Category: Intrigued

Nature and Humanity in Orthodox Christianity

Father Stephen this time mediates a YouTube video (okay, it’s two still photos, some text, and some appropriate background music) frame for one of the Twentieth Century’s great Saints’ poetic reflections on the nexus between (1) humankind’s various sins, transgressions and iniquities and (2) natural calamity:

I don’t think Saint Nikolai is saying “God is doing this stuff to punish us” or even “God is doing this stuff to get our attention so we’ll straighten out” (i.e., to chasten us). He says in conclusion, after all, that the Lord will come and set things right.

Nor is he drawing a cause and effect line between sin X and natural calamity Y, a la Pat Robertson.

I think, having now spent some 12+ years Orthodox, that he’s talking about a mystical connection between us and nature, consistent with Biblical anthropology that sees us as part of nature and yet apart from it as well, bearing the image of God and appointed as steward and priest over creation.

Others might fault this from Orthodox Wiki, but I personally couldn’t describe in prose the tradition I’m describing better that this, from Orthodoxwiki:

The Relationship between Man and Material Creation

Man as a microcosm

The idea of man as a microcosm is most commonly associated with St. Maximos the Confessor. In his Mystagogia he speaks of an indissoluble relationship and unity between man and world: “[St. Paul] put forward another suggestion, along the lines of the same imagery, that the whole world of visible and invisible things can be thought of as a man; and man, made up of body and soul, as a world” (Mystagogia, Chapter 7). Lars Thunberg, in his “Man and the Cosmos” describes St. Maximos’ understanding of man as a microcosm by virtue of his constitution and for the purpose of mediation. Being both material and spiritual, all things in the world are reflected in man, who then has the vocation to bring together mortal and immortal creatures, rational and non-rational beings. However, St. Maximos does not view this vocation of man in separation from God. Rather, he states that it is Christ who achieved this unity. Again Thunberg, analyzing the Ambigua, says that man needs to leave the sphere of creation behind and be united with God beyond his own nature. Thus, man’s mission in relation to creation can only be fulfilled in and through Christ: “Man created in the image of God is thus, according to Maximus, a key to understanding creation not only in order that he may understand it as it is, but also that by actively understanding it in his process of divinization he may elevate it to the supreme level of its full soteriological comprehension (Ambigua 10).” (Thunberg, “Man and the Cosmos, p.76)

St. Gregory of Nyssa also uses the image of man as microcosm, though his use of the expression is rather less uniform than for St. Maximus. In his conception, the parallelism seems to be limited to a common praise of God: “as the cosmos continuously lifts up a hymn of praise to God, so it is the duty of man to engage in continual psalmody and hymnody.” Metr. Paulos Gregorios postulates that St. Gregory’s reservation regarding a more in-depth parallelism stemmed from a concern that man’s high standing within creation not be attributed to his similarity to the universe (Gregorios, “Cosmic Man”). However, St. Gregory also views man as a mediator between creation and God whose mediation is made possible by the incarnation: “in Christ, Man, and through Man the whole creation, directly and without intermediaries participates in the creative energies of God Himself” (Gregorios, “Cosmic Man, p.103).

Fr. Stanley Harakas summarizes the Orthodox position thus far: “[t]he creation exists for the use of humanity; but humanity exists as a microcosm to sanctify creation and to draw it into the fullness of the life of the kingdom of God, to bring it into communion with its maker.” (The Integrity of Creation: Ethical Issues, in “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation,” p.73)

While both St. Maximus and St. Gregory note that the mediation of man is directly related to Christ’s incarnation, the details of that mediation are filled in by modern day theologians.

Man as Priest of Creation

The Genesis passage which started this article is open to other interpretations. An interpretation which gives man a certain responsibility towards the environment, presents the commission which was given to man as a stewardship. K.M. George in his essay “Towards a Eucharistic Ecology” points out that good stewardship, in the sense of the Greek ‘oikonomos:’—manager or administrator of a house,—requires trustworthiness, dependability, and wisdom. He goes on to add: “[w]e offer the creation as a thank-offering to God in liturgy” (George, Towards a Eucharistic Theology, in “Justice, Peace and the Integrily of Creation”, p.46) This statement contains within it the seed for the idea of that several contemporary theologians, among them Vigen Guroian, Metr. Paulos Gregorios, and Metr. John_(Zizioulas)_of_Pergamon, consider as the most important in defining man’s relationship to creation: man as ‘priest of creation.’

Metr. Paulos Gregorios of the Orthodox Syrian Church of the East, who was one of the most ardent advocates of Christian ecology wrote, “Nature, man, and God are not three disjunct realities on the stage with a space-interval between their respective boundaries. […] Christ has become part of creation, and in his created body he lifted up the creation to God, and humankind must participate in this eternal priesthood of Christ” (Gregorios, “The Human Presence”) Metr. John Zizioulas adds: “The priest is the one who takes in his hands the world to refer it to God and who, in return brings God’s blessing to what he refers to God. Through this act creation is brought into communion with God himself. […] This role of the human being as the priest of creation, is absolutely necessary for creation itself, because without this reference of creation to God the whole created universe will die.” He goes on to argue that ethics, as commonly understood, cannot provide a solution for the environmental problem; this is the place of the Church. Metr. John argues that the solution to the environmental problem cannot be based on a set of impersonal principles. What is needed, rather is a particular way of life based on relationships with one another, with the material world, and with God. Specifically, the Metropolitan mentions fasting, respect for the material world and acknowledgement (within the Liturgy) that creation belongs to God, as specific means by which the Church can effect change (Zizioulas, Man the Priest of Creation: A Response to the Ecological Problem, in “Living Orthodoxy in the Modern World”).

The exercise of this priesthood encompasses both our lives within the church temple (the Liturgy) and outside of it (the liturgy before/after the liturgy).

This is the sort of thing, in the end, that may be better said poetically, as Saint Nikolai say it, than in dry propositions like my introduction or like Orthodoxwiki.

Do you know, my child, why the earth overturns restlessly
and why it spews forth into the sky?
Because men have overturned the voice of conscience
Calling evil good, and good evil
and have spewed forth hatred toward those who still speak truth.

UPDATE:

Bryan Graf, a photographer, meditates differently on the relationship of humankind and nature, presumably on the occasion of Earth Day (that’s today, isn’t it?).

Ahem! I prefer St. Nikolai’s version.

CLS/Hastings update

The arguments were had before the Supremes yesterday, after my post and bold-if-not-foolish prediction.

Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal summarizes nicely here:

Presumably Gays & Lesbians for Individual Liberty do not share the CLS view of human sexuality. But they understand exactly where Dean Martinez’s logic is taking us.

“[U]nder Hastings’ forced membership policy, only majority viewpoints (or those viewpoints too banal to interest the majority) are actually assured a voice in Hastings’ forum,” argues their brief. “That is a patently unreasonable way to ‘promote a diversity of viewpoints.'”

Sadly, it appears that this is shaping up in the popular press as a case about the legal status anti-gay bigotry if religiously motivated. Few in the press note that the CLS sexuality standards bar from office unrepentant straight fornicators as well as unrepentant gay fornicators.

As well it should: so far, the sexual revolution and no-fault divorce have done a heckuva lot more damage to the formation of Christian consciences and the institution of marriage than has the gay rights movement.

Travelogoblog

Retired Indianopolis Elder Law attorney Phillip Price will set out, volcano (and God) willing, on a 500 mile hike in France and Spain, blogging merrily as he goes:

Join me on my Camino de Santiago (Way of St James).  My journey begins  April 28, 2010 departing from Indianapolis, IN.  I start walking on April 30 in St Jean Pied de Port, France, cross through a mountain pass in the Pyrenees and walk westward to Santiago de Compostela, Spain about 497 miles of walking over 36 days.

Subscribe now.

Christian Legal Society and Hastings Law School

Not surprisingly, the New York Times editorial on todays hot Supreme Court ticket gets it wrong, starting with the facts. But the Washington Post gets it right, influenced, I assume, more by Jonathan Turley’s analysis that by Newt Gingrich’s epithet-laden call to arms.

The New York Times is factually wrong, as I understand it, that the Christian Legal Society Hastings Chapter “bars non-Christian and gay students.” CLS allows all students to attend meetings, but CLS bylaws barred non-Christians, gays and non-celibate heterosexual students from serving as officers or voting members. Even on its sexual standards, it recognizes human frailty: students, gay or straight, who lapse into unchastity are allowed as members and officers if they’re repentant. It’s those who reject the virtue of Christian chastity who are excluded.

Moreover, religions typically are exclusive. The Hastings policy in effect prefers non-exclusive religions (e.g., Unitarian Universalism – though I recall a debate even there about whether a pagan polytheist can style himself Unitarian – the “belief in, at most, one God”) over typical religions, despite the Constitutional requirement of neutrality of government between religions.

This is the slippery constitutional slope down which government starts the slide when it exalts faddish and undiscerning equality (by undiscerning, I mean disregarding relevant distinctions; I’m not intending to promote invidious discrimination) over explicit mandates of the Bill of Rights.

I believe that the government itself should not discriminate on irrelevant bases, and that sexual orientation, for instance, is generally irrelevant. But it is a much different matter, it seems to me, for government to fund things with tax dollars but require as a condition of funding that recipients not discriminate, however nonviolently, based on matters that are relevant within the logic of the recipient’s associative purposes. The controlling principal in funding, I believe and predict, is that of the Supreme Court’s “Rosenberger decision in 1995, after the school refused to pay for publications for religious organizations on campus: Fund all or none.” That quote, from Jonathan Turley’s discerning column, gets to the heart of the matter.

By the way, this dispute reminds me of a maxim that I believe I coined a few decades ago: In a regime of strict separation of Church and State, when government gets bigger, the Church is forced to get smaller. That’s why as a life-long Churchman (who has, however, switched Churches) I’m biased against big government.

Three additional matters that I don’t think qualify as an update (I simply failed to mention them although I intended to):

  1. The possibility that making sexual orientation a protected class would eventually lead to denial of tax exemption to religions that do not countenance unrepentant homosexuality has long been a powerful argument to me, based on the Bob Jones University tax exemption decision (mentioned in Jonathan Turley’s column), and Turley recognizes the power of that argument in his final paragraph or two or his column.
  2. Hastings law school will no doubt attempt to rely on the case Employment Division v. Smith, which abandoned a precedent of moderate duration in favor of the rule that laws may legitimately impinge on the free exercise of religion provided they are neutral laws of general application – a surprisingly difficult test to meet (some powerful group generally lobbies for an exemption, which prevents the law being “of general application”). Hastings will argue that its nondiscrimination policy applies to every student group seeking funding. I still think the “fund them all or fund none” principle will prevail. Denial of funding because of a belief nonviolently applied is much different than generally banning a particular behavior regardless of the motivation.
  3. For almost 25 years, I was a member of the Christian Legal Society. I stopped renewing my membership finally when I realized that CLS was pervasively Protestant. Although they accept as members Orthodox and Catholics who can subscribe their doctrinal beliefs, as could I, I simply was not being “edified” by their distinctive “take” on things.

Is it possible better to distill Goldman Sachs than this?

J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at Berkeley, distills the Goldman Sachs allegations so thoroughly that it would be foolish for me to try to excerpt it. This is, maybe, a 5 minute read — if you’ve never cracked an economics textbook in your life.

UPDATE:

Here’s a half-hearted defense of Goldman Sachs, not surprisingly from the Wall Street Journal.

After 18 months of investigation, the best the government can come up with is an allegation that Goldman misled some of the world’s most sophisticated investors about a single 2007 “synthetic” collateralized debt obligation (CDO)? Far from being the smoking gun of the financial crisis, this case looks more like a water pistol.

The column suggests that the SEC overlooked, or is trying in its Complaint to ignore, “the difference between a cash CDO—which contains slices of mortgage-backed securities—and a synthetic CDO containing bets against these securities … The existence of a short bet wasn’t Goldman’s dark secret. It was the very premise of the transaction.”

Did Goldman have an obligation to tell everyone that Mr. Paulson was the one shorting subprime? Goldman insists it is “normal business practice” for a market maker like itself not to disclose the parties to a transaction, and one question is why it would have made any difference. Mr. Paulson has since become famous for this mortgage gamble, from which he made $1 billion. But at the time of the trade he was just another hedge-fund trader, and no long-side investor would have felt this was like betting against Warren Buffett.

Not that there are any innocent widows and orphans in this story. Goldman is being portrayed as Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” exploiting the good people of Bedford Falls. But a more appropriate movie analogy is “Alien vs. Predator,” with Goldman serving as the referee. Mr. Paulson bet against German bank IKB and America’s ACA, neither of which fell off a turnip truck at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets.

Free speech – England versus United States

Occasionally I think our speech in the U.S. is a little too free – like when the tabloids traffic in gossips that should make the purveyor and the consumer both want to go home and shower off the slime. It’s the sort of thing that well-formed Christians will shun, but it’s pervasive in our culture.

But I’ll take our free-wheeling system in a heartbeat over the British system where libel suits are used to silence critics, and where the burden is on the critic to prove that what he said was true, not on the target to prove that it was false.

Even the British system comes out okay in the end sometimes, as told in “Now Charlatans will know to beware the geeks.” It seems that one “Simon Singh had written an article which was true and important about the dangers of the quack therapy of chiropractic healing.” In classic British libel law form, British chiropractors tried to kill the messenger:

Then, like so many authors and publishers before him, he learnedEnglish law persecuted rather than protected honest argument and that he was in trouble.

The British Chiropractic Association was suing him for saying that there was “not a jot of evidence” that its members could help sick children by manipulating babies’ spines in accordance with the teachings of a more-than-usually nutty American faith healer.

Well-run societies do not defend men who make money from worried parents and, more seriously, fob off their children with bogus “cures”. In his wisdom, however, Mr Justice Eady decided that the law would intervene to silence a debate on public health and ruled that it would not be enough for Singh to show that there was no reliable evidence that alleged treatments worked, which Singh would have difficulty in doing because there wasn’t. Because he had written that the chiropractic association “happily promotes bogus treatments”, the judge said he had to jump the insuperable barrier of proving that the therapists were lying rather than merely deluded and face costs of £500,000 or more if he failed.

But this time the intimidation didn’t work:

Far from being depressed, the audience turned into a heaving mass of furious geeks, who roared their anger and vowed that they would not rest until they had brought down the rotten system The “skeptic movement” (always spelt with “k” by the way, to emphasise their distinctiveness) had come to Singh’s aid. He was now in the protective custody of men and women, who, with straight faces, introduced themselves by the titles of their blogs: “Hi, I’m Gimpy.”

“Jack of Kent, pleased to meet you, love your writing. This is Holford Watch, Zeno, Jago, and I thought I saw the Quackometer getting a round in at the bar.”

Unnerved by their determination, I said to Ben Goldacre, demolisher of pseudo-science in all its fraudulent forms: “The nerds are on the march. I wouldn’t like to be the one standing in their way.” An uncharacteristically mystical look passed over the great debunker’s face. “Yes,” he said. “Strike us down, we shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”

Full disclosure: I go to a Chiropractor the way I went to my M.D. before I had a chronic condition that needed monitoring: when I’ve got a problem I think he can help, typically a characteristic headache that seems to originate in neck and shoulders. I’ve never met the kind of chiropractor who make sweeping claims:

Meanwhile, their allies tracked down the web pages of every chiropractor in Britain who was claiming they could treat asthmatic children and reported him or her to their local trading standards officer.

Back to the U.S.A. In my experience, lawsuits are used to silence critics here as well, despite our free speech tradition. It may not be a straight-up libel suit, but rather may take the form of an “intentional infliction of emotional distress” claim or even a discrimination claim if the quack is in some sort of minority. I’m defending one right now (it’s unusual for me to litigate).

The problem is well-enough known that states have enacted laws to punish those who start the aptly-named SLAPP suites – Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.

I once was sued in a SLAPP by my city government for signing a petition asking it to enforce a zoning ordinance. Diana Vice, who blogs at Welcome to My Tea Party, has been sued by a roofing contractor in something that – let me be cautious here – fairly plausibly looks like a SLAPP suit by a roofing contractor that does a lot of work for school systems in ways that Vice finds fishy.

I wish Judges wouldn’t be so hesitant to impose an award of attorney fees to a winning defendant, because these suits are effective to at least “chill” free speech on important topics as long as there’s a prospect of spending unreimbursed 5-figure attorney fees as the price of speaking out.

Also, it’s particularly important that guys like Singh prevail in Britain because British law is being used to silence critics in cyberspace, which knows no borders, world-wide — on the theory that the American author spoke or “published” in Great Britain, which accordingly has jurisdiction to entertain complaints of the aggrieved — oh, let’s say Czech. You get the idea. Because someone in Britain read it on the internet, British courts can referee the spat between two non-Brits.

And it’s especially gratifying that the cyber-community mustered the evidence to win Singh’s suit.

Can homosexual orientation be changed?

Oh, my! The saga continues! This is as more confusing as than the the Intelligent Design versus Evolution kerfuffle!

The weight of professional opinion seemed to me to have become that same-sex orientation was unchangeable.

So I had pretty much come to the conclusion that Christian people with exclusive same-sex attraction simply needed to gird themselves for life-long sexual abstinence, without even the hope of an abstinent bachelor or spinster (I know the former is neutral, the latter deprecatory in connotation – sorry) someday finding Mister or Miss Right. (I generally say “chastity” instead of “abstinence” when dealing with, say, teen sexuality of clients at Matrix Lifeline, because of chastity’s relatively positive connotation. But chastity outside Christian marriage means abstinence and repentance for lapses.)

I would not have urged a gay or lesbian Christian, in other words, to try to become heterosexual.

I might have encouraged them to consider a monastic vocation to get away from our hypersexualized culture and, for an Orthodox monastic, to engage in this ultimate battle against all the passions. But monastic vocation should not be undertaken toward the specific end of sexual reorientation, as if to say “I’ll be a monastic until I’m straight, and then I’ll laicize and marry.”

But here is a flawed column citing provocative information to the effect that I may have been wrong.

[T]he American College of Pediatricians … recently began a campaign to educate schools on sexual orientation and youth. “Facts About Youth” cites research that shows that over 85% of students with homosexual attractions will ultimately adopt a heterosexual identity as adults.

Okay, the American College of Pediatricians can be, as is being, faulted as a Christian front group impersonating the American Academy of Pediatrics. Point taken. But the American Psychiatric Association did not dispassionately de-list homosexuality as a disorder because of the great weight of scientific evidence. They did it for the same reason that the American Bar Association endorsed abortion – just before I resigned: a powerful lobby with an agenda mau-maued the APA (and the ABA). It’s hard to find neutrality on some subjects.

But what of these studies they cite?

If they exist, and are methodologically sound, they at least suggest that sexuality in youth is highly confused – perhaps even malleable. Mightn’t it be premature to tell conflicted adolescents that “you’re gay (or bi-); get used to it and celebrate it”? As long ago as Kinsey, there were claims that an astonishing proportion of people had experienced some same-sex encounter in their lives. And there are, after all, even adults who get sexually aroused by things like feet or underwear. Adolescent arousal by a member of the same sex may not mean much about one’s ultimate sexual destiny. (Would you think you were destined to get off with shoes forever if they turned you on?)

[There is a] growing body of research demonstrating that changing one’s sexual orientation is indeed possible.

Among those being ignored is Columbia University’s Dr. Robert Spitzer, whose 2003 landmark study was published in the prestigious journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. To his surprise, Spitzer – who ironically spearheaded the removal of homosexuality from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 – found that the majority of his 200 subjects experienced significant change in their same-sex feelings through therapy and support groups: “Like most psychiatrists, I thought that homosexual behavior could only be resisted, and that no one could really change their sexual orientation. I now believe that to be false. Some people can and do change.”

If that’s not convincing enough, in 2009 the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality published a comprehensive overview of research, citing over 500 scientific studies spanning nearly 100 years of research that demonstrates change is possible. However, these facts aren’t being communicated to young people. What is being educated to our youth is based on political correctness, not sexual freedom.

Dr. Robert Spitzer has no known ax to grind, but is a fairly dramatic “conversion story.” NARTH may have an ax to grind; that’s not clear to me.

By all means stop the persecution of young people who have doubt about their sexuality or who have come out as gay or lesbian (or are harassed for other reasons, like Phoebe Prince), but let’s have a little retiscence about showing 13 year old boys how most safely to sodomize or be sodomized, and suchlike.

And I’m not ruling out the possibility that some adults can change from gay to straight. It won’t upset my worldview if it proves false, but I may have closed my book prematurely.

What’s going on here? Boy Scout sex abuse case.

This Wall Street Journal story blind-sided me this morning. I was unaware of this lawsuit.

On the one hand, the Boy Scouts have been roundly vilified, and even banned from city-owned buildings in gay-friendly cities, for expelling scouts who come out. Now an Oregon jury thinks they were too lenient about pedophile scoutmasters:

The jury found the national body 60% negligent for the abuse and the local council just 15% negligent, assessing economic damages of $840,000 and $210,000, respectively.

Deliberations on punitive damages—the plaintiff’s attorneys are asking for $25 million—resume here next week.

I know the connection between homosexuality and pedophilia is disputed, and denial of any connection seems very plausible to me.

But on the theory that “we’re just like you except that we prefer the same sex,” I consult my own feelings (especially when I was a younger adult) about sexually mature adolescent girls. Hmmm. It seems to me that it would be highly imprudent to put a young straight guy in a position where he could finagle sexual access to nubile female charges.

By “just like you except …” extension, is it not imprudent to allow a gay adult male to be in charge as Scoutmaster of a bunch of sexually mature if young adolescent boys?  (Note, however, that the plaintiff here was apparently 11 or 12 during the abuse, and likely pre-pubescent.) We had a local tragedy as a result of “out” gay Greg Ledbetter being put in charge of troubled adolescent boys (although he was caught later, elsewhere), and the politically correct line throughout was that the charges against him were not even plausible, but were cooked up by fanatical homophobes.

The national Boy Scout organization apparently tried to avoid such problems:

[T]he Portland case against the Boy Scouts drew national attention, in part because it was one of the very few times jurors have been allowed to review secret “perversion files” the Boy Scouts compiled against its own membership.

The national organization in the past has tried to keep those files out of court proceedings, but lost an appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court last February that would have kept confidential its files on pedophiles dating back to 1964. During the trial, attorneys for the Boy Scouts argued that the files demonstrated the lengths Boy Scouts officials have gone to police their ranks and keep suspected pedophiles away from children.

Attorneys for the defendants declined to comment, citing the coming deliberation on punitive damages. The Boy Scouts of America issued a statement on its Web site denouncing the jury’s decision.

“We are gravely disappointed,” the scouting organization said. “We believe that the allegations made against our youth protection efforts are not valid. We intend to appeal.”

I’m imputing no political agenda to the Plaintiff in this case, but is this a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma for the Scouts? How can an organization the puts adults and kids together steer between the Scylla of phobia and the Charybdis of laxity?

Tactical shift coming in Supreme Court confirmation fight?

Since Roe v. Wade was imposed on us by the Supremes 37 years ago, there has been a pervasive “abortion distortion factor”:

The “Abortion distortion factor” is that phenomenon whereby when established rules of law encounter the abortion right, the established rule is bent to accomodate the abortion right.

(Bopp, James, in A Passion for Justice – A Pro-life Review of 1987 and a Look ahead to 1988, at page 80) That factor has been huge in most Supreme Court appointment battles since 1980 – generally couched in code words and litmus tests that fooled no observant observer.

The successor for Justice Stevens may face a significantly different constellation of questions, centering on “Obamacare” partly because that issue works to the benefit of the Republicans though so pervasive is the Abortion Distortion Factor that it won’t be entirely out of play:

Another set of questions could prove embarrassing for Democrats who have lauded Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade for creating a right to privacy that includes contraception and abortion. “How can the freedom to make such choices with your doctor be protected and not freedom to choose a hip replacement or a Caesarean section?” asks former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey in The Wall Street Journal. “Either your body is protected from government interference or it’s not.”

McCaughey also notes that in 2006 the Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Oregon ruled that the federal government couldn’t set standards for doctors to administer lethal drugs to terminally ill patients under Oregon’s death with dignity act. So does the Constitution empower the feds to regulate non-lethal drugs in contravention of other state laws?

Such questions may not persuade an Obama nominee to rule that Obamacare is unconstitutional. But they can raise politically damaging issues in a high-visibility forum at a time when Democrats would like to move beyond health care and talk about jobs and financial regulation. Stevens apparently timed his retirement to secure the confirmation of a congenial successor — but some Democrats probably wish that he had quit a year ago, when they had more Senate votes and fewer unpopular policies.