But of course, we are not surprised to see “G.O.P. Pushes New Abortion Limits to Appease Vocal Base.”

It’s good to know there some constants in the universe that we can rely upon.

Some astute observers have noticed the dimensions of the problem and called attention to it. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed a brief in both marriage cases now pending in the Supreme Court, arguing that the Court should not interfere with democratic legislative processes in this field, because only such processes can result in public policies that will prevent church-state conflict in the future. The brief describes many of the problems I will discuss below, but in the end I think it is too hopeful that same-sex marriage and religious freedom may be reconciled by lawmakers to any significantly greater extent than by judges.

Two groups of prominent religious liberty scholars (one led by Robin Fretwell Wilson, the other by Douglas Laycock) have written letters (such as this one from Wilson’s group) to state legislators and governors considering same-sex marriage bills, imploring them to include various statutory provisions that would afford some protection to religious freedom. Both groups have signally failed to achieve much, if any, meaningful accommodation of religious freedom in the recent legislative enactments of same-sex marriage in New York, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Delaware.

The victorious legislators either do not see the conflict, don’t care about it, or actually welcome its arrival, relishing the further victories yet to come over the “bigotry” of religious dissenters. The last of these possibilities may be the likeliest, as Robert P. George suggested nearly a year ago here at Public Discourse. If so, our situation is dire indeed.

Read the rest here.

Get rid of the corporate income tax.

As David Rivkin and Lee Casey explained at the Wall Street Journal the other day:

The IRS crackdown on tax-exemption approvals for conservative groups was directed at nonprofit social-welfare groups, often called 501(c)(4)s after the Internal Revenue Code section granting them tax-exempt status. Such groups do not have to disclose their donors and are exempt from most taxation, although donations to them generally aren’t tax deductible.

Social-welfare organizations are permitted to engage in a range of political activities promoting their causes or beliefs, so long as these activities aren’t their “primary purpose.” This has been generally understood to mean that they must spend less than 50% of their total resources on political activities.

The IRS had little interest in 501(c)(4) political activities until the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform. That law barred dedicated political-advocacy groups from soliciting and spending soft money—funds that aren’t subject to tight federal campaign-contribution limits and are used for issue advocacy and party-building. . . .

Yet McCain-Feingold had the unintended effect of making 501(c)(4) political activities far more important than they had been, since the law’s ban on soft money doesn’t apply to such groups. . . .

So the entire hang-up in the IRS bureaucracy was whether groups claiming 501(c)(4) status could deservedly claim that designation. Did they devote the majority of their resources to non-political (educational or social) activities? How to determine which activities were political? And so on, and so on. The law is a veritable invitation to bureaucratic abuse, if one is inclined to succumb to such temptations.

But the point of claiming the status is so that your incorporated 501(c)(4) “social welfare organization” doesn’t have to pay corporate income taxes on the money it raises. If there were no corporate income tax in the first place, the issue simply wouldn’t arise.

It would, of course, be a nice bonus that eliminating the corporate income tax (which many economists believe is a deeply stupid form of taxation anyway) would give a nice boost to the economy. As one also learned in the Journal this week, America’s high corporate tax rate leads to all sorts of nonsense that intelligent lawyers and accountants have to cope with as creatively as they can. If we suddenly had the world’s lowest corporate rate—zero—in the world’s largest economy, imagine the effects.

So just get rid of it. No more corporate income tax, no more worries about which corporations have to pay it, and no more proctological exams from the IRS about what degree of “politics” people are engaged in under the corporate form.

The only question that would remain is whose donors get the charitable tax deduction now allowed under section 501(c)(3). I would extend it to any nonprofit—even to the two great political parties—and eliminate the “Johnson amendment” barring 501(c)(3) entities from engaging in lobbying and electoral politics. That’s of dubious constitutionality anyway, especially as applied to the question of “pulpit politics” in churches.

In Newman’s remarkable “The Idea of a University,” he wrote that he had no intention of bringing “the authority of the Church, or any authority at all.” At the time he was rector of the Catholic University of Dublin.

Among the blessings of the information age (along with its curses) is that so much textual matter is now searchable. The invaluable website The Newman Reader has placed online, so it appears, everything John Henry Newman ever published. The few words Delaney quoted might be rapidly located by people with particularly dog-eared copies of Newman’s famous Idea of a University, but in a split second those of us with less familiarity can find them on the website.

Delaney’s quotation comes from the first of the “discourses” in the book, simply titled “Introductory.” Here Newman is, so to speak, clearing his throat, and explaining that he will attempt to give an account of the university and its purposes that will be intelligible to all readers, whatever their own religious views, and that he will in fact take his bearings–initially–from what had been done and said regarding “liberal education” in the great Protestant universities of England. Here is the quotation (in bold below) in its native paragraph:

And here I may mention a third reason for appealing at the outset to the proceedings of Protestant bodies in regard to Liberal Education. It will serve to intimate the mode in which I propose to handle my subject altogether. Observe then, Gentlemen, I have no intention, in any thing I shall say, of bringing into the argument the authority of the Church, or any authority at all; but I shall consider the question simply on the grounds of human reason and human wisdom. I  am investigating in the abstract, and am determining what is in itself right and true. For the moment I know nothing, so to say, of history. I take things as I find them; I have no concern with the past; I find myself here; I set myself to the duties I find here; I set myself to further, by every means in my power, doctrines and views, true in themselves, recognized by Catholics as such, familiar to my own mind; and to do this quite apart from the consideration of questions which have been determined without me and before me. I am here the advocate and the minister of a certain great principle; yet not merely advocate and minister, else had I not been here at all. It has been my previous keen sense and hearty reception of that principle, that has been at once the reason, as I must suppose, of my being selected for this office, and is the cause of my accepting it. I am told on authority that a principle is expedient, which I have ever felt to be true. And I argue in its behalf on its own merits, the authority, which brings me here, being my opportunity for arguing, but not the ground of my argument itself.

Now one would want to read the several paragraphs that begin the discourse before this point to get the full context; after all, Newman is introducing a third point and we cannot see here what the first two were. But there is enough here to see that Newman is so far from affirming what Mr. Delaney appears to believe he was affirming that it would be fair to say, just on the basis of this paragraph alone, that he rejects the sort of “all views are equally worthy of honor and respect” nonsense that Delaney espouses. It is certainly quite ridiculous to enlist John Henry Newman in the cause of rejecting “authority” tout court, whatever that would mean if any intelligent person attempted it. (Have any?)

First, as I note at Public Discourse today in “Kermit Gosnell and the Logic of ‘Pro-Choice,’” the most up-to-the-minute philosophers in bioethics are dispensing with any “sharp distinction,” as Jon puts it, between the unborn child and the one who has been born. The Journal of Medical Ethics has an entire symposium on infanticide in its latest issue, in which one can see scholars at prominent institutions reasoning (plausibly, alas) that if the unborn child can be licitly aborted, then “after-birth abortion” can be permitted as well.

Second, Jon is wrong about what Pennsylvania law says on late-term abortions. He writes below, “Had Gosnell killed his victims in the womb and complied with a few other minor requirements, he would have committed no crime under the laws of Pennsylvania or the United States.” In his original Standard article, Jon wrote:

Pennsylvania is one of nine states that require a second physician to concur with the “professional judgment” of an abortionist who wants to perform a third-trimester abortion. Gosnell failed to seek second opinions. One has to wonder: Is that failure really a capital crime? Gosnell ignored a procedural requirement of Pennsylvania law.

There’s a good deal more to the Pennsylvania late-term abortion law than that. As I explain at Public Discourse:

The Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act provides that unless a physician can establish that he “reasonably believes” an unborn child is younger than 24 weeks, or, if the child is older, he can establish that continuing the pregnancy will result in either the death of the mother or “the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,” the physician cannot perform a late-term abortion.

If he knowingly commits a post-24 weeks abortion, based on such stringent life and health criteria, the doctor must certify his judgment about the threat in writing; acquire the concurrence of a second doctor in that judgment based on a “separate personal medical examination” of the woman; perform the abortion in a hospital; employ procedures designed to maximize the unborn child’s chances to survive; and have a second physician present, ready to consider any surviving child his primary patient.

The purpose of this Pennsylvania statute is, in substance, identical to that of the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA), and state laws similar to the latter. Whereas BAIPA protects the right to life of the child who survives an abortion, the Pennsylvania act protects the child who could survive an abortion, making it criminal in most cases to abort the child and, where an abortion is permissible within narrow limits, requiring doctors to treat the child as a second patient who should be brought into the world alive and unharmed if possible.

Gosnell was convicted of twenty-one counts of illegal abortions under this statute, passed in the late 1980s when pro-life Democratic governor Robert Casey, Sr. was in office. The law is a direct challenge to the anything-goes abortion license established forty years ago in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton (as I also explain at PD). We’ll see if these convictions are upheld. If they are—as they should be—we could begin to see the unraveling of the regime of abortion on demand.

Here are some portions of the Moore-Ezell statement that Matt omitted yesterday (beginning with a sentence he did include):

What incidents have taken place, we wonder, that would call for this seemingly arbitrary distinction between ‘evangelizing’ and ‘proselytizing’? Proselytizing, after all, includes a range of meaning, encompassing a definition of ‘seeking to recruit to a cause or to a belief.’ With a subjective interpretation and adjudication of such cases, we need reassurance that such would not restrict the free exercise of religion for our chaplains and military personnel.

After all, who defines what is proselytizing and what is evangelism? What could seem to be a friendly conversation about spiritual matters to one serviceperson could be perceived or deliberately mischaracterized as ‘proselytizing’ to the person on the receiving end. The fact that this has been raised at all in such a subjective fashion could have a chilling effect on service personnel sharing their faith at all.

We believe in a free marketplace of ideas. Moreover, evangelical Christianity is, by definition, a faith that believes all Christians are to share the gospel with our neighbors and friends. To insist on a privatized, non-missional Christianity is to establish a state religion of non-conversionist faith that renders evangelical Christianity as well as other faiths — such as the Latter-day Saints — out of bounds. For a religion to be free, it must be unbound by restrictions that unfairly limit its advance.

This statement is both thoroughly Christian and thoroughly American.  In the free marketplace of religious ideas, the joyful sharing of the good news with one’s fellows is an act of charity, and so too is listening respectfully.  The talking and the listening are acts of good citizenship as well, and are no conceivable threat to military discipline, good order, or the lawful carrying out of one’s duties.  To insist on a Weinstein-esque “separation of church and state” turns a garden of faiths into a desert, and is nowhere commanded by our Constitution.  Military norms that bar coercion, harassment, or untimely distractions from carrying out one’s duties–norms that would apply equally to religious speech and, say, soapbox political orations or invitations to get-rich-quick schemes–are adequate to the task of policing the boundaries of permissible religious speech.

After calling for clarification of this seemingly arbitrary “proselytization vs. evangelization” distinction, Moore and Ezell conclude thus:

Our military men and women have submitted themselves to the authority of the United States armed services. They have not placed their souls or their consciences or their constitutional rights in a blind trust. Moreover, we reaffirm what our country has always recognized, that chaplains do not serve a merely civic function. They are there in order to facilitate the First Amendment-guaranteed free exercise of religion for our servicemen and women. That is only possible if these chaplains are free to be, respectively, Baptists or Catholics or Jews or Muslims or Latter-day Saints, etc., rather than merely ministers of some generic American civil religion.

We pledge to continue meeting with military leaders to ensure civil conversation about religious liberty. We also pledge to continue meeting with elected and appointed officials in the political arena, to ensure that constitutionally guaranteed religious freedoms are maintained. We further pledge to work with persons of good will to ensure that our First Freedom is maintained, in the military and in the civilian arenas, as we render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but not that which belongs only to God.

Well said. There is much wisdom in these lines about how men and women of faith can proudly serve, as free citizens, the defense of a free country.

Anyway, yesterday’s Sunday edition of the strip did not actually end with a pun, just a rather lame play on a familiar phrase. But that’s not what’s interesting. This is: the subject of the strip was the deadly sins, “some” of which played golf one day, with amusing results. Just six of the seven deadlies made it into the strip, and which was missing?  Go have a look and you should notice.

You’re back now? Good. Of course it was Lust that was missing. Is this just because the funny pages are a “family” venue? Maybe. But perhaps it’s because Lust is the only one of the seven deadly sins that, in our postmodern age, isn’t even a sin to most people any more. It’s the one of which everyone is guilty and no one is ashamed. It has lobbyists, publicists, lawyers, and teachers on its payroll. The other six deadlies–Envy, Pride, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, and Gluttony–are drawn as hideously (and hilariously) ugly in the comic strip. Could we even put a humorously ugly face on Lust these days? We may all be guilty, at various times, of all six of the “Frank and Ernest” deadlies, but only Lust has achieved the position of employing all the others as its minions.

There’s just no room for it in the light mockery of the Sunday funnies.

Christ’s hands and feet—just as in the crucifixion—were the attachment points and had been drilled already by the sculptor. I turned the wrench that attached one of the hands to the cross with a bolt, and then went up a ladder after the assembly was put upright, and tightened it still more. It was just a job of work with some hardware and tools, and it was just a sculpture made of bronze and a great timber cross, not even blessed by a priest yet before the job was done.

But I could not shake the feeling at the time—nor have I since—that I was myself crucifying Jesus. Perhaps it was because the statue was so life-sized and lifelike. Thinking of it right now gives me the heebie-jeebies. Saying to myself “it’s just a statue” doesn’t put away such thoughts. On Good Friday, this entirely “symbolic” experience gets to me still. I can’t say I’m sorry it does.

Happy Easter to all.

The higher ed press has been abuzz lately with a story out of Florida Atlantic University, which began with a student claiming that he had been “suspended” for his refusal to take part in a classroom exercise. The student, a Mormon, was enrolled in a course in intercultural communication in which the professor “asked students in the class to write the word ‘Jesus’ on a piece of paper, fold it up, and step on it,” according to the student’s account.

When the story broke, the university’s public relations shop went into damage control—especially after Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott denounced such goings-on at a public institution—and said that no one had been suspended or otherwise punished for refusal to participate in the exercise, but that it would not be used again in any class on the campus.

But where did this “exercise” come from in the first place? Turns out it is in the instructor’s guide published as a companion to a leading textbook in the field, Intercultural Communication: A Contextual Approach, now in its fifth edition from Sage Publishing. The author is James Neuliep, a communication professor at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin. Here is the relevant passage from the instructor’s guide—the sort of book that will often include classroom exercises unmentioned in the student’s textbook precisely so that teachers can bring about an unexpected moment during class:

This exercise is a bit sensitive, but really drives home the point that even though symbols are arbitrary, they take on very strong and emotional meanings. Have the students write the name JESUS in big letters on a piece of paper. Ask the students to stand up and put the paper on the floor in front of them with the name facing up. Ask the students to think about it for a moment. After a brief period of silence, instruct them to step on the paper. Most will hesitate. Ask why they can’t step on the paper. Discuss the importance of symbols in culture.

Insider Higher Ed (where the text above can be found) picks up the story from here, talking to Neuliep, who relates that

the exercise is done with the expectation that most students won’t step on the paper. And Neuliep said he has used the exercise in his own class, that hardly anyone steps on the paper, and that this is in fact the point.

One of the “most distinguishing features” of humans (compared to other animals) is the way they view symbols, some of which are quite powerful, he said. That’s the message of the exercise. When the students hesitate to step on the word “Jesus,” they understand that a piece of paper has meaning to them because of the word, which helps them understand the force of symbols, he added.

At St. Norbert, Neuliep said he has been doing the exercise for 30 years—without any complaints. He said that the discussion that follows tends to involve students “talking about how important Jesus is to them, and they defend why they won’t step on it. It reaffirms their faith.” And at the same time, he said, they learn about symbols.

Now, it may very well be that Jim Neuliep is a fabulous professor, who approaches this exercise himself with consummate sensitivity, as a way to ease his students into a fully aware confrontation with the nature of the sacred and the profane. But everything about the exercise—if it should ever be done at all, a question to which I will return—will depend on the pedagogical skill, the interpersonal sensitivity, and not least the motives of the instructor.

Look again at the barebones sketch of the exercise in the instructor’s guide. The instructor will “have” students write “JESUS” on a piece of paper. It is not folded, as in the initial reports out of Florida, but placed face up on the floor—that is, students are “asked” to put it there in this fashion. Then they are “asked” to think about “it” for a moment—the “it” presumably being the meaning of the name “JESUS.” Then they are “instructed” to step on it. The guide goes on, “Most will hesitate. Ask why they can’t step on the paper.”

All this “having” students do this, “asking” them to do that, and “instructing” them to do the other thing, as anyone knows with as much experience teaching college students as Professor Neuliep has (and I have over thirty years’ experience myself), is going to result, some of the time, in compliance—sometimes immediate compliance, even from inwardly squeamish students. If a fairly anti-Christian professor—and we know there are such creatures—is stern and insistent enough, even given to badgering students or saying it’s “required” of them, more will do it. Much depends on how complaisant students are, and how imperious professors are. Things may be all warm and fuzzy in Neuliep’s classroom, but he cannot vouchsafe that the same conditions prevail elsewhere. This suggested exercise is an open invitation to the abuse of Christian students, whether Professor Neuliep intends it as such or not.

And that brings us to whether this exercise should ever be employed even in the friendliest atmosphere with the “coolest” professor. Neuliep says that in his own experience most of the students won’t step on the paper. That means that evidently some of them will. And that means that a communication professor—at a Catholic college—is directly instructing his students to blaspheme the name of Jesus—and sometimes he’s getting exactly that result. In short, he is telling his faithful students to sin, and some will do it, out of weakness, or respect for his authority, or even thoughtless curiosity about where he is going with this.

A fair description, in fact, of what this exercise expects of Christian students is a renunciation of the faith. Am I reading too much symbolic communication into the act? I don’t think so, and the charge that I am would sound strange coming from the professor of communication whose whole point in this exercise is to be “edgy” and push students to see the power of symbols and symbolic acts.

It’s not a happy thought, that a leading textbook in intercultural communication is accompanied by an instructor’s guide that suggests having students undertake an act of symbolic communication of a kind that early Christian saints went to their deaths as martyrs rather than commit. I think Professor Neuliep would be well advised to knock it off, and to take this out of future editions of his instructor’s guide.