On the desuetude of pardoning powers, Wesley Smith offers this on his way to calling for pardon of one Clarence Aaron:
Our leaders don’t use their power to show mercy much anymore. There isn’t a measurable political upside in releasing prisoners from lawful punishments. If the released do nothing wrong thereafter, the releaser receives no career benefit. But if a commuted criminal reoffends, woe betide the governor running for office who released him. For the ambitious politician, it is a pointless risk to take.
I nominate this for understatement of the year. Or apt distillation of the year. Or something.
I think especially of two Texas cowboy governors boasting of their State’s executions, insouciant about the likelihood of error and indifferent to mercy.
Dubya got drubbed a bit for not pardoning a female prisoner who had reportedly converted to Christianity. I don’t think a conversion to Christianity is per se grounds for pardon by any means, and I didn’t think the case for clemency in that case was very strong. That case may have even ended up a net political plus for Dubya.
My point is that politically-savvy Governors considered state-sanctioned butchery, of people who just might be factually innocent, a political feature, not a bug.
And I see the same sort of thing in miniature when the TV cameras of my local station capture the bloodlustful remarks of victims’ families. It’s a rarity, but delightful when it happens, that even someone who’s eligible to give a “Victim Impact Statement” (one of the entries for racial disparities in sentencing, by the way) might express forgiveness and willingness to let the process work without weighing in with demands for maximum retribution.
Smith:
As the world mourns Nelson Mandela, we remember him most warmly for his open embrace of mercy, rather than justice, for the perpetrators of apartheid. Similarly, the iconic image of an exhausted Abraham Lincoln staying up late into the night scouring military court-martial records desperately looking for an angle allowing him to pardon deserters from the firing squad inspires us still.
Christ told us that the merciful are “blessed” for “they shall receive mercy.” That principle surely applies to societies as well as individuals. It behooves us, then, to expand our hearts in this virtuous sphere.
As Turkey threatens (threat is how I perceive it anyway. So sue me.) to covert Hagia Sophia to a Mosque, my attention again is directed to Istanbul Constantinople, seat of my Patriarch, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholemew.
Secularité a la Kemal has not worked well in Turkey. About that, Christopher de Bellaigue in the New York Review of Books (H/T The Browser) is correct, and his analysis is surely keener than any I could pull off. But it bothers me that his longish piece finds, so far as my skimming eye could see, no comment about the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s oppression, the flight of Christians from semi-dhimmitude, the closure of the Halki seminary, or anything else about the plight of the Turkish Christian minority.
De Bellaigue ia unfamiliar to me, and I don’t mean to set him up as a villain. You can’t address everything in every piece you write, and partisan plea that “he should have written more about [insert pet cause]” is an writer’s constant annoyance, no doubt. He just happened to be the cue for my observation that persecution of Christians of various stripes in the world today is too little noted or lamented, while to note the gathering clouds in the U.S. is to invite derision as paranoid.
It’s not paranoid, there is no “it” that “can’t happen here.”
There’s a famous Supreme Court case, Lochner v. New York, involving whether limits on hours of work for women and children violated freedom of contract. The Supreme Court struck down the law, and “Lochnerizing” became infamous for even longer than the Lewinski Maneuver. But Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., dissented: “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer‘s Social Statics. (Herbert Spencer was a social Darwinist.)
Now, instead of Mr. Spencer’s social Darwinism, we have apparently read existentialist Ms. de Beauvoir‘s Second Sex into the Constitution:
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
“As a committed existentialist, [Simone] de Beauvoir saw the freedom to create one’s own life, to define one’s own values and choose one’s own projects, as essential to human dignity.” (Review of “The Second Sex” by Michelle Goldbert at Barnes & Noble Review)
Justice Kennedy’s ipse dixit “mystery passage” smuggles a controversial anthropology into the Constitution no less than Lochner smuggled in social Darwinism. The mystery passage goes dormant until some litigant posits a new sexual freedom, at which point Kennedy or someone else on the court will again channel de Beauvoir and the ineffable lightness of self-creation.
It’s absolutely vital – to understand what it means to be human if we are to know in what human liberty consists. And I’ve sometimes said that if we’re going to allow the philosophy of, say, John Dewey to be channeled into public life, we must afford Matthew, Mark, Luke and John the same dignity.
This extended quote and the law journal from which it comes may get the juices going.
Every notion of human liberty rests on an underlying assumption about what it means to be human. In other words, some theory about human nature and some hypothesis about the person’s origin, purpose, and destination are necessary to give substance to the concept of liberty. To borrow from Wojtyla, liberty is “within the domain of the person. It is impossible to understand anything about it without understanding what the person is, its mode of existence, its functioning, its powers.” The shape liberty takes in a given society will depend on that society’s public anthropology…
Is the mystery passage an adequate creation story upon which to base our nation’s concept of liberty? At first blush, there is much to recommend the Court’s view because it recognizes, implicitly or explicitly, four fundamental truths about the human being. First, it understands the vital importance of liberty for the human condition, recognizing that the inner structure of the human being yearns for freedom. To a large extent, the story of the Twentieth Century, the story of World War II and the Cold War, is the story of the struggle for freedom against those who would enslave, oppress, and tyrannize. At the heart of the human person is the desire for freedom. Second, this recognition of the importance of liberty, coupled with the Court’s willingness to attempt to protect the individual’s liberty, represents an implicit recognition that the human person has an objective value, a dignity as a person, worth protecting and preserving. Third, it recognizes that human beings, in the exercise of their freedom, yearn for meaning—yearn for answers to life’s ultimate questions. Fourth, the Court seems to recognize a certain personal and subjective dimension to the answers, understanding that a person will define himself by his own answers to these questions.
The Supreme Court appears to have gotten a lot right in articulating a creation story to express the “heart of liberty.” Reason and experience testify to these four fundamental truths: human beings possess a dignity that requires respect; essential to this respect is freedom or liberty for the human being; in freedom the human being will search for answers to life’s ultimate questions; and the human being will fashion his life— create himself—around the answers that he has found to those questions. But, is the Court’s story of self-creation complete? Is it adequate? Or, does it have serious flaws, which endanger the whole enterprise? I will argue that the Court’s anthropology, its story of self-creation, is incomplete, leading the Court into serious error about the nature of freedom.
Scaperlanda, Rehabilitating the Mystery Passage: An Examination of the Supreme Court’s Anthropology Using the Personalistic Norm Explicit in the Philosophy of Karol Wojtyla, 45 Journal of Catholic Legal Studies 631, 635-36 (2007).
Having endured clueless airport gate-loungers yammering away loudly on cell phones before every flight in recent years, I add my voice to those say “No! Please don’t allow in-flight voice calls!” But from what I understand of the technology, the Department of Transportation, not the FCC, is the right source of any continuing ban.
Fred Clark, The Slacktivist, deserves more attentive followers. His comboxes (excuse me, “comment boxes” – I was upbraided there for what I thought was standard slang; excuse me again: my Aspie interlocutor doesn’t think “comment boxes” is any good, either) are like an ADD Self-Help Group run amok.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 