ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Cornell's Foolish Attempt to Control the Press

Fox News reporter Jesse Watters was recently thrown off campus while asking students questions primarily about liberal bias in the university. On camera, he asked Senior Director of Media Relations John Carberry why he was being asked to leave and Carberry in his best imitation of an imperial bureaucrat said he would send him a statement. Carberry proceeded to send a statement asserting that Cornell does not discriminate in hiring on the basis of politics, a statement that notably did nothing to explain why Cornell threw Watters off campus. When airing the segment Bill O’Reilly said to Watters, ““Don’t they understand that they look 18 times worse than if they’d just left you alone?”

Mr. Carberry violated the first rule of public relations: never make matters worse by making public relations the story and above all, don’t appear to be covering up through censorship.

Apparently, Vice President of University Relations Joel Malina thought he was improving the situation when he released a statement indicating that it was university policy to require media outlets to receive permission from the university before interviewing or photographing students. Let’s leave aside practical questions like whether bloggers are media outlets, what counts as an interview, and whether individual students who plan to report campus conversations with their fellow students or put campus student photographs (including their own) on their Facebook pages have to go to Malina’s designee to get permission.

According to Malina, the purpose of this policy is to protect the privacy of individual students. If you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you. The purpose of this policy is not to protect consenting students; the purpose of this policy is to try to control or stay on top of the story. It is a policy that bespeaks thundering ignorance of basic principles of free expression. Great universities endorse those principles. They understand that press licensing involves not just stupid public relations, but also that the values promoted by freedom of expression are never served by the censorial urges of a club-footed bureaucracy.

 

Joe Biden and the Catholic Problem

Vice President Biden has decided not to run, but it is worthwhile to consider one of the problems he would have confronted if he had run. I have in mind the Catholic problem. It is not the same problem John Kennedy faced when he ran for President. The concern then was that he would be a puppet of the Vatican. Kennedy argued to the Houston Ministerial Association that he favored religious freedom, separation of church and state, and that he would follow his conscience rather than the impositions of religious prelates and he trusted that a Protestant would do the same. I wish he had made the point that it was part of Catholic doctrine that a person should follow his conscience rather than the views of Church leaders when he could not bring himself to agree. But Kennedy’s speech opened the door for him to run for the Presidency and his success made it clear that a Catholic could become President.

Biden’s Catholic problem is somewhat different. His problem was faced by John Kerry when he ran for President. Kerry took the position that abortion was immoral, but the choice of whether to have an abortion should be made by the woman, not by the state. In other words, he endorsed the view the view of Roe v. Wade that abortion should not be criminalized. The problem was that some Catholic Bishops took the position that Kerry should not be permitted to receive communion because his position contradicted Catholic doctrine. Many Democratic leaders believe that the opposition from these Bishops cost Kerry the election.

Biden, of course, has a similar problem. Indeed, in 2008 when Biden ran for Vice President, Bishop Martino of Scranton (Biden’s hometown, but not his current parish) publicly announced that Biden would be denied communion in Scranton. More recently another Bishop took the position that Biden would not be welcome to take communion in Colorado Springs, and Biden’s former Bishop said that Biden should not be able to speak at Catholic schools. See here.

As I understand the teaching of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic politicians who take Biden’s position either should not take communion (or, at least, the suggestion is strong that they should not), and individual Bishops can explicitly forbid specific politicians from taking communion in their dioceses. See here. It is notable that the recent worldwide Synod of Bishops considered divorced Catholics, remarried Catholics, gay and lesbian couples, and unmarried couples living together. But Catholics holding Biden’s views were not discussed. Abortion was not on the agenda. It is true that the Pope has indicated that women who have had abortion can be forgiven by the Church. But the statements by the U.S. Bishops on politicians, abortion, and communion have not been reconsidered.

Is Biden a sinner according to the Church? Not necessarily. There is a long tradition stretching back to Aquinas holding that persons must follow their conscience rather than the mandates of the Church when the two conflict. Conservative Catholics tend to hold that there can be no conflict because the conscience must be well formed and it cannot be well formed if it conflicts with Church teaching. What the conservatives cannot do is show that this circularity was ever part of Church tradition. On the other hand, the Church can decide that those politicians who “cooperate with evil” in the eyes of the Church (certainly not in my eyes) and/or who have departed from Church teaching should not take communion or should be characterized as having separated themselves from the Church even if following their conscience is morally required. The Bishops have been relentless in telling those who cannot come to terms with Church teachings that they are willfully stubborn and obdurate. The result has been that most Catholics ignore many of the Bishops’  positions (think about contraception). Many who do not ignore the Bishops leave the Church. The second largest religious group in the United States: former Catholics.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Bishops remain powerful. Robert Shrum, who among many other things was John Kerry’s campaign speech writer, wonders in his absorbing book No Excuses whether a Catholic can ever get the Democratic nomination again. Certainly a pro-life Democrat could not get the Democratic nomination. But pro-choice Catholic Democrats will draw the fire of Catholic Bishops in ways that make them less likely than Protestants to attract the important Catholic vote. John Kennedy opened the door, but the Bishops have all but slammed it shut.

 

Islam & Democracy

The following is a draft of a revised entry on “Democracy” for a new edition of an encyclopedia on Islam (it is the only one of my entries I’m revising). The format is slightly different than the actual submission but the content is identical: “Democracy & Islam.”

Cultivating Revolutionary Counterculture & Politics: an exemplum

An indispensable work on both (a few of) the causes and (some of) the effects of the political and cultural orientation of the “paperback generation” [i.e., ‘baby boomers’] is Loren Glass’s Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (Stanford University Press, 2013). First, the Wikipedia introduction to Grove Press:

“Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. He partnered with Richard Seaver to bring French literature to the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its publisher, Morgan Entrekin, merged with Grove Press in 1991. Grove is now an imprint of the publisher Grove/Atlantic, Inc.”

And now a provocative snippet from Glass’s Counterculture Colophon:

“On the one hand, individual ownership was one component of this [i.e., the boomers’] generation’s relationship to print, and in some ways a misleading one, since paperbacks were frequently shared as a form of collective property. On the other hand, assigned reading lists were only one delivery system whereby these books got into the hands of college students, whose loyalty to Grove Press nurtured a whole common culture of revolutionary reading in the 1960s. [….] [P]rivate reading and public life were powerfully stitched together in the 1960s; to be in the Movement meant, at least partly, to be reading certain books, and many, if not most, of those books were published by Grove Press.”

On the aforementioned “common culture of revolutionary reading:”

“…[I]n the second half of the 1960s, Grove expanded and enhanced both the investigative reporting and radical rhetoric of the Evergreen Review, publishing double agent Ken Philby’s revelations about British and American intelligence; Ho Chi Minh’s prison poems; extensive reports on urban riots and ghetto activism; eyewitness accounts of the events of May 1968, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the trial of the ‘Chicago 8’; interviews with My Lai veterans and other exposés on the Vietnam War; and numerous articles by and about the New Left, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, and other revolutionary movements throughout the world. In these efforts, Grove sought to merge literary and political understandings of the term ‘avant-garde’ in the belief that reading radical literature could instill both the practical knowledge and psychological transformation necessary to precipitate a revolution.”

Do Judges Need to be Lawyers?

City, Town, and Village Courts in New York State essentially entertain the same types of cases including traffic, small claims, landlord tenant disputes, violations, misdemeanors, and felony preliminary hearings. To qualify to be a City Court judge in New York, you would need to be a member of the New York bar and have practiced law in New York for at least five years. To be a Town or Village justice, you would only need to be a resident of the town or village, be at least 18, and not have committed a felony. In New York State 72% of the Town and Village Justices are not lawyers. Many are quite smart and well educated.

The County in which I live is investigating whether to seek legislation reforming this system. The Town and Village judges argue that the current system has worked for more than a century, that they are elected, that they work hard and have completed the training offered by the state and continue to update that training, that they are the judges “closest to the people,” and that because they are close to their constituents, they bring a degree of common sense to the problems they adjudicate that is not shared by lawyers.

I testified before the Tompkins County Municipal Courts Task Force yesterday. My views are at this link. http://www.tompkinscountyny.gov/files/tccog/Shared_Services/Municipal_Courts_Task_Force/Stakeholder_Input/Prof.%20Steven%20Shiffrin%20Testimony%2010.14.15.pdf

Truth in action…which sometimes precedes philosophy, or, the longue durée of nonviolent revolution in the Middle East

“The philosophical convergence between both embattled /materialist and detached idealist philosophers is captured in a short poem by René Char (14 June 1907 – 19 February 1988): ‘Towards your frontier, you humiliated, I walk at last with confidence, warned that truth does not necessarily precede action.’ This poetical aphorism opens two windows on the eternal dialectics between truth and action, theory and practice, philosophy and politics, as I see them unfolding in the Middle East convulsions of the early twenty-first century.

Let me paraphrase the great French poet. The first part says: ‘Toward the frontier of humiliated life, in the long night of the modern Middle East age of ruthless dictators, the men and women of the revolution walk with the certainty of truth.’ In this first window into the Middle East revolution, marching is physical action, and the marching operates with confidence and inevitability in its self-consciousness. The nexus between action and philosophy, more precisely the nexus of action to truth, philosophy’s meta-object, is therefore far more intimate than both engage or detached philosophers may be ready to concede.

There is more to the poem than reckoning the revelation of truth in historic changes of mass proportions that we call revolutions. Opening the second vista, Char writes that ‘la vérité ne précède pas obligatoirement l’action’ (Truth does not necessarily come before action). Necessarily, obligatoirement, is the key qualifier of the poem. Action is sometimes forced to precede truth. Sometimes truth comes before action; sometimes it does not. Philosophical truth faces deadlocks and impasses, aporia that action resolves, sometimes. In a world where the individual is always overtaken by forces far beyond his or her practical reach, the reach itself provides and answer to the impasse. Shorn of philosophy, however, that reach misses its most important resonance in world-historic terms. Truth is also in action, which sometimes precedes philosophy.”—From Chibli Mallat’s Philosophy of Nonviolence: Revolution, Constitutionalism, and Justice Beyond the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Further Reading: Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East: A Basic Bibliography.

The Great Depression & New Deal in U.S. History: A Basic Bibliography

My bibliography on “The Great Depression and The New Deal” is available here.

Was the Pope Played?

The news that Pope Francis met with Kim Davis raises a series of questions that must be answered urgently.  Let's begin with trying to understand what happened.  And so we should ask:  Did Pope Francis know who Kim Davis is?  Was he aware of the consequences that were sure to follow his meeting with her?

On his return flight from Rome at the conclusion of his visit, Pope Francis was asked by reporter Terry Moran of ABC to comment on the facts of the Kim Davis case.  While Moran did not mention her by name, he described a situation in which a government official refused to issue "marriage licenses to same-sex couples."  The Pope declined to speak to the details of Moran's description of the case but answered in general terms that "conscientious objection" is a "human right."

He elaborated on what he meant by rights of conscience with a reference to the medieval Song of Roland.  In that poem, one finds an account of Charlemagne commanding a massed, forced baptism of thousands of non-Christians.  "The baptismal font or the sword," was how Pope Francis described Charlemagne's command, and he made clear that compulsion was not for him.

It seems like a good answer.  The Pope's response drew from an historical example of Christian extremism -- Charlemagne's policy of forced conversions -- to say that no one should be coerced into professing a belief against her or his conscience.

On its terms, furthermore, it refutes Kim Davis's position.  Indeed, if we follow the logic of the papal analogy, it is Kim Davis who is playing the part of Charlemagne.  After all, she is an elected office-holder who exercises the power of the state and has used that power to impose her religious views on subordinates and the prospective same-sex partners of Rowan County, Kentucky.  Personally, I find it difficult to believe that the Pope was aware of the facts of the Kim Davis case or knew what she stood for when he gave his interview to Terry Moran.

Word, however, swiftly broke that the Pope had met briefly with Kim Davis at the papal nunciature -- essentially, the papal embassy, situated in Washington, D.C. The meeting was fifteen or so minutes long, without interpreters.  Reportedly, Francis told Davis to remain strong, advised her to pray the rosary, and handed her a pair of rosaries.  Pictures of those rosaries have now gone viral on the internet.

How do we interpret the news of this meeting, which seems so much at odds with the public message of inclusion Pope Francis sought to convey on every step of his journey?  It may be that the Pope quite innocently saw no inconsistency in his actions.  After all, he met with all sorts of people on his trip without endorsing their viewpoints.  But the reality is that the Pope was likely played by others who were aware of the controversy that would attend a papal meeting with Kim Davis and sought to use that controversy for their own ends.

I should state that I am convinced of the Pope's sincerity.  He took enormous pains, at every step of his journey to the United States, to bury the culture war.  He made no mention of same-sex marriage on his trip, not even at the World Congress of Families.  While his stance on abortion is firm, he has also made clear that the old strategy of confrontation has failed.  He knows that most women who have abortions do so out of desperation, and he wants to build social structures that relieve that desperation.

In other words, what the Pope plainly wanted from his trip was a re-invigoration of a progressive Catholicism that looked confidently towards the world and the future.  His message was compelling:  Don't dwell in the past as if it was some golden age and don't demonize the present.  Meet people where they are, take risks for the faith, and love one another.  This was the Pope's message to individual believers.  And to the political order, he advised Catholics to work with all persons of good will, whatever their perspective or way of life, towards the achievement of shared objectives -- the climate change treaty, economic justice, a fairer, more humane penal system.

So I am persuaded that the Pope was played.  Who was responsible?  Most immediately, Kim Davis and her attorney must be held to account.  They are obviously exploitative in the way they are spinning a brief, private meeting.

But one might also surmise that some highly-placed Vatican figures sought to sabotage this papacy in a way that may prove as damaging the Vatileaks scandal was to Pope Benedict XVI.  And I have little doubt that the damage will prove serious.  The Pope's ambition to build an alliance that spans the political spectrum to work for the common good will now face larger obstacles.  The larger secular world, with which he sought to open lines of communication, will view with varying degrees of mistrust.  Furthermore, a right wing that seeks to undo most of what Pope Francis stands for -- from the environment to economic equality -- gains greater empowerment.  There will doubtless be members of Congress, as the December deadline approaches, who will invoke Pope Francis as supporting the shutting down of the government.

The Pope must therefore take action.  Internally, he must make his wrath felt.  And then he needs to respond, visibly and unambiguously, because his very public stature has been put at risk.

What steps should Pope Francis take?  I can offer two suggestions.  The first comes from Francis DeBernardo, the Executive Director of New Ways Ministry.  It is about time, DeBernardo writes, for Pope Francis to meet with LGBT Catholics and their families.  He was called upon to do so during his visit to the United States and did not take up the invitation.  I concur with DeBernardo.  Such meetings must take place.  In the face of great official hostility, LGBT Catholics have remained faithful to the Church, and that loyalty must be swiftly recognized and acknowledged.

Second, the Vatican is about to host a second meeting of the synod on the family.  The first meeting was held in October, 2014, and divided badly over questions such as the reception of Communion by divorced and remarried Catholics and the status of gays within the Catholic Church.  Now would be  an excellent time to push for greater inclusiveness, beginning with a revision of the Catechism to remove that most offensive provision that describes "homosexual tendencies" as "objectively disordered" (para. 2358).

These are not extravagant requests.  They are eminently doable, and should be undertaken, the sooner the better.

Cross-posted: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/was-the-pope-played_b_8228754.html