libertyinstitutefaithethics free exercise, liberty, religious liberty, Uncategorized

Barr’s Broadside … Read it All

William Barr is currently serving his second stint as Attorney General of the United States.  On October 11, 2019 he delivered an amazing speech at the Notre Dame School of Law de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. His speech was masterful. It is a must read. He skillfully presented the natural law foundation for robust religious liberty and in so doing highlighted the political, philosophical, and anthropological rationales that have protected religious free exercise in the American legal system. 

And he did much, much more. 

He exposed the dangers of secular ethics rooted in sentimentality. He called out “modern secularists [who] dismiss … morality as other-worldly superstition imposed by joy-killing clergy.” And he explained how the Nation’s educational system has become ground zero in a cultural war that, if not thoroughly engaged and confronted, would usher in a controlling and tyrannical government intent of forcing YOU and to accept and even endorse its theology. 

His speech might be renamed or at least subtitled “Why Old Fashioned Religion Matters … It’s Not Just Piety, Baby.” The following extended excerpts gives a taste of his powerhouse presentation. Read it all. 

“The imperative of protecting religious freedom was not just a nod in the direction of piety. It reflects the Framers’ belief that religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government. 

…

Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large.

No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.

But, if you rely on the coercive power of government to impose restraints, this will inevitably lead to a government that is too controlling, and you will end up with no liberty, just tyranny. 

…

I think we all recognize that over the past 50 years religion has been under increasing attack. … we see the growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism.

By any honest assessment, the consequences of this moral upheaval have been grim.

In 1965, the illegitimacy rate was eight percent. In 1992, when I was last Attorney General, it was 25 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. In many of our large urban areas, it is around 70 percent.

Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.

As you all know, over 70,000 people die a year from drug overdoses. That is more casualities in a year than we experienced during the entire Vietnam War.

[T]he campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery. And yet, the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy.

…

Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.

…

Law is being used as weapon in a couple of ways.

First, either through legislation but more frequently through judicial interpretation, secularists have been continually seeking to eliminate laws that reflect traditional moral norms.

At first, this involved rolling back laws that prohibited certain kinds of conduct. Thus, the watershed decision legalizing abortion. And since then, the legalization of euthanasia. The list goes on.

More recently, we have seen the law used aggressively to force religious people and entities to subscribe to practices and policies that are antithetical to their faith.

The problem is not that religion is being forced on others. The problem is that irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.

…

[T]he last Administration sought to force religious employers, including Catholic religious orders, to violate their sincerely held religious views by funding contraceptive and abortifacient coverage in their health plans. Similarly, California has sought to require pro-life pregnancy centers to provide notices of abortion rights.

…

Some state governments are now attempting to compel religious individuals and entities to subscribe to practices, or to espouse viewpoints, that are incompatible with their religion.

Ground zero for these attacks on religion are the schools. To me, this is the most serious challenge to religious liberty. 

…

The first front relates to the content of public school curriculum. Many states are adopting curriculum that is incompatible with traditional religious principles according to which parents are attempting to raise their children. They often do so without any opt out for religious families.

Thus, for example, New Jersey recently passed a law requiring public schools to adopt an LGBT curriculum that many feel is inconsistent with traditional Christian teaching. Similar laws have been passed in California and Illinois. And the Orange County Board of Education in California issued an opinion that “parents who disagree with the instructional materials related to gender, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation may not excuse their children from this instruction.”

…

A second axis of attack in the realm of education are state policies designed to starve religious schools of generally-available funds and encouraging students to choose secular options.  Montana, for example, created a program that provided tax credits to those who donated to a scholarship program that underprivileged students could use to attend private school.  … But Montana expressly excluded religiously-affiliated private schools from the program.  And when that exclusion was challenged in court by parents who wanted to use the scholarships to attend a nondenominational Christian school, the Montana Supreme Court required the state to eliminate the program rather than allow parents to use scholarships for religious schools.

It justified this action by pointing to a provision in Montana’s State Constitution commonly referred to as a “Blaine Amendment.”  Blaine Amendments were passed at a time of rampant anti-Catholic animus in this country, and typically disqualify religious institutions from receiving any direct or indirect payments from a state’s funds.

The case is now in the Supreme Court, and we [the United States Department of Justice] filed a brief explaining why Montana’s Blaine Amendment violates the First Amendment.

A third kind of assault on religious freedom in education have been recent efforts to use state laws to force religious schools to adhere to secular orthodoxy. For example, right here in Indiana, a teacher sued the Catholic Archbishop of Indianapolis for directing the Catholic schools within his diocese that they could not employ teachers in same-sex marriages because the example of those same-sex marriages would undermine the schools’ teaching on the Catholic view of marriage and complementarity between the sexes.

This lawsuit clearly infringes the First Amendment rights of the Archdiocese by interfering both with its expressive association and with its church autonomy. The Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the state court making these points, and we hope that the state court will soon dismiss the case. 

…

We must be vigilant to resist efforts by the forces of secularization to drive religious viewpoints from the public square and to impinge upon the free exercise of our faith.

I can assure you that, as long as I am Attorney General, the Department of Justice will be at the forefront of this effort, ready to fight for the most cherished of our liberties: the freedom to live according to our faith.”

libertyinstitutefaithethics Bioethics, ethics, Uncategorized

Hope Sustains Us Even Now

It seems certain that Vincent Lambert will be euthanized by a doctor because of his brain handicap. This shameful episode, recently the subject of a L.I.F.E. blog post, has divided a family and exposed to plain view the mandate of enforced euthanasia – more properly defined by Saint john Paul II as a form of murder – which is spreading over the insipid cultures of morbid post-industrialized First World. 

In his masterful opus Evangelium Vitae John Paul the affirmed “that euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.” (n. 65)

Vincent Lambert will die because he is disabled and members of his family, excluding his loving parents and a minority of his siblings, have deemed his life not worthy of life. Some say it is his will; that he did not want life on such disabled terms. Regardless of the justification offered, what is happening to Lambert is a crime. John Paul speaks directly to each of these circumstances: 

True “compassion” leads to sharing another’s pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear. Moreover, the act of euthanasia appears all the more perverse if it is carried out by those, like relatives, who are supposed to treat a family member with patience and love, or by those, such as doctors, who by virtue of their specific profession are supposed to care for the sick person even in the most painful terminal stages.

The choice of euthanasia becomes more serious when it takes the form of a murder committed by others on a person who has in no way requested it and who has never consented to it. (n. 66) 

John Paul went on to describe euthanasia, along with abortion, as “crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize.” No one is obliged in conscience to obey such unjust laws but rather “there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them (n. 73). 

God bless the parents of Vincent Lambert who have witnessed to love and fought a courageous battle against the sadness of modern culture which has lost the art of loving.

libertyinstitutefaithethics Uncategorized

Something To Do With Character

New York State now champions abortion to birth and Governor Northam of Virginia nonchalantly advocates infanticide. It’s really all so old. Abortion on demand to birth has been the mandate of a legislating Supreme Court for almost fifty years. Still, something in the condescending tone of New York’s governor and the Virginia Klan fan has disturbed a long dormant fury previously manifest in many as resignation. It reaches deeper now that they have stepped from behind the curtain and made so bold a thrust into the heart of virtue. 

On February 25, 2019, several 2020 presidential candidates signaled their lock-step alliance with Northrup by voting to block the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. Senators Sanders, Harris, “Spartacus” Booker, Gillibrand, Klobuchar, and Warren voted against the bill. They opposed criminal penalties for those refusing to provide the same level of care given any other baby born at the same gestational age. The bill also required immediate hospital admission of a “child born alive” following an attempted abortion. 

Senator Ben Sasse was dumbfounded: “I want to ask each and every one of my colleagues whether or not we’re OK with infanticide.”

It calls to mind one of the most memorable defenses of decency in recent American political history:  

“Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says ‘we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’ This is about the character of our nation.”

Carly Fiorina, GOP Presidential Debate, September 16, 2015. 

Her words need no elaboration. To those unacquainted with the particular malice of Kermit Gosnell or infanticide, Fiorina’s indictment startled. As it should. 

This kind of slaughter has become so ubiquitous that almost nothing shocks. Almost. In 2007 Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in one of the Supreme Court’s momentary lapses into social sanity known as Gonzales v. Carhart,  described a typical second trimester abortion: 

The doctor grips a fetal part with the forceps and pulls it back through the cervix and vagina, continuing to pull even after meeting resistance from the cervix. The friction causes the fetus to tear apart. For example, a leg might be ripped off the fetus as it is pulled through the cervix and out of the woman. The process of evacuating the fetus piece by piece continues until it has been completely removed.  550 U.S. at 135-136.

The procedure has its alternatives, as Kennedy noted: 

Some doctors … may kill the fetus a day or two before performing the surgical evacuation. … Once dead, moreover, the fetus’ body will soften, and its removal will be easier. Id. at 136. 

In other second trimester abortions, when the baby’s head is too large to pass the partially dilated cervix, a variation may be utilized in which the child is delivered breach (feet first) until only the head or head and shoulders remain within the mother. Justice Kennedy provided the liberating details from the vantage point of a nurse who actually participated in the procedure performed on a 26 week human being:       

[The doctor] went in with forceps and grabbed the baby’s legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby’s body and the arms—everything but the head. The doctor kept the head right inside the uterus… .

The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.

The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp.

Kennedy described other methods used to kill a baby once its head lodges in the cervix.

One doctor squeezes the skull after it has been pierced so that enough brain tissue exudes to allow the head to pass through. Still other physicians reach into the cervix with their forceps and crush the fetus’ skull. Others continue to pull the fetus out of the woman until it disarticulates at the neck, in effect decapitating it. These doctors then grasp the head with forceps, crush it, and remove it.

“Disarticulates.” Almost nothing shocks. Almost. Justice Kennedy continued, quoting one abortionist’s testimony: 

Another doctor testified he crushes a fetus’ skull not only to reduce its size but also to ensure the fetus is dead before it is removed. For the staff to have to deal with a fetus that has “some viability to it, some movement of limbs,” according to this doctor, “[is] always a difficult situation.” (Id. 139-140)   

Gee, that really does sound difficult. 

What Carly Fiorina presented to the nation during the 2015 GOP debate was the most significant diagnosis of social malignancy in a generation. Not since Eisenhower ordered the filming of concentration camps in 1945 had there been such disgust. Not the killing fields of Pol Pot. Not the Biafrian genocide. Not the slaughters in Rwanda. “I dare anyone … watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking”. Eisenhower knew that others would deny the barbarity of the camps. Fiorina knew that many would deny that Planned Parenthood murders babies or that America sanctions harvesting baby parts. But we do. Watch the videos. While you’re at it, don’t miss “Eclipse of Reason,” an equally disturbing but valuable object lesson in what we have become: 

Fiorina exposed callousness, banality, evil, and indifference. They speak not of bad behavior but of vicious character. She opened a festering wound desperately in need of debridement: our national character is rotting. It is not the language of political discourse that needs a cure; it is merely a symptom. The cancer is malice against nature that denies reason or purpose or truth if there be any chance that they may challenge the ideology of radical autonomy with duty, biological normalcy, or humility. Exhibit A: Governor Cuomo. Exhibit B: “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking …” 

Defunding Planned Parenthood is the minimum any healthy society would demand. But ours is not a healthy society.  Defunding a baby body parts harvesting machine is reflexively inexplicable to those committed to the protection of infanticide:

  • Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders, all of whom cast congressional votes to preserve the particular grotesquerie of partial birth abortion.
  • Bill Clinton, who twice vetoed partial birth abortion bans.
  • Barak Obama, who repeatedly cast his state senate vote against the Illinois version of the 2002 Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

How did we get here? L.I.F.E.’s Tom Davis presented much of the of the backstory in an article last summer: Treating Embryocide with White Gloves. Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood were at the genesis of the eugenic movement that swept across the nation and eventually found welcome embrace in the Nazi pogroms of racial purification. It was not long before the eugenic spirit crossed the threshold from sterilization and breeding houses to abortion and infanticide. 

In 1942, Eugenicist Foster Kennedy, a member of the Medical Advisory Board of The Birth Control Review, writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry opined:

I believe when the defective child shall have reached the age of five years – and on the application of his guardians – that the case should be considered under law by a competent medical review board; then it should be reviewed twice more at four-month intervals; then, if the board, acting, I repeat, on the application of the guardians of the child, and after three examinations of a defective who has reached the age of five or more, should decide that that defective has no future or hope of one; then I believe it is a merciful and kindly thing to relieve that defective – often tortured and convulsed, grotesque and absurd, useless  and foolish, and eventually undesirable – of the agony of living. 

E.F. Kennedy, The problem of social control of the congenital defective: education, sterilization, euthanasia, Am. J. Psychiatry, 99:13-16. 

In the same issue of the Journal, an unsigned editorial endorsed Kennedy’s view and urged that the proper role of psychiatrists was “the evaluation and melioration of [the] parental attitude” of “fondness” for such a child “and their ‘want’ that he should be kept alive.” Euthanasia  (Am J Psychiatry, 99:  141-43 (1942).

At the end of the Second World War widespread revulsion over genocidal murder and human rights violations in national socialist Germany repressed the eugenic spirit of the age. But the idea that certain lives were simply not worth living was etched in the mind of state planners, medical professionals and social engineers.          

By the time Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, a thoroughly secular understanding of human value based solely on materialist criteria had reasserted itself. Nobel Prize winning scientist James Watson, who together with Francis Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA, opined that children should not be declared alive until three days after birth so that parents may have the option of allowing defective offspring to die, thereby saving “a lot of misery and suffering.” For his part, Francis Crick went even further in 1978: “No newborn infant should be declared human until it has passed certain tests regarding its genetic endowment … If it fails these tests it forfeits the right to live.” Lest the impression be left that these are fringe opinions it is worth noting that from 1989-1992 Dr. Watson was the director of the National Center for Genome Research, later renamed the National Human Genome Research Institute, within the National Institutes of Health. 

The groundwork for Governors Northup and Cuomo was laid long ago. A more recent yet similarly radical view of human worth has been offered by Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. In his book Practical Ethics, Singer argues that human life has value only so long as it is conscious. He holds that any sentient being with consciousness is within the sphere of “equal consideration” of interests. (P. Singer, Practical Ethics, 2d ed., Cambridge University Press (1993) p. 74).  By that he means that, human or animal, a conscious, sentient being has a greater interest in life than a fetus, a new born baby or a person diagnosed in persistent vegetative state: 

I have argued that the life of a fetus (and even more plainly, of an embryo) is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus.

If we can put aside these emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby we can see that the grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants. (Practical Ethics at 169-171).

If we can put aside these emotionally moving ... aspects of the killing of a baby …  He is serious. This is about the character of our nation. 

Singer defends his position by arguing that “our present absolute protection of the lives of infants is a distinctively Christian attitude rather than a universal ethical value” and that several ancient cultures considered infanticide, “the natural and humane solution to the problem posed by sick and deformed babies” and concludes that their “superior” moral sense was subverted by the Christian “doctrine of the sanctity of human life“. His thought is mired in his own subjectivism:

[T]he fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that makes the difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings.

When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of a happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second: Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him. (Practical Ethics at 182-186). 

Given Singer’s notion of reflective self-consciousness as the critical element of personhood, it is not surprising that he dismisses any idea of intrinsic value for the  newborn infant:

I cannot see how one could defend the view that fetuses may be “replaced” before birth, but newborn infants may not be.

It all began here, in the United States, championed by Sanger and carried on today by Planned Parenthood and a cadre of abortion zealots who cannot see the humanity in treating a newborn that survives an abortion as a person. It has something to do with character.  

libertyinstitutefaithethics Bioethics, biotech, ethics, free exercise, freedom of speech, religious liberty, technology

L.I.F.E. is Live – Join Us

Life is short, so the saying goes. Here at L.I.F.E. we are going long, as in “for the long haul.” Liberty, life, freedom of conscience, and family structures face unprecedented challenges in the era of technological revolution, expanding government intrusion into daily life, and rapidly evolving social norms. The interface of natural sciences, medicine, and technology offers previously unimaginable vistas. At the same time, those disciplines and others, such as law, ethics, economics, and philosophy open potentials for abuse. 

L.I.F.E. is a new resource, tracking developments related to religious and political liberty, bioethics, and cultural expression. It is no neutral observer. Rather, it proposes a natural law ethic that presupposes and advocates certain first principals: the human person is a creature possessed of free will; societies of persons are the natural state of human persons, beginning with the family based on marriage of one man and one woman, and expanding to local, regional and international political structures; there exist inherent standards of good and evil not contingent on circumstance or intention but of their very nature; each human life is precious, unique and unrepeatable and demands the protection of law from conception to natural death; the free exercise of religion is fundamental to the legitimacy of a given political order; each person is endowed with unalienable rights including freedom of thought, speech, conscience, and religion; and each is obliged to respect the freedom of others and to fulfill the duties inherent to the flourishing of civil society. L.I.F.E. offers a critical assessment of the forces shaping the 21stCentury in light of those first principals. 

L.I.F.E.’s principal organs of commentary, advocacy, and study are the Saint John Paul II Bioethics Center, the Religious Liberty Observatory, and the Center for the Study of Bioethics & Law. 

The annual Saint John Paul II Bioethics Lecture presents academics, jurists, scientists, and others addressing timely topics in bioethics. The 2019 lecture, And Such Were Some of You: Homosexuality and the Bible, features renowned scripture scholar Rev. Sebastian Carnazzo, PhD. And the Center for the Study of Bioethics & Law offers a free university level course: Bioethics & Law 101, with many more in the pipeline.

Please take a stroll through our easy to navigate site. We think you will find in it sources that both delight and challenge.