Mirror of Justice

The Execution of Saddam Hussein

Here are two competing Catholic perspectives.

Which one, dear reader, if either, do you find persuasive:

StephenBainbridge.com

Evangelical Catholicism

"Winter Games"

In this piece, "Winter Games," from the Dec. 22 issue of the New Republic, Michelle Cottle describes the now-annual ritual of fights over Christmas displays as "Christmas' war on multiculturalism."  Huh?  A misprint?  Anyway -- at the end of the day, it's a reasonable piece.  Too bad she had to clutter it up with cheap shots ("nutters" and "Christmas crazies") about those who resent (what strikes me as) the bizarre insistence in some quarters on pretending that the reason we, in the West, have a big holiday in late December is not the birth of Jesus Christ.  Still, I admit, her suggestion -- "unclench and have a cup of frigging eggnog" -- seems a good one.

China's bishops

Joseph Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong has apparently called on Pope Benedict XVI to excommunicate China's state-appointed bishops.  Another reason to feel guilty, I suppose, about the recent influx into my house of low-priced, "made in China" toys.

Gibson, "Apocalypto," and violence

Here is Thomas Hibbs (Baylor), writing about the possibilities for a collaboration between Mel Gibson ("Apocalypto") and M. Night Shyamalan ("Signs").  And, here is Rod Dreher, commenting on the former:

. . .  I can't think of a film that is at once so violent and such a protest against violence. For me, the key moments of "Apocalypto" come atop that high altar, when the high priest is ripping the hearts out of and decapitating prisoners, while the bored royal family looks on. They've seen it all before. This is their "normal." Their ho-hum, anesthetized reaction to the unbelievable sadism they're inflicting on human beings is more shocking than any disembowelment. When I saw that, I thought about the concentration camp workers who went about their satanic jobs, then went home to their wife and kids and slept peacefully. And I thought about our ancestors who, not terribly long ago, enslaved Africans and treated them with similar barbarism, and yet were quite civilized. And I thought about how we today are even more civilized, yet we tolerate this -- and indeed quite a few Americans see this as a virtual sacrament. The Mayans in the "Apocalypto" grotesquely sacrificed innocent humans so that they could live as they wished to live; so do we, in our way. I came away from "Apocalypto" unsettled, convinced in an unfamiliar way that there is something deeply, deeply wrong with us humans. We are born to trouble and violence, and will to power.

Empirical Support for the Natural Law?

Penn law prof Paul Robinson, Penn psychology prof Robert Kurzban, and Vanderbilt law/biology prof Owen Jones have posted their paper, The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice.  Here is an excerpt from the abstract:

Contrary to the common wisdom among criminal law scholars, the empirical evidence reveals that people's intuitions of justice are often specific, nuanced, and widely shared. Indeed, with regard to the core harms and evils to which criminal law addresses itself - physical aggression, takings without consent, and deception in transactions - the shared intuitions are stunningly consistent, across cultures as well as demographics. It is puzzling that judgments of moral blameworthiness, which seem so complex and subjective, reflect such a remarkable consensus. What could explain this striking result?

The authors theorize that one explanation may be an evolved predisposition toward these shared intuitions of justice, arising from the advantages that they provided, including stability, predictability, and the facilitation of beneficial exchange - the cornerstones to cooperative action and its accompanying survival benefits. Recent studies in animal behavior and brain science are consistent with this hypothesis, suggesting that moral judgment-making not only has biological underpinnings, but also reflects the effects of evolutionary processes on the distinctly human mind. Similarly, the child development literature reveals predictable stages in the development of moral judgment within each individual, from infant through adult, that are universal across all demographics and cultures.

Or do the shared intuitions suggest a common author?  Is this evidence of the law written on our hearts?

Kudos to Shiffrin

MoJ-er Steve Shiffrin will be honored in February at a gathering of legal luminaries including Nadine Strossen, Eugene Volokh, Robert Post, Martin Redish, Kathleen Sullivan, Erwin Chemerinsky, and Charles Fried.  Loyola Law School (Los Angeles) is hosting a conference titled Commercial Speech: Past, Present & Future, A Tribute to Steven Shiffrin.

Prison Decision Fallout

David Opderbeck wonders whether groups like the Family Research Council and the Becket Fund are overreaching in their doomsday portrayal of the recent federal court decision holding Prison Fellowship's Innerchange Initiative unconstitutional.

Are lawyers intellectuals (or just smart)?

Reflecting on the Volokh Conspiracy's discussion of whether science fiction qualifies as literature, Joseph Bottum wonders whether lawyers qualify as intellectuals.

Summer Institute on Catholic Social Thought

Clarke Cochran, who coordinates a Catholics and Politics group that has lunch every year at the APSA - among other things - sends a message to "those who are graduate students and faculty with graduate students interested in Catholic social thought: The Catholic University of America and the Society of Catholic Social Scientists are sponsoring a Summer Catholic Social Thought Institute -- May 21-25, 2007, at CUA. 3 graduate credits through Graduate Theological Foundation are available. Tuition is $650.
Contact Mrs. Beth Matanzo at bmatanzo@franciscan.edu or 740-284-5836."

Abortion and pain: Update

I blogged earlier about the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, and expressed regret that many of the Democrats who, by their voting, indicate a concern about the humane treatment of animals nevertheless voted against the Act.  I also suggested that the Act "would seem . . . the kind of non-prohibitory, educational, conscience-raising measure that, it is often suggested by pro-lifers on the political left, pro-life people can and should support."

Over at Crescat Sententia, "Quaker" writes, in response:

I was reminded, reading this post, of the argument that the information which would be required is substantially false and misleading. Now, I haven't read up on the research in question, and it could be that this argument is false (though Prof. Garnett does not attempt to so demonstrate). Yet if that argument is not false, why is it inconsistent with pro-life principles to object to a requirement that doctors provide false information to their patients, even in the area of abortion? To put it slightly differently, it seems to me one could very well argue that bills that are merely tendentious ax-grinding unmoored from the best scientific understanding make it harder, rather than easier, to find common ground on the evils of legal abortions, etc. Which vote, then, is more consistent with being pro-life?

I agree entirely that doctors should not provide, and that law should not require doctors to provide, information to patients that is not true.  And, it is entirely fair for Quaker to note that, in my post, I assumed that the required information was not false.  [UPDATE:  This assumption of mine is, I think, quite justified.  See this response to the claim, to which Quaker linked, that unborn children don't feel pain.]  I also embrace entirely the idea that the discussion (and regulation) of abortion should be informed, to a greater extent than it is now, by our "best scientific understanding[s]."

Catholic mega-trends

A great piece by NCR's John Allen, on "ten mega-trends shaping the Catholic Church."  Can anyone (readers or bloggers) think of any that he missed?

Religion and "values"

In this Times (London) op-ed, the editors contend that "the real strength of religion today rests in its values":

The truths of Christianity, Islam, Judaism and the other world faiths that command the respect of millions do not lie in items of clothing or the display of insignia. They lie in the eternal verities of human relations, the selfless practice of morality and in Man’s relationship with God. But in our materialistic age, two trends have become apparent: a growing intolerance towards the faithful by an increasingly secular society; and a retreat into symbolism by those who are firm in their faith and increasingly contemptuous of that secular society.

It is the nature and claims of secular society that have largely provoked both these tends. As society has become increasingly atomised, with the frequent break-up of families, greater mobility and a more frenetic pace of life, so we lay ever more responsibility on our nanny state to legislate for happiness, opportun-ity and personal “rights”.

So far, so good.  Next:

True faith should not be a source of conflict. Faith should instead be a force for cohesion — social, spiritual and ethical. Religion that is perverted to become akin to a totalitarian philosophy is no true religion, but a politicisation and distortion of faith. That is what is wrong with extremism and intolerance, whether it be al-Qaeda killers who murder in the name of Islam or the Ku Klux Klan that trumpets its “Christian” values.

The essence of belief is in valuing all life and acknowledging individual differences. That necessarily makes tolerance a fundamental principle in Western societies that are multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. And if and where this principle conflicts with religious claims to a monopoly of righteousness and spiritual guidance, those claims must be questioned by adherents as well as by opponents.

The force of this assertion depends, I suppose, a lot on what the writer means by "religious claims to a monopoly of righteousness and spiritual guidance."  If the argument is "non-judgmentalism is a fundamental principle of free society and so religious truth claims are inherently suspect and, indeed, inadmissible in such a society," then, well, I'm unmoved.  If it is just that "religious believers who imagine that only those who share their beliefs are decent people, worthy of respect and just treatment," then the claim is unassailable, though somewhat trivial. 

Religion is about much more than values; the Faith is about more than "ethics"; and insisting on "cohesion" is, to me, far more troubling than recognizing the disagreements and divisions that always come (unless they are suppressed) with pluralism.

A Christmas Poem

From G.K. Chesterton:

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world's desire.)

The Christ-child stood on Mary's knee,
His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down

"Nuevo Catholics"

Maybe it's just because today is Christmas Eve, but the Times is having a good day.  This long essay, "Nuevo Catholics," from the magazine is a thorough and engaging look at the transformation of the Catholic Church in America associated with Latino immigration, especially immigration from Mexico.  The discussion of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Cristeros, and the deep devotion of Spanish-speaking Catholics is rich, and welcome.   

True, there are a few tinny moments, like this:

Within certain orders active in Los Angeles, above all the Jesuits, campaigns for social justice continue to loom large, and it sometimes can seem as if the social commitments of the church of an earlier era are alive and flourishing in L.A., no matter what the current Vatican line may be.

"Current Vatican line"?  Whatever.  Is the suggestion that the "current Vatican line" is somehow not consonant with concerns about social justice?  I also think the piece also moves a bit too quickly, in the effort to highlight Cardinal Mahoney's commendable commitment to the Latinos in his diocese, past the quite reasonable concerns about his leadership generally, and about his role in the sexual-abuse scandal.  Still, it's an inspiring Christmas read, I think, and one that leaves the reader -- this reader, anyway -- with a lot of hope.

Conservatives and prison reform

An interesting read, in the New York Times Magazine, about the right's "jailhouse conversion" on a number of criminal-justice and prison-reform issues, including the "Second Chance Act."  I was struck by this passage:

Over the past decade, as the political scientists William Galston and Elaine Kamarck have suggested, the culture war of the 1970s and 1980s that revolved around race has been replaced by one that revolves around religion. A side effect has been a radically different crime debate. If the Second Chance Act fails to pass, it will not be because the two parties cannot agree on the importance of rehabilitation programs in prisons. But it may be because they disagree on the role religious organizations should play in rehabilitation. . . .

By passing the Second Chance Act, Democrats can acknowledge that the Christian desire to improve the lives of prisoners is more than a mere proxy for evangelism. And in doing so, they can re-embrace a cause of their own: the creation of a criminal-justice system that is more humane and more just. The current moment is, in Michael Jacobson’s view, “the best opportunity of the last 25 years for altering the way in which the United States has used incarceration.” But if that moment is to be seized, if there’s any possibility to reform a prison system that almost everyone thinks has failed, both parties are going to have to rely, at least a little bit, on faith.

Also this, regarding Sen. Sam Brownback:

There are few, if any, senators more closely identified with the Christian conservative movement than Sam Brownback. Like a growing number of conservatives, Brownback is a political proponent of the so-called new-evangelical causes, which range from AIDS in Africa and slavery in Sudan to poverty and the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a bill that helped build the coalition of Democrats and Republicans in the re-entry movement. Even when he disagrees with his fellow religious conservatives, he gives faith-based reasons for doing so. A convert to Catholicism, he has said his religion informs his support for a less punitive approach to immigration reform. In February, he held a hearing intended to foster debate on whether the death penalty can be reconciled with Pope John Paul II’s call to create “a culture of life.”

Brownback also routinely mentions prison reform — especially the faith-based variety — in public speeches.

The Santa Question

When our children found out about Santa, we initiated them into our family secret - Santa or St. Nick is real because he lives on in each of us as we take up the task of giving to others.  Therefore, it was now their responsibility to be Santa for others.  My son, Chris, reports that this made sense to him.  At a young age, he understood in some sense that while the Santa of the red suit, sleigh, and reindeer was not a factual reality, the myth of Santa was real in that it told a truth at a level deeper than surface facts.  As a teenager and young adult, he continued to connect the dots, seeing the importance of myth in the stories of Tolkein, Lewis, and even George Lucas.

Happy short fourth week of Advent -

Michael

Res Ipsa Loquitur (With a Vengeance)!

[For previous posts:  here and here.]

New York Times
December 23, 2006

Italy: Church Funeral Denied in Right-To-Die Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS   

The Roman Catholic Church denied a religious funeral for Piergiorgio Welby, the muscular dystrophy patient at the center of a debate on euthanasia who died this week after a doctor disconnected his respirator, saying it would treat his public wish to “end his life” as a willful suicide. In his high-profile case, Mr. Welby had said he was not seeking to commit suicide but to remove himself from medical treatment he did not want. His widow, Mina, who defended the doctor’s decision, said the family would hold a lay funeral for him tomorrow. The family said they learned of the Rome Diocese’s decision to withhold a religious funeral when they tried to make arrangements with their local parish. “I won’t deny that I was furious,” said his sister, Carla. She said the decision would be hard for her mother. “I don’t know with what words we will tell her that she can’t hold a funeral for her son in church,” she said. The church opposes euthanasia. In many apparent suicides, it allows funerals on the assumption that the deceased was not of sound mind. The office of the Vicar of Rome said it had refused a funeral for Mr. Welby because of his “repeated and publicly affirmed” desire to “end his life.”

The Santa Question

Even on a sleepy pre-Christmas Friday afternoon, the Santa question can stir thoughtful responses.  Thanks to J. Peter Nixon for forwarding me his own post on the subject from three years ago.  Here's an excerpt:

Nor am I convinced that children finding out the “truth” about Santa is a serious threat to their faith. At some point my children are going to learn about the questionable historicity of certain elements of the infancy narratives of Luke and Matthew. Will learning that the two accounts disagree about whether the angel appeared to Mary or Joseph shake their faith? Will learning that the scriptures never depict the shepherds and the magi under the same roof shatter them? Should I keep the crèche under wraps next year?

I actually think that believing in Santa is good practice for living a life of faith. One begins with naïve, uncritical belief: Santa is a flesh and blood person who lives at the North Pole and who flies around the world on Christmas Eve giving presents to five billion people. Eventually, though, such a belief becomes untenable. We then face a choice. We can walk away in anger at having been deceived about what “really happens” at Christmas. Or, we can recognize that the Santa myth embodies deeper truths about ourselves, about God, and about the meaning of Christmas that are best expressed through the stories and rituals associated with that myth.

Believing in Santa Claus, like believing in God, is an act of the imagination. It cultivates our faculties of wonder, awe, and trust. Anyone who believes that these faculties are somehow ancillary to the transmission of faith is dangerously naïve. My children believe in any number of things that do not exist--dragons, superheroes, talking animals, invisible friends. Their world is gloriously full of the supernatural, and I relish watching them live in it. For I know from personal experience that the mind that has stretched itself in imagination will never be able to accept that the visible, measurable, quantifiable world is all that “really exists.”

I guess I don't have much of a problem with my kids believing in something and then naturally coming to realize that it's not true.  But I start having a problem if I actively promote their misdirected belief.  I do not point out the historical inaccuracy of the manger scene depicting the magi with the shepherds, but last week when my daughter asked me when the magi arrived at the manger, I pointed out that they arrived much later.  I will provide presents "from Santa" and facilitate the possibility of Santa's reality, but if my daughter asks point blank, "Is Santa real?," I will not say yes.  (So far I've gotten away with "what do you think?")  My discomfort is not with the belief in make-believe, but with my abuse of their trust that I will not steer them into falsehood once they've grown skeptical.

And Karen Heinig points out that:

[A]n active Christian faith isn't just a whimsical decision to believe, it's experiencing God's love and forgiveness in one's life. Something that can't just be written off as being made up by "some guy". It is this real encounter with God that we ought to model and encourage for our children, not merely apologetics.

Amen.  But this might be where my own baggage comes in.  I'm a believer who has always been strong on apologetics, but fairly flimsy on experience.  Not that I don't experience God, but I don't experience God in the unshakeable, faith-affirming way that some of my friends do.  For them, the cognitive dissonance of truth uncovered as falsehood may not be that jolting because the foundation is personal experience.  For me, both now and when I was a child, experience did not take me all that far on the path toward belief.  My struggle with truth was the core of my faith journey, and that struggle required me to distinguish the Christian story from fairy tales.  I appreciate the imagination-bolstering power of myth, but I am reluctant to put my own credibility on the line once the project aims to confuse my children's power of discernment.  For the time being, though, Santa is coming, and the magic of belief will hold sway at least for another year.

"Left Behind" video games

Hmmmm.  I am starting to think it was good that I stopped playing video games in the "Asteroids" and "Galaga" days . . .

"Humane" legislating

On December 6, the House of Representatives voted on the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, which would have required abortion facilities to inform women considering abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy that the abortion will likely cause her unborn child intense pain.  It would also required abortionists to offer mothers a chance to give their babies anesthesia before the abortion.  It would not have outlawed a single abortion.  It would seem, then, the kind of non-prohibitory, educational, conscience-raising measure that, it is often suggested by pro-lifers on the political left, pro-life people can and should support.

While 210 of 219 Republicans (96 percent) voted for the Act, just 40 of 192 Democrats (21 percent) did likewise.

Daniel Allott notes:

Even worse, of the 6 Democratic congressmen recently recognized by the Humane Society as "The Best of the Best" (meaning they received a perfect voting score and sponsored animal protection legislation), not one voted for the UCPAA. Conversely, four out of the five Republican Representatives at the top of the Humane Society's list also voted for the UCPAA, including the legislation's primary sponsor, New Jersey Representative Chris Smith.

Here's hoping for better things from the next Congress.

Finnis on Thomas More, conscience, and morals

This essay, "Thomas More and Today's Crisis in Faith and Morals," by my colleague John Finnis, is, I think, a must-read.  It is relevant and responsive to many of the discussions and debates we've had here on MOJ over the years.  (It's hard to believe that we can now refer to things we've been doing on MOJ "over the years"!).

Sarat on "botched" executions

Death-penalty expert Austin Sarat has this FindLaw column, "When Executions Go Wrong: A Horribly Botched Florida Killing Adds Strong Impetus to a National Reconsideration of Capital Punishment," on the recent Diaz execution.  I'm not sure I agree that focusing on the method-of-execution debate the wrongful-conviction problem -- although very, very important -- is a good abolition strategy.  There will always be plenty of capital murderers whose factual guilt is unquestioned and unquestionable, and -- it seems to me -- it is also always possible for death-penalty supporters, legislators, and prison administrators to devise new execution protocols and methods.  Maybe it's just because I have an unhealthy attraction to abstract moral arguments, but it seems to me that the question, at the end of the day, remains, "do some murderers deserve the death penalty and, if so, may our governments administer that penalty?"   

Human Nature, the Transcendent, and Truth (and the Seasonal Tolerance for Untruth)

I believe that humans are hard-wired to believe in a reality beyond the material world, and that this belief is most clearly evident in children.  So when we facilitate our children's belief in Santa (or the tooth fairy), are we supporting a healthy exercise of their capacity to believe in the unseen, or are we unhealthily fostering confusion between reality and make-believe?  In my house, we try to proceed carefully, not dispelling our daughters' belief prematurely but also not propping it up after they begin to show skepticism.  Last night my 6 year-old was quizzing me about the tooth fairy (she has been a frequent visitor lately), then related that one of her classmates told her that "Jesus and God aren't real -- they were just made up by some guy."  (In first grade!)  At that moment, my instinct was to pull back the curtain on Santa and the tooth fairy, then have a long talk about the historical reliability of the New Testament documents.  Thankfully, I remembered not to drop my own baggage on my 6 year-old, so I gently affirmed the reality of God and Jesus but did not attempt to disprove her other objects of faith.

But my question remains: do we strengthen or diminish our children's inclination toward faith when we prop up society's portrayal of make-believe as reality?  Our society is more than willing to lump Jesus in with Santa and the tooth fairy, and if we want to avoid that categorization, shouldn't we be drawing the boundaries now?

Remembering Evil

Miroslav Volf has a beautiful essay on forgiveness and memory in the current Christian Century.  Here's an excerpt:

In a prayer on behalf of the survivors of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel writes: "Oh, they [the survivors] do not forgive the killers and their accomplices, nor should they. Nor should you, Master of the Universe. But they no longer look at every passer-by with suspicion. Nor do they see a dagger in every hand. Does this mean that the wounds in their soul have healed? They will never heal. As long as a spark of the flames of Auschwitz and Treblinka glows in their memory, so long will my joy be incomplete."

Christian readers should not stumble over the first lines of this prayer and thus miss the import of its last sentence. For Wiesel's request for the Master of the Universe not to forgive killers and their accomplices echoes the psalmist's request that the sins of "wicked and deceitful men" may "always remain before the Lord" (109:15). Wiesel is a modern-day psalmist, not a follower of the Christ whose forgiveness knows no bounds.

But the last line of the prayer makes a point on which the followers of Christ will agree with Wiesel: Remembering horrendous evils and experiencing joy, especially joy in one another, are irreconcilable. A world to come that keeps alive the memory of all wrongdoings suffered—and not just of horrendous evils—would be not a place of uplifted radiant faces but one of eyes downcast in shame, not a place of delight in one another but a place enveloped in the mist of profound sadness. For Wiesel, the unforgiving and never-to-be-forgotten memory of the flames of Auschwitz precludes the experience of pure felicity. So it would be for everyone who remembered the wrongs of history truthfully and whose heart had not grown hard.

CST & Economic Justice Mini Course

Apologies for my long long silence.  I hope to make it up to you all over the break!

Just a word about CST teaching.  At the moment I am gearing up to teach a one-credit seminar in Catholic Social Thought and Economic Justice. I have frequently returned to our “brainstorm” last June, where some of us expressed frustration with a “march through the documents” approach to the CST survey.  We’ll see how this turns out, but as I do the syllabus, I sense that a seven-week course zeroing in on one topic provides some additional flexibility.  I thought I’d put out just a few thoughts that might be helpful if other folks are also gearing up to teach in this area.

In terms of getting them into the overarching principles in a short time, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church might seem to have a bit of a “cliff notes” feel, but as I reviewed it recently I had the sense that it provided a very helpful shortcut into the overarching principles – especially for a short course.  I’m dipping into chapters 2, 3 and 4 for the first day intro.

In order to avoid the “march through the documents” feel, I have tried to sprinkle throughout the course several concrete applications to discuss. After we spend week 2 drawing out some of the key theme from Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno, week 3 will move into a discussion of poverty and development (Populorum progressio and Octogesima adveniens) with a glance at some of the debates surrounding Liberation Theology.  Then in week 4 we’ll read Laborem exercens and explore the problem of billable hours and work schedules in large firm practice.

Week 5 will focus on Sollicitudo rei socialis and Economic Justice for All, and we’ll consider the US Reception of Catholic Social and Economic Teaching – assigned texts include Charles E. Curran, The Reception of Catholic Social and Economic Teaching in the United States (in Ken Himes’ Modern Catholic Social Teaching volume), and excerpts from the 1984 letter by the Lay Commission on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, Toward the Future: Catholic Social Thought and the U.S. Economy.

For week 6 we’ll read Centesimus annus and explore CST Perspectives on Corporate Structures and Law & Economics.  If anyone’s teaching in this area, take a real close look at Mark Sargent’s two pieces – Competing Visions of the Corporation in Catholic Social Thought, J. Catholic Social Thought 561 (2004); and Utility, the Good and Civic Happiness: A Catholic Critique of Law and Economics, 44 J. Catholic Legal Studies 35 (2005) (both at the sidebar under his name).  They strike me as really terrific teaching tools which quickly and neatly summarize the debates in this area, probing the creative tensions within CST.  For the Law & Econ critique we’ll also dip into my Toward a Trinitarian Theory of Products Liability.

Then week 7 concludes the course with some reflections on potential constructive models, including a glance at The Economy of Communion Project, and we'll also explore the question of whether it’s fair to clients to bring CST economic perspectives to bear on legal analysis (dipping into some of the "religious lawyering" ethics analysis.

I’ll keep you posted on their reactions.  I am planning on having fun with this, and hope they do too!  The course has filled to capacity – so I have the sense that there’s real interest in digging in.

I won't say Merry Christmas because I hope to post again before then!

Best, Amy 

Followup to Yesterday's Post

[For yesterday's post, click here.]

New York Times
December 21, 2006

Italian in Euthanasia Debate Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS  

ROME (AP) -- A paralyzed man at the center of a right-to-die debate in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation died after he was taken off his respirator, days after an Italian court issued a contentious ruling in the case.

Piergiorgio Welby, 60, died late Wednesday of cardiorespiratory arrest, said Mario Riccio, the doctor who removed the respirator. Riccio said Thursday that Welby had a constitutionally guaranteed right to refuse treatment.

''This must not be mistaken for euthanasia. It is a suspension of therapies,'' said Riccio. ''Refusing treatment is a right.''

Riccio said he was ''very serene'' and did not fear legal consequences.

According to Italian law, assisted suicide can carry a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.

Welby had been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy as a teenager. He was confined to a bed, attached to a respirator and communicated through a voice synthesizer. He was receiving nourishment through a feeding tube.

On Saturday, a Rome judge recognized Welby's right to refuse treatment but ruled that doctors were not obligated to take measures that would result in the patient's death -- even at the patient's request. The ruling urged legislators to address the issue, saying that for the moment the decision to pull the plug ''is left to the complete discretion of any doctor to whom the request is made.''

The case divided doctors and politicians and gripped the public's attention in a country where the Catholic church still wields influence.

Euthanasia is illegal in Italy, and the Vatican forbids the practice, insisting that life must be safeguarded from its beginning to its ''natural'' end.

In the past few months, Welby had made a plea to Italy's president, and appealed to Italian courts to have his respirator taken away.

''My dream ... my desire, my request -- which I want to put to any authority, from political to judicial ones -- is today in my mind more clear and precise than ever: being able to obtain euthanasia,'' Welby said in his appeal this fall to President Giorgio Napolitano.

In another setback for Welby, a panel of Italian medical experts, the Higher Health Council, said Wednesday that a respirator does not constitute ''extraordinary means'' of keeping a gravely or terminally ill person alive and so need not be removed. The panel, whose opinion is not binding, also decided that precise guidelines for doctors were needed urgently to spell out what the law allows and what it does not.

U.S. law generally permits patients to ask that medical treatment be withheld or withdrawn, even if it raises their risk of dying. Voters in Oregon went further and approved the first physician-assisted suicide law in the U.S. in 1994, but it is now under legal challenge.

CLT and Sports Law? or Animal Rights Law?

A question for you theologians:  does the Catholic intellectual tradition offer anything that might help with a discussion of the appropriate regulatory scheme to prevent future tragedies of this type (courtesy of the Andy Borowitz Report)?

Brawl Erupts at Reindeer Games

Rudolph Suspended for Season

The epidemic of sports violence spread to the North Pole last night as a brawl erupted between fans and reindeer at this year’s reindeer games, resulting in the ejection and suspension of Rudolph for the remainder of the season.

The games, a holiday classic that dates back to 1949, had a mostly uneventful history until 2002, the year that beer and other alcoholic beverages first became available for sale at the event.

Since then, fans say, the reindeer games have drawn increasingly unruly crowds who aggressively goad the hoofed creatures with catcalls and obscenities.

“Given how wasted the fans are, it’s amazing that something like this didn’t happen sooner,” said Harlan McDougal, a fan who makes the trip from Pittsburgh every year to see the reindeer play.

Rudolph, who was fined by the league for spitting in the face of Blixen earlier in the season, was the object of the fans’ ire from early in the first period.

“Fans were shouting at him,” Mr. McDougal said. “I didn’t hear everything they said, but let’s put it this way -- they were not shouting out with glee.”

After nearly two periods of such abuse, Rudolph had had enough, prancing into the stands and attempting to gore several fans with his antlers.

Mr. McDougal said that alcohol may have played a role in Rudolph’s violent rampage.

“It was obvious that he had been drinking,” Mr. McDougal said. “Did you check out his nose?”

Elsewhere, as part of a new plan to eradicate the insurgents, President Bush said he favors increasing the number of Taco Bells in Iraq.

Lisa

Sisk on Religious Liberty

My colleague and MoJ-er Greg Sisk is interviewed by Christianity Today regarding his empirical work on the success rates of religious liberty litigants.

What Should the Law Be for a Case Like This?

New York Times
December 20, 2006

A Poet Crusades for the Right to Die His Way

By IAN FISHER

ROME, Dec. 19 — Many patients on respirators are not conscious and so cannot say whether they want to live or die. But Piergiorgio Welby is still full of words, hard and touching ones, that may be changing the way Italy thinks about euthanasia and other choices for the sick to end their own lives.

“I love life, Mr. President,” Mr. Welby, 60, who has battled muscular dystrophy for 40 years, wrote to Italy’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, in September. “Life is the woman who loves you, the wind through your hair, the sun on your face, an evening stroll with a friend.

“Life is also a woman who leaves you, a rainy day, a friend who deceives you. I am neither melancholic nor manic-depressive. I find the idea of dying horrible. But what is left to me is no longer a life.”

Now Mr. Welby’s long drama appears to be nearing its final act. Last weekend, an Italian court denied legal permission for a doctor to sedate him and remove him from his respirator. Fully lucid but losing his capacity to speak and eat, he is deciding whether to appeal or to perform an act of civil disobedience that will kill him.

He is doing so in a very public way. Until a recent steep decline in his condition, he used a little stick to rapidly peck out blog entries with one hand. His book, “Let Me Die,” was just released. Near daily front-page stories chronicle the political, ethical and, with the Catholic Church a vital force here, religious issues his case presents.

“Dear Welby: Wait Before Taking Yourself Off” the respirator, read a front-page headline on Tuesday in La Repubblica, written by a top Italian surgeon, Dr. Ignazio Marino, who is also a senator for the Democrats of the Left. He had visited Mr. Welby the day before.

What has given the case a particular political twist is that Mr. Welby, attached to a respirator for nine years, has long been a spokesman for euthanasia and is a central part of the Radical Party’s effort to have it legalized. In fact, members of the Radical Party have offered to personally remove his respirator if asked — and may do so any day now in a frontal challenge to Italian law.

But the Catholic Church and many of this traditionally minded nation’s politicians on the left and the right not only oppose euthanasia generally but are also not entirely sure what to do about Mr. Welby’s case. He says he is not seeking to commit suicide but to remove himself from medical treatment he does not want.

“It is an unbearable torture,” he wrote two weeks ago.

To decline forced medical treatment is allowed under Italian law, experts say, but Italy has another law that makes it a crime to assist in a death, even with consent. So a doctor could not detach the respirator without risking prosecution.

The church, too, has conflicting teachings about what to do in this case, and what the Vatican thinks has a deep impact not only on the nation’s political class but also on doctors tied to the scores of Catholic-run hospitals around Italy.

The defense of life is central to the social doctrine of the church, and so it opposes abortion and capital punishment. Only last week Pope Benedict XVI reaffirmed his opposition to euthanasia, saying governments should find ways to let the terminally ill “face death with dignity.”

The church also opposes medical treatments to artificially prolong life, but several church officials have worried recently that ending artificial life support could result in de facto euthanasia.

“The problem is to know if we find ourselves truly in front of a case of an artificial prolonging of life,” Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, the Vatican’s top official for health, said in a recent interview with La Repubblica.

Seeing the church as one major obstacle to dying as he wants to, Mr. Welby, a poet and prolific writer, has had little patience with the Vatican’s argument for a “natural end” to life.

“What is natural about a hole in the belly and a pump that fills it with fats and proteins?” he wrote in his letter to the president. The letter was delivered with a video of Mr. Welby in his bed at his home in Rome attached in silence to the respirator, with a laptop at his bedside reading his words in a spooky synthesized voice.

“What is natural about a hole in the windpipe and a pump that blows air into the lungs?” he wrote. “What is natural about a body kept biologically functional with the help of artificial respirators, artificial feed, artificial hydration, artificial intestinal emptying, of death artificially postponed?”

{There is more.  To read on, click here.]

Harsh words against tradition and morality

Today's Washington Post carries a highly charged critique against Christians who hold and express traditional moral views especially on sexual matters HERE. The article, entitled "Episcopalians Against Equality" written by Mr. Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post staff, presents a curious view of equality in support of his position. Moreover, his assertions identify as bigots those who disagree with his views. But, his harsh words are not restricted to Episcopalians for he speaks of the Catholic Church's "inimitable backwardness" on matters that are dear to him. In short, his rhetoric should be a source of concern for those who cherish religious liberty in this country and elsewhere.   RJA sj

Access v. Excellence

Today's New York Times reports on public universities raising tuition in their quest to be ranked among the elite.  To what extent are Catholic universities (and law schools) sacrificing access in order to achieve excellence?  And does our conception of excellence make room for our provision of access?

PGD with a twist

Now here's a perverse twist on the pro-life news front, from Lifenews.com.  On the one hand, I applaud this heartfelt respect for the diversity of the types of lives God offers us as examples of his image.  On the other hand, though, I mourn for the selected-out non-disabled embryos presumably not being welcomed by these couples.

Baltimore, MD (LifeNews.com) -- Genetic screening has come under fire from pro-life advocates because parents can use the process to destroy human embryos who carry any disability traits. However, a new study shows that a handful of parents use the screening process to purposefully give birth to children who have disabilities similar to their own.

Scientists at the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University are set to publish an article in an upcoming issue of the journal Fertility and Sterility on the subject.

Their publication will discuss how some parents use pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, to screen for human embryos who have the same flawed genes.

Susannah Baruch and her colleagues, according to a New York Times report, surveyed 190 American PGD clinics and found that three percent of parents intentionally used PGD "to select an embryo for the presence of a disability."

Baruch says some parents don't see the conditions as disabilities or want their children to have an appreciation of the kind of disabilities they endure.

While critics may deride such decisions as intentionally trying to cripple children, it's nothing new.

The Washington Post in 2002 profiled a deaf lesbian couple who set out to have a deaf child by purposefully soliciting a deaf sperm donor.

"A hearing baby would be a blessing," Sharon Duchesneau told the newspaper at the time. "A deaf baby would be a special blessing."

However, some fertility clinics told the Times they find such practices unacceptable.

Robert Stillman of the Shady Grove Fertility Center in Rockville, Maryland, denies allowing parents to screen specifically for deafness or dwarfism.

"In general, one of the prime dictates of parenting is to make a better world for our children," he said. "Dwarfism and deafness are not the norm."

Yury Verlinsky of the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago also refuses such requests and told the newspaper, "If we make a diagnostic tool, the purpose is to avoid disease."

Lisa

The Work of Prophets

From "The Prison Meditations of Father Delp":

"Advent is the time for rousing.  Man is shaken to the very depths, so that he may wake up to the truth of himself.  The primary condition for a fruitful and rewarding Advent is renunciation, surrender... A shattering awakening; that is the necessary preliminary.  Life only begins when the whole framework is shaken.

"...May the Advent figure of St. John the Baptist, the incorruptible herald and teacher in God's name, be no longer a stranger in our own wilderness.  Much depends on such symbolic figures in our lives.  For how shall we hear if there are none to cry out, none whose voice can rise above the tumult of violence and destruction, the false clamor that deafens us to reality?

"...There is so much despair that cries out for comfort; there is so much faint courage that needs to be reinforced; there is so much perplexity that yearns for reasons and meanings.  God's messengers, who have themselvs reaped the fruits of divine seeds even in the darkest hours, know how to wait for the fulness of harvest."

As we continue through this Advent season, let us pray that we recognize God's messengers when they appear to us, and that we be that messenger to others.

Amen!

"Make School Choice a Factor in 2008," writes Edwin Fuelner:

. . . If politicians really want to improve lives, they'll expand -- not shut down -- the school-choice programs that are already helping students from poor families.

Apparently it's never too early to start campaigning, so let's make school choice a critical factor in the 2008 elections.

Robert George on Public Morality

Many of us have blogged and written about the question, "to what extent should the law embody and enforce morality?"  Now available over at First Things is Robert George's recent essay, "Public Morality, Public Reason."  (This might be worth reading in conjunction with the recent Skeel / Stuntz paper on legal moralism, "Christianity and the (Modest) Rule of Law.)  The conclusion:

[F]rom the Catholic vantage point, there is something scandalous in the effort of theorists such as Rawls and Habermas to remove such issues from public debate by arbitrarily restricting reasons on one side of the debate over the nature, dignity, and destiny of the human person. There is nothing “liberal,” “democratic,” “reasonable,” “moral,” or “ethical” about that.