Thirteen years in prison, nine years in solitary confinement. Five loaves and two fish. “Stay with us,” prayed the disciples on the road to Emmaus. So he took bread, blessed it, and gave it to them to eat.

Yesterday, at the 49th International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec City, the sister of the late Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, delivered a moving address on her brother’s life in the communist prison camps of South Vietnam—and the sustenance he found in the Eucharist. Cardinal Thuan, whose cause for canonization was opened last fall, reflected on the source of his strength in a powerful little volume, Five Loaves and Two Fish. Here, his sister recalls the intimate Eucharistic love to which her brother boldly witnessed—even in Communist Vietnam, even in a hidden prison cell:

During an interview with the media after his release, he was asked what his secret strength had been that kept him alive and sane. His answer was always, “The Eucharist.” He explained how when he was arrested, he had to leave immediately, empty-handed. The following day he was allowed to write to his faithful to ask for some personal effects. He wrote: “Please send me a little wine as medicine for my stomach pain.” They understood right away. A few days later, the guards handed him a small container addressed to him, and labeled “Medicine for stomach aliments.” He also received another small container containing small pieces of Holy Host.

With three drops of wine and a drop of water in the palm of his hand, he would celebrate Mass. “Each time I celebrated Mass, I had the opportunity to extend my hands and nail myself to the cross with Jesus, to drink with Him the bitter chalice” (Testimony of Hope). And those were the most beautiful Masses of his life.

. . . He always carried in his shirt pocket the little container holding the Blessed Sacrament. He would repeat “Jesus, You in me and I in You” adoring the Father. Van Thuan reminds us, throughout his writing, that it is not enough to celebrate the Eucharist strictly according to the liturgical rites.

He points out to all of us that Christ offered his sacrifice with immense fervour, as in the hour of His passion and crucifixion, when He obeyed the Father; and this, even to the point of His humiliating death on the cross to bring back to the Father a redeemed humanity and a purified creation. ln prison with the Eucharistic Jesus in their midst, Christian and non-Christian prisoners slowly received the grace to understand that each present moment of their lives in the most inhuman conditions can be united with the supreme sacrifice of Jesus and lifted up as an act of solemn adoration to God the Father. Together each day, Thuan would remind himself and encouraged everyone to pray: Lord, grant that we may offer the Eucharistic sacrifice with love, that we accept to carry the cross, and to be nailed to it to proclaim Your glory, to serve our brothers and sisters.

. . . I would like to end my reflections with those tender thoughts recorded on the Feast of the Holy Rosary, October 7, 1976, in Phu-Khanh prison, during his solitary confinement: “I am happy here, in this cell, where white mushrooms are growing on my sleeping mat, because You are here with me, because You want me to live here with You. I have spoken much in my lifetime: now I speak no more. It’s Your turn to speak to me, Jesus; I am listening to You.”

In 1993 U2 wrote a song called “The Wanderer” for Johnny Cash, which they then recorded with him. The result is a haunting picture of a sinful man looking for God in the modern world, all in Cash’s rich baritone. If you’ve never heard it, watch the movie below.

Our editor in chief has some poignant remarks on Tim Russert’s passing in today’s daily article on the homepage. Read those first. But also take a look at Peggy Noonan’s column.

A taste:

The beautiful thing about the coverage was that it offered extremely important information to those age 15 or 25 or 30 who may not have been told how to operate in the world beyond “Go succeed.” I’m not sure we tell the young as much as we ought, as clearly as we ought, what it is the world admires, and what it is they want to emulate.

In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn’t. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn’t, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better. That’s what it really admires. That’s what we talk about in eulogies, because that’s what’s important. We don’t say, “The thing about Joe was he was rich.” We say, if we can, “The thing about Joe was he took care of people.”

The young are told, “Be true to yourself.” But so many of them have no idea, really, what that means. If they don’t know who they are, what are they being true to? They’re told, “The key is to hold firm to your ideals.” But what if no one bothered, really, to teach them ideals?

After Tim’s death, the entire television media for four days told you the keys to a life well lived, the things you actually need to live life well, and without which it won’t be good. Among them: taking care of those you love and letting them know they’re loved, which involves self-sacrifice; holding firm to God, to your religious faith, no matter how high you rise or low you fall. This involves guts, and self-discipline, and active attention to developing and refining a conscience to whose promptings you can respond. Honoring your calling or profession by trying to do within it honorable work, which takes hard effort, and a willingness to master the ethics of your field. And enjoying life. This can be hard in America, where sometimes people are rather grim in their determination to get and to have. “Enjoy life, it’s ungrateful not to,” said Ronald Reagan.

And ask yourself this:

I’d add it’s not only the young, but the older and the old, who were given a few things to think about. When Tim’s friends started to come forward last Friday to speak on the air of his excellence, they were honestly grieving. They felt loss. So did people who’d never met him. Question: When you die, are people in your profession going to feel like this? Why not? What can you do better? When you leave, are your customers—in Tim’s case it was five million every Sunday morning, in your case it may be the people who come into the shop, or into your office—going to react like this? Why not?

A reader sends in a link to this report, just published online:

A new study of Texas’ Inpatient Hospital Discharge Public Use Data Files for 2000 through 2003 shows that the six US Catholic hospital systems operating in Texas reported providing contraceptive devices and medications as well as sterilizations of men and women in violation of human dignity and the Gospel (study may be downloaded from Catholic hospitals betray mission). Over 9,600 women were explicitly diagnosed for direct sterilization. 900 additional operations to interrupt fallopian tubes and 57 events related to legally induced abortion or “termination of pregnancy” were reported in circumstances that may also have violated Catholic hospital directives. The study does not include data on the hospitals’ provision of these procedures on an outpatient basis.

Though this data is from the earlier part of this decade, one wonders if it’s not part of a continuing trend. Consider this article in yesterday’s edition of the Washington Times:

Federal authorities are investigating the actions of a Catholic charity in Richmond which helped a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl to receive an abortion in January, in possible violation of Virginia law.

In possible violation of Catholic charity, too.

Bishop Arthur Serratelli of Patterson, NJ, in his diocesan newspaper The Beacon (via Whispers in the Loggia), writes a sound defense of the proposed new translation of the Mass. Or more accurately, a sound defense of the spirit in which the translation was made:

But there is something more at stake than pleasing individual tastes and preferences in the new liturgical translations. The new translations aim at a “language which is easily understandable, yet which at the same time preserves . . . dignity, beauty, and doctrinal precision” (Liturgiam Authenticam, 25). The new translations now being prepared are a marked improvement over the translations with which we have become familiar. They are densely theological. They respect the rich vocabulary of the Roman Rite. They carefully avoid the overuse of certain phrases and words.

The new translations also have a great respect for the style of the Roman Rite. Certainly, some sentences could be more easily translated to mimic our common speech. But they are not. And with reason. Latin orations, especially Post-Communions, tend to conclude strongly with a teleological or eschatological point. The new translations in English follow the sequence of these Latin prayers in order to end on a strong note. Many of our current translations of these prayers end weakly. Why should we strip the English translation of the distinctive theological emphases of the Latin text? A slightly non-colloquial word order can lead the listener to a greater attention to the point of the prayer. . . .

A language suited for the Liturgy: this is the one of great advantages of the work being done on the new translations. There is more to the Liturgy than the human language of any age or any one country. In the new translations of the Roman Missal, a conscious effort is being made to suit the human word to the divine action that the Liturgy truly is. As Pope Benedict XVI has said, the “central action of the Mass is fundamentally neither that of the priest as such nor of the laity as such, but of Christ the High Priest: This action of God, which takes place through human speech, is the real “action” for which all creation is in expectation. . . .This is what is new and distinctive about the Christian liturgy: God himself acts and does what is essential” (The Spirit of the Liturgy p. 173).

Bishop Serratelli is right: It’s not just an argument about taste. At the core is an argument over the nature of the liturgy itself. Is the Mass a time to teach the faith and worship God or a time to feel good about ourselves? Is the liturgy a foretaste of the communion of heaven or a party for our own enjoyment?

Not that these actions are mutually exclusive. We should enjoy the liturgy as a foretaste of heaven, and we should rejoice in the truths it proclaims. But the fundamental question remains: Is the Mass primarily about us or is it about God? According to Bishop Serratelli, the new translation of the Mass better points us toward its proper focus: the author of our salvation and the source of our joy.

The limerick is—or ought to be—the poetic genre ideally suited to the blogosphere: Short and pithy, quotable and memorable, feisty and funny and fine. And sometimes, just sometimes, it actually reveals a kernel of wisdom through the show of wit. Here are two eminent examples, from the respective fields of lapsarian theology and linguistic zoology:

St. Augustine thought he had found
The sin by which mankind is bound:
“It was not,” so said he,
“The fruit on the tree,
But the lust of the pair on the ground.”
—Bob L. Staples

The bustard’s an exquisite fowl
With minimal reason to growl:
He escapes what would be
Illegitimacy
By the grace of a fortunate vowel.
—George Vaill

Via Liberating the Limerick by Ernest W. Lefever.

In yesterday’s daily article, I wrote about the War on Abstinence being waged by Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. At the top of the Drudge Report this morning are news reports from Gloucester, Massachusetts, about seventeen girls—all under the age of sixteen—who made a pact to become pregnant together.

Not surprisingly, the Time magazine story pushes Catholicism as the problem and contraception as the answer right in the second paragraph: “The question of what to do next has divided this fiercely Catholic enclave. Even with national data showing a 3% rise in teen pregnancies in 2006—the first increase in 15 years—Gloucester isn’t sure it wants to provide easier access to birth control.”

But there was no contraception failure here. Nor was limited access to contraception the cause. These were intentional teen-age pregnancies—something a comprehensive sex-ed program doesn’t speak to. It appears that the students saw childbearing and rearing as a means to finally discovering unconditional love:

Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. “They’re so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally,” Ireland says. “I try to explain it’s hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m.”

This seems in keeping with the fascinating book that came out a few years ago by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage.

How will Planned Parenthood and the ACLU—with their emphasis that sexual autonomy rules the day—persuade these women that putting marriage before motherhood is the way to go?

In yesterday’s Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby writes of the the dangers of depopulation and of how having more people can help society. A sample:

Like other prejudices, the belief that more humanity means more misery resists compelling evidence to the contrary. In the past two centuries, the number of people living on earth has nearly septupled, climbing from 980 million to 6.5 billion. And yet human beings today are on the whole healthier, wealthier, longer-lived, better-fed, and better-educated than ever before.

The catastrophes foretold by Malthus and his epigones - some of them in bestsellers like “The Population Bomb,” which predicted that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now” - have never come to pass. That is because people are not our greatest liability. They are our greatest asset - the wellspring of every quality on which human advancement depends: ambition, intuition, perseverance, ingenuity, imagination, leadership, love.

True, fewer human beings would mean fewer mouths to feed. It would also mean fewer entrepreneurs, fewer pioneers, fewer problem-solvers. Which is why it is not an increase but the coming decrease in human population that should engender foreboding. For as Phillip Longman, a scholar of demographics and economics at the New America Foundation, observes: “Never in history have we had economic prosperity accompanied by depopulation.”

Via Real Clear Politics

Our friend Wesley J. Smith writes:

I have been warning and warning that a virulent anti-humanism is becoming rampant. A site on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (roughly akin to the BBC) Website–Planet Slayer–specifically, “Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator” tells you to enter and “find out when you should die!”

I kid you not. Hit the start button and find out when you should become six feet under (I assume cremation is worse than burial for global warming). I answered the questions roughly, and found I should have died at age 7.4. The pig (me) blew up in a bloody mess. Realize that this is being sold to children and it is shameful and profoundly nihilistic. And it illustrates again how profoundly anti-human and pro death certain aspects of our culture are becoming.

As Andrew Bolt, a blogger for the Herald Sun noted:

What a lovely insight into the green philosophy. Children should die to save the planet. [My son] Scott, I calculated, should have died at age 4.2.

A little joke, you will say. A mere attention grabber in a good cause. Trouble is, though, that there really is an insanely anti-human bent to deep green preaching on global warming, and there really are believers who feel only too keenly the planet is doomed by our sin, and humans must vanish.

Take the influential Gaia preacher Professor James Lovelock, whose latest book, The Revenge Of Gaia, calls for nine-tenths of humanity to vanish to “save” the planet from warming. Or hear the ABC’s Ockham’s Razor air a lecture by a former academic arguing we must “put something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system and would make a substantial proportion of the population infertile.”

And see the lengths to which some true believers now go. There’s Toni Vernelli, from animal liberation group PETA, who aborted her baby because “it would have been immoral to give birth to a child that I felt strongly would only be a burden to the world.” There’s Sarah Irving, from Ethical Consumer magazine, who sterilised herself because it “was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do” in a warming world.

In “The Silence of the Asparagus” I warned:

What is clear, however, is that Switzerland’s enshrining of “plant dignity” is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

And once we see “the planet” as personal, it is easier to see humans as the vermin good only for eradication. This is very, very dangerous. Is anybody paying attention?

One of the more annoying trumps played in discussions about politics, abortion, and voting is the “well, he gets all those pro-lifers to vote for him, but look at how little he’s done.” It’s annoying largely because it’s untrue. Most recently this line has been played by several members of the blog Vox Nova.

Christopher Blosser of the Catholics in the Public Square blog has a very helpful post in response with an exhaustive list of recent pro-life political measures. Here are a couple:

* Unborn Victims of Violence Act
* Born-Alive Infants Protection Act
* Partial Birth Abortion Ban
* Hyde/Weldon Conscience Protection Amendment
* The U.S. House turned back a “stealth attempt” by Democratic leadership to pass a “clone-and-kill” bill
* President Bush’s veto of legislation (S. 5) that would mandate federal funding of the type of stem cell research that requires the killing of human embryos, in addition to issuing an executive order to promote more federal funding for promising types of stem cell research that do not require harming human embryos.

Read the entire post here.

First it was DC’s voucher program under attack, now it’s New York’s charter schools. An opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal gives the details:

Charter schools are built on a simple idea. In exchange for less state funding and a mandate on performance, charters are exempt from many high-cost regulations that hamstring traditional public schools.

Tapestry Charter School in central Buffalo has accepted that bargain and has excelled. It has served lower- and middle-income students since it opened its doors in 2001. Today it has about 350 students and, like most charters, outperforms district public schools on state tests. With smaller class sizes, more individual attention, longer school days and a longer academic calendar, students at Tapestry receive nearly two years more of instruction by the time they enter high school than students in other schools.

Recently, Tapestry won approval to add high school grades, and this is where the trouble started. To accommodate these new grades as well as serve the other students, the school decided to build a new building. It expected to pay about $8.5 million.

But last autumn, as a sop to labor unions, Labor Commissioner M. Patricia Smith ordered charter schools to adhere to state “prevailing wage” requirements, which mandate paying union wages for construction projects and which typically add 30% or more to the cost of a project. In Tapestry’s case, it would add more than $1.5 million, putting the school’s building expansion plans on hold.

Since their inception, charter schools had been exempt from this state law which, like its federal counterpart, the Davis-Bacon Act, applies to most public-works projects. Last month, however, state trial judge Michael Lynch upheld the new mandate, erroneously applying labor law to charter schools beyond anything intended by the legislature or precedent. The case is on appeal and will likely be overturned, but that could take years.

The Institute for Marriage and Public Policy has just published a fascinating research brief, “Newspaper Reactions to California Marriage Cases.” How have Americans responded to the May 15 gay-marriage ruling?, it asks, turning to the editorial pages of the twenty largest U.S. newspapers as one major indicator. The results are striking: Of the twelve which published editorials on the matter, only four supported the ruling.

All this doesn’t mean that our journalists have suddenly had a mass moral conversion, but rather, in this case at least, that the media understands America and democracy better than the courts. Or better than the courts care to. The whole brief is well worth perusal, but following are some excerpts. In short, as Robert Miller has been arguing, marriage may best be defended by democracy—which is another way of saying, by the people.

The New York Post, in “Overreach on the Left Coast”: “The ruling was yet another unwise exercise in judicial activism: judges imposing their personal vision of a proper social order on an unwilling electorate.”

The Washington Post, in “Meddling in Gay Marriage”: Pre-1954 racial segregation was “a far cry from the California experience with the rights of same-sex couples. . . . [The judges] engaged in an unnecessary bout of judicial micromanagement by redefining marriage through a novel reading of the state constitution.”

The Wall Street Journal, in “Gay Marriage Returns”: “As with California’s Supreme Court, many of the berobed judiciary take it as their solemn duty to do the people’s thinking for them on the world’s most difficult and divisive social issues. So it was with Roe v. Wade, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared 50 state legislatures irrelevant. The aftermath has been more than 30 years of the abortion wars. California’s Supreme Court is not the law of the land, but its 4–3 ruling . . . explicitly told both the state’s voters and its elected legislatures to get lost.”

Former First Things assistant editor John Rose has spent the past year living in Spain while working for a think-tank there. He’s headed to Duke Divinity School in the fall, and his employer is looking for a replacement. Young readers of First Things might want to consider applying:

The Social Trends Institute is beginning a new STI Fellowship program this year. Applicants should be recent college graduates and native English speakers. They should also possess strong writing and organizational skills, and preferably speak some Spanish. Knowledge of website maintenance is a strong plus. Main responsibilities include: organization of experts meetings, book proposals and dissemination, preparing articles, website maintenance, new projects. A small team structure means a high level of responsibility and involvement in decisions.

This year’s fellowship will begin in September and last for one or two years. STI Fellows will be provided with a reasonable salary. Other benefits include the opportunity to live in Barcelona, Spain and work in a lively university environment. If you know a young person who fits this description, please encourage him or her to email a resume and cover letter to ksemler@iese.edu.

If you’re in New York today, you might want to attend the following public forum:

“What Did Pope Benedict Say to America?”

Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus (Editor in Chief, First Things)
Fr. John Farren, OP (Director of Advancement,
Dominican Province of St. Joseph)
Angelo Mater (Publisher and Editor, Godspy.com)

June 18 at 7:00 PM
St. Vincent Ferrer Church Hall

On June 18, join us for a public forum entitled “What Did Pope Benedict Say to America?” Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus, Fr. John Farren, OP, and Angelo Matera will reflect on the Pope’s recent apostolic journey to our country, focusing particularly on his messages to American Catholics, American non-Catholics, and American culture. A question-and-answer session will conclude the evening. Call 212-744-2080 or visit www.csvf.org.

I’m not sure that Jody is correct to say that “At this point, it appears the question isn’t whether same-sex marriage is going to be imposed on the nation by the courts—but how far the demand for acquiescence from the rest of us is going to be pushed.”

The majority of states have enacted some form of marriage protection, at either the constitutional or statutory level, and public opinion—even in CA—is still in favor of traditional marriage. Yes, the younger generations are more inclined than the older generations to support same-sex marriage. But with solid arguments they can be persuaded.

To that end, I’ll link to two short articles that offer some publicly-accessible lines of reasoning about same-sex marriage.

Here is a review of David Blankenhorn’s book The Future of Marriage that I co-authored with Robert P. George.

And here is an article I wrote after the release of two documents: “Beyond Gay Marriage” (bad) and the “Princeton Principles on Marriage” (good).

Both articles provide summaries of what the best social science, anthropology, and philosophy have to say in defense of marriage as traditionally conceived, along with analyses of where same-sex marriage will take us.

Opera is known for its ridiculous plots, but La Scala is taking it up a notch. According to the New York Times, they have commissioned the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli to write an opera of Al Gore’s book An Inconvenient Truth. The Times’ John Tierney has a marvelous satire of what this might look like. Here’s a sample:

Perhaps, as you complain, Petroleo does exude a certain glamour in his patter song promising magic lanterns and horseless carriages and flying machines. But when he seduces the chief Minemaiden, the music darkens with a menacing crescendo as they embrace, singing “Combustione! Combustione!” There is no mistaking the unholiness of their union, nor its catastrophic consequence once their daughter Carbonia is born.

I grant you it would be more chemically precise to give Carbonia twin siblings named after oxygen. But this would dilute the role and doom our chances of getting Anna Netrebko for Carbonia, and she is essential for the scene on Olympus. If it is to be credible, we must have a Carbonia with the sinister beauty to inflame the passions of Zeus, Poseidon, Aether and the other weather gods. . . .

I don’t share your fear that audiences will expect Prince Algorino to “offset his travel footprint,” so I don’t see the need for the tree-planting scene you suggest. Once the Weather Seer has explained Poseidon’s passion and shown him the rising seas, Algorino should immediately rush back to save Gaia. And why, with his lover in peril, would he pause en route to rescue a drowning polar bear?

In a web article last week, I reproduced my testimony before the Appropriations Committee of the Pennsylvania Senate concerning S.B. 1250, a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would limit marriage to unions of one man and one woman. I argued that sooner or later someone will file a lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s current marriage laws and that such a suit will require the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to decide whether the general anti-discrimination provisions in the state constitution require the state to recognize same-sex marriages. I then argued that judges have no superior insight into the moral, philosophical and political questions that the issue of same-sex marriage raises, and so it would be better to settle the question democratically by allowing the people of Pennsylvania to vote on the matter.

Responding to this argument, some critics (including Michael Perry at www.mirrorofjustice.org, for which see here and here) have said that, if the key point concerns resolving the issue democratically rather than judicially, then I ought to support not the amendment actually proposed in S.B. 1250 (which limits marriage to unions of one man and one woman) but an amendment that would simply strip from the Pennsylvania judiciary the ability to decide the issue (e.g., “Nothing in this constitution shall be interpreted to require or prohibit the state from recognizing marriages between individuals of the same sex”). Such an amendment would prevent a judicial resolution of the issue and leave the matter in the normal legislative process.

There is some truth in this argument, and I would happily support such an amendment. Political realities in Pennsylvania are such, however, that if the legislature approves any amendment to the Pennsylvania constitution, it’s very likely to be in the form of the amendment actually proposed in S.B. 1250. Hence, for practical purposes, it’s S.B. 1250 or nothing. If there is to be a political debate in Pennsylvania about same-sex marriage, therefore, the Pennsylvania legislature has to bring S.B. 1250 before the voters.

This raises, however, another important point, which is that people on different sides of the same-sex marriage debate will tend to think differently about the relative merits of a democratic versus judicial resolution of the issue. In short, opponents of same-sex marriage have a special interest in a democratic resolution whereas proponents of same-sex marriage have a special interest in a judicial resolution.

For, if the state supreme court takes a same-sex marriage case, there are roughly two possible outcomes: either, the court decides that the state constitution requires same-sex marriage (as in the recent California decision), or else the court decides that the state constitution does not require same-sex marriage (as happened in New York). In the former case, the proponents of same-sex marriage win outright and opponents of same-sex marriage lose outright. In the latter, the issue remains in the normal political process, and both sides can continue to advocate for their views in the state legislature (even though the opponents of same-sex marriage will be somewhat helped, and the proponents of same-sex marriage somewhat harmed, because the non-discrimination argument made by the latter will have been authoritatively rejected in the courts).

From the point of view of opponents of same-sex marriage, therefore, allowing the judiciary a crack at the same-sex marriage issue has great down-side risk and little upside potential. From the point of view of proponents of same-sex marriage, however, the situation is exactly reversed: allowing the judiciary a crack at the issue has great upside potential and only limited downside risk. For this reason, opponents of same-sex marriage are likely to favor, and proponents of same-sex marriage are likely to oppose, even a constitutional amendment that merely strips the judiciary of authority to settle the issue.

Given these facts, if (as I think right) constitutional principle requires a democratic resolution of the same-sex marriage issue, the burden of generating a democratic debate on the issue by bringing a constitutional amendment before the people will tend to fall largely on the opponents of same-sex marriage. Even if democratic principles we all tend to agree on favor a democratic rather than a judicial resolution of the issue, it is unreasonable to expect proponents of same-sex marriage to assist in bringing before the people an amendment that is adverse to their immediate interests. But, if proponents of same-sex marriage cannot reasonably be expected to assist in generating a democratic debate about the issue (and may even work against bringing the matter in whatever form before the people), then by the same token opponents of same-sex marriage cannot reasonably be expected to bear the burden of generating the needed debate without framing the amendment in a way that, if enacted, settles the issue in a way favorable to them. In other words, if we cannot reasonably expect proponents of same-sex marriage to assist in generating a political debate largely contrary to their immediate interests, we similarly cannot reasonably expect opponents of same-sex marriage to generate the political debate otherwise than on terms largely favorable to their immediate interests.

It follows that, as a matter of constitutional principle and given political realities and what we can reasonably expect from people in the public square, bringing S.B. 1250 before the people is probably the best available solution of the same-sex marriage issue in Pennsylvania.

At this point, it appears the question isn’t whether same-sex marriage is going to be imposed on the nation by the courts—but how far the demand for acquiescence from the rest of us is going to be pushed. Will clergy who refuse to perform such marriages be punished? Will churches that lack ceremonies for such marriages be deprived of tax-free status.

“If past rulings are any guide, it is religious rights that are likely to be obliterated” when they run up against things like the California Supreme Courts utter assurance of the rightness of its rulings on same-sex marriage. Or so, at least, notes the American Jewish Congress’ Marc D. Stern in an op-ed today in the Los Angeles Times.

“Allowing same-sex couples to force religious individuals or organizations to act out of accord with their faith is not cost-free,” he adds. “Their dignity is no less affected. Unless claims rooted in equal protection under the law are to sweep away claims rooted in freedom of religion, a more sensitive balancing approach is essential.”

A worrying account and an essential read.

Marc Stern, general counsel of the American Jewish Congress, has a good column in the L.A. Times today. He concludes: “If past rulings are any guide, it is religious rights that are likely to be “obliterated” by an emerging popular majority supporting same-sex relationships — and it seems unlikely that the California courts will intervene. That’s a shame.”

Stern echoes a lot of the points Maggie Gallagher made two years ago in a cover story for the Weekly Standard. That article is well-worth (re-)reading.

Archbishop Edwin O’Brien of Baltimore has made public a stiff letter of concern about the activities of the Legion of Christ and its lay affiliate, Regnum Christi, setting out guidelines to be met for its continuing operation in the archdiocese. In the course of his letter he notes the grave charges of sexual abuse made against the founder of the Legion, Fr. Marcial Maciel, which led in May 2006 to the Holy See’s directing him to retire to a life of penitence and prayer. Fr. Maciel died in January of this year. Jason Berry, who has been reporting on priestly sex abuse for many years, is now bringing out a new documentary on Fr. Maciel and the Legion, “Vows of Silence.” Following the action by the Holy See, Fr. Neuhaus wrote this in the Aug-Sep installment of The Public Square: “I do not know all that the CDF and the Holy Father know and am not privy to the considerations that led to their decision. It is reasonable to believe that they concluded that Fr. Maciel did do something very seriously wrong. To censure publicly, toward the end of his life, the founder of a large and growing religious community is an extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented, measure in Catholic history. Moreover, because the only public and actionable charges against Fr. Maciel had to do with sexual abuse, the clear implication is that that was the reason for the censure. In view of the public knowledge of the charges, it is not plausible that he was censured for some other and unknown reason.” The Legion has promised to comply with the guidelines specified by Archbishop O’Brien.