I suspect he is the proverbial voice crying in the wilderness, but in an op-ed piece in the New York Times Jed Rubenfeld, professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School, says Attorney General Designate Michael Mukasey is going against at least three Supreme Court rulings -- and even the previous position of the Justice Department -- when he claims that the president can disobey a valid federal law to defend the country.
Contrary to Mukasey's testimony during his confirmation hearings, Rubenfeld writes: "Under the U.S. Constitution, federal statutes, not execuative decisions in the name of national security, are 'the supreme law of the land.' It's that simple. So long as a statute is constitutional, it is binding on everyone, including the president.
"The president has no supreme, exclusive or trumping authority to 'defend the nation.' In fact, the Constitution uses the words 'provide for the common defense' in its list of the powers of Congress, not those of the president."
Rubenfeld says that Mukasey should not be confirmed unless he retracts his statement and says plainly that a federal statute is supreme when the president and the Congress, both acting within their constitutional powers, clash.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Special Olympics: From Eunice Kennedy's Front Lawn to Shanghai
I had forgotten that Eunice Kennedy Shriver basically founded the Special Olympics in 1962, when she invited some children with Down syndrome to compete on her front lawn.The following article, from the 10/12 edition of the National Catholic Reporter, says that at age 87 she is still promoting the Special Olympics around the world--and even traveled to Shanghai in late September for the Special Olympics World Summer Games 10/2-10/11. Even Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets center, was on hand to welcome the competitors to China, which until recently has had a difficult time acknowledging it has people with intellectual disabilities.
The article is quite a testimony to what one determined individual with a creative idea can contribute to humanity.
By COLMAN McCARTHY
Whenever I’ve been with Eunice Kennedy Shriver, I’ve always come away thinking, “I must become a better person.”
A similar thought may have entered the minds of some of the tens of thousands who gathered from Oct. 2 to 11 in Shanghai, China, for the Special Olympics World Summer Games. Some 7,500 athletes with intellectual disabilities from 160 nations competed in 23 sports.
The event could really have been called the Eunice Shriver World Games. For 40 years she has traveled the planet, to every continent except Antarctica, doing the hard labor of rousing governments, schools, corporations, volunteers and families to include “the special people” in all parts of life.
She did that in her Massachusetts childhood as the sister of the mentally disabled Rosemary Kennedy, and in the 1960s when she persuaded -- browbeat, some say -- her brother President John F. Kennedy to get on the legislative ball regarding the intellectually handicapped. She set out to prove, and eventually did, that the confidence Special Olympians gain through sports could be transferred to their academic and working lives, including acquiring marketable skills in the service industries.
What began in the spring of 1962, when Eunice Shriver invited a few children with Down syndrome to meet and compete on her front lawn, is now the world’s largest sports program, one involving several million athletes and coaches. A 1994 poll taken by the Chronicle of Philanthropy said that the Special Olympics ranked first as the nation’s most credible nonprofit venture, well ahead of the Girl Scouts, the Salvation Army and the American Red Cross.
Eunice Shriver left for Shanghai in late September. I have to think that all kinds of observers told her not to go, saying, “You’re 87. You had a stroke in July and doctors said you would never speak again. You’ve been hospitalized twice in critical condition. You’ve had two severe car crashes. You’ve grown old and now it’s time to get sedentary.”
Similar cautions have been thrown at Eunice Shriver for decades: “You can’t do much about retardation. It’s a genetic or prenatal defect for which early intervention or education -- much less winning medals in the 100-yard dash -- won’t help.”
“Baloney,” she barked. Or, in more stately language, as she said in a White House dinner in honor of her 85th birthday two years ago: “Let us not forget that we have miles to go to overturn the prejudice and oppression facing the world’s 180 million citizens with intellectual disabilities. ... As we go forward, all of us, may our numbers increase in this noble battle. May you overturn ignorance. May you challenge indifference at every turn. And may you find great joy in the new daylight of the great athletes of the Special Olympics.”
I came to know Eunice Shriver in the mid-1960s when I worked for her husband, Sargent Shriver. To describe him the word “ebullient” was invented. Maybe I’ve missed the others, but I can’t think of any other couple whose works of mercy and rescue for almost a half century have uplifted the lives of more people in more parts of the world.
For Sargent Shriver, it was the Peace Corps, Head Start, Legal Services, Job Corps, Foster Grandparents, Upward Bound -- all programs he started and then protected as Republicans in Congress and the White House attacked them. For Eunice Shriver, her lasting achievement was not only to give the mentally disabled the chance they deserve but to completely reverse the negative thinking of mental health experts about retardation.
More work is ahead. Timothy Shriver, who has succeeded his mother as the head of Special Olympics, tells of a recent Gallup poll in which 62 percent of Americans said they don’t want their child to be in a school with a retarded child.
I don’t know whether that’s true in China, but after the Shanghai games, those ideas may be changing.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Why the “Wall of Separation” Is Indispensable for American Democracy
National Catholic Reporter writer John Allen reported online 9/21 that at a recent Pittsburgh symposium, Thomas J. Curry, a Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop in Los Angeles, denied that U.S. Constitution mandates a “wall of separation” between church and state.
Curry acknowledged it was Thomas Jefferson himself who crafted the phrase “wall of separation” in 1802, as a handy synonym for the freedom-of-religion language that Congress adopted in 1789 and the states ratified in 1791. But Curry thinks the U.S. Supreme Court was wrong to rule in 1947 that Jefferson’s interpretation is correct and normative.
Given the history of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, it’s quite astonishing that Curry could forget how closely they matched Jefferson’s views.
Seven different drafts of the First Amendment’s religious freedom language were distilled by Congressional committees or representatives from Virginia’s “Act for Establishing Religious Freedom,” which Jefferson proposed as governor in 1779. But the Virginia legislature didn’t pass its act until 1786, because it took Jefferson that long to overcome Patrick Henry’s competing proposal to make Christianity the state religion of Virginia, with all denominations given equal privileges. This was in a context where nine of the original 13 colonies had an established religion. Jefferson dedicated years to changing that, in Virginia and in the Constitution.
Curry says the First Amendment applies only to the state—so that churches are not bound by it and cannot violate it. He argues that the “wall of separation” image has led to mistaken conclusions that religions should stay out of public debates and that government has a positive role as a promoter of religious freedom.
The opening 16 words of the First Amendment read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
Since Congress is the entity barred from establishing religion or prohibiting free exercise of religion, Curry may be correct in saying that churches cannot violate the First Amendment all by themselves. However, it is the basic ground rule for religions operating in the United States: churches here are bound by it, and they have tried repeatedly to get government entities to violate it.
A typical example is the “Religious Viewpoints Anti-Discrimination Act,” passed by the Texas Legislature last spring. In a recent analysis, Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, says the law requires that schools turn public events like morning announcements, football games and graduation ceremonies into “limited public forums,” which allow student speakers to promote their own religious beliefs and even try to convert other students.
While the act purports to shield students from discipline for expressing religious beliefs and to protect schools from lawsuits under state law, it hardly leaves the public school a neutral actor under the First Amendment. On the contrary, the school will be acting as a government agency forcing all students to participate in functions that promote specific religious views they or their families do not share. Miller envisions some real-life conflicts that might ensue:
“When a Wiccan student council president closes morning announcements each day with a prayer to the Mother Goddess, will Christian families object? What happens when the captain of the football team decides to use his pep rally speech to mock the faith of opposing players and, potentially, the faith of some students in his own school?”
I might add the very likely scenario of a conservative Christian valedictorian who asks the graduates and their families to praise Jesus for getting them to this milestone, when Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu or agnostic students might think Jesus had little to do with it and find their own religious views denigrated by the claim.
In my 8/24 posting on CNN’s series on religious extremists, I observed: “The blood-thirsty insistence by 'God’s Warriors' that they must destroy anyone who disagrees with them is the strongest present-day confirmation that that the wall of separation is the perfect antidote to intolerant self-worship masquerading as faith—and that the sooner it is adopted in every nation on earth, the safer the world will be.”
Jefferson and the other architects of the Bill of Rights experienced the chaos and misery that result when any religion is allowed to lord it over others. It took them decades, but it was precisely a wall of separation which they built between church and state. Their wisdom has proved durable for over 200 years. And every year has its cast of religious crackpots to remind us why.
Curry acknowledged it was Thomas Jefferson himself who crafted the phrase “wall of separation” in 1802, as a handy synonym for the freedom-of-religion language that Congress adopted in 1789 and the states ratified in 1791. But Curry thinks the U.S. Supreme Court was wrong to rule in 1947 that Jefferson’s interpretation is correct and normative.
Given the history of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, it’s quite astonishing that Curry could forget how closely they matched Jefferson’s views.
Seven different drafts of the First Amendment’s religious freedom language were distilled by Congressional committees or representatives from Virginia’s “Act for Establishing Religious Freedom,” which Jefferson proposed as governor in 1779. But the Virginia legislature didn’t pass its act until 1786, because it took Jefferson that long to overcome Patrick Henry’s competing proposal to make Christianity the state religion of Virginia, with all denominations given equal privileges. This was in a context where nine of the original 13 colonies had an established religion. Jefferson dedicated years to changing that, in Virginia and in the Constitution.
Curry says the First Amendment applies only to the state—so that churches are not bound by it and cannot violate it. He argues that the “wall of separation” image has led to mistaken conclusions that religions should stay out of public debates and that government has a positive role as a promoter of religious freedom.
The opening 16 words of the First Amendment read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
Since Congress is the entity barred from establishing religion or prohibiting free exercise of religion, Curry may be correct in saying that churches cannot violate the First Amendment all by themselves. However, it is the basic ground rule for religions operating in the United States: churches here are bound by it, and they have tried repeatedly to get government entities to violate it.
A typical example is the “Religious Viewpoints Anti-Discrimination Act,” passed by the Texas Legislature last spring. In a recent analysis, Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, says the law requires that schools turn public events like morning announcements, football games and graduation ceremonies into “limited public forums,” which allow student speakers to promote their own religious beliefs and even try to convert other students.
While the act purports to shield students from discipline for expressing religious beliefs and to protect schools from lawsuits under state law, it hardly leaves the public school a neutral actor under the First Amendment. On the contrary, the school will be acting as a government agency forcing all students to participate in functions that promote specific religious views they or their families do not share. Miller envisions some real-life conflicts that might ensue:
“When a Wiccan student council president closes morning announcements each day with a prayer to the Mother Goddess, will Christian families object? What happens when the captain of the football team decides to use his pep rally speech to mock the faith of opposing players and, potentially, the faith of some students in his own school?”
I might add the very likely scenario of a conservative Christian valedictorian who asks the graduates and their families to praise Jesus for getting them to this milestone, when Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu or agnostic students might think Jesus had little to do with it and find their own religious views denigrated by the claim.
In my 8/24 posting on CNN’s series on religious extremists, I observed: “The blood-thirsty insistence by 'God’s Warriors' that they must destroy anyone who disagrees with them is the strongest present-day confirmation that that the wall of separation is the perfect antidote to intolerant self-worship masquerading as faith—and that the sooner it is adopted in every nation on earth, the safer the world will be.”
Jefferson and the other architects of the Bill of Rights experienced the chaos and misery that result when any religion is allowed to lord it over others. It took them decades, but it was precisely a wall of separation which they built between church and state. Their wisdom has proved durable for over 200 years. And every year has its cast of religious crackpots to remind us why.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
The Very Rich Get a CLEW: Avoid "the Twinkiefication of Deluxe" by Giving It Away
In a column earlier this week, with tongue conspicuously in cheek, George Will lamented the lot of the very rich: “...they are getting diminishing psychological returns on their spending now that luxury brands are becoming democratized. When there are 379 Louis Vuitton and 227 Gucci stores, who cares?”
While I almost always enjoy reading Will, it’s rather rare that I agree with him. But I think he’s on to something here.
Will acquaints us with the Forbes CLEW index, which tracks the Cost of Living Extremely Well. Along with other “bling indexes”—Fortune magazine’s lists of stocks like Christian Dior and Richemont (Cartier and Chloe), and Citicorp’s “plutonomy” stocks such as Sotheby’s, Bulgari and Hermes—the CLEW shows how it is “increasingly expensive to be rich.”
The aspiring very rich used to achieve notoriety by acquiring so-called “positional goods”—luxuries that only people of immense wealth could afford. Sadly, when too many people become wealthy enough to purchase such luxuries, what was once exclusive and elite becomes common, and acquiring them ceases to satisfy. And so, says Will, envy increases in direct proportion to wealth, perhaps exponentially.
Thus the cul-de-sacs of “so much money sloshing around the world:"
“When 40 percent of all Japanese—and, Fortune reports, 94.3 percent of Japanese women in their 20s—own a Louis Vuitton item, its positional value vanishes…
“Now that Ralph Lauren is selling house paint, can Polo radial tires be far behind? When a yacht manufacturer advertises a $20 million craft—in a newspaper, for Pete’s sake; the Financial Times, but still—cachet is a casualty.”
We are witnessing what a University of Florida professors calls "the Twinkiefication of deluxe."
But Will sees a way out. The heavy burdens of the plutonomous might turn out to be a blessing for the rest of us: “…because the merely affluent are diminishing the ability of the very rich to derive pleasure from positional goods, philanthropy might become the final form of positional competition.”
And so Will suggests an outcome Adam Smith appears never to have envisioned: “When rising consumption of luxuries produces declining enjoyment of vast wealth, giving it away might be the best revenge.”
Of course, folks like Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett and Joan Kroc seem to have realized this a while ago. But perhaps those who aspire to outdo them will at long last learn to emulate their generosity too—learn to envy and enjoy the singular satisfaction that only comes from competing to improve the common good.
While I almost always enjoy reading Will, it’s rather rare that I agree with him. But I think he’s on to something here.
Will acquaints us with the Forbes CLEW index, which tracks the Cost of Living Extremely Well. Along with other “bling indexes”—Fortune magazine’s lists of stocks like Christian Dior and Richemont (Cartier and Chloe), and Citicorp’s “plutonomy” stocks such as Sotheby’s, Bulgari and Hermes—the CLEW shows how it is “increasingly expensive to be rich.”
The aspiring very rich used to achieve notoriety by acquiring so-called “positional goods”—luxuries that only people of immense wealth could afford. Sadly, when too many people become wealthy enough to purchase such luxuries, what was once exclusive and elite becomes common, and acquiring them ceases to satisfy. And so, says Will, envy increases in direct proportion to wealth, perhaps exponentially.
Thus the cul-de-sacs of “so much money sloshing around the world:"
“When 40 percent of all Japanese—and, Fortune reports, 94.3 percent of Japanese women in their 20s—own a Louis Vuitton item, its positional value vanishes…
“Now that Ralph Lauren is selling house paint, can Polo radial tires be far behind? When a yacht manufacturer advertises a $20 million craft—in a newspaper, for Pete’s sake; the Financial Times, but still—cachet is a casualty.”
We are witnessing what a University of Florida professors calls "the Twinkiefication of deluxe."
But Will sees a way out. The heavy burdens of the plutonomous might turn out to be a blessing for the rest of us: “…because the merely affluent are diminishing the ability of the very rich to derive pleasure from positional goods, philanthropy might become the final form of positional competition.”
And so Will suggests an outcome Adam Smith appears never to have envisioned: “When rising consumption of luxuries produces declining enjoyment of vast wealth, giving it away might be the best revenge.”
Of course, folks like Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett and Joan Kroc seem to have realized this a while ago. But perhaps those who aspire to outdo them will at long last learn to emulate their generosity too—learn to envy and enjoy the singular satisfaction that only comes from competing to improve the common good.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Outlawing Abortion Does Not Reduce Abortion Rates; Contraception Does.
The first time I questioned official Catholic teachings publicly was May 8, 1967. It was in the first issue of my stint as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper at Loyola University of Los Angeles (it became Loyola Marymount in the summer of 1968). I raised the questions in an editorial titled “Senate Abortion Bill: Do We Protest Too Much?”
The other staffers were so anxious about the position I was taking in an official publication of a Catholic college—just recovering from a run-in with the very conservative “James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, Archbishop of Los Angeles” over which direction altars should face—that they made me initial the editorial in print.
The editorial discussed a bill proposed in the California legislature by State Sen. Anthony Beilensen to liberalize the state’s abortion laws. Toward the start I said, “The manner in which parishes throughout the Southland have sought to mobilize opposition to the abortion bill has been particularly disturbing. Week after week prelates, pastors, and parish societies have engaged in a concerted effort to impose Catholic moral teaching on the non-Catholic people of California.”
Noting that the Episcopal Bishop of California testified before the State Senate Judiciary Committee that a permissive abortion law was not immoral, I concluded, “Only a law that allows members of both faiths to live out the dictates of their consciences and their religious beliefs is consistent with the Constitution of the United States and the spirit of Vatican II.”
As expected, reaction to the editorial was mixed, largely along liberal vs. conservative lines. Let’s say I didn’t change very many Catholic minds in 1967.
But the subsequent 40 years did not talk me out of it. If anything, the sustained drumbeat of official Catholicism, here and abroad, that abortion must be outlawed, has solidified my stand.
The U.S. bishops, of course, have persuaded the evangelical right and together they have coerced numerous right-wing Catholic politicians to toe the official line.
Still, other Catholic politicians, better educated in theology and constitutional law, have repeatedly told the bishops that what they want is a bad idea, because it cannot succeed in a society where people hold a whole range of beliefs about abortion. Of course, some of those politicians have paid a heavy price for abiding by their oaths to uphold the Constitution. Bishops have attacked them personally, campaigned for their opponents, and even denied them communion to deny the validity of their argument.
Well, those Catholic politicians just got some new ammunition. It turns out there’s another reason to oppose laws that outlaw abortion: they don’t work!
Research just published in The Lancet medical journal tracked abortion trends from 1995 to 2003, the largest study ever on the global incidence of abortion. It found that women are just as likely to get an abortion in countries where it is illegal as they are where it is legal. This was true whether the country was rich or poor.
Globally there are about 205 million pregnancies each year, about 68 million unintentional. Abortions worldwide dropped from 46 million in 1995 to 42 million in 2003 (from 22.4% of pregnancies to 20.4%).
The only places abortion rates stayed noticeably higher were countries where the government had enthusiastically encouraged abortions. In eastern Europe, for example, there were 105 abortions for every 100 live births.
In western Europe, where abortion is generally legal, there were 23 abortions per 100 births. Yet in Africa, where most countries outlaw abortion, the rate was nearly the same: 17 abortions per 100 births.
Remarkably, in the United States, where the campaign to outlaw abortions has been longest and loudest, there were 33 abortions for every 100 live births. On the face of it, the western European model produces better results.
Two numbers from the study were the most damning. Half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe. And 97% of all unsafe abortions were in poor countries. About 70,000 women die each year from the unsafe abortions, and another five million are injured, some permanently. The study declared these results “a public health crisis and a human rights atrocity.”
The researchers found only one strategy that works to decrease the rate of abortions: increase the availability of contraception.
In an editorial about the study, the Houston Chronicle found two conclusions inescapable: “The evidence is crystal clear: if abortion is a woman’s only viable choice to limit her family, she will take it, regardless of laws or safety concerns. It is equally clear that in countries where contraception is widely available, abortion rates go down. That is a choice that is both reasonable and humane.”
The message is obvious: Those who oppose abortion and contraception need to seriously reconsider their position. Trying to deny women access to both does not reduce abortions. But promoting contraception does.
If the Catholic church and the evangelical right are truly interested in reducing the number of abortions, they need to use preaching and persuasion to sell their position that abortion is wrong—and stop the pretense that outlawing abortion and discouraging contraception accomplishes anything. All it really gains is more deaths from unsafe abortions. They say they have no appetite for executing mothers who abort. Then they need to stop pushing laws that carry a death penalty.
The other staffers were so anxious about the position I was taking in an official publication of a Catholic college—just recovering from a run-in with the very conservative “James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, Archbishop of Los Angeles” over which direction altars should face—that they made me initial the editorial in print.
The editorial discussed a bill proposed in the California legislature by State Sen. Anthony Beilensen to liberalize the state’s abortion laws. Toward the start I said, “The manner in which parishes throughout the Southland have sought to mobilize opposition to the abortion bill has been particularly disturbing. Week after week prelates, pastors, and parish societies have engaged in a concerted effort to impose Catholic moral teaching on the non-Catholic people of California.”
Noting that the Episcopal Bishop of California testified before the State Senate Judiciary Committee that a permissive abortion law was not immoral, I concluded, “Only a law that allows members of both faiths to live out the dictates of their consciences and their religious beliefs is consistent with the Constitution of the United States and the spirit of Vatican II.”
As expected, reaction to the editorial was mixed, largely along liberal vs. conservative lines. Let’s say I didn’t change very many Catholic minds in 1967.
But the subsequent 40 years did not talk me out of it. If anything, the sustained drumbeat of official Catholicism, here and abroad, that abortion must be outlawed, has solidified my stand.
The U.S. bishops, of course, have persuaded the evangelical right and together they have coerced numerous right-wing Catholic politicians to toe the official line.
Still, other Catholic politicians, better educated in theology and constitutional law, have repeatedly told the bishops that what they want is a bad idea, because it cannot succeed in a society where people hold a whole range of beliefs about abortion. Of course, some of those politicians have paid a heavy price for abiding by their oaths to uphold the Constitution. Bishops have attacked them personally, campaigned for their opponents, and even denied them communion to deny the validity of their argument.
Well, those Catholic politicians just got some new ammunition. It turns out there’s another reason to oppose laws that outlaw abortion: they don’t work!
Research just published in The Lancet medical journal tracked abortion trends from 1995 to 2003, the largest study ever on the global incidence of abortion. It found that women are just as likely to get an abortion in countries where it is illegal as they are where it is legal. This was true whether the country was rich or poor.
Globally there are about 205 million pregnancies each year, about 68 million unintentional. Abortions worldwide dropped from 46 million in 1995 to 42 million in 2003 (from 22.4% of pregnancies to 20.4%).
The only places abortion rates stayed noticeably higher were countries where the government had enthusiastically encouraged abortions. In eastern Europe, for example, there were 105 abortions for every 100 live births.
In western Europe, where abortion is generally legal, there were 23 abortions per 100 births. Yet in Africa, where most countries outlaw abortion, the rate was nearly the same: 17 abortions per 100 births.
Remarkably, in the United States, where the campaign to outlaw abortions has been longest and loudest, there were 33 abortions for every 100 live births. On the face of it, the western European model produces better results.
Two numbers from the study were the most damning. Half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe. And 97% of all unsafe abortions were in poor countries. About 70,000 women die each year from the unsafe abortions, and another five million are injured, some permanently. The study declared these results “a public health crisis and a human rights atrocity.”
The researchers found only one strategy that works to decrease the rate of abortions: increase the availability of contraception.
In an editorial about the study, the Houston Chronicle found two conclusions inescapable: “The evidence is crystal clear: if abortion is a woman’s only viable choice to limit her family, she will take it, regardless of laws or safety concerns. It is equally clear that in countries where contraception is widely available, abortion rates go down. That is a choice that is both reasonable and humane.”
The message is obvious: Those who oppose abortion and contraception need to seriously reconsider their position. Trying to deny women access to both does not reduce abortions. But promoting contraception does.
If the Catholic church and the evangelical right are truly interested in reducing the number of abortions, they need to use preaching and persuasion to sell their position that abortion is wrong—and stop the pretense that outlawing abortion and discouraging contraception accomplishes anything. All it really gains is more deaths from unsafe abortions. They say they have no appetite for executing mothers who abort. Then they need to stop pushing laws that carry a death penalty.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Judge Halts Bush Attempt to Make Employers Immigration Cops
I strongly agree with the following editorial, originally in the New York Times and adopted today as an editorial by the Houston Chronicle:
A crackdown on hold
A federal judge has halted a reckless plan by the Bush administration to use Social Security records for immigration enforcement. This is good news, not just for the American economy, which would have been crippled by the attempt to force millions of undocumented workers off the books, but also for the untold numbers of innocent citizens and legal residents who also would have been victims of the purge.
The judge, Charles R. Breyer of the Northern District of California, ruled that the Department of Homeland Security could not enforce a new rule requiring employers to fire workers if their Social Security numbers could not be verified within 90 days. The assumption behind the rule was that workers whose numbers did not match the Social Security Administration's database were illegal immigrants using fake or stolen identities.
Breyer recognized that assumption as deeply flawed and the new rule as an unlawfully crude enforcement tool. The Social Security database is riddled with errors not related to immigration status. Many of the "no-match" letters — which call attention to database discrepancies — involve legal residents.
"There is a strong likelihood that employers may simply fire employees who are unable to resolve the discrepancy within 90 days," the judge wrote, even if the problem was caused by data-entry mistakes, misspellings or name changes. He warned that the rule would cause "irreparable harm to innocent workers and employers."
Breyer also scolded the administration for imposing a policy change with "massive ramifications" for employers without a legal explanation or a required survey of the costs and impact to small businesses.
It is not the case — though infuriated hard-liners will insist otherwise — that millions of undocumented workers are now being let off the hook by a soft-headed judge. If the no-match crackdown had proceeded, many workers without papers would still have found jobs in the underground economy, perhaps worse ones or with better-forged papers.
The shadow economy would have adapted, as always. The world of on-the-books employment would have suffered greatly.
The federal government has embarked on a disastrously one-sided immigration strategy — pulling out one harsh enforcement tool after another without having repaired the broken system. We have already seen the results of runaway enforcement on the agricultural industry — a shortage of workers leading to rotting crops and farmers relocating south of the border. The trouble with crackdowns, like the foolish one involving "no-match" letters, is that they cause oceans of pain and havoc — not just for undocumented immigrants, but also for legal residents and the economy — without actually solving anything.
A crackdown on hold
A federal judge has halted a reckless plan by the Bush administration to use Social Security records for immigration enforcement. This is good news, not just for the American economy, which would have been crippled by the attempt to force millions of undocumented workers off the books, but also for the untold numbers of innocent citizens and legal residents who also would have been victims of the purge.
The judge, Charles R. Breyer of the Northern District of California, ruled that the Department of Homeland Security could not enforce a new rule requiring employers to fire workers if their Social Security numbers could not be verified within 90 days. The assumption behind the rule was that workers whose numbers did not match the Social Security Administration's database were illegal immigrants using fake or stolen identities.
Breyer recognized that assumption as deeply flawed and the new rule as an unlawfully crude enforcement tool. The Social Security database is riddled with errors not related to immigration status. Many of the "no-match" letters — which call attention to database discrepancies — involve legal residents.
"There is a strong likelihood that employers may simply fire employees who are unable to resolve the discrepancy within 90 days," the judge wrote, even if the problem was caused by data-entry mistakes, misspellings or name changes. He warned that the rule would cause "irreparable harm to innocent workers and employers."
Breyer also scolded the administration for imposing a policy change with "massive ramifications" for employers without a legal explanation or a required survey of the costs and impact to small businesses.
It is not the case — though infuriated hard-liners will insist otherwise — that millions of undocumented workers are now being let off the hook by a soft-headed judge. If the no-match crackdown had proceeded, many workers without papers would still have found jobs in the underground economy, perhaps worse ones or with better-forged papers.
The shadow economy would have adapted, as always. The world of on-the-books employment would have suffered greatly.
The federal government has embarked on a disastrously one-sided immigration strategy — pulling out one harsh enforcement tool after another without having repaired the broken system. We have already seen the results of runaway enforcement on the agricultural industry — a shortage of workers leading to rotting crops and farmers relocating south of the border. The trouble with crackdowns, like the foolish one involving "no-match" letters, is that they cause oceans of pain and havoc — not just for undocumented immigrants, but also for legal residents and the economy — without actually solving anything.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Is Houston Judge Fit to Remain on the Bench?
I have the deepest sympathy for Elizabeth Shelton, the University of St. Thomas student who got very drunk with her boyfriend last October, went on a 2:00 a.m. joy ride with him hanging out the window, and then rear ended a truck on a major freeway at a high rate of speed, killing him. Anyone who has driven after having too much to drink can understand how awful she must feel and how jail time for intoxication manslaughter might be something she would find unbearable, on top of the guilt she must live with for the rest of her life.
And I sympathize with her parents' protective instinct to do and say anything that might spare their daughter more pain.
But I also agree with columnist Rick Casey, writing in today's Houston Chronicle, that as a State District Judge in a family court where nearly half the cases involve juveniles charged with crimes, her father Pat Shelton engaged in conduct during his daughter's trial that calls into question his fitness to remain on the bench. Casey's column follows.
State District Judge Pat Shelton isn't up for re-election until 2010.
I hope at that time voters don't visit upon him the sins of his daughter, who was convicted Tuesday of intoxication manslaughter.
He has enough sins of his own for voters to consider.
They are sins for which a father might be forgiven, but for which a judge should be judged.
In this case, his behavior is especially relevant since Shelton presides over a family court, with nearly half his caseload devoted to juveniles charged with crimes.
Elizabeth Shelton tested at three times the blood-alcohol limit last October after slamming her Lexus SUV into the back of a box truck at 2 a.m. on U.S. 59. Her longtime boyfriend was killed instantly.
Since Judge Shelton and his wife weren't tried for bad parenting, we don't have enough information to consider their share of responsibility. (And the humbling experience of being a parent would make me pray I wasn't chosen as a juror in such a trial.)
But Shelton did engage in conduct during the trial that raises questions about his suitability as a judge.
In an antagonistic exchange with the prosecutor, Shelton first attacked the driver whose truck his daughter hit.
He said his daughter told him at the hospital that night that the driver had swerved into her lane at the last minute. But a doctor at the hospital had a different recollection.
"When her mom and dad were there, she said, 'It's my fault, and I do not want to live,' " the doctor testified.
What's more, when a person is that drunk, it may have appeared that the entire highway was swerving all over the place.
An expert for the defense testified there was evidence the driver did swerve, but an expert for the prosecution said there was none. That's the nature of paid courtroom expertise: It almost always agrees with the people writing the check.
But Judge Shelton took it further. He accused the driver of having no insurance and of being the subject of a hot check warrant.
The judge had done at least some research. It turns out the insurance on the truck had lapsed. But it was a company truck and someone else at the company was responsible for paying the bills.
And the hot check warrant? Let's give the judge the benefit of the doubt: He was mistaken.
It's OK for fathers to be mistaken, although it's stupid from the witness stand since being caught hurts one's credibility.
But lawyers and judges should know to be very careful about making unfounded accusations in court.
The worst accusation Shelton made against the truck driver was that he should have been charged for leaving the scene of the accident.
"You should not cherry pick who you want to favor and who you want to put down," Shelton told prosecutor Paul Doyle. "No one is above the law."
But the driver explained that he pulled off U.S. 59 because it wasn't safe to stay in the middle of the freeway or to back up to where the wrecked car was.
"I got off at the Buffalo Speedway and made a U-turn and came back around as quick as I could," said Lance Bennett on Thursday.
"That man slandered me," he said. "He shouldn't be a judge."
Shelton also argued that Doyle should have prosecuted Federico Vasquez, who stopped to assist at the scene. He testified he was going about 60 mph when the Lexus sped by him, lost control and crashed into the truck.
Shelton alleged Vasquez was an illegal immigrant. There was no testimony as to Vasquez's citizenship, so we don't know if Shelton just assumed that anyone with that name who testified against his daughter must be an illegal immigrant.
But if Vasquez is, the last thing that should happen is to be deported because he stopped to give aid and stuck around to tell the police what he had seen.
Prosecutor Doyle responded by raising his voice: "The same man who stopped to aid your daughter, to do the right thing, you're attacking his citizenship status? Are you kidding me?"
But Shelton wasn't kidding. I don't blame him for not wanting his daughter prosecuted. It would be a cold father who did.
But to attack two innocent people whose "crime" was to be in her drunken path?
I'm with the truck driver. He shouldn't be a judge.
And I sympathize with her parents' protective instinct to do and say anything that might spare their daughter more pain.
But I also agree with columnist Rick Casey, writing in today's Houston Chronicle, that as a State District Judge in a family court where nearly half the cases involve juveniles charged with crimes, her father Pat Shelton engaged in conduct during his daughter's trial that calls into question his fitness to remain on the bench. Casey's column follows.
State District Judge Pat Shelton isn't up for re-election until 2010.
I hope at that time voters don't visit upon him the sins of his daughter, who was convicted Tuesday of intoxication manslaughter.
He has enough sins of his own for voters to consider.
They are sins for which a father might be forgiven, but for which a judge should be judged.
In this case, his behavior is especially relevant since Shelton presides over a family court, with nearly half his caseload devoted to juveniles charged with crimes.
Elizabeth Shelton tested at three times the blood-alcohol limit last October after slamming her Lexus SUV into the back of a box truck at 2 a.m. on U.S. 59. Her longtime boyfriend was killed instantly.
Since Judge Shelton and his wife weren't tried for bad parenting, we don't have enough information to consider their share of responsibility. (And the humbling experience of being a parent would make me pray I wasn't chosen as a juror in such a trial.)
But Shelton did engage in conduct during the trial that raises questions about his suitability as a judge.
In an antagonistic exchange with the prosecutor, Shelton first attacked the driver whose truck his daughter hit.
He said his daughter told him at the hospital that night that the driver had swerved into her lane at the last minute. But a doctor at the hospital had a different recollection.
"When her mom and dad were there, she said, 'It's my fault, and I do not want to live,' " the doctor testified.
What's more, when a person is that drunk, it may have appeared that the entire highway was swerving all over the place.
An expert for the defense testified there was evidence the driver did swerve, but an expert for the prosecution said there was none. That's the nature of paid courtroom expertise: It almost always agrees with the people writing the check.
But Judge Shelton took it further. He accused the driver of having no insurance and of being the subject of a hot check warrant.
The judge had done at least some research. It turns out the insurance on the truck had lapsed. But it was a company truck and someone else at the company was responsible for paying the bills.
And the hot check warrant? Let's give the judge the benefit of the doubt: He was mistaken.
It's OK for fathers to be mistaken, although it's stupid from the witness stand since being caught hurts one's credibility.
But lawyers and judges should know to be very careful about making unfounded accusations in court.
The worst accusation Shelton made against the truck driver was that he should have been charged for leaving the scene of the accident.
"You should not cherry pick who you want to favor and who you want to put down," Shelton told prosecutor Paul Doyle. "No one is above the law."
But the driver explained that he pulled off U.S. 59 because it wasn't safe to stay in the middle of the freeway or to back up to where the wrecked car was.
"I got off at the Buffalo Speedway and made a U-turn and came back around as quick as I could," said Lance Bennett on Thursday.
"That man slandered me," he said. "He shouldn't be a judge."
Shelton also argued that Doyle should have prosecuted Federico Vasquez, who stopped to assist at the scene. He testified he was going about 60 mph when the Lexus sped by him, lost control and crashed into the truck.
Shelton alleged Vasquez was an illegal immigrant. There was no testimony as to Vasquez's citizenship, so we don't know if Shelton just assumed that anyone with that name who testified against his daughter must be an illegal immigrant.
But if Vasquez is, the last thing that should happen is to be deported because he stopped to give aid and stuck around to tell the police what he had seen.
Prosecutor Doyle responded by raising his voice: "The same man who stopped to aid your daughter, to do the right thing, you're attacking his citizenship status? Are you kidding me?"
But Shelton wasn't kidding. I don't blame him for not wanting his daughter prosecuted. It would be a cold father who did.
But to attack two innocent people whose "crime" was to be in her drunken path?
I'm with the truck driver. He shouldn't be a judge.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Texas Is a State, Isn't It? Inquiring Justices Want to Know
The joke was on Texas yesterday at the Supreme Court.
A Mexican citizen is on death row after Texas failed to follow a treaty that gave him the right to contact his embassy after he was arrested. While quoting a sentence from the U.S. Constitution that says "the judges in every state" are bound by treaties, Justice Stephen Bryer drew a laugh when he said, "I guess it means, including Texas." The following is in today's Santa Fe New Mexican:
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, with a bit of dramatic flair in the packed courtroom Wednesday, whipped out his pocket-size Constitution and began reading to a lawyer from Texas the pertinent section on international treaties.
Treaties "shall be the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every state," Breyer said, pausing briefly, "I guess it means, including Texas, 'shall be bound thereby.' "
His little joke aside, Breyer was probing a question at the heart of a complicated dispute over the role of international law and claims of executive power in the case of a Mexican on death row for rape and murder.
Despite his support for the death penalty, President Bush has intervened in the case on behalf of Jose Ernesto Medellin.
Texas Solicitor General R. Ted Cruz told Breyer and his colleagues that the international court ruling has no weight in Texas and that Bush has no power to order its enforcement.
The justices engaged in a spirited discussion of who gets the final say in whether Texas courts must give Medellin a new hearing because local police never notified Mexican diplomats he had been arrested, in violation of an international treaty.
A Mexican citizen is on death row after Texas failed to follow a treaty that gave him the right to contact his embassy after he was arrested. While quoting a sentence from the U.S. Constitution that says "the judges in every state" are bound by treaties, Justice Stephen Bryer drew a laugh when he said, "I guess it means, including Texas." The following is in today's Santa Fe New Mexican:
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, with a bit of dramatic flair in the packed courtroom Wednesday, whipped out his pocket-size Constitution and began reading to a lawyer from Texas the pertinent section on international treaties.
Treaties "shall be the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every state," Breyer said, pausing briefly, "I guess it means, including Texas, 'shall be bound thereby.' "
His little joke aside, Breyer was probing a question at the heart of a complicated dispute over the role of international law and claims of executive power in the case of a Mexican on death row for rape and murder.
Despite his support for the death penalty, President Bush has intervened in the case on behalf of Jose Ernesto Medellin.
Texas Solicitor General R. Ted Cruz told Breyer and his colleagues that the international court ruling has no weight in Texas and that Bush has no power to order its enforcement.
The justices engaged in a spirited discussion of who gets the final say in whether Texas courts must give Medellin a new hearing because local police never notified Mexican diplomats he had been arrested, in violation of an international treaty.
Friday, October 05, 2007
Is the General Motors Contract a Good Deal?
Houston Chronicle business columnist Loren Steffy, historically one of the first in Houston to sound the alarm about Enron's bizarre business practices, has a clever column today questioning whether the agreement between GM and the UAW to offload GM's health care costs into a trust managed by the union will actually work.
The column is entitled The GM settlement boils down to a matter of trust. It notes that Caterpillar set up a very similar arrangement in Peoria, but it ran out of money in six years, and Caterpillar's retirees are now having to pay a big chunck of medical costs themselves. GM hopes that the $24 billion they're putting into the UAW trust upfront, plus a few billion more in the next few years, will be enough to keep the trust solvent. Recalling the bad calculations and bad outcome when GM sold off its Delphi division, Steffy is very skeptical.
The clever part of the column is that Steffy pretends he is interviewing Howie Makem, the Quality Cat mascot that GM had walk through its Flint, Michigan plant at random intervals in the 1980s, weaing a long red cape with a giant Q for Quality, and purring slogans like "Quality is the backbone of good workmanship" and "Safety is safe" to bewildered workers. The character is featured with glee in Ben Hamper's 1992 book Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line.
Evidently GM had a contest to name the cat. Howie Makem won out over the likes of Tuna Meowt, Roger's Pussy, and Wanda Kwit. Howie, of course, is gung ho for the health care trust and thinks it will be a resounding success.
I'd love to post a picture of the Quality Cat. But apparently GM was quite successful in preventing one from ever being published.
The column is entitled The GM settlement boils down to a matter of trust. It notes that Caterpillar set up a very similar arrangement in Peoria, but it ran out of money in six years, and Caterpillar's retirees are now having to pay a big chunck of medical costs themselves. GM hopes that the $24 billion they're putting into the UAW trust upfront, plus a few billion more in the next few years, will be enough to keep the trust solvent. Recalling the bad calculations and bad outcome when GM sold off its Delphi division, Steffy is very skeptical.
The clever part of the column is that Steffy pretends he is interviewing Howie Makem, the Quality Cat mascot that GM had walk through its Flint, Michigan plant at random intervals in the 1980s, weaing a long red cape with a giant Q for Quality, and purring slogans like "Quality is the backbone of good workmanship" and "Safety is safe" to bewildered workers. The character is featured with glee in Ben Hamper's 1992 book Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line.
Evidently GM had a contest to name the cat. Howie Makem won out over the likes of Tuna Meowt, Roger's Pussy, and Wanda Kwit. Howie, of course, is gung ho for the health care trust and thinks it will be a resounding success.
I'd love to post a picture of the Quality Cat. But apparently GM was quite successful in preventing one from ever being published.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Impeach Clarence Thomas: Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut. Sometimes You Don’t.
It looks like Congress will have to impeach Clarence Thomas.
He has retaliated publicly against a former employee who accused him of sexual harassment.
That is a violation of the law and an abuse of his office as a Supreme Court Justice of the United States.
Not only does the retaliation bolster the original sexual harassment charge; it constitutes a new act of harassment based on sex.
The victim of the harassment, Anita Hill, may have remedies of her own. She might, for instance, file a complaint with the EEOC (the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). That would be poetic, since she alleged in 1991 that Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was head of that agency. That and the age of the charges probably ruled out an EEO complaint in 1991. But now that Thomas, in print and in recorded interviews, has engaged in current acts of retaliation against Hill’s original charges, he may finally have opened a door to that administrative remedy.
If an EEOC complaint is unsuccessful, or impossible, Hill might also consider a civil suit. The grounds might include: the failure of Justice Thomas’s employer (presumably Chief Justice Roberts) to stop Mr. Thomas from violating EEO laws; the failure of the EEOC to enforce those laws; and perhaps libel or slander.
But even if Ms. Hill succeeded these pursuits, would it be a sufficient remedy for Congress, the citizens of the United States, or the rule of law under the U.S. Constitution? I suggest that it would not.
Congress, which had ample justification not to confirm the nomination of Justice Thomas in the first place, should face the consequences of the flawed decision it made in 1991.
Justice Thomas has had 16 years to prove his detractors were wrong. As Supreme Court watchers have observed repeatedly, his record reeks lack of judicial temperament in case after case. And now he resorts to judicial misconduct at its worst: he misuses his platform as a sitting Supreme Court justice to heap public abuse on a black female who questioned his commitment to following the law.
This latest behavior simply magnifies the assessment of Antonin Scalia, the only other justice whose conservative activism comes even close, that Clarence Thomas has more loose screws the Supreme Court can endure.
I close with the account of Scalia’s assessment, in this 10/1 post by Nicole Belle at crooksandliars.com:
60 Minutes: Clarence Thomas addresses abortion and Uncle Tom accusations
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was interviewed on 60 Minutes yesterday to promote his book, My Grandfather’s Son, and he had some just odd things to say about his critics. When asked why there was so much controversy about his nomination to the highest court in the land, his answer: abortion. Huh? While he is correct that there was an overriding concern amongst Democrats of the time that a conservative majority would result in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I think it’s a vast oversimplification to put the focus solely on that.
But then again, Thomas has a habit of making strange oversimplifications and assertions. As Marty Kaplan recounts:
But no less an authority than arch-conservative fellow Associate Justice Antonin Scalia told Thomas’ biographer, Ken Foskett, that Thomas “doesn’t believe in stare decisis, period.” If you think nutcase is too strong a word to summarize that view, listen again to Scalia, as quoted in this Terry Gross interview with Jeff Toobin about his new Supreme Court book, The Nine:
TOOBIN: Clarence Thomas is not just the most conservative member of the Rehnquist court or the Roberts court. He’s the most conservative justice to serve on the court since the 1930s. If you take what Thomas says seriously, if you read his opinions, particularly about issues like the scope of the federal government, he basically thinks that the entire work of the New Deal is unconstitutional. He really believes in a conception of the federal government that hasn’t been supported by the justices since Franklin Roosevelt made his appointments to the court. You know, I went to a speech that Justice Scalia gave at a synagogue here in New York a couple of years ago, and someone asked him, `What’s the difference between your judicial philosophy and Justice Thomas?’ I thought a very good question. And Scalia talked for a while and he said, `Look, I’m a conservative. I’m a texturalist. I’m an originalist. But I’m not a nut.’
He has retaliated publicly against a former employee who accused him of sexual harassment.
That is a violation of the law and an abuse of his office as a Supreme Court Justice of the United States.
Not only does the retaliation bolster the original sexual harassment charge; it constitutes a new act of harassment based on sex.
The victim of the harassment, Anita Hill, may have remedies of her own. She might, for instance, file a complaint with the EEOC (the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). That would be poetic, since she alleged in 1991 that Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was head of that agency. That and the age of the charges probably ruled out an EEO complaint in 1991. But now that Thomas, in print and in recorded interviews, has engaged in current acts of retaliation against Hill’s original charges, he may finally have opened a door to that administrative remedy.
If an EEOC complaint is unsuccessful, or impossible, Hill might also consider a civil suit. The grounds might include: the failure of Justice Thomas’s employer (presumably Chief Justice Roberts) to stop Mr. Thomas from violating EEO laws; the failure of the EEOC to enforce those laws; and perhaps libel or slander.
But even if Ms. Hill succeeded these pursuits, would it be a sufficient remedy for Congress, the citizens of the United States, or the rule of law under the U.S. Constitution? I suggest that it would not.
Congress, which had ample justification not to confirm the nomination of Justice Thomas in the first place, should face the consequences of the flawed decision it made in 1991.
Justice Thomas has had 16 years to prove his detractors were wrong. As Supreme Court watchers have observed repeatedly, his record reeks lack of judicial temperament in case after case. And now he resorts to judicial misconduct at its worst: he misuses his platform as a sitting Supreme Court justice to heap public abuse on a black female who questioned his commitment to following the law.
This latest behavior simply magnifies the assessment of Antonin Scalia, the only other justice whose conservative activism comes even close, that Clarence Thomas has more loose screws the Supreme Court can endure.
I close with the account of Scalia’s assessment, in this 10/1 post by Nicole Belle at crooksandliars.com:
60 Minutes: Clarence Thomas addresses abortion and Uncle Tom accusations
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was interviewed on 60 Minutes yesterday to promote his book, My Grandfather’s Son, and he had some just odd things to say about his critics. When asked why there was so much controversy about his nomination to the highest court in the land, his answer: abortion. Huh? While he is correct that there was an overriding concern amongst Democrats of the time that a conservative majority would result in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I think it’s a vast oversimplification to put the focus solely on that.
But then again, Thomas has a habit of making strange oversimplifications and assertions. As Marty Kaplan recounts:
But no less an authority than arch-conservative fellow Associate Justice Antonin Scalia told Thomas’ biographer, Ken Foskett, that Thomas “doesn’t believe in stare decisis, period.” If you think nutcase is too strong a word to summarize that view, listen again to Scalia, as quoted in this Terry Gross interview with Jeff Toobin about his new Supreme Court book, The Nine:
TOOBIN: Clarence Thomas is not just the most conservative member of the Rehnquist court or the Roberts court. He’s the most conservative justice to serve on the court since the 1930s. If you take what Thomas says seriously, if you read his opinions, particularly about issues like the scope of the federal government, he basically thinks that the entire work of the New Deal is unconstitutional. He really believes in a conception of the federal government that hasn’t been supported by the justices since Franklin Roosevelt made his appointments to the court. You know, I went to a speech that Justice Scalia gave at a synagogue here in New York a couple of years ago, and someone asked him, `What’s the difference between your judicial philosophy and Justice Thomas?’ I thought a very good question. And Scalia talked for a while and he said, `Look, I’m a conservative. I’m a texturalist. I’m an originalist. But I’m not a nut.’
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
The Tilted Cross: How Architect Philip Johnson Kept Outdoing Himself for 60 Years
This Houston Chronicle photo shows the juxtaposition, at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, of two Philip Johnson architectural designs reflecting noticeably divergent creative styles and time frames. On the right is one of the sleek, black-steel, two-story walkways that connect Johnson's academic buildings, reflecting his subtle, minimalist style in the 1950s. But on the left is the Chapel of St. Basil, which, as a Chronicle columnist says today, is about as subtle as "Marilyn Monroe at a gathering of nuns." In her column entitled The perfect finish: Philip Johnson's final work in Houston is a billboard for St. Thomas Lisa Gray reflects on the parallel growth of Johnson and St. Thomas: "Over the years, both the architect and the university changed radically, but they changed in ways that kept them right for one another."
Through six decades the university transitioned from buildings facing inward and each other, to the very public Chapel of St. Basil and now Johnson's entrance "billboard." The evolution of campus structures reflected the church's transition from the wagons-in-a-circle siege mentality of the 1950s to Vatican II's landmark document Gaudium et Spes, with its stunning affirmation, "The joys and hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of people today, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ."
The same decades witnessed the maturing of Philip Johnson's architecture, from emulating the "Less is more" philosophy of his mentor Mies van der Rohe, then the "Less is a bore" mentality of postmodernist Robert Venturi, then finally distilling and outdoing himself, by designing a sign!
As I noted 9/27 about previous coverage of this "ultimate Philip Johnson work," today's analysis does not mention that Johnson was a gay man who had the same partner for 45 years. Two things remain remarkable about that. First, the maturation of his architecture seems to have gone hand in hand with the maturation of joy and hope in his personal life. Second, the university's outreach included adopting and celebrating the achievement of a man whose personal life was quite at odds with the official moral teaching of the Catholic Church. Both developments should be remembered. And be treasured. And be encouraged anew.
After describing possibly the greatest frustration of Johnson's career — how his design for the Rothko Chapel displeased Mark Rothko and had to be tweaked by others — Gray continued her homage to Johnson. Below is the second half:
Determined never to bore, Johnson appropriated any image, allusion or style that caught his eye. It was said that, though he wasn't original, he excelled in distilling other people's styles and ideas, boiling them down to their essences. He could out-Mies Mies, out-Venturi Venturi.
Transco Tower was the Empire State Building rendered in shiny blue glass. The University of Houston's architecture building, with its funny Greek temple on top, was so closely based on a design of French visionary architect Étienne-Louis Boullée that some called it a rip-off. For AT&T's New York headquarters, Johnson famously topped a glass skyscraper with what looked for all the world like the top of a giant Chippendale bureau — a wink at Venturi.
Those later buildings were "cartoons," as Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin put it, "two-dimensional corporate logos blown up to massive scale." Like good logos, they stuck in your brain, as catchy as pop songs.
Kamin's description fits the chapel that St. Thomas eventually got from Johnson: the va-va-va-voom Chapel of St. Basil. Other architects had conscientiously rendered the rest of the quad in a style that matched Johnson's original buildings, but he seemed delighted to break with his own past. Instead of brick and black steel, he designed the chapel's base in white stucco and topped it with a super-shiny gold dome. It presides over St. Thomas' quad like Marilyn Monroe at a gathering of nuns.
The chapel seems determined to be the life of the party. Its sexy dark entrance looks like a long slit in a woman's skirt. And the ball-shaped dome works quite literally as a logo: Its cross-topped outline looks great on T-shirts.
Just as logo-ready was the tilted glass cross on the chapel's west wall — the shape that Johnson reused on the new black-granite marker. Over on Montrose, that shape shouts that St. Thomas has lost its diffidence and now aims to stake out Catholic turf in a noisy world — or, in the words of its strategic agenda, to "assert our identity, academic brand, and image."
Over the years, Johnson had become precisely the right architect to do that. Accused of stealing other's ideas, he cheerfully stole the tilted cross from himself — a repetition that, like good advertising, strengthens the St. Thomas brand. Accused of designing buildings that are three-dimensional logos, he went one step further and designed ... a two-dimensional logo. A sign.
The Edward P. White Memorial Plaza is the ultimate Philip Johnson work — "ultimate" not just because it's among his last, but because after years of distilling other people's ideas, he got around to distilling himself. With this last doodle, he out-Johnsoned Johnson, and made a cartoon of his own cartoon.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Why Evolution Is Darwin’s Great Gift to Philosophy and Theology
Daryl P. Domning, self-described comparative biologist, teaches anatomy at Howard University in Washington, D.C. With the late theologian Monica Hellwig he wrote Original Selfishness: Original Sin and Evil in the Light of Evolution. In the 9/28 edition of the National Catholic Reporter, Domning has an article, “Unfinished business: Evolution offers an explanation of original sin.” The full text is at
http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2007c/092807/092807o.php
In Domning's view, Darwin’s discoveries tell theology that it was metaphysically impossible for God to create “anything physical at all” apart from physical evil and an inherently selfish instinct to survive. Pursuing this understanding brings him very close to Whitehead’s description of God as “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.” Excerpts from the NCR article follow:
Physical evil (suffering and death) is in every case a result of something physically coming apart. Molecules, or larger bits of me, come apart in ways that hurt or kill me, whether by dismemberment of my body, burns, broken bones, toxic attack by disease organisms, or mutations of my DNA that cause cancer. All such changes are made possible by the simple “breakability” of all matter, right down to the subatomic level: Anything made of parts can come apart.
Not even God could create out of matter a universe in which this wasn’t true since that would involve a contradiction. As for moral evil (sin), it too will be unavoidable wherever intelligent creatures have free will -- especially ones evolved by Darwinian natural selection, which enforces self-centered behavior, hence, “original selfishness” or original “sin” as the price of survival.
We only exist thanks to the accidental copying errors in our ancestors’ genes that natural selection has preserved, just as we are inclined to sin by the genetically (as well as culturally) encoded selfishness that same selection has enforced. Moral evil has literally evolved out of physical “evil.”
The theological mistake we have made is thinking that God has a choice of whether to tolerate bad stuff in this good universe. But the Creator has no choice: The only alternative to making creatures that would suffer and sin was not to make anything physical at all. Only at the price of walking with us in our sufferings, even sharing them in person (and finally saving us from them in “new heavens and a new earth”), could God create such as us: beings freely capable of a personal relationship with their maker.
And more and more I … sympathize with the crises of faith that a fundamentalist approach to life’s ultimate questions needlessly inflicts on so many of my fellow Christians. The theological upgrade is now available, however, in a growing body of work by evolutionary theologians, and the unfinished business of installing it in all our churches should no longer be postponed.
http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2007c/092807/092807o.php
In Domning's view, Darwin’s discoveries tell theology that it was metaphysically impossible for God to create “anything physical at all” apart from physical evil and an inherently selfish instinct to survive. Pursuing this understanding brings him very close to Whitehead’s description of God as “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.” Excerpts from the NCR article follow:
Physical evil (suffering and death) is in every case a result of something physically coming apart. Molecules, or larger bits of me, come apart in ways that hurt or kill me, whether by dismemberment of my body, burns, broken bones, toxic attack by disease organisms, or mutations of my DNA that cause cancer. All such changes are made possible by the simple “breakability” of all matter, right down to the subatomic level: Anything made of parts can come apart.
Not even God could create out of matter a universe in which this wasn’t true since that would involve a contradiction. As for moral evil (sin), it too will be unavoidable wherever intelligent creatures have free will -- especially ones evolved by Darwinian natural selection, which enforces self-centered behavior, hence, “original selfishness” or original “sin” as the price of survival.
We only exist thanks to the accidental copying errors in our ancestors’ genes that natural selection has preserved, just as we are inclined to sin by the genetically (as well as culturally) encoded selfishness that same selection has enforced. Moral evil has literally evolved out of physical “evil.”
The theological mistake we have made is thinking that God has a choice of whether to tolerate bad stuff in this good universe. But the Creator has no choice: The only alternative to making creatures that would suffer and sin was not to make anything physical at all. Only at the price of walking with us in our sufferings, even sharing them in person (and finally saving us from them in “new heavens and a new earth”), could God create such as us: beings freely capable of a personal relationship with their maker.
And more and more I … sympathize with the crises of faith that a fundamentalist approach to life’s ultimate questions needlessly inflicts on so many of my fellow Christians. The theological upgrade is now available, however, in a growing body of work by evolutionary theologians, and the unfinished business of installing it in all our churches should no longer be postponed.
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