♦ I’m grateful to Mary Ann Glendon for her generous response to my heretical rejections of dialogue and human rights (“Reclaim Human Rights”). She’s surely right that the wisest course of action will require witness and real dialogue rather than the “let’s talk until you capitulate” version, as well as criticism of human-rights ideologies and advocacy of genuine human rights. Glendon agrees, however, that our circumstances have changed over the last generation. Christianity was shouldered aside when the European Union set about to formulate a preamble to its constitution. That decision reflects a wider effort to reorient the Western consensus toward secular progressivism. As this shift gathers momentum, the civic virtue of dialogue and the moral imperative of human rights take on new, often ideological meanings that work against rather than in harmony with our deepest commitments. In “Amnesty International Betrays Women,” in this issue, Darren Geist reports on Amnesty International’s push to decriminalize prostitution—in the name of human rights. It’s a sign of how far things have gone. Our participation in public life is very likely to become more often critical than cooperative, at least as long as the secular world defines the terms of cooperation.
♦ The Charles Koch Foundation and an anonymous donor proposed a large donation on the condition that George Mason University’s law school be renamed in honor of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The university trustees accepted. Outcry ensued. New York Times writer Nicholas Fandos breathlessly reported that this gift and name change “focused attention for the first time in a serious way on whether the administration and trustees at George Mason had allowed Virginia’s largest public university to become an ideological outpost.” Behold the first principle of academic life: Conservatism is ideological; progressivism is good people applying reason to solve society’s problems.
