The question is not whether Germany’s policy violates the American Constitution, whether it violates the parameters of an international treaty or whether Germany’s law is a good idea. It is whether the Romeikes have established the prerequisites of an asylum claim—a well-founded fear of persecution on account of a protected ground.
The Romeikes have not met this burden. The German law does not on its face single out any protected group, and the Romeikes have not provided sufficient evidence to show that the law’s application turns on prohibited classifications or animus based on any prohibited ground.
The family will in all likelihood appeal this decision, asking first of all for an en banc rehearing before the entire Sixth Circuit and then for their day in court before the Supreme Court. I do not have high hopes for them. After all, I have a hard time disagreeing with with George W. Bush appointee Judge Jeffrey Sutton that:
The United States has not opened its doors to every victim of unfair treatment, even treatment that our laws do not allow. That the United States Constitution protects the rights of “parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control,”…does not mean that a contrary law in another country establishes persecution on religious or any other protected ground. And even if, as the Romeikes claim, several human-rights treaties joined by Germany give parents the right to make decisions about their children’s educations . . . that by itself does not require the granting of an American asylum application. . . .
As then-Judge Alito explained, “the concept of persecution does not encompass all treatment that our society regards as unfair, unjust, or even unlawful or unconstitutional. If persecution were defined that expansively, a significant percentage of the world’s population would qualify for asylum in this country—and it seems most unlikely that Congress intended such a result.”
There was a time when a member of Congress could have offered a private member’s bill to deal with hardship cases like these, but that time is, as I understand it, long since past. More to the point, the Obama administration could have left well enough alone by not seeking to overturn the initial decision to grant asylum to the family.
I’m tempted to advise the Romeikes to start behaving like other immigrants who have no legal permission to be here and await the almost-inevitable immigration reform deal that would put their status on the road to normalization. But I want homeschooling parents to teach their children to obey the law. Perhaps some sympathetic member of Congress could find room in the current immigration reform proposals for a provision prying open our gates to foreign homeschoolers whose countries treat them harshly.
]]>They also understand quite well making a living, something that is pounded into them on a variety of fronts.
But making a life? A few could explain it, but most essentially assimilated it to making a living. If you love your job (and it’s “meaningful”), you’re making a life. Most, in other words, seemed unaware of the possibility of a rich and deep life outside the workplace. That’s the disheartening part of the experience for me, since the “liberal” part of a liberal education is supposed to be precisely about that. (If I could found my own college and money were no object, its motto would be: “Majors are for drones.” As my daughter would say, “just kidding.”)
So, as professors do when they’re in the throes of grading and want some sympathy, I took to Facebook and posed the question about the motto to the alumni who have condescended to friend me. The results were gratifying. To a person, they got it and could articulate the difference between making a life and making a living. It helps, I suppose, that they have some experience–not just book learning–with both, and have recognized that much of what gives their lives meaning doesn’t take place at the office or (dare I say it?) in the classroom.
But I’d like to think that discussing Aristotle’s conception of moral virtue, reading Plato’s Republic (not to mention other “Great Books”), and pondering life’s big questions with fellow students and with me–how shall I say it?–made a difference.
]]>Whatever might be the case for the Board of Trustees, whose statement acknowledges internal disagreement about these matters, students and faculty seem vociferously opposed to the decision to maintain this connection to the college’s denominational heritage. Students are typically present-minded (that’s the nice way of putting it). As far as they’re concerned, they are the college, and they don’t have much sense that they’re part of an institution whose identity persists over time (and whose character should change, if at all, only through a respectful consideration of that heritage). They came to Davidson because of its academic reputation, and that really seems to be all that matters to them.
The most respectable articulation of faculty opposition is offered by Douglas F. Ottati:
The Reformed tradition “wants to support a college of liberal arts and sciences that will further what is called ‘true religion’ in the tradition,” he said. That tradition “encourages people to engage in free inquiry. This is a tradition that thinks when you are studying the world, you are studying God’s world.” This world view “wants to invite people to practice and reflect on their commitments — religious and non-religious,” he said. . . .
Ottati said that it’s true that there are colleges of strong academic quality that require everyone to sign a statement of faith or share a specific set of beliefs. And he said that many colleges founded in a tradition of faith have decided to “just relinquish it.”
He said he believes there is much to be gained by “a middle road in which you try to embody this tradition, but at the same time you are not going to be exclusionary.”
Davidson will be true to its heritage, he said, if it ends the religious test, but simply states that it expects good candidates for president to understand, appreciate and support the college’s religious roots and values. Many such people are not Presbyterian, he said.
It’s true, he said, that some people fear a shift would result in a loss of religious identity. But Ottati stressed that the religious identity of Davidson is an inclusive one, and that the board is diverging from that religious tradition. “If we have an exclusionary requirement we’re going to end up undercutting some of these most deeply held traditions,” he said. “If the only way to save a tradition is to kill it, that’s not a happy circumstance.”
Perhaps this middle ground is tenable, but I doubt it. First of all, it seems insensitive to the fact that almost all the pressure on a college like Davidson is secularizing. To retain any connection with a religious heritage at all requires a great deal of effort, pulling hard against the prevailing winds. Second, while I agree that studying the world as God’s world is a good place to begin a consideration of the life of the mind in a religious context, there’s a temptation to hold your understanding of God hostage to what you think you learn about the world. I’d be more comfortable if there were an equal emphasis in his articulation of the tradition on God’s Word.
I guess that’s why we should be glad that there are trustees.
]]>We have made an idol of choice, regarding it as the logical concomitant of our “natural” freedom. But freedom so conceived is really anti-natural, for it demands that we do away with all the barriers and constraints that come from nature (and, I might add, nature’s creator). The only way to overcome nature and hence to facilitate choice is to acquire power, lots of it. Choice requires empowerment, in other words. But what is truly empowered in this process is not the human being, but the organization (that is, the government) that purports to empower him or her. C.S. Lewis, by the way, saw this in The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength.
Our libertarians, so infatuated with choice, are really infatuated with what facilitates or empowers that choice—that is, with government.
The antidote is to recognize what we are made for, about which our bodies (created by the creator) give us some very strong hints. We can through very great efforts seem to overcome the limits of our bodies (in medicine, we sometimes call that “playing God”), but that doesn’t free us so much as it makes us dependent, not on the partners for whom we were made, but on the Leviathan that offers us choices.
The fundamental issue here is not anyone’s sexual orientation; it’s the assumption that choice, pleasure, and self-fulfillment are our be-all and end-all, an assumption that many—nay, all—of us sinners share.
]]>If I had to name one reason for their dislike, it’s the tight connection between marriage and children that the book draws. All of them say they want to get married, but I haven’t heard one express any real enthusiasm for having children. I suppose that that might change with age (and the right spouse), but I’ll credit them with having given the matter some serious thought and won’t attribute it to the short-sighted self-absorption of youth. So for them marriage isn’t even in principle about having kids. It is about emotional intimacy and lifelong commitment. Again, I give them credit for distinguishing between the emotions of the moment and the moral commitments that begin from, but transcend, those emotions.
Of course, I agree with Girgis and company that there’s no principled distinction between this sort of “marital” promise and any other contract into which I might enter to satisfy the passion of the moment. The energy underlying the commitment comes from my integrity or my interest in appearing to possess integrity (the difference, perhaps, between a Kantian and a Hobbesian reading of the contract). The state might enforce such contracts simply because we want it to, just as we would want it to enforce other contracts that provide goods to the partners. But we couldn’t regard them as anything special, with all the costs that the book well elucidates–costs, by the way, that we’re already paying.
My nightmare is this: There’s a continuum between the attitudes my students display and the largely unappealing portrait of prospective parenthood sketched by this anonymous father. Here’s hoping his twin boys never read his self-indulgent expressions of dismay (pre-partum depression?) at the prospect of bringing them into the world. (I can’t help but think in this connection of friends for whom similar treatments produced triplets, to add to the boy they already had. My friend’s quip: “We wanted three, but settled for four.” Amen, brother.) May the grace of God rescue my students from harboring the thoughts so frankly expressed in that post. And may the grace of God change this man’s heart, so that he and his wife come to welcome the gifts they have been given.
]]>The latter post deals with a Wisconsin case, where the Elmbrook School District, with the able assistance of attorneys from the Becket Fund and, among others, Michael McConnell, has petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari. That petition compellingly makes the argument that the en banc Seventh Circuit panel extends the logic of the Supreme Court’s school prayer cases–already in some measure questionable, so far as I’m concerned–far beyond what is appropriate, conflicts withe other appellate decisions, and calls into question any use of church facilities for public purposes (e.g., as a precinct site during elections). Those are reasons enough for the Court to hear the case.
Here’s hoping and (dare I say?) praying that the Supreme Court agrees to hear this case. There is a concerted campaign by organizations like Americans United to force school districts all over the country to refrain from using church sanctuaries, often the most convenient and comfortable venues available, from commencement exercises. Absent a decision from our highest court, the Seventh Circuit decision stands as the freshest “authority” that can be cited, even if it technically doesn’t govern any disputes outside its geographic area.
And perhaps Professor McConnell can persuade some of his erstwhile brothers on the bench to restore a little post-Sandra Day O’Connor sanity to the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence. If not now, when?
]]>“It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling us back . . . for blacks to be back in the back of the bus . . . for women to be back in the kitchen . . . for immigrants to be back on their side of the border.”
The Washington Post story includes gays and lesbians in this list of things conservatives apparently wish to restore to some imagined status quo ante.
I get it. Easter changes everything, assuring us of an ultimate triumph over all our earthly ills:
“Easter vision” will allow you to see the whole world in a different way. “There is no injustice so insidious that there can be no truth . . . no war so deep that there can be no peace . . . no enemy so bitter that they can’t become a friend.”
But the priest here seems to focus on the future of the here and now, on a “new and improved” here and now, not on eternity. His “Easter vision” is emphatically this-worldly and political.
If President Obama wanted that, he could have stayed at home and read the Sunday papers. Indeed, perhaps sermons like this one are why increasing numbers of people are doing just that.
]]>In addition to open letters to President Obama and the House and Senate leadership, the group has issued a statement on citizenship, organized an Evangelical Day of Prayer and Action for Immigration Reform, and issued the “I Was a Stranger” challenge.
The group favors immigration reform that upholds the following principles:
I have no doubt that the organization means well, and that its members wish to approach immigration reform in a humane and biblically-informed way. I took the trouble this morning to look up the forty Bible verses they would like us to contemplate and pray over. Many from the Old Testament urge Israel to treat sojourners justly, typically mentioning them in the same breath with widows and orphans, i.e., those outside the protection of a household headed by what may loosely be called a citizen. It’s hard to derive anything about a path to citizenship from these verses; indeed, the organization seems to exclude a few verses (like Ex. 12:48, when we’re supposed to contemplate Ex. 12:49) that show how high the barriers are for full inclusion. I’m tempted to go even further and insist that most of the verses presuppose a more or less permanent distinction between Israel and those who sojourn among it.
Let me state the problematical character of the Old Testament verses in another way. They call Israel to some combination of charitable or compassionate behavior and what we would now call equal protection of the laws. I can offer someone charity and equal protection of the laws without offering him or her a path to citizenship. That much is surely required when we regard our fellows as created in God’s image. But neither in the Old Testament nor in any political theory that takes its departure from human dignity is there a requirement that particular human communities extend full membership to all who request it.
The New Testament verses aren’t on the whole more straightforwardly helpful to the organization’s cause. Matthew 25:35 is a call for personal charity and hospitality, not to admission to citizenship. Paul’s speech in the Areopagus (Acts 17: 22-31) would seem to cut in a different direction as well, focusing on God’s providential creation of different nations:
And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him.
Similarly problematic is Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians (2:14-18, omitting the highly relevant 2:19):
For he [Jesus] himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.
The universality and catholicity is of the city of God, not the city of man, but the members of the Evangelical Immigration Table don’t want to call our attention to this, so to speak, inconvenient truth. Indeed, other passages (from Philippians and 1 Peter) make more or less the same point: that, as Christians, we are sojourners whose true citizenship is in heaven.
I don’t know if I’m enough of an “Evangelical thought leader” to sign their statement of principles (there are people I admire and respect who have signed), and I’m tempted to sign onto the general principles, but the path from Scripture to those principles is, as I hope I’ve shown, hardly straightforward. Sola Scriptura doesn’t get them all the way, it seems to me.
]]>Here’s the way Senator Rob Portman characterized it when he announced his change of heart on the subject, one that I don’t think was calculated for political benefit:
British Prime Minister David Cameron has said he supports allowing gay couples to marry because he is a conservative, not in spite of it. I feel the same way. We conservatives believe in personal liberty and minimal government interference in people’s lives. We also consider the family unit to be the fundamental building block of society. We should encourage people to make long-term commitments to each other and build families, so as to foster strong, stable communities and promote personal responsibility.
Let’s start with his statement about personal liberty and minimal government interference. Most would call that one of the hallmarks of American conservatism, but I say: not so fast. It all depends upon why you favor these things. Perhaps you think that an individual–Thomas Hobbes’s “ordinary husbandman”–is the best judge of what’s good for himself or herself. If it’s a matter of mere preferences, there’s no reason to think that anyone else’s preferences ought to be substituted for my own. And whatever superiority there might be in another’s reason or judgment doesn’t compensate for the difference in preferences. The fact that your IQ is higher than mine gives you no basis for saying that you may substitute your preference for rocky road over mine for mint chocolate chip.
So far, so good, but the devil is in the details. There are still two questions–at least–to consider here. The most obvious one is how we distinguish between matters of personal preference and those matters of the common good which require some sort of common judgment. I might add to this also the issue of how we arrive at a common judgment: Is it by collecting private preferences or some process of rational deliberation, in which it’s conceivable to consider relevant differences of authority or judgment? The former is not obviously conservative, the latter may or may not be.
A second consideration here is the status of reason. Is the distrust of government based upon a distrust of human reason generally or upon a claim of the sufficiency of individual reason? Confidence in the sovereign sufficiency of human reason to guide one’s life isn’t exactly conservative.
Perhaps a better model for the role of reasonable conservatism is the Kass-Mansfield brief in Hollingsworth v. Perry (the California Proposition 8 case). Consider, for example, this statement:
There could conceivably come a time when supporters of traditional marriage are compelled by scientific evidence to acknowledge that same-sex marriage is not harmful to children or to society at large. That day is not here, and there is not the slightest reason to think it is imminent. It is no less possible that scientific evidence will eventually show that redefining marriage to encompass unions of samesex couples does have harmful effects on our society and its children. That day is also not yet here, but there is no basis for this or any other court to conclude that it will never arrive. Now and for the foreseeable future, claims that science provides support for constitutionalizing a right to same-sex marriage must necessarily rest on ideology.
The statement doesn’t rest upon a doctrinaire view of small government and large personal freedom. It doesn’t insist upon the unassailable authority of tradition. It doesn’t run ahead of the evidence in the name of some abstract ideology. Rather, it insists upon the scrupulous and careful weighing of the evidence, as it becomes available.
What’s more, the Kass-Mansfield brief offers a somewhat different version of the relevant common good than does Sen. Portman. The latter relies upon the following abstraction–the “family unit” is the “fundamental building block [is there another kind?] of society.” For him, the family is the locus of “long-term commitments” that “foster strong, stable communities and promote personal responsibility.” He says nothing about children. I have nothing against contractual commitments (which, by the way, assume as well as promote personal responsibility). But the abstraction of Sen. Portman’s argument leads us in two directions that it would be hard to regard as conservative.
The first is that it treats all long-term commitments as equally contributing to community and responsibility, thereby providing us no basis for distinguishing between two-person and multi-person marriages. (For the recond, I doubt he intends this, but he is a prisoner of his own abstractions.) The second is that the language of commitment is, in a sense, subjective. I enter into commitments voluntarily, as it pleases me. The language of obligation, which he doesn’t use, implies responsibilities that aren’t necessarily voluntary, such as moral laws that oblige one whether one consents or not. Such language ought to roll trippingly off the tongues of conservatives.
By focusing on the contested terrain of the effect of same-sex marriage on the well-being of children, Kass and Mansfield call our attention to obligations that are in no sense of the term voluntary. Whether we like it or not, children deserve our concern and care; we are obliged to care for and about them. They provide reasons for entering into “long-term commitments” that aren’t simply a matter of personal preference. I recognize that there are all sorts of “reasons” for paying attention to the connection between child-rearing and family formation, but, as they say, the heart has its own reasons and doesn’t really require social science.
We can, and should, reason all we want about these matters, but we have to recognize that at the center of our concern ought to be a consideration that isn’t in the first instance “rational.” Leon Kass and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. get it. So should all the others who call themselves conservative.
]]>This essay on how economists view and study the family does a very good job of highlighting the limits of that approach. Here’s a taste:
Superficially, economic models catch a little of the truth of marriage in our culture. There is even something noble in economists’ assumption that social life is based on mutually beneficial exchange, rather than on coercion and plunder. But this is not nearly so noble and beautiful as what philosophy, theology, literature, and married men and women throughout history can tell us about the real substance of marriage. This substance is love, which is willing the good of another as other. Love in marriage is willing the good of your spouse, full stop. It is not willing the good of your spouse so that your spouse will return the favor.
Love is not an exchange. It is more correctly seen as a transformation. Love transforms the lover into the one who is loved. When we love our spouse, we become one with our spouse. Thus a model of self-interested exchange between two autonomous individuals cannot capture the heart of marriage.
As they say, read the whole thing.
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