The obituary for the mother of a (Methodist) female gym teacher at a Catholic high school in Ohio mentions said gym teacher's female partner. Gym teacher is promptly fired. Maybe Cardinal Dolan should get Bishop Campbell on the horn and explain to him that Catholics are supposed to "try
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On Justice Stevens's birthday, I suppose it is appropriate that there is an article in the New York Times that, to my mind, highlights the wisdom of his 2000 dissenting opinion in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. In that case, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the state of
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A big question for me in assessing the new Pope's performance is whether the admittedly dramatic (and, in my opinion, hopeful) differences between Francis and Benedict are simply matters of style or whether they portend some substantive change in direction for the bureaucracy. One of the litmus
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In 1995, in one of the more interesting exchanges over the morality of gay marriage, Stephen Macedo debated Robby George & Gerard Bradley in the pages of the Georgetown Law Journal. Noting the emphasis that natural law arguments against gay marriage place on the fertility of heterosexual
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Here are a couple of interesting links to stories about the new pope. The first is from the AP (via TPM), discussing Francis's low-key style, which John Allen sees as perhaps pointing towards an effort to demystify the office a bit.
The second is a link to a thoughtful discussion by Katharine
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Here's a clear-eyed but (in my opinion) hopeful assessment of Bergoglio's promise from the prominent liberation theologian, Jon Sobrino (thanks to commenter John Donaghy for the translation and the link):
In all that, one can assess his specific way of making an option for the poor. Not in
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With his permission, I'm posting this (extensive) comment by Charles Kenney (Professor of Political Science University of Oklahoma, specializing in Latin America), which appeared in the thread of my last post, because it brings together more detail and context on the Bergoglio, Dirty War issue than
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The Vatican has made a statement on the rumblings about Bergoglio's (in)actions during the Argentine junta, attributing the questions to "anti-clerical left-wing" forces who want to discredit the new Pope. The more things change, etc... Thinking about Margaret's post below, it seems
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I'm going to take a break from my Lenten "fast" from blogging to just note that it seems likely to me that picking a man as Pope who held a position of authority in the Church in Buenos Aires during Argentina's dirty war seems likely to dredge up some bad memories, and perhaps even a
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A report in today's NY Times from the front lines of the continuing liberal war on religion:
WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved legislation that would allow the use of federal money to rebuild churches and synagogues damaged by Hurricane Sandy, despite concern
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I am with Garry Wills in finding myself unable to get too excited about the selection of a new pope:
[A] new pope will be elected by cardinals who were elevated to office by the very popes who reaffirmed “eternal truths” like the teaching on contraception. They were appointed for their loyalty
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The Obama administration has published a proposed new contraception rule coverage proposal for public comment. Here's a link to the proposal. I haven't yet had a chance to read through it, but it seems to address both religious nonprofits not covered by the original rule and self-insured
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This article in today's Times -- announcing a religious freedom clinic at Stanford Law School (co-sponsored with the Templeton Foundation and the Becket fund) -- seriously rubbed me the wrong way. I don't know whether it's the fault of the Times's reporter or the Stanford Law School, or both. I
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There has been a lot of discussion of this chart:
I want to recommend the ongoing conversation at Talking Points Memo, where Josh Marshall has been posting a very interesting series of reflections by voters of color (of various backgrounds) about how they have taken conservatives'
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The past week has seen two new decisions in the fight over the HHS contraception mandate. Interestingly, both involved motions for preliminary injunctions by for-profit commercial enterprises. Likelihood of success on the merits of the claims is a central inquiry when courts consider a request
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I just got off an overnight flight to Milan. Polls were just beginning to close when the plane pushed back from the gate, and the election had pretty much been called by the time the plane landed at 2am eastern time.
It seems to me that, besides Mitt Romney and the tea party right, two of the
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Despite the common assertions that religious and cultural conflicts are increasingly dominating American politics, there is quite a bit of data showing that income still correlates very strongly with voting patterns in about the way you'd predict, with wealthier voters more likely to vote
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Here is a taste of Amy Sullivan's (in my opinion, very sensible) take on the Mourdock dust-up:
Take a look again at Mourdock’s words: “I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And...even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to
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A good op-ed in today's NY Times by Fordham theology professor Michael Peppard (I hope he has tenure!). It's nice to see that others have noticed (as I did in a post a few weeks back) the inconsistency between Ryan's insistence that questions about abortion be turned over to the democratic
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File this with the other studies that confirm what most people would have predicted.
Free birth control led to greatly lower rates of abortions and births to teenagers, a large study concludes, offering strong evidence for how a bitterly contested Obama administration policy could benefit women
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Video of the proceedings of the roundtable/conference on the contraception mandate, hosted on Sept. 21 by Georgetown Law Center and Georgetown's Berkley Center, is now available online. Here's the link
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From the Post Pew (HT Balloon Juice):
President Obama’s support among Catholic voters has surged since June, according to a new poll, despite a summer that included the Catholic bishops’ religious freedom campaign and the naming of Rep. Paul Ryan, a Catholic, as the GOP’s vice-presidential
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David Brooks had an interesting column in yesterday's paper on the imbalance within the modern conservative movement. He starts out by identifying the various elements of the conservative coalition of the 1980s, as he saw it:
When I joined the staff of National Review as a lowly associate in
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For those of you in or near DC, Georgetown Law Center will be hosting a conference later this week on the contraception mandate. dotCommonweal's own Cathy Kaveny and MOJ's Rob Vischer (along with many others in a really terrific lineup) will participate. Here's the announcement:
Contraception
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Paul Ryan spoke today at the Value Voters Summit and he said something that a lot of abortion rights opponents say, but that just can't be true for someone who accepts the Vatican line on abortion's legality. Here's his quote (via TPM):
"These vital questions should be decided, not by the
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Dolan, not Romney, that is. This piece by Thomas Edsall is well worth a read. He argues:
Most importantly, the Pew surveys show that 89% of voters who identify themselves as Republican are white. Faced with few if any possibilities of making gains among blacks and Hispanics — whose support for
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The Economist has posted an interesting story, reporting the results of its detailed investigation of Church finances in the U.S.. (HT Daily Intel) It does not paint a pretty picture. Here's a taste, but go read the whole thing:
The documents that have been disclosed reveal that some bishops
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I am late in getting to posting this review of Katharine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers," her fascinating account of life in a Mumbai slum. The book was just going into print during the tail end of my stay in New Delhi, and so I didn't get a chance to read it while I was there.
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Shorter Mitt Romney advisor to the British press: He's white ya'll. He's white ya'll. He's whitily white white white ya'll
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Back in May, I posted about the ACA lawsuits filed by various Catholic institutions challenging the contraception mandate. I wondered why they had decided to file their lawsuits without waiting for the amended rule the administration has promised to promulgate in order to better accommodate
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The Supreme Court's decision in the SB 1070 case is a big win for opponents of the law. Although it leaves the odious "show me your papers" provision in place, the posture of that case as a facial challenge always made that a tough claim to win in this case, and the Court left the door
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Here's an interesting chart I came across in the course of reading about income inequality. This comes from a paper by Brian Nolan and Ive Marx in the Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality (Wiemer Salvedra et al. eds. 2009). I found it interesting because it is so, well, plausible. It
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A major talking point in the Church's opposition to the contraception mandate has been that the mandate goes beyond requiring employers to cover contraception and requires them to pay for products that, in the Church's view, amount to abortion. For example, the Notre Dame complaint (.pdf)
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For me, one of the most interesting things about the lawsuits filed last week against the contraception mandate was their timing. (I confess at the outset that I haven't read all of the complaints, just the one from Notre Dame.) I think the Notre Dame complaint makes some reasonable arguments
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This new poll has some interesting data on how different religious groups are viewing the presidential election. Here's the summary (HT TPM):
White evangelical voters strongly support Romney over Obama (68%vs. 19%). Catholic voters overall say that they would be more likely to vote for Obama
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There's really nothing much more comical/offensive than reading political analysts (invariably Anglos) speculating about how Romney picking Marco Rubio has the potential to peel the Latino vote away from Obama. The stupidity that this implicitly attributes to the Latino electorate(s) is genuinely
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[Cross posted at PrawfsBlawg] The Trayvon Martin case has justifiably generated an enormous volume of commentary. One of the most interesting aspects of this commentary is the difficulty people have had in grappling with how to categorize George Zimmerman, the shooter. At first, he was
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Following up on Lisa's post below, I think Dolan's call for Catholics to get more involved in politics is very interesting for what it suggests about how the bishops view the role of laypeople and about their conception of the role of the Catholic Church (understood in the broadest sense) in
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Robby George has a post up at Public Discourse detailing what he thinks is wrong with the Obama compromise on the contraception rule. After some ground-clearing, the heart of his argument is as follows:
Both would, however, requirematerial cooperation. And that material cooperation would have
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I was about to write a post along just these lines, but Andrew Sullivan beat me to the punch. I think this is exactly right:
Why so utterly fixated on sex, especially the sex lives of women and gay men? Why so utterly indifferent to the whole range of public policies which Catholic orthodoxy has
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Part of my question in my long post on religious exemptions below is what it means for a claim to be religious. A related question is whether the requirement that employers provide insurance that covers, among other things, contraception, constitutes a substantial burden for an employer who
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I don't know how the timing of this press release lines up with Dolan's statement in Grant's post below, but it sounds significantly less open to compromise. Here's the key paragraph (emphasis in the original):
These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some
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I thought these comments from the chief counsel for the USCCB were interesting, and suggest that the bishops are, as Grant suggested below, not going to be satisfied with a Hawaii-type compromise, or even with a total exemption (without conditions) for Catholic institutions:
The White House is &
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I'm feeling proud of my home state today. Amidst the news coverage of its vote to allow same-sex couples to marry, I found this quote from marriage equality supporter, and Republican and Catholic State Rep. Maureen Walsh very moving:
Republican representative Maureen Walsh, whose daughter told
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I've been refraining from commenting on the contraception rule, because, to be honest, I'm puzzled both by the decision to mandate contraception coverage (which strikes me as politically very tone deaf) and by the reaction to it among liberal Catholics. I'll leave the political wisdom of the
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I'm spending my sabbatical in New Delhi, where my wife is working on a Fulbright project. While here, I've been attending mass at St. Alphonsa Church, in Vasant Kunj, a neighborhood on the southern edge of New Delhi, very close to the airport. It's a large, beautiful new church, named after
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Over at the Corner NRO, Mark Steyn has a post about the lessons he draws from the chaos on board the Costa Concordia, which he contrasts with the orderly evacuation of the Titanic 100 years ago. The difference between the two disasters, he says, tells us a lot about the problems of contemporary
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Nothing makes me despair more about the corruption of our legislative process than the dynamic surrounding intellectual property laws. SOPA and PIPA provide yet more evidence, as it if were needed. This article by former lobbyist TC Sottek illustrates the point nicely (HT Balloon Juice):
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I know I'm late to this party, but since Douthat decided to write about it in yesterday's paper, I figure I'm not unforgivably tardy. I saw that last week Steve Bainbridge posted a lengthy defense of Romney's work at Bain, and of corporate takeovers more generally. His defense largely matches
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From today's NY TImes, a story out of Santa Monica, California, where (sort of) local atheists have flooded the city with applications to obtain space to install holiday displays. The application process was established to administer the public space that has in the past been used to construct an
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The damning DOJ report on Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's discriminatory policing practices illustrates the tight connection between rhetoric targeting illegal immigration and discriminatory attitudes and practices aimed at Latinos in general. On the level of impact, this connection is so
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What a clunky, disaster of a mass that was. I think I'm going to go grab a chalice of scotch
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This story out of Ledyard, New York, which is a very small town just up the lake from Ithaca, is interesting for a number of reasons. The gist of it is that the town clerk, a self-described "Bible-believing Christian," believes that signing the marriage licenses of same-sex couples
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Shorter Douthat: We can't stop executing people, because if there's no risk of occasionally killing an innocent person, my friends (who didn't care about killing Troy Davis) won't worry about locking innocent people up for life. Also, too, life in prison is worse than death
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As part of a raft of recent economic reforms, including a limited liberalization of self-employment, the Raul Castro government has recently reiterated its plans to introduce a market for housing at the end of this year. The reforms will permit Cuban homeowners to buy and sell their residential
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A big part of the law professor's job involves being able to think on your feet, whether it be in a faculty workshop or in front of a first-year class using the socratic method. Over the years, I've gotten better at both of those formats, though I still have a lot to learn. In my nearly five
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Archbishop Dolan's blog refused to take Father's Day off from the crusade against gay marriage. I applaud Dolan's embrace of blogging, and Dolan's posts have attracted a great deal of media attention, but I wish he would put more thought into his posts on this topic. I think it would be a much
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From the Huffington Post:
Slipped into the FY 2012 agriculture appropriations bill that the House is expected to take up today is an unusual provision on page 13 requiring the National Arboretum to maintain a very specific portion of its azalea collection.
"The Committee directs the
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At America's blog, Vincent Miller has a terrific post up that pretty much captures my own views on Dolan's letter to Rep. Ryan:
On matters concerning abortion, and now marriage, the bishops are quick to react and don’t shy from direct public confrontation. In 2008, when Nancy Pelosi opined
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Republicans are threatening to try to filibuster Goodwin Liu's nomination to the Ninth Circuit. My memory of the Democratic filibuster of some of Bush's most extreme judicial nominees was that, thanks the echo chamber, the supposed illegitimacy of using the filibuster in that context became a
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I feel a little silly asking this, because it is so obvious that I'm sure it's already been addressed (either in the John Jay report itself or elsewhere). But, based on the news accounts, the report seems to make a great deal of the spike in reported abuse after the 1960s, using it to attribute
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From at least some of the accounts I've been reading, it sounds at least possible that OBL may have been summarily executed. [UPDATE: Reuters is reporting that the SEAL team was under orders to kill, not capture, OBL.] Politically, I can see the reasons for doing that, since having him as a
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Take a look at this interesting analysis of the origins of our current debt problems by the Washington Post (HT John Cole). Here's a taste:
Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in
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Over at the Washington Examiner, David Freddoso takes issue with my post on Ayn Rand-fan Paul Ryan's plan to reduce the debt by cutting taxes on the rich and then dismantling Medicare and Medicaid. He says my argument rests on the assumptions (1) that there is some ideal tax rate mandated by
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Just to stir the pot a little... Catholic conservatives frequently distinguish between disagreeing with the Church's views on abortion/gay marriage/stem cell research and a departing from the Church's views on the death penalty/torture/war/economic justice. The idea, as then Cardinal Ratzinger
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From TPM, an overview of conservative economists' assessment of the Ryan plan. Their bottom line is not that different from Krugman's -- the plan is neither serious nor courageous. Here's a taste:
"It doesn't address in any serious or courageous way the issue of the near and medium-term
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Did it really take a peer reviewed study for these researchers to figure this one out? My wife and I often marvel at the amount of spare time we had (and mostly wasted) before the kids arrived on the scene:
A study found that mothers of young children were heavier and ate more calories, sugary
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PPP has an interesting poll of Mississippi Republicans. Here's a taste:
We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal. For the most part there
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I suppose one way to get the government's hands off your Medicare is to eliminate the program
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60 Minutes is on the case. (HT Atrios) Sadly, our lawmakers (from either party) are not
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One interesting thing to me about the present foreclosure crisis is the apparent inaction of our democratic bodies. In the past, crises like these have caused elected bodies to enact all sorts of debtor protection laws. Maybe this is happening in some states, but I haven't heard about it. To
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Fordham University, Fairfield University, Yale Divinity School, and the Union Theological Seminary will be hosting a series of one-day events in September and October exploring Catholic views on sexuality. Here is a link to the website with the schedule. So far, the organizers have lined up
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The South Dakota legislature is about to consider the following bill:
FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:
Section 1. That § 22-16-
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Here's the transcript of a back and forth between Republican Kansas state legislator Connie O'Brien and a Democratic counterpart (Rep. Sean Gatewood) on a legislative committee discussing the payment of in-state tuition by the children of illegal immigrants.
REP. O’BRIEN: My son who’s a Kansas
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New York Magazine has had an interesting series on the our porn-saturated culture. I thought this article -- the second of three -- would be of some interest to readers. It focuses on the consequences of consuming too much pornography on young men's abilities to sustain real-world relationships
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I've avoided blogging about the HCR litigation, because the real action is obviously in the Supreme Court, which won't get to it for a little while. But the willingness of Republican-appointed federal district judges to strike this law down is interesting. The latest is the district court in
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An interesting story about neighbors in a UK village banding together to defend a squatter who had restored a neglected home that had become an eyesore brings out the ambiguity of squatting, a topic near and dear to my heart. (HT NPR
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Genius.
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Matt Zoller Seitz discusses MTV's latest:
Like the original, it revolves around a group of improbably glamorous, self-assured teens who have tons of casual sex and do massive amounts of drugs (mainly pot and pills) under the noses of clueless and/or ineffectual parents and teachers. Their
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If you're not from Seattle, you just won't understand, but this is an amazing tribute to an icon of my childhood (and, thanks to the magic of the Internet, my adulthood
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When the Republicans read the Constitution in the House today, I wonder whether they'll just skip the Fourteenth Amendment.
UPDATE: Apparently, they are leaving out a few unfortunate provisions of the Constitution's original text.
UPDATE II: Just leaving out provisions that have been
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This may be my favorite story so far from a pretty dismal run of anti-Muslim hysteria gripping the American right. (HT TPM):
A would-be Koran-burner in Amarillo, Texas was foiled by a 23-year-old Texas skateboarder named Jacob Isom, who was among a group of people protesting a planned burning
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From the Seattle Times. (The story doesn't say he's a Sikh, but I'm assuming that's what the turban means. Pretty much every time conservatives ramp up the Islamophobia, a few Sikhs get beat up
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Be sure to read Douthat today, on the virtues (actually, I believe "real wisdom" is his phrase) of racism, anti-Catholicism, and xenophobia in American history
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There is lots of stupid floating around the opposition to the proposed mosque and community center a few blocks away from Ground Zero. This excellent speech by Mayor Bloomberg highlights just a few of the most salient points. Here's an excerpt:
The simple fact is, this building is private
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Apparently, American Spectator blogger Jeffrey Lord didn't get the memo that, after the original Breitbart smear was revealed to be a fraud, the plan was to argue that this was never about Sherrod but rather about racism within the NAACP. Lord decided to pen an article attacking Sherrod as a liar
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Shirley Sherrod should get her job back (though I wonder whether she even wants it at this point), and Tom Vilsack should publicly apologize to this woman. It's scandalous that anyone in this administration would push someone to resign based on a Fox News/Andrew Breitbart report without
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I don’t usually read Douthat’s column. But today’s headline caught my eye. I figured from the title that he was going to blame liberals for racial hostility on the Right. That’s not quite what he did. Nevertheless, I found his column to be perverse, but in a slightly
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No doubt he has a traditional prenup too. Check out the photo. Ewwww.... (HT Glenn Greenwald
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I know I'm a little late to the party on this one. On May 19, the USCCB wrote a letter setting out its reasons for opposing the proposed Employment Nondiscrimination Act, which would prohibit discrimination against homosexuals in employment. The crux of its position appears to be that it is
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In today's article in the NY Times on the Rand Paul, civil rights controversy, the reporters said this:
Mr. Paul said in an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on Wednesday night that he supported the sections of the Civil Rights Act that applied to public accommodations but had concerns when
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Rand Paul has been making waves for his criticism of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's prohibition of discrimination in places of public accommodation. Title II of the CRA makes it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of race (and a number of other grounds) at establishments like restaurants, movie
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Brazilian Archbishop Dadeus Grings does his best Archie Bunker impersonation, seeming to wistfully recall the days when it was acceptable to discriminate against homosexuals. (Via the Daily Telegraph, HT Andrew Sullivan):
"When sexuality is trivialized, it's clear that this is going to
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No matter what you think of the question of illegal immigration, there's no denying that the Arizona immigration law will have a huge impact on legal resident Latino immigrants, naturalized citizens and even U.S. born Latino citizens (and, although the focus has been on Latinos, the same would go
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What's next? Gold stars? (Oops, just violated Godwin's Law.) Of course, that's out of line because this immigration debate has nothing to do with race
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Cornell Clinical Law Professor and conservative blogger William Jacobson argues that the Az. immigration law is not racist and does not encourage racial profiling. He says:
The law does not authorize unlawful stops, but only permits verification of immigration status once a lawful stop has been
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Chapter One, in which a bunch of white conservatives talk about how a law empowering police offices to harass anyone who looks Latino is not such a high price to pay to protect us from illegal immigration
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Via Andrew Sullivan, Hendrik Hertzberg suggests that the Church may ultimately owe a debt of gratitude to the pluralism of modern society:
The iniquities now roiling the Catholic Church are more shocking than the ones that so outraged Martin Luther. But the broader society in which the Church is
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Douthat defends the Pope against his critics in his column today. Here's the gist of it:
In the 1990s, it was Ratzinger who pushed for a full investigation of Hans Hermann Groer, the Vienna cardinal accused of pedophilia, only to have his efforts blocked in the Vatican. It was Ratzinger who
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A while back, the NY Times had an article talking about efforts by some within the pro-life movement to turn abortion into a racial issue in the hopes of bringing the black community into the movement. The disproportionate concentration of abortion clinics in black neighborhoods (and the
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I heard this segment of This American Life on my way home today. It was a powerful story that, in my view, captures what is wrong (but at the same time almost inevitable) about how the hierarchy has responded to the (now global) abuse problem. Here's the summary:
Patrick Wall was a special
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The NY Times has an interesting piece on the nuns' letter in support of the health care reform. Here are a few nuggets:
“It is an utter mystery to me” how religious groups that oppose abortion could read the same bill so differently, said Sister Simone Campbell, the executive director of
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Stupak dismisses the nuns' letter:
Congressman Bart Stupak, D-Mich, responded sharply to White House officials touting a letter representing 59,000 nuns that was sent to lawmakers urging them to pass the health care bill.
The conservative Democrat dismissed the action by the White House
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From the AP, endorsement of HCR by the leaders of 60 orders, representing 59,000 nuns:
Meanwhile, in a rare public disagreement that will reverberate among the nation's 70 million Catholics, leaders of religious orders representing 59,000 nuns sent lawmakers a letter urging lawmakers to pass the
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Obviously, the investigation is ongoing, but this doesn't look good:
A widening child sexual abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI, as a senior church official acknowledged Friday that a German archdiocese made “serious mistakes” in handling an abuse case
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Doesn't seem like much to be scared of here. Very cute. (HT Salon
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I am just starting to emerge from my hole after about 2 months of ridiculous travel commitments. So this is a bit tardy, but I wanted to alert dotCommonweal readers to ReligiousLeftLaw.com, a new blog by various religious lefty legal academic types (that's a mouthful). Contributors include
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This is not from the Onion (HT Salon):
In some of the most eye-roll-inducing news to come out of Milan's fashion week, Vivienne Westwood's fall 2010 menswear collection celebrates "homeless chic" inspired by "the roving vagrant whose daily get-up is a battle gear." For the show
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Please take a moment today to remember this remarkable man. And not just the warm, fuzzy MLK distilled down from little snippets of the "I Have a Dream" speech, but the fire and brimstone prophet of the April 4, 1967 Riverside Church speech on Vietnam. The man who said this:
The war
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In his widely reported remarks taking Vatican ambassadors to task for their countries' failure to reach a climate change agreement in Copenhagen, the Pope had this to say about gay marriage:
Creatures differ from one another and can be protected, or endangered, in different ways, as we know from
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Well, I guess it's not completely self-promotion, since the book is co-authored, but I wanted to alert dotCommonweal readers to the publication of my (our) first book, Property Outlaws, which is now available at Amazon and directly from Yale Press. Needless to say, Sonia and I are both very
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A few weeks back, Paul posted a comment on the Pfizer decision to pull out of New London, a decision that throws that city's redevelopment plans into disarray and likely means that its use of eminent domain to obtain title from the holdouts against redevelopment in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood
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The Mormon Church throws its support behind a Salt Lake City law prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals in housing and employment (HT Andrew Sullivan):
The Mormon church for the first time has announced its support of gay rights legislation, an endorsement that helped gain unanimous
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There's an interesting article today about the public rift playing out in Rhode Island between Patrick Kennedy (son of the late Senator) and his Bishop, Thomas Tobin. Apart from its visibility, there's nothing all that new here (at least by recent standards). This quote from the Bishop did
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I think Commonweal readers are likely to have some interest in the newest book by my friend and colleague, Steve Shiffrin. Here's a link to the publisher's page. And here's a blurb from the publisher's description:
In The Religious Left and Church-State Relations, noted constitutional law
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Per Dahlia Lithwick, Justice Scalia tries to pour new wine into old wineskins, with unconvincing results:
There's just one person at oral argument in Salazar v. Buono this morning who really wants to talk about whether a 5-foot cross on federal government land in the Mojave National Preserve
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Over at Conservapedia, some contributors are concerned about the possibility that certain passages in the Bible might be misinterpreted as progressive in their implications. So they are suggesting the creation of a new translation that is politically correct free from "liberal distortions.&
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A Newsmax columnist advocates describes the possibility of a bloodless military coup to solve the "Obama problem." (HT TPM) This is not an isolated case. Media Matters surveys the growing trend of violent rhetoric from the right
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A good story in today's NY Times laying out the various options on how to treat abortion in the health care reform plan. Here's a taste, but go read the whole thing:
At least 31 House Democrats have signed various recent letters to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, urging her to allow a vote on
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A new Harvard Medical School study estimates that 45,000 people die each year due to lack of access to health insurance (HT TPM):
Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard
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The Washington Monthly has a piece up profiling Ave Maria and its law school's travails. Here's a taste:
From the beginning, Monaghan insisted he wouldn’t meddle in the law school’s daily operations. As he put it in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, “When I owned the
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I'm not sure what's more disgusting -- Pat Buchanan's Nazi sympathies or MSNBC's decision to provide a platform for this drivel. One of the more bizarre features of his argument is the way he turns Hitler's impatience and irrationality (why didn't he develop a 4-engine bomber? why did he
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If you want a dose of inspiration for the day, go read the rest of this article:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- He toiled in California's farm fields alongside his Mexican migrant worker parents and didn't learn English until he was 12. Now Jose Hernandez, NASA astronaut, is about to rocket into orbit
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As several commenters have pointed out, it would be nice to hear more Catholic voices (from all political perspectives) in the "debate" over healthcare. In light of the rich tradition of Catholic thought on issues of social justice, it would probably help to clarify some of the points
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There's a lot to be puzzled about in the "debate" (I hesitate to dignify it with that term) over health care reform: Palin's exploitation of her infant son with her instantly infamous "death panel" comment; the anti-reform protester who was supposedly injured in a scuffle with
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Michael Lewis channels his inner Goldman Sachs i-banker. Here's a taste:
Rumor No. 2: “When the U.S. government bailed out AIG, and paid off its gambling debts, it saved not AIG but Goldman Sachs.”
The charge isn’t merely insulting but ignorant. Less responsible journalists continue to
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Maybe it's just because I live in New York, where our notoriously corrupt state government was recently AWOL for about a month, but this reader at TPM really nails how I'm feeling these days:
Just to mention something that is obvious, but hopefully not overlooked, i.e., if this country cannot pass
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In her hearings today, Sotomayor testified that Obama did not ask her views on abortion before nominating her to the Court:
Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor declined repeatedly at Senate confirmation hearings Wednesday to disclose her views on abortion rights, and said President Barack Obama
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From the National Law Journal:
In the latest twist to the two-year-old suit filed in state court by a three former professors, Tom Monaghan, the school's founder and financier, filed a motion last month claiming that the law professors are "ministerial." Therefore, he argues, because the
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Here is Randall Terry's reaction to the murder of George Tiller in his church yesterday:
Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue states, "George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that
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Listen to this a conversation between Fred Barnes and Bill Bennett.
BARNES: I think you can make the case that she's one of those who has benefited from affirmative action over the years tremendously.
BENNETT: Yeah, well, maybe so. Did she get into Princeton on affirmative action, one wonders
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I have a guest post up over at one of Slate's companion blogs, explaining why Sotomayor's comment about "wise Latinas" was not only not racist, but also almost undeniably true. Here's a taste:
[C]onsidered in the context the rest of her speech, it is clear that Sotomayor merely meant
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I've had the pleasure of meeting Judge Sotomayor and hearing her speak on several occasions. When I clerked at the Second Circuit, our chambers went out to lunch with her chambers. A few years later (I believe it was 2006), she was the recipient of the Yale Latino Alumni Association's public
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If you are following the Notre Dame/Obama flap, you might be tempted to think that being consistently and vocally opposed to legal abortion would protect you from having your invitations to speak at Catholic institutions of higher education criticized by the Catholic Right. You'd be wrong,
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When I lived in Arlington, Virginia and saw things like the Jefferson Davis Highway, I often wondered why people who consider themselves patriotic would celebrate the Confederacy, which was, after all, an act of mass treason against our nation's government. Now I have new fodder for this
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Sen. Inhofe in 2003:
“But the Democrats, who cannot muster a majority to oppose him, are seeking, in effect, to change the Constitutional majority-vote requirement. By sustaining this filibuster, they are asserting that 60 votes, not 50, will be required to approve Mr. Estrada. If successful,
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Philip Zelikow nicely outlines the many problems with the legal argument in the May 2005 torture memos in this important post. Here's a taste:
The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel,
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Here's a link to a really great story about RUN DMC (who are being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) on NPR. Go take a look (or listen
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I suppose this isn't too surprising. What is surprising to me is that it is getting any attention in the mainstream media at all. Why on earth does anyone care what Glenn Beck things of this appointment (or anything else for that matter)? Or even what some conservative Republican Senator
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I've got a piece up over at Slate on squatting in the current economic downturn. Here's a taste:
To survive, everyone needs to have a place to be and to sleep, eat, and, let's face it, go to the bathroom. For most of us, that place is the home. As rising unemployment pushes more people out of
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Here's a great story about a priest looking out for his parishioners:
EAST HAVEN, Conn. — Latino merchants in this New Haven suburb have been complaining for months that they get a disproportionately large share of attention from the local police. Officers, they say, have harassed them and their
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Now that I have your attention, read this very interesting essay in the Tablet. (HT Wolcott) Here's a taste:
Instead of men kneeling in confessionals admitting to lust, maybe they should be encouraged to regard greed, which was bottom of the male list, as a more devastating and destructive sin
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Via Reuters:
Researchers said on Sunday they had found a safer way to transform ordinary skin cells into powerful stem cells in a move that could eventually remove the need to use human embryos. It is the first time that scientists have turned skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS
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In which Ann Althouse suggests that those who thought Jindal flopped (a group which seems to include everyone who watched the speech with the exception of Rush Limbaugh) might be manifesting subconscious racism, and in which her commenters respond by adding anti-Catholicism to the mix. At first,
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The consensus seems to be that it was not a good night for Bobby Jindal. But the award for the strangest response to the President's speech clearly goes to George Will: (HT HuffingtonPost)
Asked for a "final thought" on the president's speech last night, conservative columnist
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Amy Sullivan has an informative piece in Time on the movement to stop a bill that has yet to be introduced. Check it out. The upshot is that the anti-FOCA hysteria -- brought to you in part by the USCCB -- has little to do with FOCA itself and a lot to do with disillusionment on the Catholic
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The NY Times had a profile this weekend of St. John the Evangelist parish in Stamford, Connecticut and the comeback that "confession" is making in that parish. I was a member of that parish while I was clerking in New Haven in 1999-2000 (my wife was working in NYC, so we lived in
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Alan Greenspan, former acolyte of Ayn Rand, comes out in favor of (temporary) bank nationalization. (HT Paul Krugman
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Over at Mirror of Justice, where, until recently, I used to blog, Richard Stith has been pushing an analogy between abortion and the Spanish Civil War. (I know.) Here's his latest post. His basic argument, in a nutshell, is that abortion is private violence carried out with the acquiescence (
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Tell it to the people who died from this latest salmonella outbreak: (HT TPM)
The company e-mails obtained by the House panel showed that Peanut Corp. of America owner Stewart Parnell ordered the shipments tainted with the bacteria because he was worried about lost sales.
At one point, Parnell
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A few days ago, I posted a short and optimistic defense of the Obama administration's progressive bona fides by pointing to his terrific legal appointments. Then, just as soon as I posted the defense, that legal team (or, until we know more information, I should maybe just say that someone,
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David Sirota has a very interesting post in which he is very critical of Obama's economic and national security teams. Here's a taste:
Obama's national security team, for instance, includes not a single Iraq war opponent. The president has not only retained George W. Bush's defense secretary,
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Via ThinkProgress:
Limbaugh told his listeners that he was asked by “a major American print publication” to offer a 400-word statement explaining his “hope for the Obama presidency.” He responded:
So I’m thinking of replying to the guy, “Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t
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We are all losers in this current economic crisis. On an intellectual level, though, no one has been more damaged by the crisis and the bailout than property rights libertarians. I think this is true across the libertarian spectrum.
There are two broad types of property rights libertarian
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To my mind, one of the worst things Clinton did during his time in office was the huge hole he sliced in our social safety net in 1996. It's not that I think welfare as it then existed did not need reform, but turning it into a time-limited program was less a reform than a gutting of its
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A must-read. Here's the conclusion:
The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud
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Kevin Drum has an interesting chart on the relationship between strength of party identification and frequency of prayer. The results may surprise you
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Last week, Steve Bainbridge posted a lengthy discussion of rumors that Doug Kmiec might be a candidate for the ambassadorship to the Vatican. Some of his reasons for counseling against such a move made some sense -- e.g., according to Bainbridge's post, some well-connected people at the Vatican
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This is interesting and heartening (HT Steve Benen):
"BJU’s history has been chiefly characterized by striving to achieve those goals; but like any human institution, we have failures as well. For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was
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Inexplicably, Newsweek has decided to run a short article on those who think Obama is the antichrist (HT: Steve Benen). Here's a taste:
After years of tribulation—natural disasters, other cataclysms (such as the collapse of financial markets)—God's armies will vanquish armies led by the
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Networks call Ohio for Obama. Game over. I never thought I would see this day. I guess (if certain Bishops are right) hell is going to be a little more crowded, but the company there will be good
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HT Politico:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsQC64hsSxY&eurl=http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/[/youtube
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From TPM:
Interesting anecdote and probably a testament to ground organization. I have no idea what this means. Friday night (which happens to be the start of our Sabbath) my wife answered the phone to hear a man stating he was from the McCain-Palin campaign. He asked who she was supporting. She
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HT Andrew Sullivan:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL20TdHjX2s&eurl=http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/[/youtube
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You'll laugh, you'll cry. (HT DailyKos)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq8Uc5BFogE[/youtube
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This is interesting. It seems to me that, with the exception of Kmeic, what the "Obamacons" all have in common is that they are not members of the Religious Right. It suggests the collapse of the Republican Coalition. In light of this exodus, it's interesting that many in the Church
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Over at Mirror of Justice, Rick Garnett links to an essay discussing the legal treatment of abortion before Roe, and says:
In my view, there is nothing hypocritical or otherwise suspect about saying (a) our Constitution permits legislatures to regulate abortion more closely than Roe permits; (b)
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Perhaps those pushing the inane theory that the Community Reinvestment Act (and other efforts to provide affordable credit to credit-worthy residents of low-income neighborhoods) is responsible for the financial meltdown can take a crack at explaining the connection between the CRA and this sort
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Here's an interesting chart, which strongly suggests that the election of a Democratic president reliably leads to greater income gains for those at the bottom, while the election of a Republican has the opposite effect. To be more specific:
When a Republican president is in power, people at
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Morning's Minion has an interesting and thoughtful post on Faithful Citizenship and the bishops up at Vox Nova. Go take a look
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This is an interesting video. Watch these Muslim McCain supporters slap down an anti-Muslim bigot at a McCain rally.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl2EndLZv7w&eurl=http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/10/mccainiacs_against_bigotry.php[/youtube
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From TPM:
The McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee are pumping a robocall into multiple states that directly alleges that Obama has "worked closely" with "domestic terrorist Bill Ayers," whose organization has "killed Americans," according to multiple
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The Washington Post has in interesting and important story today about the Bush White House's support for torture. Here's a taste:
The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as
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With an Obama win looking increasingly likely, Catholic Republicans are pulling out all the stops to press the argument that Catholics cannot in good faith vote for a pro-choice candidate, or at least a candidate whose positions on abortion are as stark as Obama's. George Weigel takes a crack at
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I guess those 12,000 emails found him:
Christopher Buckley, the author and son of the late conservative mainstay William F. Buckley, said in a telephone interview that he has resigned from the National Review, the political journal his father founded in 1955.
Mr. Buckley said he had “been
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These days, it takes more courage than usual for conservatives to say the obvious. So Kudos to Christopher Buckley (son of William F.). Somehow, I think the 12,000 emails will still manage to find him:
My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itEucdhf4Us[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjxzmaXAg9E[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuSYHnVpYbs[/youtube
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Here's another great debunking of the CRA-caused-the-meltdown myth that keeps rearing its head. My favorite part:
[T]he CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek
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From the AP:
Hurricane Ike's winds and massive waves destroyed oil platforms, tossed storage tanks and punctured pipelines. The environmental damage only now is becoming apparent: At least a half million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico and the marshes, bayous and bays of
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Here are some more debunkings of the argument that the 1977 CRA somehow caused the recent financial meltdown. One of the key problems with the argument, as Ellen Seidman points out, is the timing of the crisis. The CRA's teeth are supplied by the penalties it metes out to those covered entities
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From ABC News:
We calculate there are about 31 competitive House races divided between Democratic and Republican House members, and 24 of the 31 members in competitive districts voted against this package
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Some of the most consistently accurate predictions throughout this economic crisis have come from Nouriel Roubini, a professor at NYU's business school. It is therefore significant to me as I struggle to form an opinion about something about which I have almost no understanding that he thinks
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In one of the more comical efforts to characterize the current financial crisis as something other than a massive market failure, some conservatives have decided that the real blame lies not with greedy Wall Street financiers, but with the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 law aimed at getting
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I hope this is not true. Sanctity of marriage, and all that
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Steve Benon:
Reasonable people can disagree about the nature of Palin's difficulties. Some will argue that Palin just hasn't had time to learn about government and policy issues. Others will argue she isn't very bright. Others still may make the case that she's just cracking under the pressure.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDe5N1njo88&eurl=http://www.eschatonblog.com/[/youtube]
HT: Atrios
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Via Matt Yglesias:
As you may recall, over the summer Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki embarrassed John McCain by endorsing Barack Obama’s call for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2010, thus rejecting the Bush/McCain position that such a timeline would constitute some
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If you've noticed a sort of fatigued incoherence in my posts of late, I have a good excuse. Here's a picture of the new guy. He obviously gets his good looks from his mother
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The more I read about this bailout, the more is stinks. A request for nearly $1 trillion dollars to bail out bankers from their bad gambles. No strings attached, no oversight, and no judicial review. Just trust us, the administration is saying. And this is brought to you by the same crowd
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Anonymous Liberal manages to pretty much sum up my feelings about McCain's economic thinking and trillion dollar bailouts for investment bankers in one post. So I'll just excerpt it in its entirety:
In a rational universe, this single paragraph would be the nail in the coffin of John McCain's
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Obama is running an ad on immigration that tries to link John McCain to Rush Limbaugh and the nativist wing of the Republican party. Here's a link.
While one might argue that McCain has invited this comparison by turning against his own immigration proposals in an effort to woo the hard right
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For those of us who favor a new direction within the Democratic party on this issue, I think this sort of activity from the Obama campaign is disappointing, to put it mildly. We desperately need a new way of talking about the abortion issue, but these ads simply regurgitate the same old positions
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Daniel Drezner vents a bit:
What I’ve learned about Sarah Palin to date is that she doesn’t know a lot about foreign policy, doesn’t know a lot about the economy, and she sounds just as bad in friendly interview situations as she does in slightly more probing interviews. Her best skill
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9ZlxsEioUA[/youtube]
HT Salon
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Conservative Alaska radio host Dan Fagan is uncomfortable with the McCain/Palin campaign's dishonesty:
Clearly most Alaskans choose to ignore the facts of the Troopergate scandal. They want Palin to make it to the national stage. Republicans scold me all the time, "You don't want Obama to
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It sure is strange how things that seem good for the poor are really quite bad for them, but as it turns out, things that seem good for the rich are actually good for them, and not only for them, but for the rest of us as well
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This piece from today's NY Times on Palin's tenure as mayor and governor is a must read.
And this piece from yesterday's NY Times, on the McCain campaign comfort with lying is also important. As the Politico notes, this lying is not a glitch but a feature of the McCain strategy.
Why the
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Kevin Drum on the Palin pregnancy:
JUST ASKIN' INDEED....Jakes Tapper asks:
What would the response be if Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and his wife Michelle had a pregnant unmarried teenage daughter?
Yeah, yeah, I know how annoying this kind of conjecture is. But I couldn't help thinking about
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From the LA Times (HT Kevin Drum):
By midafternoon, both campaigns were in full battle cry and sought to portray the other candidate as living an ostentatious lifestyle. Both campaigns called reporters, rushed out scathing TV attack ads, unveiled new websites and unleashed surrogates. McCain,
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First, he told us that you're not rich until you're making $5 million. Now, we have this from Politico:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own. "I think — I'll have my staff get to you," McCain told
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This is reassuring: (HT Kos)
John McCain's campaign ad "The One" has generated a lot of buzz regarding the "Left Behind Series." Political commentators are comparing McCain's portrayal of competitor Barack Obama with the blockbuster apocalyptic series' depiction of the
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Kevin Drum has posted a few interesting thoughts about the impact sustained high gas prices are likely to have on the suburbs.
Here are a few reactions:
(1) While he's right that jobs are now as likely to be in the suburbs as in center cities, I don't think this means that high gas prices won
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There's an interesting essay over at Salon by a Christian physicist discussing the relationship between religion and science. The essay is framed around a discussion of atheistic zealotry of the Dawkins/Hitchens variety, including a description of the recent hateful antics of University of
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Our pro-life president (via Politico):
"President Bush this morning accepted the recommendation of the Secretary of the Army to approve a sentence of death for Army Private Ronald A. Gray, affirming the sentence that resulted from a general court martial for multiple charges of murder and
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Here's an interesting abstract from the UK journal PLoS Medicine, finding that participation in IMF loan programs increases mortality from tuberculosis due to decreased government spending on public health:
We performed multivariate regression of two decades of tuberculosis incidence, prevalence,
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How are we doing on the human development front here at home? Not too well it seems:
The American Human Development Index has applied to the US an aid agency approach to measuring well-being – more familiar to observers of the Third World – with shocking results. The US finds itself ranked
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The Pope reiterates the moral imperative of acting to combat climate change:
There is a need to "wake up consciences [on climate change]," Benedict responded. "We have to give impulse to rediscovering our responsibility and to finding an ethical way to change our way of life."
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I was never much of a fan of the hypocritical tendency to honor hateful people when they die. I can understand not going out of your way to put them down, refusing to pile on while loved ones are grieving, etc. But I don't understand the need some people have to say nice things that are
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From the Independent:
It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.
The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the
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From the Toronto Star:
Fast-growing churches, frustrated with the slow pace of municipal planning, often find themselves pushed into setting up shop in rural areas on the edge of town, where they end up contributing to suburban sprawl, a Ryerson University study has found.
"They rapidly
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Earlier this week, Krugman had an op-ed criticizing the longstanding policy of encouraging homeownerhip. His bottom line was that homeownership is not for everyone, and that government shouldn't be trying to push as many households as it can into that form of tenure:
There are, of course,
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We've had several discussions about the economics of the minimum wage. Over at Crooked Timber, there's a very interesting and instructive discussion of the way ideology permeates economic analysis, with particular attention to the question of the impact of the minimum wage on employment. (HT
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Back in December, I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post suggesting that rising oil prices might be having an impact on Americans' taste for exurban homes. At the time, the data in support of this thesis was still very anecdotal. In the six months since then, more data has been gathered,
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South Carolina is moving forward with plans to issue “I Believe” license plates, complete with an image of the Cross and a stained glass window. Here’s an image of the plate
According to the New York Times, South Carolina has a process by which private groups can "sponsor" a
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(Cross posted at PrawfBlawg) Since it's summer time, and I'm catching up on Lost episodes, I wanted to use this post to get something off my chest that's been bothering me for a long time. A recent story on Canada's (!) search for astronauts for its space program brought it back to mind.
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From the Washington Post (via Alex Koppelman):
For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election
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From the WSJ:
In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white
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I know this is not really on topic, but I've always been interested in the connections between memory and intelligence, perhaps because I'm so absent-minded. And I never like to miss an opportunity to plug a Borges short-story. (Borges is the Simpsons of literary reference, since virtually any
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Voter ID laws, the Notre Dame edition:
Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary's Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.
The nuns, all
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Frank Rich points towards a double standard in the media's treatment of Wright:
None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long relationship with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair
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It's very hard to figure out what she's trying to say here, but it seems like she's saying that rich people like her and O'Reilly have a special obligation to contribute to the common good. Nothing wrong with that. But why is her campaign denying that she said "God bless us"?
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From the AP:
Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized Barack Obama on Monday for opposing proposals to suspend federal gas taxes this summer, a plan she and Republican John McCain have endorsed. Obama didn't take the bait. He ignored Clinton and focused on McCain.
"My opponent, Senator Obama,
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I tried to say some nice things about McCain's seemingly rational climate change position in my recent Commonweal essay, but then he has to go and mess everything up by proposing to eliminate the gas tax for a while. Here's the take on this over at Climate Progress:
Let’s be very clear — the
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I've always thought this as well. It's nice to see someone else agrees
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This guy is my hero: (HT BoingBoing)
· Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a
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This seems right to me:
And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably
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Just a day after Obama elevated our national discourse on race with his historic speech, Republican strategists are already licking their chops and getting ready to drag us right back down into the gutter: (HT TPM)
Although Barack Obama's speech yesterday on race relations was generally
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So, the wealthy bankers whose greed brought us this crisis are bailed out by the Fed.
In the meantime, these folks get zippo:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnnOOo6tRs8[/youtube]
Yes, I know that the argument for bailing out the banks is the harm that will be done to the economy
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From Josh Marshall:
Last we heard from John McCain he was denouncing John Hagee's anti-Catholic statements while holding on to his endorsement. But now McCain seems to be having second thoughts. Today McCain went on Hugh Hewitt's Bill Bennett's show and explained that while he would condemn Hagee
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Two interesting and hopeful items on the religion/environment front this morning. First, the Southern Baptists issue a strongly worded statement on climate change, which the AP describes as a "major shift":
In a major shift, a group of Southern Baptist leaders said their denomination
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There is simply no comparison between Obama's connection to Farrakhan (none that I know of) and McCain's connection to Hagee (McCain has obsequiously courted Hagee's endorsement, and then held a joint rally with him). Despite his attenuated relationship, Obama "renounced and rejected"
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Here's Hagee discussing the Great Whore on YouTube (HT Greenwald):
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=uViQ0hVV57Q[/youtube
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While I find all this "renounce" and "reject" stuff a bit silly, as long as we're playing that game, what is good for the goose should be good for the gander. With that in mind, I want to give credit to Bill Donohue for calling on John McCain to renounce the support of the
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I've seen this argument trotted out in our comments far too many times. Let's put a fork in this one:
The supposed "global cooling" consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can't make up their minds — is
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Continuing to protect us from the threat of global communism, the folks at the Corner voice some concerns about Obama's parents (HT DailyKos):
Until I came across this article by Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, which I regard as factual — with all that that implies — the questions about
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Although Fidel has not been running things for some time, his official retirement marks the beginning of a new chapter in Cuban history. Still, it's not clear how much of a change it will make. The communist regime remains firmly in place, and there are no signs of any impending political
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Scalia on torture on the BBC (HT TPM):
"You can't come in smugly and with great self satisfaction and say 'Oh it's torture, and therefore it's no good'," he said in a rare interview. . . . In the interview with the Law in Action programme on BBC Radio 4, he said it was "
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gwqEneBKUs[/youtube
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From today's NY TImes Book Review:
the Democratic Party’s long string of counterproductive responses to the enduring influence of the religious right has had the cumulative effect of driving away any type of base with the word “faith” attached to it, and opening the door to the Republicans
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From NPR:
With the season of Lent upon us, [Anglican] bishops in London and Liverpool have come up with a new kind of 40-day fast. Along with the aid agency Tearfund, the bishops have launched a carbon fast. Instead of giving up chocolate, how about giving up on plastic bags or incandescent light
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For the first time since right after the Iowa caucus, Obama is leading Hillary as the likely Democratic nominee on Intrade. Of course, I have serious doubts about the reliability of these prediction markets, but it's at least an indication of how people with money to blow are interpreting the
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Joe Klein gets it just right:
It may well be true that any Democrat is going to have to handle that sort of sewage in the general election, but I've now--belatedly!--figured out that the real audacity in Barack Obama's campaign--far more than his positions on the issues, which almost seem an
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From the AP (via TPM):
"They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender. That's why people tell me Hillary doesn't have a chance of winning here," the former president said at one stop as he campaigned for his wife, strongly suggesting that blacks would not support a
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Here's an open thread to discuss Hillary's apparent embrace of race-baiting and voter suppression
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For those who missed it, there's an interesting essay by Steven Pinker in today's NY Times Magazine on human beings' moral instincts. Here's a taste:
The findings of trolleyology — complex, instinctive and worldwide moral intuitions — led Hauser and John Mikhail (a legal scholar) to revive
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For the next few weeks, when I'm not grading, I will likely be on a plane. But this one was too good to pass up. From the Times of London (HT -- once again -- BoingBoing):
The cradle of Christianity was rocked by an unholy punch-up when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a
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The Senate (Republicans) prove Grant right. From the AP (via TPM):
Senate Republicans blocked a bill Friday that would restrict the interrogation methods the CIA can use against terrorism suspects. The legislation, part of a measure authorizing the government's intelligence activities for 2008,
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$40 billion (this month) to bail out the bankers? No problem. $500 million to help the poor pay their heating bills? No way. From USA Today:
Soaring fuel prices are creating a crisis among low-income people and senior citizens who can't afford to heat their homes, say local agencies that
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According to a Vatican press release, the Holy See has a delegation at the ongoing climate talks in Bali:
VATICAN CITY, DEC. 4, 2007 (VIS) - The 13th session of the conference of States parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is being held on the Indonesian island
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Per USA Today, the Pope is not too happy with the consumerization of Christmas:
Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday criticized "materialistic" ways of celebrating Christmas, pressing the Vatican's campaign against unbridled consumerism. His brief comments, delivered from the window of his
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This reads like something from the Onion. (HT Kevin Drum
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It's comments like these, as much as anything else, that explain Giuliani's surprising acceptability to folks like Robertson. This is why I doubt the religious right will totally defect from the Republicans if Giuliani is nominated. He may be personally pro-choice, the argument
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For those who are interested, here is the link for the latest version of Faithful Citizenship. Per Thomas Reese, not much new here, although, as Margaret S. notes below, Archbishop Chaput seems to finally be getting on board with the program. I suspect, though, that his change
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NPR has an interesting story on the history of the waterboarding technique. Not much new information in the story, but it provides a useful summary of the technique's past, in any event. Here are some excerpts:
Its use was first documented in the 14th century, according to Ed Peters, a
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HT: DemFromCT
Ad Campaign Criticizes Pro-Life Members of Congress for Voting against Children's Health Insurance
Washington, DC- Catholics United will launch a radio advertising
campaign targeting ten members of Congress whose opposition to the
State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP
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Here's a link to a new Guttmacher-WHO study on worldwide abortion rates in the most recent issue of the Lancet. (And here's the NY Times story on the same.) According to the study (via the NY Times):
abortion
rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those
where it
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More proof that God exists, and that she's not a Yankee fan. This game had it all -- even Biblical plagues! (See Exodus 8:12-15
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From today's NY Times. Discuss:
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared
torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush
administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly
unlimited presidential authority to order brutal
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From the BBC:
The head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has
told the BBC he believes some European-made condoms are infected with
HIV deliberately. Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claimed some
anti-retroviral drugs were also infected "in order to finish quickly
the
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In These Times gives us this inside look at a seminar on how to prevent your workers from unionizing. (HT Kevin Drum) Here's a sample:
Once the seminar got underway, I learned that all of us were doing
the right thing in resisting unions. “We believe that the union is
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Over at MOJ, a group of law professors (including me) have signed a joint statement regarding the evolving crisis/scandal at Ave Maria Law School. Here's a taste (click the link to read the rest):
We applaud the effort to build a law school that consciously draws upon
and engages the
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Kevin Drum
makes a nice, and frequently overlooked, point about why unions matter
for reducing inequality. The Church has gotten this for over a century:
If you're interested in
government policies that actively favor the working and middle classes,
you need to have some kind of
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For those who like their family law disputes with a little Cuban flavor, there is this story from NPR: A child custody trial begins Monday in Miami that threatens to
become a repeat of the Elian Gonzalez case.
A
farmer from Cuba is trying to get his 5-year-old daughter returned to
him
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From Media Matters via Talking Points Memo:
LIMBAUGH: Here's [caller] in Lake Orion, Michigan. Thank you for calling. Great to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. It's great to talk to you. I talked to you
once before. I've been listening to you for a couple of years now, and
I
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From Newsweek (HT BoingBoing):
In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has
banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government
permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration
for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect
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Bobby Jindal is under attack in the Louisiana governor's race for some articles he wrote on religion (apparently before he entered politics). You can find links to the articles here (although you'll have to pay to read the entire articles). According to the descriptions on the site, which appears
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While I'm on the music theme, there was a very interesting profile yesterday on NPR of socially conscious hip-hop artist, Common (fka Common Sense). It included a discussion of his 1997 song on (among other things) abortion, Retrospect for Life. Here are a few of the lyrics:
Yo, we gotta
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I can't dream up a plausible Catholic link to this, but this op-ed on Elvis's racial views is an interesting one, especially for those of us whose opinions on the subject may have been influenced by Chuck D
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This is one of those "controversies" that completely escapes me. Still, interesting reading
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From Newsweek (HT BoingBoing):
Wal-Mart is Mexico’s largest private-sector employer in the nation
today, with nearly 150,000 local residents on its payroll. An
additional 19,000 youngsters between the ages of 14 and 16 work after
school in hundreds of Wal-Mart stores, mostly as grocery
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I've been traveling for the past two weeks, which explains my lack of posts. A couple of weekends ago I was in Cuba to meet with Oswaldo Paya, a pro-democracy activist and the man behind the Varela Project, an ingenious petition drive that sought to take advantage of a provision of the
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Here's Cal Thomas holding forth on Hilary Clinton's religious faith (HT Digby):
Liberal faith, which is to say a faith that discounts the authority
of Scripture in favor of a constantly evolving, poll-tested relevancy
to modern concerns -- such as the environment, what kind of SUV Jesus
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Apropos of the iPope, please say hello to the JesusPhone (HT: BoingBoing
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Via McClatchy:
WASHINGTON — More than half of Americans say they wouldn't consider
voting for Sen. Hillary Clinton for president if she becomes the
Democratic nominee, according to a new national poll made available to
McClatchy Newspapers and NBC News. The poll by Mason-Dixon Polling and
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Here's a very interesting Reuters article on health care in Cuba. I don't fully understand how the headline ("Health Care in Cuba More Complicated Than on Sicko") jibes with the text of the article, since about the worst things the author can say about Cuban health care are that (1)
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Interesting story from tomorrow's NY Times. Here's the nut graf:
[C]hurch leaders say they are frustrated by prominent Catholic politicians
like Mr. Giuliani who argue that while they are personally opposed to abortion,
they do not want to impose their beliefs on others
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From the AP:
HARTFORD, Connecticut (AP) — Democratic
presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama told a church convention
Saturday that some right-wing U.S. evangelical leaders have exploited
and politicized religious beliefs in an effort to sow division. "Somehow, somewhere along
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On June 7, John Carr, the head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Department of Social Development and World Peace, testified
before the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works regarding
the Catholic "bishops' position on climate change." Although the
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Hot off the presses, here's the Vatican's newly released discussion of the "moral aspects of driving." Here are it's Ten Commandments for drivers:
I.
You shall not kill.
II.
The road
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A while back, I wondered whether those convervative Catholic voices who opposed Kerry so strenuously in 2004 would oppose with equal fervor the pro-choice, pro-gay rights (and Catholic) Giuliani. The Huffington Post has a report on a few who are beginning to do so:
In its campaign to
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Sam Brownback's op-ed on evolution in today's Times gets off to an interesting start, but quickly devolves into a self-contradictory muddle. It appears intended to stake out a middle ground on evolution (hence the attempt to reach out to readers of the Times) but after a few paragraphs
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Normally, in blog discussions, comparing those holding a particular position to Nazis constitutes a violation of Godwin's Law.
But, in this case, (1) the reference is not mine, but Andrew Sullivan's
and (2) the comparison is substantively interesting, so I think I'm on
safe ground. Here's a
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This sounds like something from the Onion, but it's apparently true. (HT: BoingBoing
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Here's an interesting study from Media Matters on the religious voices making their way into the news media. The entire study is available for download (.pdf) here. Here's the summary:
Religion is often depicted in the news media as a politically
divisive force, with two sides roughly
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Here's an interesting article
from the front page of today's Times on the persistence of Liberation
Theology. This persistence should come as no surprise. As the article
says, in the years since Cardinal Ratzinger began his (let's say)
"encounter" with liberation theology, "the
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The only time I read the Post is on days like this.UPDATE: Oh well, all good things must come to an end
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In order to be just, a war must have (among other things) a just goal and must be fought according to just and prorportionate means. What are the goals for staying in Iraq and is the death and destruction that our presence is likely to entail proportionate to those goals? This
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Who are these people?
Seriously. This is sick stuff. It reminds me of this song by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones
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HT BoingBoing:
UPDATE: In the comments, Joseph makes a good point. A little googling turns up this site dedicated to unearthing each of the Beatles' Irish heritage
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Over at MOJ, Rob Vischer posted a link to this story about a Wyoming lesbian couple denied communion after publicly voicing opposition to a Wyoming bill that would deny recognition to same-sex marriages
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It's almost not worth commenting on the obvious parallels with Kerry at this early stage in the nominating process, since I think Rudy's honesty on this issue makes it very unlikely that he will ultimately be the Republican nominee. But I do want to put a marker down in the event that it
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Since we've been talking about global warming on this site a bit, I thought I'd link to the Supreme Court's opinion today (written by my former boss, and joined by Justices Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer) in Massachusetts v. EPA. The Court held that the Bush Administration was wrong to
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Via CNN (HT: BoingBoing):
NEW YORK (AP) -- A planned Holy Week exhibition of a nude,
anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ was canceled
Friday amid complaints from Catholics, including Cardinal Edward Egan. The
"My Sweet Lord" display was shut down by the hotel
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This discussion from US News, is interesting for any number of reasons, not least because of the suggestion by the spokesman for Focus on the Family that anyone who is not an "evangelical" Christian, no matter how reliably conservative on issues that matter to evangelicals, will have a
MORE
USAToday reports on efforts by cities to regulate the distribution of food to the homeless:
Cities are cracking down on charities that
feed the homeless, adopting rules that restrict food giveaways to
certain locations, require charities to get permits or limit the number
of free meals they can
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According to Newsweek:
$351 billion has been spent or appropriated between 2003 and 2007 [for the war in Iraq], and
the president's additional budget request of $68 billion in 2007 will
bring that to $419 billion, if it passes, according to estimates by the
Congressional Budget Office (these
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HT BoingBoing:
Thwarted in her attempt to enjoy a cup of a
coffee at her favorite spot, Louise Kilborn unwittingly found herself
at the center of a social debate that's been brewing for years.
The
70-year-old Lisle woman was kicked out of the Starbucks in downtown
Glen Ellyn a few weeks ago.
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There are few economic issues on which the Church's teaching is more clear than the importance of organized labor within a market economy. Here, for example, is John Paul II in Laborem Exercens:
All these rights, together with the need for the workers themselves to
secure them, give rise to
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Over at Reasons and Opinions, Morning's Minion, a frequent participant in our comment threads, has posted a very thoughtful analysis of the gay marriage question from the point of view of John Courtney Murray's thought on the relationship between morality and law
MORE
According to a study analyzing US Census data:
The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty
has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling
closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves"
and "have-nots&
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Over at TPM, Katha Pollitt gets it mostly right (IMHO) regarding the Edwards blogger flap. The key point:
[Edwards] wants -- he needs -- the votes of people who have never looked at a blog in their lives, who are deeply religious, culturally staid, and easily offended in about a thousand ways
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From USA Today:
A premature baby that doctors say spent less
time in the womb than any other surviving infant is to be released from
a Florida hospital Tuesday.
Amillia Sonja Taylor was just 9½ inches long and
weighed less than 10 ounces when she was born Oct. 24. She was
delivered 21 weeks
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Who knew? Via Talking Points Memo. Read the whole, incredible story:
Meet our new friend, Georgia State House Rep. Ben Bridges (R), chairman of the retirement committee in the state house.
Bridges is now in a bit of trouble for spilling
the beans about evolution being the product of a
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According to the WHO (via Reuters):
Millions more South Asians will
suffer from diseases like malaria and cholera, or go hungry due
to global warming, but governments are not fully aware of the
dangers, the World Health Organization said on Thursday
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UNICEF has come out with a report ranking countries as better or worse places for children. The results are, perhaps, not all that surprising:
The charity looked at 40 indicators to gauge the lives of
children in 21 economically advanced nations -- the first study
of its kind -- and found
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NPR, via Kos:
A change in immigration policy now allows families who are in the
U.S. illegally to be detained. Last summer, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement began holding entire families, including small children, at
a converted prison outside of Austin, Texas. Officials
say that before
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This might get interesting. From the website of the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance: (HT BoingBoing)
The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance seeks to defend equal marriage in this state by challenging the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling on Andersen v
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As Grant mentions in his post below, the Huffington Post has put up a piece talking about our conversation concerning the Edwards blog controversy. It's entitled "Edwards Decision To Keep Bloggers May Risk Catholic Vote," and links to our thread for support. I have a couple of
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Since we're a blog for Catholics, we'd be remiss if we didn't at least mention the current dust-up between the Edwards campaign and, ahem, William Donohue, self-proclaimed protector of all things Catholic (or at least his version thereof).
According to the NY Times:
Two bloggers hired recently
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Several states are bucking the national trend and considering expansions of their use of the death penalty. The states in question are Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Missouri, Georgia and Utah. Texas and Tennessee, for example, want to expand the death penalty to cover some non-homicide crimes, such
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Here is Hillary's campaign chair (Terry McAuliffe) on NPR on immigration (HT Matt Stoller):
CALLER: I'm one of those Republicans who helped change the political
arrangement by sitting on the sidelines, and if you want to get 10
percent of the Republicans, right now, to vote for Hillary
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Seriously, this is messed up:
Farmland Friends on Friday joined churches nationwide in abruptly
canceling its Super Bowl party for fear of violating a federal
copyright law that prohibits public venues from showing NFL games on
big-screen TVs.
Sports bars are specifically exempted. Churches
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Over at the Mother Jones environmental blog, Blue Marble, a nice summary of the possible consequences of various global warming scenarios. Here's what's on the menu for a 3 degree increase in global mean temperature (a scenario that looks increasingly likely):3 DEGREES* In Southern Europe,
MORE
Here's a link to an interesting article about the religious right's take on immigration issues. The sound bite version:
Unlike abortion, the immigration issue has sharply divided the
movement's leaders and political allies. Fierce "pro-family" culture
warriors stand on both sides of
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It's funny to me how some conservatives, who are normally so prone to doubt the competence of human beings to meddle with complex systems, like the economy, are -- shall we say -- somewhat less skeptical about our ability to solve complicated environmental problems through technology. With even
MORE
In today's NY Times, Tyler Cowen (economist at George Mason) makes the following astonishing claim about economic inequality:
The broader philosophical question is why we should worry about
inequality — of any kind — much at all. Life is not a race against
fellow human beings, and we should
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There's an excellent oped in the Week in Review section of today's NY Times about the news that a majority of women are now living without a spouse for what social scientists say is the first time. In her opinion piece today, Kate Zernike argues that economics has a lot to do with this
MORE
A while back, we discussed Arthur Brooks' book, Who Really Cares?, in which Brooks claims to have found an increased tendency among "conservatives" (compared to "liberals") to donate money to charities of all sorts and to volunteer at higher rates as well. After offering
MORE
Over at his blog, Stephen Bainbridge has an interesting discussion going on Catholic views on the minimum wage. I have a nit to pick, though, with the nit Stephen is picking with
the Nit Picker about the relationship between the minimum wage and Catholic teachings on just wages (you'll have to
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Here in Ithaca, NY, daffodils are pushing up through the soil in my garden and it is an unbelievable 60 degrees on the Feast of the Epiphany. Last January, it was nearly 50 degrees for the entire month. This year, we have yet to see real snow in upstate New York. In Minnesota, the Jaycees
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Michael Novak, discussing the Hussein execution -- and continuing to attempt to defend the justice of the Iraq war, which he and his colleagues have championed -- has this to say:
The crucial point has been and is the rule of law. Under great
difficulties, and with considerable heroism and
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With the media focused on the execution of Saddam Hussein, now is as good a time as any to re-read and reflect on what the Catechism has to say about the death penalty:
Assuming that the guilty party's identity and
responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the
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An interesting article in today's NY Times about Sam Brownback's decision to stop blocking the nomination of Judge Janet Neff, a state judge appointed to be a federal trial judge, because she had attended and spoke at the commitment ceremony (not a gay marriage, since those were not yet legal in
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A few weeks ago, I participated in a Federalist Society debate at Cornell regarding the immigration issue. One of the things that came up was family separation. My opponent was confident that, even with more rigorous immigration enforcement, the government would not seek to separate illegal
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Here's an interesting article about a new breed of executive, referred to in the article as "extreme workers," who eagerly work 70 hour weeks with little vacation. In reading Catholic Social Teachings on labor (e.g., Laborem Exercens) for the CST class I've taught at three different law
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When I was in high school, two of my classmates were ultra-conservative religious types. One was a Mormon and the other was the member of a small, fundamentalist sect. The two inevitably took the same side in any political discussion and came to see each other as allies in classroom debates
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From USA Today:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Conservative leaders voiced
dismay Wednesday at news that Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Dick
Cheney, is pregnant, while a gay-rights group said the vice president
faces "a lifetime of sleepless nights" for serving in an administration
that
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One of the constant features in the bishops' discussions of immigration has been their insistence on a "path to citizenship" for both legal and undocumented immigrants. Just as constant has been conservative opposition, particularly from those on the far right, to the facilitation of
MORE
If you haven't already seen Michael Richards go on a deranged, racist rant at a comedy nightclub after being interrupted by some hecklers, you should. (Warning: This is incredibly disturbing and contains offensive language; you may never be able to watch Seinfeld again.) First Mel Gibson and now
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Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds comments on a new book purporting to show that religious conservatives are more generous than secular liberals because they donate more to charities. Reynolds spins this into the following comment:
ARE CONSERVATIVES more charitable?
"The book's basic
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Today's issue of USA Today reports on the new document by the U.S. Catholic bishops addressing the question of the pastoral care of homosexuals. (You can find the document here.) In the article, Bishop Arthur Serratelli (Patterson, NJ) says:
Homosexual acts are never morally acceptable.
Such
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