Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Wardle on Abortion, Same-Sex Marriage, and Education

Another paper by Lynn Wardle (BYU), The Impacts on Education of Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage and Lessons From Abortion Jurisprudence.  The abstract follows.

One of the most contentious issues to arise in public policy debates concerning the legalization of same-sex marriage is whether legalizing same-sex marriage has a significant detrimental impact on education, particularly public education. However, legal scholarly and professional consideration of this issue is scarce and one sided. This article reviews the evidence that legalizing same-sex marriage has had a serious, profoundly controversial, and arguably detrimental impact on public education. It then explains why legalization of same-sex marriage must have some impact on educational curriculum. When the meaning of marriage changes it must be reflected in the curriculum that covers that subject. Next, the existing constitutional protections against detrimental impacts upon parents’ rights and family integrity interests of legalizing same-sex marriage are reviewed. The article also presents an analogy from abortion jurisprudence that may provide some protection for parental rights to control the education of their children and protect them against some detrimental effects on education from legalizing same-sex marriage. Finally, the article provides some recommendations for legal remedies and community action that may address these concerns.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Catholic Bishops Focus on Religious Liberty

Here is a story that should be of some  interest to those who work on and think about religious liberty.  The story, notwithstanding various slanted statements in it (the bishops did not “reorder their priorities” between the 1980s and the 1990s, all of a sudden deciding that abortion was very important to them) as well as several rhetorical lowlights (using words like “ire” and so on to describe what are religious beliefs, suggesting that Catholic beliefs have been strategically “recast” in certain ways), seems at least accurately to report a new focus of the bishops on questions of religious liberty.

The piece is another indication that John Allen had it exactly right.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Russia’s Proposed Abortion Law and the Influence of the Orthodox Church

From Reuters’s FaithWorld blog, a story about a proposed abortion law in Russia. The new law, which seems likely to pass, would ban all abortions after the 12th week of pregnancy, impose a one-week waiting period, and require women who are more than six weeks pregnant to view an ultrasound picture of the embryo and listen to its heartbeat before going through with an abortion. The new law has the strong backing of the Russian Orthodox Church, a powerful force in Russian society, and the FaithWorld story focuses on that angle.  I wonder how much the church is really driving things, though. Russia faces a demographic crisis; by 2050, the UN predicts, Russia’s population will have fallen by 20%, if current trends continue. And its abortion rate is the highest in the world, 73 per 100 births in 2009. So I suspect that secular forces support the new law as well; their influence may be the decisive factor. — MLM

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Personhood Amendment Fails in Mississippi

An update on the proposed Personhood Amendment on the ballot in Mississippi, about which I posted last month. The measure, which would have amended the state constitution to define life as beginning at  the moment of conception, failed yesterday. The defeat was surprising, given earlier opinion surveys in this socially conservative state, but the Personhood Amendment had divided abortion opponents, including the Catholic Church, which declined to endorse the measure for pragmatic reasons. — MLM

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Requiring Nurses to Perform Abortions

Another case raising the issue of so-called conscience exemptions: this week, a group of 12 hospital nurses in New Jersey brought suit against their employer, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), for requiring them to participate in abortions. The plaintiffs allege that the hospital’s actions violate the “Church Amendment,” a federal law which forbids hospitals receiving federal funds, like UMDNJ, from requiring employees to participate in abortions if participation would violate the employees’ “religious beliefs or moral convictions.” The plaintiffs allege that the hospital’s actions violate state law as well. As my friend Rick Garnett at Mirror of Justice notes, this seems to be a pretty blatant violation of law, but, based on a student note I read recently, it’s not all that unusual. The complaint in the case, Danquah v. UMDNJ, is here. — MLM

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

The Personhood Amendment and Pragmatism

From the New York Times, a report on a proposed constitutional amendment in Mississippi that would declare a fertilized human egg to be a legal person. As the Times points out, the Personhood Amendment would effectively make abortion, as well as contraceptive methods like the morning-after pill that prevent the uterine implantation of a fertilized egg, a form of murder under state law. According to the Times, the amendment’s supporters speak in frankly religious terms. One is quoted as saying that the Amendment is “an opportunity for people to say that we’re made in the image of God.”

A couple of points. First, notwithstanding the Rawlsian critique, theological arguments like this are actually fairly rare in American politics, for understandable reasons. As a practical matter, if you want to persuade people in a pluralistic society, you’ve got to make arguments that appeal to different religious and ideological commitments; you’ve got to speak in an idiom that includes rather than excludes. (This may not be the case in Mississippi, concededly, where the amendment is popular and has the support of both the Democratic and Republican gubernatorial candidates). This explains why the right-to-life movement in America tends not to speak in strictly theological terms, but to rely on arguments from reason and, lately, embryonic Read more