Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Greve on “The Bob Jones Rule”

I was going to post on one particular exchange between Solicitor General Verrilli and Justice Alito in yesterday’s oral argument in the same-sex marriage case, but Professor Michael Greve’s post is a better read than what I can come up with. A bit:

Justice Alito: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same-sex marriage?

Solicitor General Verrilli: You know, I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that.

That answer is about as straightforward and committal as you’ll see from an experienced lawyer. It’s curious because the Solicitor General had excellent reasons to deny the point and to deflect the question. His task was to assuage worries about what the Court is being asked to do here and to script the justices’ forthcoming press release (formally known as “the opinion for the Court”): that’s not what this means. And he had a million ways of making reassuring noises. It’s not some complicated legal case, for Pete’s sake: all Mr. Verrilli needed was to argle-bargle for the remaining five minutes of friendly colloquy about First Amendment values, competing dignities, the arc of history, and the meaning of life. In short, Verrilli made the concession not because he had to; he volunteered it. Why?

Because if the tax exemption jazz becomes “an issue,” it’s decided the minute gay marriage becomes the constitutional baseline. Because everyone knows that. Because the LBGT folks already have those complaints and briefs in their drawers, to be filed (almost “certainly”) on July 1.  And because DoJ and the IRS and OCR, in their last remaining eighteen months in office, are in a hurry to roll over to their constituencies and to hammer the hold-outs, in meticulous observance of the law. A hallmark of this administration. Or maybe they’ll hand out waivers.

“I don’t deny that” says “dare me. It’s not going to hurt me in this case, and I’ll plant a flag for the next cases.” Mr. Verrilli could have coasted; instead, he waited for his opening to push further. A heck of a lawyer, at his considerable best.

Posted on by

“Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics” (Sifton, ed.)

This month, the Library of America released “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics” edited by Elisabeth Sifton. The publisher’s description follows:

From the 1920s through the 1960s, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was among America’s most prominent public intellectuals. As a pastor, teacher, and writer, he bridged the divide between religion and politics with perspicacity, grace, and singular intelligence, whether writing about pacifism and “just war” theory, the problem of evil in history, or the crises of war, the Depression, and social conflict. His provocative essays, lectures, and sermons from before and during World War II, in the postwar years, and at the time of the Civil Rights Movement offered searching analyses of the forces shaping American life and politics. Their profound insights into the causes of economic inequality, the challenges of achieving social justice, and the risks of adventurism in the international sphere are as relevant today as they were when he composed them.

This volume, prepared with extensive notes and a chronology by the author’s daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, is the largest, most comprehensive edition of Niebuhr’s writings ever published. It brings together the books Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1929), his personal reflections on his experiences as a young pastor in Detroit as it was being transformed by the explosive growth of the auto industry; Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), a brilliant and tough-minded work that draws out the implications of Niebuhr’s view that while individuals can sometimes overcome the temptations of self-interest, larger groups never can; The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), a passionate defense of democracy written during World War II; and the essential study that Andrew Bacevich has called “the most important book ever written on U.S. foreign policy”: The Irony of American History (1952), a consideration of American conduct in the early Cold War years that takes equal aim at Soviet communism and at the moral complacency of the United States in its newfound global ascendancy.

These four works are supplemented with essays, lectures, and sermons drawn from Niebuhr’s many other books, as well as prayers—among them the well-known Serenity Prayer. The volume also includes a chronologically arranged selection of his journalism about current events, many of the pieces appearing here in book form for the first time. “We are bound to go back to Niebuhr,” the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once wrote, “because we cannot escape the dark heart of man and because we cannot permit an awareness of this darkness to inhibit action and abolish hope.”

Posted on by

Rios Oyola, “Religion, Social Memory and Conflict”

In June, Palgrave Macmillan will release “Religion, Social Memory and Conflict: The Massacre of Bojayá in Colombia” by Sandra Milena Rios Oyola (Utrecht University, Netherlands). The publisher’s description follows:

The field of transitional justice and reconciliation considers social memory 9781137461834
to be an important mechanism for acknowledging the violation of victims’ rights and a step toward building peace. Societies in conflict, such as Colombia, challenge our current understanding of using memory in the construction of social peace processes, which in turn question the impossibility of forgiving violence that is still to come. Drawing on original ethnographical research, Rios analyses strategies of memorialization after the massacre of Bojayá, Colombia, as an arena of political contention but also of grassroots resistance to persistent and diverse forms of violence. The book focuses on the work of the local grassroots Catholic Church and of the victims’ association ten years after the massacre of Bojayá. It explores the role of religion in the management of victims’ emotions and in supporting claims of transitional justice from a grassroots perspective in a context of thin political transition.