeed, it seems to me that exploring what it might mean is liberalism’s historic project.”—Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005): 267.

“Whether or not the notion that the international legal human rights system is grounded in and serves to affirm the inherent dignity of humans is a central feature of the system, it is surely at least a desideratum for a justification of the system that it can make sense of this notion given its prominence. [….] [T]he relevant notion of dignity can be understood to include two aspects. First, there is the idea that certain conditions of living are beneath the dignity of the sort of being that humans are. [….] Let us call this first aspect of dignity the well-being threshold aspect.

The second aspect of dignity is the interpersonal comparative aspect, the idea that treating people with dignity also requires a public affirmation of the basic equal status of all and, again, that if they are not treated in this way they suffer an injury or wrong. [….] The well-being threshold aspect of dignity concerns whether one is doing well enough for a being of the sort one is; it makes no reference to how one is treated vis-à-vis others. The interpersonal comparative aspect has to do with whether one is being treated as an inferior relative to other people. The point is that one’s dignity can be respected in the well-being threshold aspect and yet may be compromised in the interpersonal comparative aspect.”—Allen Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013): 99-100.

Recommended Reading:

• Capps, Patrick. Human Dignity and the Foundations of International Law. Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2010.
• Daly, Erin. Dignity Rights: Courts, Constitutions, and the Worth of the Human Person. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
• Düwell, Marcus, et al., eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Kateb, George. Human Dignity. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Luban, David J. “Human Rights Pragmatism and Human Dignity” (December 28, 2013), forthcoming in Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Massimo Renzo, Rowan Cruft, and Matthew Liao, eds., Oxford University Press). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2394233
• McCrudden, Christopher, ed. Understanding Human Dignity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Rosen, Michael. Dignity: Its History and Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Waldron, Jeremy (et al.) Dignity, Rank and Rights (Berkeley Tanner Lectures, 2009). New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Liberals and Sexual Orientation: Religious Liberty and Hate Speech

Liberals think it obvious that evangelical Christians should not have a constitutional right to discriminate in hiring or in deciding which customers to serve on the basis of sexual orientation. I agree with these conclusions, but I think the question whether good faith religious liberty claims should be respected in the case of customer discrimination should be regarded as a closer question than most liberals would concede.

It is not that I have appreciation for the religious position taken by evangelicals. I enjoyed a sermon on Easter by a Methodist minister who said she regarded those who discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation as wolves masquerading as the Lamb of God, and she found it hard to believe that Jesus died on the cross, so that Christians could discriminate against people on the basis of who they love.

Nonetheless, religious liberty claims should not be dependent on whether we subscribe to the religion in question. Quakers should be entitled not to fight in wars whether or not we think the just war doctrine is correct and the Native Americans in Employment Division v. Smith were wrongly denied the religious  right to ingest peyote in their religious ceremonies. Religious liberty rights should have particular force when a believer in good faith professes a religious obligation to do something or not to do something.

But religious liberty claims have to give way when the government interest is sufficiently strong. In the employment context, because job opportunities are scarce, equality protections against discrimination are of substantial material importance. What is the interest of gays and lesbians in not being discriminated against as customers? Frequently, discrimination in the consumer market will be of no material importance. A gay or lesbian citizen in most circumstances will be able to purchase the product or service elsewhere. Let us assume that. What then is the harm of the discrimination?

The harm is the stigmatizing effect of the discrimination, and the failure to respect the equal citizenship of gays and lesbians by the discriminator. This is reinforced by the state permitting the discrimination. Government has a strong interest in assuring that gays and lesbians are equal citizens. Permitting discrimination in employment and consumer markets should not be tolerated.

This brings me to the main point of the post. Why do liberals value freedom of speech over freedom of religion? Why should the state tolerate hate speech on the basis of sexual orientation (not to mention race)? If permitting some religious individuals the ability to discriminate against gays and lesbians in the purchasing of products and services is a stigmatizing denial of equality, how much more stigmatizing is virulent hate speech? In addition, however difficult it might be for many liberals to muster any empathy for the evangelical Christian who feels a religious obligation not to serve gays or lesbians, the explicitly homophobic hate monger is surely worthy of substantially less respect which is to say – no respect.

Some liberals will say that the hate speech example involves speech, and discrimination is conduct. But speech is conduct, as is defamation, most forms of fraud, and perjury. Other liberals will say that in the area of free speech, we do not take the value of speech into account. This is true much of the time, but there are exceptions (obscenity, fighting words, commercial speech, near obscene speech, and private speech) and there should be more of them (depictions of animal cruelty targeted to sadists or masochists, gruesomely violent video games). Why shouldn’t this be one of the exceptions? Note these are the same liberals who believe that equality on the basis of sexual orientation should be a Constitutional right. In other words, they believe that homophobia like racism should be renounced in our C onstitution. Of course, everyone should have a right to question the wisdom of our constitutional rights, even the equal protection clause, but that should not implicate a right to stigmatize and libel citizens on the basis of sexual orientation (or race).

Which is worse? Denying the sale of a product on the basis of sexual orientation because of a traditional, albeit untenable, religious position or engaging in a homophobic diatribe designed to stigmatize gay and lesbian citizens on the basis of who they love? I think the question answers itself.

 

 

 

More Books on Liberalism

Montesquieu (18 January 1689 – 10 February 1755)

I have a guest post up at the U.S. Intellectual History blog (Saturday, April 4) with a short bibliography on Liberalism (introduced with an apologia). I want to thank L.D. Burnett for prompting me to put together this list and the invitation to post it at the blog of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873)

A Christian Apology to Jewish People at Passover and Easter

As a lifelong Christian, I apologize to my Jewish friends and to all Jewish people on Passover.  Our organized Christian religions have built many of our most beautiful ceremonies and beliefs upon the foundation of our Jewish leader Jesus and upon principles of Judaism and your scriptures.  Yet we have also repeatedly engaged in and celebrated extremely harmful anti-Jewish stereotypes, especially at this time of Easter.   

Each year many Christian churches reflect on, celebrate and reenact what we call the Passion of Jesus based in large part on Passover.  In our attempt to lift up the struggles, death and resurrection of Jesus, we unfairly demonize your religion and your people again and again.  We misinterpret the teaching parables of Jesus as anti-Jewish stories ignoring the fact that these stories were for an all Jewish audience.  We wrongfully insist that Christianity is a religion of love in opposition to a caricature of Judaism which we say is based only on strict laws and wrath.  We condemn the Jewish people for not recognizing our God as yours.  These are not only religious mistakes.  These have also fueled the fires of draconian anti-Semitism for almost two thousand years.

Followers of my religion have persecuted yours.  We have been responsible for millions of murders, tens of millions of acts of violence, and hundreds of millions of acts of intentional discrimination and marginalization for centuries.  We have engaged in Crusades in which you were targeted.  We have forced untold numbers to convert from Judaism to Christianity or be slaughtered.  We have cursed you from our pulpits and condemned you in our churches.

For this and so much more, I apologize.  I want to continue to learn from your lives and your experiences as a people.  I know many other Christians feel the same way.  Our churches must challenge our ignorance, faulty theology and lack of historical knowledge of what our world was like twenty centuries ago, in order to radically reorient our religion away from anti-Semitism.  We must recognize you as our sisters and brothers seeking, like us, meaningful ways to live out lives of respect, family, love and community.  Together we can make our world a better place.