J. S Mill 2

On Liberty, from chapter 3:

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.

He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being?

It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. . . .

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develope itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

Meet Michael Sandel

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Michael Sandel is one of the most articulate men on the planet, but Colbert uses him as a straightman.  Sandel gets to say little, while Colbert enacts the very demon Sandel wants to exorcise.

See Sandel in a more serious vein (Today Show): on paying children to read.

His website, with videos of his courses.

J. S. Mill

From On Liberty (1859):

There is, in fact, no recognised principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, would willingly instigate the government to undertake the business; while others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than add one to the departments of human interests amenable to governmental control. And men range themselves on one or the other side in any particular case, according to this general direction of their sentiments; or according to the degree of interest which they feel in the particular thing which it is proposed that the government should do, or according to the belief they entertain that the government would, or would not, do it in the manner they prefer; but very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consistently adhere, as to what things are fit to be done by a government. And it seems to me that in consequence of this absence of rule or principle, one side is at present as often wrong as the other; the interference of government is, with about equal frequency, improperly invoked and improperly condemned.

Religious Freedom! Religious Freedom!

I haven't been overly impressed by the U.S. bishops' rhetoric about religious liberty in the context of the health-care and contraceptive-coverage debate.  All smoke, no fire?  But Fr. Joseph Komonchak, looking at Notre Dame's suit against the government, suggests there's substance to the bishops' concerns:

I have been struck by how often and how quickly criticisms of the bishops for their insistence that religious liberty is at stake in the matter of the government’s contraception-mandate have attributed other motives to their actions and statements, and Fr. Jenkins at Notre Dame has not been spared similar accusations. So I read Notre Dame’s suit and would like to bring forth two sections of it.

First, as quoted in Notre Dame’s suit, the regulatory “religious employer” exemption contains this definition of terms:

For purposes of this subsection, a “religious employer” is an organization that meets all of the following criteria:

(1) The inculcation of religious values is the purpose of the organization.

(2) The organization primarily employs persons who share the religious tenets of the organization.

(3) The organization serves primarily persons who share the religious tenets of the organization.

(4) The organization is a nonprofit organization as described in section 6033(a)(1) and section 6033(a)(3)(A)(i) or (iii) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended. Id. at 46,626 (codified at 45 C.F.R. § 147.130(a)(iv)(A)-(B)).

Second, here in full is the heart of Notre Dame’s claim that religious liberty is being compromised by the government’s regulation:

Go to his post at Commonweal magazine's blog

NSFW (Not Suitable for Work)

A tad coarser than most of my offerings, but we're all grown-up here.

A Quote for the Day

"In the last generation, the values of the market have come to permeate every aspect of our society. The notion that the public good may be measured in other than economic terms has pretty much been abandoned."

Eric Foner, in an address to Columbia University's Ph.D. recipients

Bishop Disagree with Religious-Freedom Strategy

E. J. Dionne Jr.

There is a healthy struggle brewing among the nation's Roman Catholic bishops. A previously silent group, upset over conservative colleagues defining the church's public posture and eagerly picking fights with President Barack Obama, has had enough.

The headlines this week were about lawsuits brought by forty-three Catholic organizations, including thirteen dioceses, to overturn regulations issued by the administration requiring insurance plans to cover contraception under the new health-care law. But the other side of this news was also significant: That the vast majority of the nation's 195 dioceses did not go to court.

It turns out that many bishops, notably the church leadership in California, saw the litigation as premature. They are upset that the lawsuits were brought without a broader discussion among the entire membership of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and wanted to delay action until the bishops' June meeting.

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See How These Christians Love One Another

A woman writes to Dan Savage:

So I am in a really bad place right now and maybe I just have to hear "buck up" and "it will get better."

I'm a 32-year-old lesbian who's been out for 10 years. I was raised in a very conservative Pentecostal family and I am the baby of my family of 15 kids. The day before my college graduation from Liberty University I came out to my family, as a way of explaining why I was not going to walk to get my diploma. The day before I just realized how crazy it was to be going to that school listening to those messages when I knew it was all wrong. I packed everything before telling my family that night—I wanted to make sure I had all my pictures and the bible my dad gave me for my 13th birthday—because I knew how it was going to end even though I, of course, tried to hold on to hope. My father slapped me that night and told me that I was no longer his child and I was no longer a child of God. I haven't seen my family for 10 years. I've always held out hope that they would change their minds and realize that they do love me.

I got a call from my oldest sister last month. I wasn't sure what she was going to tell me—had one of my parents died? was I going to be let back into the family?—and then she told me that she needed my help. Her son was gay and she needed me to come and get him. I didn't understand what she meant at first. I thought she wanted me to come and talk to him. But, no, she meant come and get him. She didn't want that "filth"—her own son—in her home. When I picked him up a large part of my family was there, and I swear to God I had never felt so much hate in my life. I don't understand it and I know I never will, but I swear it broke me.

He is here with me now and the family that I have made for myself over the years. In my little group he will get to meet every color of the rainbow flag. I will help him learn to love himself for who he is if it is the last thing I do in this world.

But I feel like I'm broken. I feel like everything I have made for myself over the last 10 years is nothing. How can my whole family not only not love me anymore but hate me with so much passion? I don't understand why this is affecting me so much. I already knew all of this. I've known it for a long time. But to see it on their faces was something new.

I need to know how to pick myself up. A 15-year-old boy is relying on me.

Preaching Hatred

La Reine Est Morte

Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post:

Donna Summer, who died Thursday, was the undisputed monarch of a musical genre that I tried my best to hate. Disco had none of the spontaneity and rough edges of rock-and-roll, none of the rawness and authenticity of rhythm and blues, and yet it emerged from those sources like some sort of genetic anomaly. Disco was slick, polished, relentless. Intellectually, it was boring.

Viscerally, it was irresistible. To be on a dance floor in the late 1970s, before the mirrored ball became a cliche, was to be assaulted by thumping bass and screaming synthesizers until you surrendered and let the music carry you along. For all its space-age sheen, disco was all about music’s most ancient and primal element, the beat. It was about becoming what diva Grace Jones called a “slave to the rhythm.” Harmony and melody, for most artists, were afterthoughts.

But not for Donna Summer. Only a handful had the pipes to sing with expressiveness, subtlety and control above the clamorous frenzy of a disco groove, and Summer was one of them. Her voice had what seemed like effortless power. You got the sense that if she wanted to crank it up, she could blow any band right off the stage.

And she had something to say. Songs such as “Bad Girls,” “Hot Stuff” and “She Works Hard for the Money” were anthems to female empowerment and sexual liberation. Whether she was playing the role of a saucy streetwalker, a club-hopping adventuress or an Everywoman shouldering the burdens of the world, she was always the protagonist, never the victim. “When I’m bad,” she famously sang, “I’m so, so bad.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/disco-queen-and-go-go-king/2012/05/17/gIQAb8MkWU_story.html?hpid=z2

A Judge’s Plea for Pot

I first learned of medical marijuana in the mid-1980s, when a friend of mine was undergoing chemotherapy for AIDS-related cancer.  (He died in 1989.)

By GUSTIN L. REICHBACH

THREE and a half years ago, on my 62nd birthday, doctors discovered a mass on my pancreas. It turned out to be Stage 3 pancreatic cancer. I was told I would be dead in four to six months. Today I am in that rare coterie of people who have survived this long with the disease. But I did not foresee that after having dedicated myself for 40 years to a life of the law, including more than two decades as a New York State judge, my quest for ameliorative and palliative care would lead me to marijuana.   

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Handwriting on the Wall

This seems unbelievable:

When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics.”)

In the book that documents these findings, titled unChristian, David Kinnaman writes:

“The gay issue has become the ‘big one, the negative image most likely to be intertwined with Christianity’s reputation. It is also the dimensions that most clearly demonstrates the unchristian faith to young people today, surfacing in a spate of negative perceptions: judgmental, bigoted, sheltered, right-wingers, hypocritical, insincere, and uncaring. Outsiders say [Christian] hostility toward gays...has become virtually synonymous with the Christian faith.”

Later research, documented in Kinnaman’s You Lost Me, reveals that one of the top reasons 59 percent of young adults with a Christian background have left the church is because they perceive the church to be too exclusive, particularly regarding their LGBT friends. Eight million twenty-somethings have left the church, and this is one reason why.

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Capitalists and Other Psychopaths

By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

THERE is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

       

The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news. The English writer Bernard Mandeville asserted as much nearly three centuries ago in a satirical-poem-cum-philosophical-treatise called “The Fable of the Bees.”

“Private Vices, Publick Benefits” read the book’s subtitle. A Machiavelli of the economic realm — a man who showed us as we are, not as we like to think we are — Mandeville argued that commercial society creates prosperity by harnessing our natural impulses: fraud, luxury and pride. By “pride” Mandeville meant vanity; by “luxury” he meant the desire for sensuous indulgence. These create demand, as every ad man knows. On the supply side, as we’d say, was fraud: “All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, / No Calling was without Deceit.”

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Quotes for the Day

“President Obama’s words today will be celebrated by generations to come. . . . For the millions of young gay and lesbian Americans across this nation, President Obama’s words provide genuine hope that they will be the first generation to grow up with the freedom to fully pursue the American dream. Marriage — the promise of love, companionship, and family — is basic to the pursuit of that dream.”

Chad Griffin, the incoming president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group

“No American president has ever supported a major expansion of civil rights that has not ultimately been adopted by the American people, and I have no doubt that this will be no exception.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/us/politics/obama-says-same-sex-marriage-should-be-legal.html?hp 

Remembering John XXIII

The Power of Introverts

Susan Cain speaks (19 minutes):

http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html

Defending Our Sisters, cont'd

A letter to the Times:

In honor of the mostly smart and selfless nuns who taught me and innumerable American Catholics, I offer a two-question pop quiz.

Consider:

(a) A dwindling but devoted group of women, working for neither profit nor status, to comfort the mournful, nourish those hungry for justice, extol peacemaking, and meet the consequences of poverty, meekly and with mercy and purity of heart.

(b) Envoys of inquisition from a gilded institution, one feckless in protecting God’s children from debasing and cruel abuse.

Who are the “authentic teachers of faith and morals”?

Whose “themes” are “incompatible with Catholic faith?”

MARY GIBBONS
Washington, April 29, 2012