There’s an interesting story in the New York Times, and it’s interesting how the headline plays it: Sheriffs Refuse to Enforce Laws on Gun Control. The first example is a law that sounds as if it’s principal virtue was allowing legislators to preen about their decisiveness; it’s unenforceable as a practical matter.
Some sheriffs, like Sheriff Cooke, are refusing to enforce the laws, saying that they are too vague and violate Second Amendment rights. Many more say that enforcement will be “a very low priority,” as several sheriffs put it. All but seven of the 62 elected sheriffs in Colorado signed on in May to a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the statutes.
Legislators too often let good intentions justify bad, or incoherent laws. They preen while leaving the heavy lifting to others, like judges. That’s the characteristic temptation of legislating rather than judging.
The cult of Santa Muerte is a massive challenge to American ideas of religious freedom. We tend to think of all religions as being basically good, or at least socially positive. But this? Is it really possible to be neutral when confronted with a new religion with these values? The idea of people presenting their babies to a death goddess with a skull face is horrifying. Seems to me that American ideas about religious liberty developed within a context in which religions like Santa Muerte did not figure into our deliberations. That may change.
(Rod Dreher, Millions Of Mexicans Love Saint Death)
For the record, and for whatever it’s worth, I have long refused (I think; if you know of counter-examples, call me on it) to defend “religion” as a generic category, but this Santa Muerte phenomenon in Mexico makes a starker example than I had in mind. Some of the devotion to the “saint” appears to be teetering on the brink of resurrecting Moloch.
Baptist Timothy George does his best to give the Virgin Mary her due, and it’s not bad. What especially caught my attention, though, was this:
In the later Middle Ages, certain theologians (with time on their hands, one thinks) debated whether God, by virtue of his sheer absolute power, could have become incarnate in a donkey rather than in a human person—asinus Christology. Others, pursuing this logic further, wondered whether, de potentia absoluta, God might have become invegetate in a carrot or even encalcified in a piece of granite. The problem with this approach, among others, is that donkeys and rocks do not weep at the graveside of their friends and carrots are not crucified.
That’s okay so far as it goes, but I think the last sentence is really lame and misses a profounder point.
I have heard Evangelicals who spoke of Mary as if she were a mere conduit, and for them, the asinus Christology presumably (I’m walking on eggshells here, as I don’t want to misrepresent my former tradition, whose nuances are fading from memory) would be plausible, and some might even vehemently say “Of course! God can do whatever he wants!” (de potentia absoluta), thinking thereby to honor God.
But any such answer would fail to appreciate, and I think Evangelicalism does fail to appreciate, the momentousness of “one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God … incarnate of … the Virgin Mary” in the Nicene Creed.
He was truly and fully her son, truly and fully human. He shared her DNA.
A donkey could not have given him a human body. A donkey might have served as a conduit for a human-ish simulacrum or cyborg, but human bodies come from humans.
He He come to earth as a donkey, a carrot or a stone, we would not be healed. “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.” (Gregory of Nazianzus)
So it’s not just that Mary said “yes” to being a conduit, looking pregnant, and ultimately expelling from her womb a human simulacrum sent from outer space. She gave God something He didn’t have: a human body.
Beatus.
From the sublime to the ridiculous, Eugene Kontorovich demonstrates how law professor types can carry idea to their “logical” extreme:
The Utah polygamy-rights decision is truly a courageous civil rights ruling. Most sexual liberties decisions going all the way back to Griswold v. Connecticut come at a time when the relevant practices have won very broad acceptance, especially among the educated elites. Not so with polygamy, which is quite far from the lives of the elites, and is opposed by a Baptists and bootleggers coalition of religious conservatives (bad for the “traditional family,” smacks of Mormonism) and secular liberals (bad for women, smacks of Mormonism). The judge will make few friends with his ruling. Editorialists will not liken it to great civil rights breakthroughs. It will surely be overturned, with conservative judges fearing an expansion of substantive due process, and liberal ones fearing a backlash. And that is what makes it brave, whether right or wrong.
Now seems like a good time to revisit a post on bestiality from earlier this year, which surely seems less radical now. Bestiality bans are [even?] less constitutionally defensible than polygamy bans because the purported harms associated with the practice are lower ….
Yes, he goes on at length to defend bestiality. At length. If it’s satire, the signals eluded me, though I’ll admit I averted my eyes from a human debasing himself so.
I think it was G.K. Chesterton who said “The madman isn’t one who has ‘lost his reasoning.’ He’s the one who has lost everything but his reasoning.”
Not that I get a lot of comments, but for what it’s worth, I’m announcing in advance that I won’t allow comments favoring bestiality, however “reasonable.” Write your own damn blog if you want to advocate anything that sick.
Eugene Volokh, having ended his weekend family trip, weighs in on why he thinks the Utah polygamy law was unconstitutional even though the Judge’s opinion was pretty poor. I saw what was coming when he observed this:
Utah law, then, isn’t a regulation of sexual conduct (which would raise interesting questions under Lawrence v. Texas). People are free to have sex with lots of other people, and live with all those people. What triggers criminal punishment is saying something to the world — “we’re married,” including “we’re married in the eyes of God” or “we’re married in our own eyes,” even when it’s clear to all that the marriage is not legally recognized. It is a restriction on speech, including a particular ritual that is usually a religious ritual.
If Volokh’s right on those facts, he’s probably right in his conclusion, it seems to me.
Perry Dane at the Center for Law and Religion Forum analyzes the facts similarly, though without the “speech” emphasis:
At its core, this statute, like all bigamy statutes, criminalizes knowing efforts by a married person to enter into another state-licensed, state-sanctioned, marriage … But in the light of Utah’s distinct history with polygamy, both the language of the statute and its interpretation by courts go a step further than most other states: They also seek to punish persons who “purport to marry” even by entering into purely “private” or religious marriages. without trying to get a license, and without demanding any legal benefits or rights from the state. On the other hand, the Utah courts have also held that the statute only covers relationships that hold themselves out to be “marriages” of one sort or another. Thus, despite the “cohabitation” language, the statute does not cover simple adultery, even when the adulterers live together …
The district court upheld what I’m calling the core application of the statute … But the district court struck down the extended application of the statute. It held that (1) the state had no legitimate interest trying to regulate purely “religious cohabitation” and (2) that the law unconstitutionally discriminated between such “religious cohabitation” (in which the parties held themselves out to be in some sense “married”) and other extra-marital or multiple-partner arrangements.
…
This opinion is yet another instance of a serious and damaging failure, which I’ve discussed in other contexts here,here, and here, to appreciate the distinctively interwoven, intertwined, character of religion in the United States. Marriage as we know it carries a complex combination of governmental, religious, cultural, sociological, psychological, and maybe even “natural” meanings. And those meanings have never been, and probably cannot be, kept hermetically sealed off from each other.
I don’t think I can distill the rest of Dane’s analysis.
Note that Dane here is at least tacitly critiquing the simplistic following of precedents down a narrow channel to absurdity, which decidedly is the characteristic temptation of judging rather than legislating.
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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 