–Hunter, dear child, scientific knowledge IS the opposite of faith. We’re not “being insincere,” your faith is NOT rational.

And just like marriage, the Constitutional answer is to remove the State from the process. If you let marriage, divorce, adoption, etc. be the sole province of private organizations all will have greater freedom to act according to particular religious dictates, including the Catholic Church.

Of course this too can work against you — a hypothetical Muslim or Atheist adoption agency would be able discriminate against Christians, and Mainline Protestant Churches would be able to offer Gay Marriage as equally valid as Traditional Marriage.

Suffice it to see that the old adage is true – Freedom isn’t free. The price is the tolerance of others’ freedom and the equal treatment of all under the law. For some, that is simply too high a price to pay.

“From there, it was only a short step to the headline “State Putting Church Out of Adoption Business,” which ran over an opinion piece in the Boston Globe by John Garvey, dean of Boston College Law School. It’s worth underscoring that Catholic Charities’ problem with the state didn’t hinge on its receipt of public money. Ron Madnick, president of the Massachusetts chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, agreed with Garvey’s assessment: “Even if Catholic Charities ceased receiving tax support and gave up its role as a state contractor, it still could not refuse to place children with same-sex couples.”

The whole article is at:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/191kgwgh.asp

Adoption services offered by certain persons or agencies; penalty
[Text of section effective until July 8, 2008]

Section 11A. Any person or entity other than a DULY AUTHORIZED AGENT or employee of the department of social services or a child care or placement agency licensed under the provisions of chapter twenty-eight A, who causes to be published in the commonwealth an advertisement or notice of children offered or wanted for adoption, or in any way offers to place, locate or dispose of children offered or wanted for adoption, or who holds himself out in any way as being able to place, locate or dispose of children for adoption shall be punished by a fine of not less than one hundred nor more than one thousand dollars.

Chapter 28A: Section 9. Definitions applicable to this section and Secs. 10 to 16
[Text of section effective until July 31, 2008]

“Placement agency”, a department, agency or institution of the commonwealth, or any political subdivision thereof, or any organization incorporated under the laws of the commonwealth, one of the principal purposes of which is to provide custodial care and social services to children, which receives by agreement with a parent or guardian and under contract with a state agency or as a result of referral by a court of competent jurisdiction, any child under 18 years of age for placement in family foster care or a group care facility.

For the purposes of adoption placement, however, a “placement agency” shall be a department, agency or institution of the commonwealth, or any political subdivision thereof, or any organization incorporated under chapter 180, one of the principal purposes of which is to provide custodial care and SOCIAL SERVICES to children, which receives by agreement with a parent or guardian and UNDER CONTRACT WITH A STATE AGENCY or as a result of referral by a court of competent jurisdiction, any child under the age of 18 years of age for placement in adoption.

That strikes me as kinda an early place to draw the Enlightenment line.

I know Dinesh D’Souza has, for some time, argued racism as we know it an invention of Western Enlightenment thought. However, his is a specially plead definition of the concept — a reasonable definition, but by no means universally accepted (having to do with modern biological/genetic understandings).

Some of the things Jefferson said in Notes on the State of VA, in this vein (as armchair scientist of genetic differences between races) are quite cringe worthy.

D’Souza’s critics have noted the concept of ethnic or “group” oriented bigotry — not all that different from “racism” — goes back forever. What the Hutus and Tutsis had against one another may not have been technically “racism” because they are both groups are black; it’s just as bad and arguably comes from the same bad place as racism. And that kind of thing isn’t an invention of the Enlightenment.

Anyway, I’m getting back to grading papers.

Perhaps I will see you on Monday or Tuesday at Princeton?

That’s precisely why the Perez’s were forbidden to marry in California. The secular racist standards did not allow them to participate in the Catholic sacrament of marriage.

“Secular” and “religious” do no intellectual work at all. They are an adjectival means to engage in metaphysical apartheid.

As for the Enlightenment–to answer Jon–I should have said “after the beginning of the Enlightenment,” which I trace to its roots in the 15th and 16th centuries. The decline of confidence in knowing essences and natures–beginning with the medieval nominalists which shaped the ideas of Descartes, Bacon–as well as the age exploration, made racism too good to pass up. Once you deny that our minds are capable of extracting a real human nature from our encounters with particular human beings, you become a skeptic about our ability to know there is a real human nature. And given the big differences between Western culture and what the explorers found in Africa, and the economic benefits of slavery, you had in place both the philosophical and economic incentives.

People in the Middle Ages knew of non-white and non-European cultures. In fact, there were many saints from a variety of racial grounds in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Racism, as we know it today, is a recent invention in human history. But its evil not only lies in the damage it does to its victims. It also lies in the way in which superficial characteristics have been allowed to blind us to what our untainted intellect can clearly see: we all share the same nature, and all made in God’s image.

The Constitutional answer, Francis Beckwith, is to remove the state from adoptions and so remove the limitations upon private organizations like the Catholic Church.

Okay. I haven’t meticulously delved into the footnotes with this as I have other things. And I’ve learned that once you delve in, sometimes you learn the prevailing scholarly wisdom is wrong.

However, I wonder if you’ve read this article and can explain some of its claims.

http://hnn.us/articles/4708.html

In one part, the author writes:

“The first law against interracial marriage was passed in the colony of Maryland in 1664. It set a precedent that spread to the North as well as the South: Massachusetts, for example, adopted a miscegenation law in 1705. After British colonies turned into American states, they continued, one by one, to pass miscegenation laws, until, by the time of the Civil War, they covered most of the south, much of the mid-West, and were beginning to appear in western states, too. Before the Civil War, there was only one significant challenge to this pattern of steady expansion. In Massachusetts, in the 1830s, a remarkable group of radical abolitionists went out on a limb to argue that the Massachusetts miscegenation law contradicted the fundamental American principle of civil equality. For more than a decade, abolitionists urged the Massachusetts state legislature to repeal the law; finally, in 1843, they succeeded.”

Arguably the time and place of these periods are not “Enlightenment.” This wasn’t Kant, Hegel or even Locke.

No doubt about it, Jon. But, what’s interesting is that these arguments come after the Enlightenment, and the Catholic Church never, ever entertains them. It is an exclusively American Protestant (and not all American Protestants, of course) phenomenon, just as in the case of the anti-alcohol craze. From my reading of the literature, the religious arguments against intermarriage were the typical attempt on the part of religious citizens to “get with the times” and be “enlightened.” This is why the arguments are never really biblically or theologically very good. They are ad hoc attempts on the part of religious folks to show that they are educated and “scientific” about race.

Interestingly enough, in the California Supreme Court, Perez v. Sharp (1948), the precursor to the U. S. Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia (1967), the couple, a black man and an Hispanic woman, partially base their case on their Catholic faith, which has no prohibition of intermarriage. It’s fascinating how that fact never makes into the press.