The Washington Post runs a weekly feature in its Sunday “Outlook” section, examining “Five Myths About” something new each week.  Of course the whole point about such a feature is to have a guest writer debunk some notions that are widely believed to be true but aren’t.  Therefore it isn’t surprising if someone says of an attempted debunking, “but that isn’t a myth at all–it’s true!”  The weekly feature is also fairly space-constrained, so the guest debunker has to give a concentrated dose of truth if he is going to get his argument across.  Either that, or he has to choose some easy targets, with the obvious risk that he will appear to have chosen straw men in which no one really does believe.

Jonathan Rauch cannot be accused of picking straw men, in his contribution from the latest “Outlook,” titled “Five Myths About Same-Sex Marriage.”  But he has not delivered on the concentrated dose of the truth that this demanding format requires.  Four out of his five “myths” are plainly true, completely true, unassailably true, and all Rauch accomplishes is to run aground on the hard shoals of the truth.  Only one of his myths, the last one, is in any way a “myth” at all.  (It’s also the one that relatively few people believe, as well.)  Let’s take them each in turn.

1.  Rauch’s first “myth” is that “letting gay couples get married redefines marriage.”  He accepts as a “true premise” the proposition that “with few exceptions, marriage has always been about uniting the two sexes and linking mother and father to children.”  But he calls it a “false conclusion” to say that changing this means that “marriage ceases to be marriage.”  Why is that false?  Because, Rauch says, “marriage multitasks.”  It’s an institution that does lots of other things, and has various “social benefits” for those brought within its boundaries.

This is true but not exactly on point.  Marriage has historically been about many things–about legitimacy of offspring, and inheritance, and the acquisition and transmission of property, and the alliances of families, and even about international relations in the case of royalty. (more…)

Over at Public Discourse (published by the Witherspoon Institute, where I work), you can already see tomorrow morning’s article, the first of a three-part series by Greg Forster, titled “Evangelicals and Politics: The Hundred Years’ War.”  I think it’s very thought-provoking, and I look forward to the remaining installments.

I find much less thought-provoking Greg’s post just below, in which he accuses me of being “inquisitorial” and just all-around unfair to Richard Grenell (the correct spelling of his name), recently named foreign-policy spokesman to the Romney campaign.  Fortunately, all the evidence of the unwisdom of this appointment is contained in the NRO Corner posts to which Greg links, and in the links therein.  I particularly commend to readers’ attention the links to Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post, and to Grenell himself at the Washington Blade.  Readers, it’s your call whether I engaged in an unjust “personal diatribe,” or whether I have dealt the defense of marriage a setback here.

The South Bend Tribune reports that 131 faculty of the University of Notre Dame have signed a letter calling on Fr. John Jenkins, the president of the university, to “issue a statement” that will “definitively distance Notre Dame” from remarks made in a homily by Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, a member of the Congregation of the Holy Cross who sits on the Notre Dame Board of Fellows.  And these faculty want Jenky either to “renounce” the remarks in his homily or resign from the board.

What is the grievous offense of Bishop Jenky?  According to the faculty signatories, “he described President Obama as ‘seem(ing) intent on following a similar path’ to Hitler and Stalin.”  It would indeed be an outrage if, as the faculty intimate, the bishop were suggesting that President Obama is “intent on” genocide, murdering millions, etc.

But what did Jenky actually say in his April 14 homily?  Its full text is here.  Let’s quote enough to get the full flavor of this strong meat:

Remember that in past history other governments have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches like the first disciples locked up in the Upper Room.

In the late 19th century, Bismarck waged his “Kulturkampf,” a Culture War, against the Roman Catholic Church, closing down every Catholic school and hospital, convent and monastery in Imperial Germany.

Clemenceau, nicknamed “the priest eater,” tried the same thing in France in the first decade of the 20th Century.

Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care.

In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path.

So it turns out that the “similar path” Obama “seems intent on following,” according to Bishop Jenky, is one that Bismarck, Clemenceau–and Hitler and Stalin “at their better moments”–charted already.  That is, the bending of churches and religious institutions to the political authority, and the occupation of an increasing proportion of civic space by the state, shouldering aside the churches.

The reductio ad Hitlerum is a real problem in modern political rhetoric.  But in its classic form it is the unwarranted conclusion that a small tyranny portends real totalitarianism, genocide–the whole package of the Third Reich.  Jenky is not guilty of that here, not remotely.  He has an argument about parallels between Obama and past assailants of the Church.  Those assailants include Hitler and Stalin even “at their better moments,” when their tyrannies were just beginning.

If the upset faculty of Notre Dame want to counter his argument with a better one, let them try.  Instead they engage in ritual denunciation, bullying, and a petulant tantrum meant to mau-mau Father Jenkins and the bishop.  They should go back to school.  Better teachers than these would not accept their letter as representing a responsible contribution to public or academic debate.

My morning reading has settled into some habitual grooves, and for a reliably thoughtful one or two articles a day, I go to FT’s “On the Square,” to Public Discourse, and to The Catholic Thing, where one of the regulars is Brad Miner.  Today Mr. Miner (we’ve never met so I won’t call him “Brad”) has one of his characteristically sound commentaries, but seems to me to hit one false note with respect to language.  He writes:

Is there one person who may be said to have certainly “seen” (understood) the true identity of Jesus Christ while he lived? Mary or Joseph perhaps? One may be tempted to read the Incarnation back into the exclamations of Simeon and Anna, yet Luke (2:23) states quite clearly of those prophecies that Mary and Joseph “were wondering at those things which were spoken concerning [Jesus].” Wondering isn’t proof positive that they were not fully aware of the divinity of Jesus, but it’s suggestive.

The verse Miner wants is Luke 2:33, not 2:23, but that’s neither here nor there.  What I am wondering about is what he means by “wondering.”  Nowadays we’re prone to say things like, “I wonder why he did that,” indicating a certain curiosity, a desire to know, an indication that we are ignorant about or baffled or mystified by something we want to think through and understand better.  I just used it that way a couple sentences ago.  Is that what Miner means?  That when Luke tells us Joseph and Mary were “wondering,” he means (or might mean) that they were puzzled, or trying to figure out who Jesus was?

If this is the way Miner reads the passage, then he may have fallen prey to the sort of change over time in a word’s use that C.S. Lewis cautions us about in Studies in Words.  I do not know what Luke’s Greek was here (and some reader is bound to tell us in the comments), but my RSV gives the verse this way: “And his father and mother marveled at what was said about him.”  “Marveled” does a better job of conveying what “wondered” once meant–that one takes in an experience as awe-inspiring, deeply significant, and so on.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives this first definition for the verb “to wonder”: “To feel or be affected with wonder; to be struck with surprise or astonishment, to marvel.”  Perhaps Miner is reaching for the “surprise or astonishment” here–feelings frequently accompanied by a sense that something passes one’s understanding.  But to be amazed and astonished–to marvel and be awestruck, even to sense something present is beyond your ken–is perfectly consistent with Mary and Joseph’s full knowledge of who their little boy was.  That they were in the presence of the divine second Person of the Trinity must have been a daily source of wonder and amazement to them.  They lived with a miracle, the greatest of all miracles.

Theirs was, in truth, a wonderful life–an adjective we do not employ to indicate our bafflement about something.  The usually perspicacious Mr. Miner seems to me to have put one foot wrong here, in an otherwise excellent column.

This may fall into the category of blogging-when-provoked (always risky), or it may come down to a matter of de gustibus non est disputandum.  But the wild overhyping on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather wouldn’t provoke me if those doing the hyping didn’t use such unwarranted superlatives.  Our own Matthew Cantirino calls The Godfather and its immediate sequel “the greatest ensemble of American films ever produced.”  John Podhoretz, long on record about this matter, gives it another go at the Weekly Standard, calling The Godfather “the best motion picture made up to that time” (1972), and maybe since then too, and “arguably the great American work of popular art,” a statement that seems to sweep even beyond the genre of film (Mark Twain, call your office).  At least Cantirino makes a case for the seriousness of the films as a work of tragedy.  Podhoretz just seems utterly smitten by a film that caught him by the heart in his youth.

I don’t want to go on at length about The Godfather‘s defects (the lugubrious score, the ponderous directing, the leaden acting).  In many respects the movie succeeds despite them.  But please.  The real test is whether one wants to see the picture again and again.  And in the case of Coppola’s “great” film, I just don’t.  The art of the motion picture–complete with sound– came into its own in the 1930s and 1940s.  And dipping quickly and without much close attention into my own collection, here are 100 movies–just from those two decades–that I’d rather watch before seeing The Godfather ever again:

1. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

2. Animal Crackers (1930)

3. Little Caesar (1931) (more…)

Sorry if that sounds like the beginning of a shaggy dog story.  In the study of political communication, one of the most fruitful concepts employed by scholars in the last two decades has been “framing theory,” which concerns the way in which a story, a person, a decision, an institution–even a question–is “framed,” so that we are not only led to consider something worthy of our attention (known as agenda-setting), and not only led to view it in a certain light or think of it when prompted (priming), but are subtly lured into thinking through an issue in a certain way.  As a picture is framed, so that a boundary is set around it, or as a window is placed in a wall, to include a view of some things but exclude a view of others, so framing of political subjects leads us to say that an issue concerns this and not that.  (For the foregoing I thank my wife the communication scholar, who does not own any distortions on my part.)

So why this brief excursion about framing theory?  Well, the notion has been around long enough for it to become second nature even for journalists themselves–the “framers” par excellence–to employ it.  Thus we have Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal today, writing an article titled “On Contraception, Framing of the Debate Is Key.”  Here’s the gist:

If the issue [of the HHS mandate] is defined as a question of birth control in the weeks and months ahead, the Obama administration and Democrats will have the upper hand. If Republicans succeed in defining the issue as a question of religious liberty, the balance will shift in their direction. (more…)

The Witherspoon Institute’s Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution, which I direct, is offering two seminars this summer for early-career faculty, and for graduate and law students.

Church and State: Religion in the Young American Republic

This seminar, held on the campus of the Princeton Theological Seminary from July 29 to August 4, 2012, will explore the interaction of religion and political life in the early American republic, from colonial and revolutionary times to the early nineteenth century, employing primary sources and emphasizing theological perspectives as well as political and legal ones.  It is open to post-doctoral, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track scholars in political science and political theory, history, law, and religious studies.  Faculty for the seminar will be leading historians of religion in early American history: Prof. Mark Noll of the University of Notre Dame, Prof. Harry Stout of Yale University, and Prof. Gerald McDermott of Roanoke College.  Applications are due by March 30, 2012.  More information can be found here: http://www.winst.org/corac/seminars/church_state/index.php

Moral Foundations of Law

This seminar, held on the campus of Princeton University from August 5 to 11, 2012, examines the relation of moral and legal philosophy, the debate between positivism and the natural law, and questions regarding constitutionalism and judging, among other subjects.  The seminar is open to rising 2L and 3L students in law school, as well as LLM and SJD candidates; graduate students in political philosophy and jurisprudence may also apply.  Faculty for the seminar will be Gerard V. Bradley of Notre Dame Law School; John M. Finnis of Oxford and Notre Dame; Matthew J. Franck of the Witherspoon Institute; Patrick Lee of Franciscan University; and Gerard Wegemer of the University of Dallas.  Judge Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is scheduled as a guest speaker.  Applications are due March 30, 2012.  More information can be found here: http://www.winst.org/corac/seminars/mfl/index.php.

I have a number of friends who are huge admirers of the farmer-poet-essayist Wendell Berry.  Now comes word via the Chronicle of Higher Education that the National Endowment for the Humanities has invited Berry to give this year’s Jefferson Lecture, on April 23 in Washington.  I look forward to the lecture, and to learning more from him about what so attracts my friends.

Even such liberal stalwarts as E.J. Dionne and Michael Sean Winters can be heard to complain about the Obama administration’s HHS mandate that all employers–including all religious institutions but the most narrowly defined ones–include fully paid coverage for contraceptives (including abortifacient drugs) and sterilization in their employee health plans.  But let it not be said that President Obama and Secretary Sebelius are entirely without their defenders, even among those who call themselves Catholics.

Here is Joan Vennocchi, for instance, a liberal columnist for the Boston Globe:

The president should be ready for the fight, knowing that on this one he is right.

At Sunday Mass, Catholic parishioners across the country were read letters denouncing the Obama administration’s recent decision to require religiously affiliated hospitals, colleges, and charities to offer health insurance coverage to employees for contraception and the “morning-after pill.’’ On Monday, Rubio, a Republican star who is often mentioned as a VP candidate, introduced a bill that would override the Obama policy by allowing religious institutions that morally oppose contraception to refuse to cover it.

But not all employees of Catholic institutions are Catholics. Why should their employers impose their religious beliefs on them and deny coverage for birth control and other medical care? As long as those Catholic institutions are getting taxpayer money, they should follow secular rules. That’s the Obama administration’s argument, and it makes sense.

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I wrote about this last week, and only scratched the surface.  It’s this bad.  Why any parents of intelligent young people would desire a Vanderbilt education for them, while this nonsense goes on, is beyond me.

Jason Hoyt of the national Christian fraternity Beta Upsilon Chi has the story of what’s happening at the prominent Nashville university.  Evidently inspired by the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded ruling in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez in 2010, the university’s administration changed the student organization handbook in the fall of that year, in order to impose an absurd “no-discrimination” principle on student groups that constitute themselves precisely by reference to their religious beliefs.  Hence a Christian student group cannot limit its membership or the privilege of officeholding to Christian students.  This cannot be any reasonable person’s idea of what it means for students to associate freely with one another.

Like most private universities in this country, Vanderbilt had a kind of Christian founding.  Though it appears never to have been sectarian, its founder was a Methodist bishop, and the university’s first chancellor (the officer who would be called president in most places) preached sermons to the student body in the chapel.  I dare say that in the 1880s, when Chancellor Garland was running the show, there was more real freedom on campus than there is now.  The fashionable oppressions of our own day can hardly be called progress.

Here in New Jersey where I live and work, the state legislature, controlled by Democrats, has put same-sex marriage at the top of its agenda.  We already have same-sex civil unions, thanks to a legislative response to an activist state supreme court ruling several years ago.  Governor Chris Christie–who sent a rather mixed message the other day when he nominated the first-ever openly gay state supreme court justice, the Republican mayor of Chatham–has said he would veto a same-sex marriage bill.  And it doesn’t look like the votes would be there to override his veto.  Now Christie has called for putting the question to the people in a constitutional referendum, but it sure doesn’t seem likely that this legislature will go for that.  (In New Jersey, a constitutional amendment gets on the ballot via the legislature, not by petition.  Either three-fifths of each house, acting once, or simple majorities in each house, acting in two consecutive annual sessions, need to vote to propose any amendment to the people.)

Meanwhile, last Friday the seven Catholic bishops in the state (for the six geographic dioceses and for the Syriac Catholic diocese) issued a statement strongly defending the conjugal understanding of marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman:

With exquisite timing–two days before the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and three days before the March for Life descends on Washington–the Obama administration’s secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, has released a long-awaited statement confirming her department’s rule, first proposed several months ago, that under Obamacare almost all health insurers in the nation will have to cover sterilization and contraception, including those “contraceptives” so classed by the FDA but known to be abortifacients.  (The policy’s effect is suspended for a year, until after the 2012 election.  But surely there was no political calculation in this . . .)  To this policy, unjust in itself as applied to anyone with moral scruples (which is to say, nearly anyone who would not choose to provide or purchase such coverage voluntarily), HHS offers only a ridiculously narrow “religious exemption,” described as follows by my colleagues on the Witherspoon Institute’s Task Force on Conscience Protection:

Houses of worship are almost certainly protected, but all other religious ministries and institutions are almost certainly not. The exemption covers only: a “religious employer” that has the “inculcation of religious values” as its purpose; “primarily employs persons who share its religious tenets”; and primarily “serves persons who share its religious tenets.” Further, the employer must qualify as a church organization under two narrow provisions of the tax code. Religious institutions such as colleges and universities, as well as hospitals and charitable institutions that employ and serve the public (versus only co-believers) will be ineligible. Individuals, and religiously affiliated health insurers are also outside of the scope of the exemption.

You think the putative commerce clause violation of the ”individual mandate,” currently being litigated before the Supreme Court, is bad enough?  Try this on for size: the Obama-Sebelius HHS rule forces countless Americans to purchase health insurance that violates their religious beliefs.  And it forces religious organizations that seek to do good in the world–universities and schools, hospitals and clinics, adoption and social-service agencies, soup kitchens and clothing banks–to violate the consciences of their religious communities if they want to continue to do all these good things.  Cover abortifacients and sterilizations in your employee health plan, the little Christian school down the road from you will be told.  The choices will be a) violate your conscience, b) drop your health coverage and propel your employees into the government-run “exchanges” awaiting them with all the tender mercy of federal bureaucrats, or c) close up shop.  Some choices.

Last week I wrote here at First Things that the Hosanna-Tabor precedent might bode well for the struggle against this injustice, because the unanimous Supreme Court in that case endorsed the proposition that in the internal governance of religious organizations, the First Amendment permitted no government interference.  Is there anything more important to the internal affairs of a church, or a church-run organization than the moral choice to honor the sanctity of life in all the organization’s dealings with its own members–its employees, students, and clients?

The Obama Justice Department went for broke in Hosanna-Tabor, attacking the “ministerial exception” to federal anti-discrimination laws, as though the religion clauses of the First Amendment didn’t even exist.  For its troubles, it had a unanimous Court call its view “remarkable,” “untenable,” and “extreme.”  Now that HHS has similarly gone for broke on the “contraception” mandate, we can pray its extremism will meet a similar fate, either from Congress or from the courts.

If, like me, you read Theodore Boutrous’s defense, yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, of the proposition that the FCC should cease and desist from enforcing any notions of decency in broadcast television, and you wondered what exactly could compel a person to make such vacuous arguments, then Anthony Esolen, writing today at The Catholic Thing, may have the answer for you.  It worked for me.

In his latest Washington Post column, E.J. Dionne considers the newly surging candidacy of Rick Santorum.  It is not a particularly memorable or insightful column–in other words, par for the course–but there is one paragraph that makes one’s hair stand on end:

Santorum is a Catholic of a certain kind, and it’s the most important thing about him. He’s on one side of a long-standing debate in the church about how to build a decent society. Social-justice Catholics (and I’m one of those) represent an older American tradition. We agree with more conservative Catholics on the family as an essential social building block but see capitalism as in need of regulation and correction if it is to serve the common good and protect the family itself. Many of us — and here we depart from the church’s official teaching — see gay marriage not as undermining fidelity and commitment but as encouraging them.

Dionne tells us here that he is a “social-justice Catholic” whose “American tradition” is “older” than the wing of the church in which he would peg Santorum (who, in the next paragraph, he calls a “social renewal” Catholic).  He declares his agreement with “more conservative Catholics” (again, this presumably included Santorum) about the importance of the family.  So far so good.

(more…)

I thank R.R. Reno for pointing us to Leon Wieseltier’s essay on Alex Rosenberg’s exercise in reductionism, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.  (And yes, Edward Feser’s review was a real pleasure as well.)  Reviews like this do us a double service: while they entertain and instruct, they also steer us clear of bad books that would be a waste of our time (although I daresay Rosenberg’s title alone would have done the job for me).

Wieseltier calls Rosenberg’s “the worst book of the year.”  Big claim, that.  Many candidates present themselves, some in the remainder bins, some on the bestseller lists.  (Thomas Friedman is always in contention.)  My own nominee–certainly the worst book I read in 2011–is Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life.  (In Britain its title was The God Instinct, and God knows why W.W. Norton decided to change it for the U.S., where Christopher Hitchens had a hit with God Is Not Great.)

Here is Bering’s whole argument, to save you the trouble: Human beings evolved by believing a number of stupid things in order to survive and reproduce.  The dumbest thing they evolved to believe is that there is a God.  If you still believe there is a God, now that you have read my book, you should wise up and stop, already.

Okay, there’ s a little more than that–but seriously, not much.  Bering works in the field of cognitive psychology, which has made a number of interesting findings about the “naturalness” of religious belief.  (A much better exploration of such findings is Justin Barrett’s Why Would Anyone Believe in God?)  But his book is fatally marred by his smarmy atheism and his gleeful mockery of religion, qualities that are particularly grating in light of the fact that he does not even attempt to offer any warrant whatsoever for his convictions that there is no God, that we are merely bodies with firing synapses in the region above our necks, that those bodies are merely the products of blind evolutionary chance, and so on.  Bering presents himself as a relentless practitioner of “logic,” but he seems blissfully uninterested in our logical nature, and appears never to have encountered a genuine philosophical thought of any kind–let alone a theological one.  In the end, the book is really rather sad for the glimpse it gives of its author’s soul.  (And why that last word appears in his book’s subtitle, I cannot say.)

The two best things I have read on the question of Newt Gingrich’s admitted past adulteries, the forgiveness of his sins upon entering into the Catholic Church, and the relevance of these facts for voters considering his presidential candidacy, are by Frank Beckwith at The Catholic Thing and Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review Online.  Both are eminently worth reading.

At 3:00 p.m. EST, I will be on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” program, along with Charles Blow of the New York Times, to discuss this report of the Pew Research Center suggesting that belief in American “exceptionalism” is subsiding.  If you look at the full report linked on that page, you’ll find that none of the survey questions actually asked about American “exceptionalism,” in so many words.  Since it was a cross-national survey querying the British, the French, the Germans, and the Spanish as well, perhaps it was not the sort of question that travelled very well.  Anyway, I hope it will be an interesting discussion, and FT readers might want to tune in.

Over at Public Discourse today, I review Naomi Schaefer Riley’s book The Faculty Lounges, which R.R. Reno discussed here at FT last week.  A sample of my take:

Why are so many academic departments so ideologically homogeneous? Why are assistant professors so hard at work producing so many books and articles, for so few readers, on narrow subjects of such doubtful value? Why are teaching loads so light for so many of the permanent full-time faculty at many universities? Why is it so hard to clear out the “deadwood” of lazy or incompetent teachers in the ranks of senior faculty? Why are so many classes taught by adjunct faculty with no substantial role in the life of the institutions where they teach? Why are curricula, graduation requirements, and available courses chopped up into such a crazy quilt of incoherent academic programs? Why is it so hard for university administrations to reform or shut down underperforming or misdirected academic units, and to reallocate resources? The answer to each of these questions is: tenure. (Riley’s title might be best understood if its third word is taken as a verb, not a noun.)

Meanwhile, William McGurn muses about the educations acquired by those Occupy Wall Street protesters who complain about their college loan debts.

The other day Joe Carter linked to a BBC item about a debate that was held in Philadelphia, on the question whether the Declaration of Independence was “illegal.”  Evidently there were legal scholars on both sides, the British arguing that the Declaration (hence the American Revolution, hence the country that resulted from it) was illegal, and the Americans arguing that the Declaration was indeed legal.  The BBC’s online article, and the brief accompanying video that was presumably aired on the network, were both a bit sketchy in their account of the arguments made by the two sides.  But from what I can gather, the Brits probably mopped the floor with the Americans–the former’s bad arguments being less bad than the latter’s.

The strategic error of the Americans was the decision to defend the “legality” of the Declaration.  Of course the Declaration of Independence was illegal.  That was the whole point–that one could be driven to revolutionary action by standards of justice that are higher than the law, and against which the law is judged.  Of course the signers of the Declaration were committing treason, from the standpoint of British law.  They knew this perfectly well; remember that bit about hanging together or else hanging separately?

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On Saturday, this site ran my “On the Square” essay, “Anaesthetizing America’s Conscience,” in which I faulted two university presidents, Fr. John Jenkins of Notre Dame and John Garvey of Catholic University, for a missed opportunity to speak the whole truth to power about the proposed new HHS mandate that would force all health insurers to cover abortifacient drugs under the rubric of “contraceptives” in “preventive” health coverage for women.  (See also Stephen P. White’s essay on the same day.)

Yesterday my friend Rick Garnett, who teaches law at Notre Dame and blogs at Mirror of Justice, took issue with my article (and White’s).  I don’t think Rick and I are all that far apart.  He agreed with me about the “basic immorality of the administration’s rule”–that to whomever it applied (i.e., all the not-exempted), it would put the legal authority of the federal government behind the mandatory provision of early-stage pharmaceutical abortions.  He remarks that Fr. Jenkins and President Garvey would surely agree with us both about this, and I am sure he’s right–I was sure from the beginning, and only disappointed that neither of them said so when appealing to the administration for a broader exemption than the rule contemplates.

Rick is nonetheless persuaded that my criticism was misplaced because Jenkins and Garvey “proceed[ed] on the basis of the (sound) assumptions that the mandate itself is not going to be dislodged unless the next election dislodges it and that this Administration is not open” to allowing any exemption a great deal broader than one that would fit their institutions within its four corners.  Thus, as a matter of “tactics,” the two university presidents did the prudent thing, Rick suggests.

Here my friend and I just have to disagree.  I am not enamored of the now unfortunately hackneyed phrase “speak truth to power” (yes, I know I used it above), but it has its place here.  Shaming the Obama administration for being anti-life, as well as for its trampling on the rights of conscience, could not have been a mistake in this case.  The real problem with the Obama HHS mandate goes all the way down–it is not the inadequate religious exemption to the rule that is the essence of the injustice, but the rule itself.  Would it anger the Obama administration to be told the truth about this?  Perhaps.  Would it actually be counterproductive for the attainment of a broader exemption to the mandate, for the sake of Catholic universities and other institutions?  I don’t think so.  It could even help.

Rick has now followed up by posting a copy of an advertisement placed in today’s print editions of Politico and The Hill.  I note that Fr. Jenkins and President Garvey are both signers of the statement in the ad, along with eighteen other Catholic leaders, including Archbishop Dolan of New York, the president of the USCCB.  Rick rightly characterizes the ad’s text this way: “Fr. Jenkins and Pres. Garvey endorse clearly the proposition that the mandate burdens unjustifiably the consciences of individuals as well as religious-institution employers like the ones they lead.”  The best line in the ad is that the HHS mandate “harms society as a whole by undermining a long American tradition of respect for religious liberty and freedom of conscience.”  Hear, hear!  I’m glad to see this sentiment expressed, and I applaud all the signers of the ad.

But let us not forget the evil at the bottom of this whole contretemps, and the cause of the Obama administration’s disregard (so far) for the rights of conscience.  This administration is dedicated to abortion and indifferent to the sanctity of life–and that is why it is also indifferent to religious liberty.

Three years ago, my friends Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen (both senior fellows at the Witherspoon Institute and familiar to FT readers) published a short and powerful book called Embryo: A Defense of Human Life–a wonderful combination of scientific and philosophical rigor with accessible readability.  Now a second edition has been published.  In First Things, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus said of the first edition, “The persuasiveness of their carefully, even scrupulously, reasoned case is enhanced by the generosity with which they engage counterarguments. . . . George and Tollefsen are models of rational exactitude.”  Just so.  The book is one-stop shopping for those who want to think clearly and in a principled fashion about the issues surrounding embryo-destructive research.  Not incidentally, Embryo is one of the few indispensable books you need in hand for arguing with your fellow citizens about abortion as well.

The second edition, published by the Witherspoon Institute, includes a new afterword addressing recent advances in stem-cell research, and an appendix that includes the review of the first edition by William Saletan in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and George and Tollefsen’s reply to Saletan at National Review Online.  You can buy the second edition of Embryo in paperback or e-book format from Amazon.  More details here.

Sorry, folks, it’s the New York Times again that is the source of our amusement.  Today they have a story in the news pages with the following lead: “A bake sale sponsored by a Republican student group at the University of California, Berkeley, has incited anger and renewed the debate over affirmative action by asking students to pay different prices for pastry, depending on their race and sex.”  The College Republicans announced that they planned to charge $2 per pastry to white customers, with declining prices for Asians, Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans, and a 25 cent discount for women of all races.  The rest of the story is predictable, making it painfully obvious that the ensuing furor on the Berkeley campus is just what the College Republicans wanted to prompt, as leftist administrators and students engaged in ritual denunciation, but were quite unable to speak intelligibly about just what was wrong with the CRs’ plans, if they themselves are devoted to preferences in the name of diversity.  In the event, the CRs relented, permitting customers to pay what they pleased, but they had amply made their point.

So what headline did the Times put on the story?  “A ‘Diversity Bake Sale’ Backfires on Campus.”  Um, backfires?  Au contraire.  It was a smashing success for the planners of the sale, whose object–quite obviously realized–was to embarrass the supporters of “diversity.”  How does a headline writer actually read the story he’s titling, and then get it that wrong?

Joe Carter included this in his “First Links” this morning, but I wanted to call readers’ attention again to the fine essay at Public Discourse today by Helen Alvaré, Gerard V. Bradley, and O. Carter Snead, “Conscience, Coercion, and Healthcare.”  It concerns the unprecedented mandate of the Obama administration, that all private health insurers must cover contraceptives, including those that are abortifacients, and this without any meaningful exemption honoring the freedom of religious conscience of countless faithful people and the institutions in which they work.  The authors are members (and Alvaré is the chair) of the Task Force on Conscience Protection at the Witherspoon Institute, where I work.

Thomas Farr, the chair of our other Task Force, on International Religious Freedom, was the author of Friday’s Public Discourse essay, “Preventing Another Attack: International Religious Freedom,” which rightly places this concern at the center of American foreign policy.  This is not a place, alas, where the Obama administration locates it, as Tom notes.

Both essays are must-reads, in my humble opinion.

That’s what went through my mind when reading this op-ed by Matthew Avery Sutton, who is bylined as an associate professor of history at Washington State University, and author of Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.  The essay is a bizarre train wreck of an argument, which, as I sort through the various bits of detritus of which it consists, seems to say this:

Certain leading figures in American “fundamentalist” Christianity (or is it “evangelical” Christianity? the author is casual about any distinctions there might be) in the twentieth century were very concerned about the “last days,” the apocalypse heralded by the “Antichrist.”  These leaders included Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell.  (Again, differences are coolly elided.)  They read signs of the apocalypse in the careers of Hitler, Stalin, and even FDR.  They were–you knew it was coming–politically conservative.

And their legacy lives on today!  There are some on the Christian right today (and it is essential to this kind of pseudo-analysis that they are never, ever named) who see Barack Obama as the Antichrist.  And somehow or other (this logical bridge is never built, let alone crossed) this apocalyptic sensibility is evident among (again unnamed) supporters of presidential candidate like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.  A standard disclaimer is thrown in that “few of the faithful truly think that the president is the Antichrist,” but the overall message is in the piece’s final, ominous sentence: “Indeed, the tribulation may be upon us.”  In short: be afraid.  Be very, very afraid of those crazy Christians who speak darkly of apocalypses and Antichrists and end times. 

Even if you can’t name any, or actually spot any real trends in the real political life of the nation. 

I have no doubt Professor Sutton knows everything worth knowing about Aimee Semple McPherson, about whom he wrote his doctoral dissertation six or seven years ago, before getting it published as the above-mentioned book.  But this essay is written from inside the intellectual silo of the new associate professor at a big university, who has applied himself to a narrow expertise in order to publish and get tenure.  Emptier political analysis than this is rarely spotted, even in the pages of the New York Times.  But the editors loved it.  This says much more about them than about Professor Sutton.