The Irony Of Secularism Being Held As Something Sacrosanct And Above Critical Analysis - Hate Mail Wrap Up

IF YOU'VE READ MUCH of what I've posted here, you will know that I have gone from skepticism about the so-called "enlightenment" which turned science from a method to find a few things about physical objects out into an ideological framing as a substitute for the religion that, at least in the latter day framing of those self-declaring enlightened ones, it replaced.  Or will, any day now.  While the cover story is that the light of science and the reason that those who rejected religion replaced it with was all explaining and all sufficient for not only understanding general descriptions of some of the simplest aspects of some of the simpler or simplified objects that could be observed, and with that would come the creation of a heaven on Earth, things didn't turn out that way.     

As no one who was honestly thinking about what science is and what it can do should ever have been unscientific enough and irrational enough to have ever said, never mind fallen for. The allegedly scientific regimes that have so far existed, from the French Revolution to the enduring Marxist states have been horrific hells. Their scientism endures, their materialism endures, whatever of Marx was a shadow of egalitarian religious morality was the first casualty as they found they could go from "socialism" to capitalism on steroids, grinding workers and the poor into raw materials of profit as the most ruthless of capitalists.  

In dealing with the claims of not only the ignorant scientistic boobs online but even some very sophisticated physical scientists, the bizarre notions as to what science was and was not, what it could do and what it certainly couldn't do, it's clear to me that no one should get a BS in any topic of science without a very serious knowledge of that being demonstrated.  The philosophical ignorance of scientists is a serious lapse, especially, so I read, in those who speak English though I think it's more extensive than that.  It's as clear to me that, given the role that the dismal "science" has played in that, scientists and science faculties around the globe should demand and enforce the removal of that label from economics, all of the "behavioral sciences," sociology and the other pseudo-sciences because they are not, never have been and never will be sciences but people stupid enough to believe they are, as judges, "justices" and politicians do, are friggin' dangerous.  

In the recent posts I've done about the problem of alleged "rights" and the real rights that living beings have, I've pointed out the role of the secularism which was the "enlightenment" solution to governments in a religiously and a-religiously pluralistic society and the consequences of that since every scheme of secularism I've ever looked into comes with the down-playing of morality and, as the scientism of a secular society develops, abandonment of the moral basis that equality and democracy require.*  

It is certainly not taken seriously when it is replaced by the secular-legalism that is what has really replaced Abrahamic belief in morality in the United States in the post-WWII era.  In that a dangerously vague notion of "rights" has replaced the more stringent moral demands that society and the state deliver equal justice which results in material and experienced equality.  The origin of that replacement of legalism for the moral basis of equality and democracy is related to but somewhat separate from the problem of scientism mentioned above.  In the elite, college-credentialed mainstream that substitution has always been going on since before the Revolutionary War and the establishment of the government, that elite, such as filled the leading roles in the law, in politics, in the clergy, even.  The devolution of liberal Calvinism into Unitarianism in much of New England came with a good part of that to the extent that when they came to establish what would become the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, they set it about as far from Harvard as they could manage within the state so as to lessen the influence of that devolution, at least that's what I've read being claimed about it. I like that story so I'm inclined to believe it.

But I think in 2022 to quibble about the influence of university based downgrading and bashing of the morality taught by Jesus, Moses, and the other Prophets is to focus on what is a minor influence compared to the glitzy, mind-bending, mind-monopolizing influence of mass media in the 20th century.  The more serious replacement for revealed religion than scientism is that old foil of it, Mammonism.  What, when media was something like a traditional American liberal novel like Uncle Tom's Cabin which could influence the moral sensibilities of mid-19th century America in favor of the abolition of slavery has, when it is shown on screens 24-7 and eats up most of whatever conscious life many if not most Americans have, apart from driving and work, the media is the predominant determinant in whatever results there are.

The results are not good.  

If it does not determine how most people think, it certainly heavily influences how they think and how an effectively destructive margin of them will tend to vote.  It's possible that the results, especially bad ones, in the actual experienced life of many People will have some power to overcome the oligarchic favoring propaganda of the entertainment they consume or the news, in rapidly descending power to move the nation.  Entertainment as a determinant of how the majority of Americans think is much more powerful than the bypassed "news" which consumes far less of most peoples' time.  Reagan and Trump are products of entertainment media, which should tell you something important.   

Whatever pitiful and often discrediting results "religious" broadcasting has, it will be mainly through them adopting the methods and practices and structure of entertainment programming, the differences not being denominational but media format.  There is the variety-show-night-club on-air "church," the home-shopping and infomercial, the pseudo-moral struggle of football or hockey or professional "wrestling" or the soap-opera. I think that is a modern version of the bizarre mixing of pagan-medieval Feudalism with tales and legends of quasi-religiously ordained knights and kings and a rigid class system that infected medieval Christianity and still has some sway, leading to a large amount of the discrediting as churches were identified with and became "kingdoms of the earth."

For example, it's no great mystery as to why the putrid billionaire-multi-millionaire financed astro-turf of "traditional Catholicism" is intent on turning the liturgy back into an incomprehensible medieval spectacle with Latin text, the most extreme of operatic garb such as the drag-queen outdoing Raymond Burke favors and absolutely no moral content except to despise and exclude LGBTQ+ and Catholics who divorce and remarry which, oddly, doesn't seem to exclude the likes of the Gingriches from the thing.  Critical as I can be over the self-hating excesses of many of my fellow gay males, especially in porn, I can't but be suspicious of anyone for whom "morality" means primarily nosing into the sex lives of others to find fault (or into the shopping cart of someone on food stamps). The fans of Pope Francis-hating trad-catholicism which is probably strongest in the media-addled United States imagine a golden age of Catholicism which never was, as seen on TV and in the movies.  A similar description with other details could describe any large influential right-wing religious operation.  The fact is that for the past fifty years the media has overwhelmingly presented that kind of thing as "Christianity" entirely ignoring real Christianity, whether Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox or unaffiliated.  It is no wonder that the generations most fed that, in their total ignorance of anything more authentic as Christianity, don't want to have anything to do with it. I don't want to have anything to do with it, either.

Comedy as a means of mocking and degrading anything that needs to be taken seriously is among the worst in that, even among some of those who should certainly know better.  In comedy, getting the laugh trumps everything and there is nothing like kicking religion around for that.  In that venue, it's the safest of powerless punching bags as that very unfunny comedian George Carlin settled on. Perhaps it is an indication of the nihilism that is an inevitable consequence of the down-grading of morality under a vague and general downgrading of any morality that costs you something, Trumpism certainly is and it began as a form of lite comic entertainment sharing the outrageous excessiveness that what passes as comedy consist of, today.

But, since just about anyone in the media was credentialed by and, to some extent, indoctrinated at a university or more, the influence of the general college and university culture on that, it is certainly a part of the whole thing.  That lecture by Walter Brueggemann on "Slow Wisdom" is about the best presentation of the collusion of universities and the culture of the "enlightenment" in our amorally corrupt liberal democracies in crisis I've ever heard.  If it's a choice of him or Hauerwas, Brueggemann is the more essential to listen to.  

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In Defense of Theology

I have long been tempted to write about the differences between the Black Liberation Theology of a James Cone and the Womanist theology strongly associated with Dolores Williams that has, to some extent, been critical of his focus on the resurrection power of suffering and martyrdom but I'm not qualified by my identity to do that discussion. I wish someone admiring both sides would or someone would point me to it.  Theology, unlike science, is not a producer of generalized universal descriptions and predictions and should not be attempted to come up with a universal system of thought.  The experience of a James Cone gives his view of Black Liberation theology a prophetic power which is no less than the prophetic power of the Black Women who do Womanist theology.  I've found both of those have more to tell a gay male quasi-Catholic than I could ever get to even if I had been smart enough to start when I was a lot younger than I did.  And things that are far more hazy and even confusing, which I'm sure is partly due to who I am and who I am not.  I can say the same thing about reading the Catholic Karl Rahner or even the quasi-theology of Marilynne Robinson.

The same could be said of many other present day and earlier theologians, many of whom disagreed with each other, some on some very basic things.  The reason for doing or reading theology isn't to come up with an accurate measure of abstracted, generalized objects in space or the possibilities of making atoms and molecules form new substances, it is to address real life that is far too complex for science to deal with.  In that it is far closer to egalitarian democratic politics than it is to science.  I think the framing of the enlightenment that opposed religion to government was wrong, I think the real problem is how to make the two work together to produce a world where people do to others what they would have done to them. If you were able to produce a political and legal system which both compelled people to do to others what they would have done to them, if you had a general culture in a society in which that was the primary focus and agreed to goal, equality and democracy would be the consequence.  If Christians or any other religion had done that among themselves, it would be seen as the greatest advance in human history, no secular ideology would have been able to touch it in terms of credibility or respectability, the ancient Athenians would have been seen for the oligarchic gangsters they were, the Roman Republic for the same thing.

Of course you have to start out with that intention in both or it won't work but the enlightenment model doesn't do that any better so its failure to produce what the age of alleged "Christendom" didn't and which liberal democracy certainly doesn't would seem to require us to going back to the idea of egalitarian reciprocal moral obligations which was never really tried in any but the earliest period of Christianity and, from what evidence we have, not universally successfully then, either. Paul, James, etc. had to exhort their followers and fellow Christians to do that in the earliest days.  I agree with Stanley Hauerwas and others that the Constantinian co-opting of the Christian Church was a disaster for the moral character of Christianity, one which we have not, yet, overcome on anything like a sufficient basis.  

* Equality is the foremost guarantee of a decent society, a decent life, a decent government. Nothing that doesn't strive for physical, social and economic equality should ever be considered a democracy.  It is a shame that that old Greek word which began as the name for a government of male oligarchs from old families should have ever been adopted for the striving to make a government in which all are equal and expected and required to do to others what they would have done to them.  Perhaps as an indication of just how unscientific the study of political-economics is, those who adopted that word and continued to use it for something supposed to be quite different didn't notice the discrepancy.  Really equal in effect is either what American Democracy will be or it will be just another variation on the kind of gangster governance favoring the few which Republican-fascists and Trumpians and the majority on the Roberts Court want it to be.  What I'd guess most people in TV, the movies and the radio want it to be, a few wishy-washy egalitarians in front of the camera and as writers, excepted, a little.  As someone pointed out the other day, American conservatism has never, ever, been egalitarian and so was never genuinely democratic.

UPDATE: Re-reading the above, I wouldn't be surprised if the "trad-catholics" had their way that they would eventually overturn the reform that came as late as Pius XII in which the Gospel was read in the vernacular so that those attending mass could understand it.  I'm pretty sure that the financiers of that heresy would figure out that they didn't want Catholics hearing, from time to time, that they were to not worship Mammon, that line about camels passing through the eyes of a needle, doing to the least among you, etc.  They and those addled cultists they've gulled through the network of the wicked Mother Angelica and other neo-fascist Catholic media are truly sinister, as the number of really evil Republican converts to it will indicate.  They've already gotten a majority on the Supreme Court through the Federalist fascist Society.  I pray good Pope Francis will live long enough to appoint smarter Cardinals of good will who will elect the next Pope who will continue his attempt to make Catholicism more Christian than his two immediate predecessors left it. Though I would expect there will be a major schism as the billionaires take their captive church out of it.

Spiritual At Noon - Hazel Dixon Won't You Come And Sing For Me

 

how dangerous an assertion or even a definition of rights can be unless it has an intention of rigorous pursuit of morality and good will behind it. Secularism rejects that safety measure

WHY ARE YOU transcribing what Stanley Hauerwas is saying if you disagree with him so much, is the question.  Well, I don't disagree with him on the basic theme of his talk that there are some very deep and serious problems with the way we talk and so think about rights* and how we express moral problems and issues that go far deeper than "rights language" can go and which secular political discourse can and those are problems that quickly impinge on all of us and, so, become entwined in our politics.  As I pointed out the other day, when Neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, Republican-fascists, Trumpzis, etc. and their allies in the mendacious Murdochian media are the foremost pushers of "rights" which they explicitly invoke to gain power to destroy rights, with the collusion of the Republican-fascists in Congress and on the Supreme Court, all of this rights business has been transformed and distorted nightmarishly in the most horrific hall of mirrors in modern history.

I think the diversion he made his speech go into on abortion was, itself, an example of the problem of dealing with a particularly fraught issue in which problems of how we talk about abortion and so how we misconstrue it and what to do about it are central to that.  The challenges I made to the problem of those who want to prevent abortions as to why they have not, in the past fifty years, championed extensive and pervasive programs to educate the public on how to effectively use contraception to prevent unwanted or impossible pregnancies - the only real way to prevent most abortions - and why the anti-choice side with few exceptions oppose any real and enduring support of pregnant Women, the children born to them and the fathers whose "rights" over a fetus seems to be the only thing they belief is worth considering but not when the child is born and in need of care and parenting, all of that is a product of how we talk about rights and other such issues lead us away from clarity and into self-defeating circles.  

I notice you haven't argued with those points or the others I've made over the past two days, I wonder why that might be.

I certainly don't agree with some of what Hauerwas says, in transcribing what he said I don't want anyone to think I consider him to be in the same class of thinker or writer as a Robinson, a Brueggemann, a Hans Kung or a James Cone.  On the other hand, he's not a light or inconsiderable thinker. I do think many of the things he says are important and, because of the consequences of the promiscuous use of the idea of "rights," in which the language casually developed by the left in the 1960s and beyond was so easily adopted by not only conservatives but overt oligarchs and fascists, our indigenous form of that in white supremacy, and now even Neo-Nazis with ACLU lawyers representing them.  The ACLU lawyers may deplore the point, but they must do this knowing their clients fully intend to do what they say when, through their exercise of speech and press, they come to power.  If the ACLU in 2022 doesn't believe that is possible they are too stupid to hold law licenses.  Or maybe just stupid enough to hold them considering the Supreme Court's rulings.

I do mean it when I say that secularism is impotent to deal with these things in an effective way because it lacks and rejects the central concept that makes rights not only comprehensible but intellectually and emotively durable, God.  There is a reason that that brilliant young man of the 18th century scientistic enlightenment, Jefferson, when he was assigned to write the Second Continental Congress's declaration breaking with the King of Britain, probably against every inclination he had, HAD TO RESORT TO GOD AS THE SOURCE OF THE RIGHTS HE WAS CITING because no one then and no one now has located any other intellectually plausible source of rights as real things.*  

Supreme Court's sometimes foolish most other times sleazy practice of inventing "rights" for artificial objects such as endowing money with that status is intimately tied up with the intellectual dishonesty that you can practice when you figure God is either absent through deistic indifference, as adopted by some of the Founders, or if you don't really believe in God as I really, truly believe a majority on the present Court does not.  They certainly don't believe in the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, they most certainly don't believe in the same God Jesus talked about.  They serve Mammon, they don't serve God.

Their creation of "rights" and their and the framers of the Constitution illogically assigning rights to humanly created entities such as the press and religion and political units and stupidly and vaguely seeming to do so to guns is certainly a logical contradiction of Jefferson's assertion in the Declaration of Independence and as Hauerwas has pointed out once you separate rights from the People whose lives are where rights play out in any phenomenological manner, you can do that kind of thing whenever you figure it works for you.  I do think his tying of "inherency" to that is wrong, I think it is when you remove the source of that inherency that you get that happening.  I don't think it is unrelated to the Supreme Court bestowing "person-hood" on corporations in one of the most cynical and dishonest things that frequently cynical and dishonest Court has done.

I will probably take a break and decide if I want to go on with Hauerwas's talk, though I would very much encourage anyone to listen to it and think about what he says with enough respect to not just agree with it.  If there is a better source for introducing a discussion of the problems I've laid out with our "rights language" I would willingly consider using it to discuss that.

* This issue makes considering how we talk about things containing the limits of how we think about them a lot clearer.  The beginning of the talk in which Hauerwas makes a joke about how it is unthinkable to question any aspect of the assertion of rights due to our habits of language and how notions of propriety make any questioning of some rights assertions socially unacceptable is worth considering.  I would point out that that prohibition is certainly not anything like uniform, the rights of all manner of People in various underclasses are certainly breezily down-talked, denied to exist and are easily disposed of.  Look at how easily the Roberts Court dispatched the right to vote of Black People and others in what is now probably a majority of the states of the old Confederacy, now joined by Union states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.  I don't see the level of objection to that by the free press that the danger of it warrants, the freest press in our history which could certainly do to that reversion to Jim Crow American Apartheid what they did to Hillary Clinton or what they are doing to President Biden, risking cementing Republican-fascism into place for a very long time.  I will never take back what I said about the Warren Court stupidly creating a right to lie for the media in the Sullivan decision because it has had one of the most devastating effects on our politics during my lifetime as any Court decision, especially with the way later Courts maliciously built on it.  The political, social, economic and other effects of that decision are certainly more pervasive and durable than the Brown v. Board decision.  American schools are hardly desegregated any more than they were equal under the lie of  Plessy. v. Ferguson. 

Jefferson's faith in the, on balance, beneficial nature of the press was grotesquely misplaced.  Especially now with electronic media which gives so much power to it, sucking up the thinking and attention of most Americans in ways that an 18th century newspaper never could.  The conception of the right of the press granted to a humanly invented entity, conceived of in the minds of those who knew little about electricity that was unknown to Benjamin Franklin and could not possibly imagine radio, TV or the internet and a world in which media is ubiquitous to the point where it is hardly escapable, has become a cancer that is destroying democracy and equality and the planet.  Without effective restraints on lying in the media, it is deadly.  And the cowardly refusal to face that truth is self-defeating because with the corporate media lying like it does for political purposes, those who will truly put restrictions on it so it only lies for them and never tells the truth is guaranteed just as it happens in all anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic governments.  The Republican-fascists will do that as the whiny, idiot civil-libertarians are left without any coherent countering to that because their secularism leaves them with nothing.

You see, you have to really think outside the box of "rights" that we are all in to think about them as they really are, now.  "Rights language" doesn't allow that. You have to leave it to even admit how bad the problem has gotten.

* I think rights are real things, that isn't anything like saying our conception of them is full or spot-on or even very clear.  I think one of the clearest things we know about rights is that our conception of them is extremely liable to error.  Our legal, intellectual and philosophical conceptions of them are make-shift at best, often distorted by self-interest and ideology, typically.  If there is one thing that the witness to seeing Nazis and fascists and white supremacists and corporate lawyers and scumbag Supreme Court "justices" invoking rights must lead you to, it is an appreciation of how dangerous an assertion or even a definition of rights can be unless it has an intention of rigorous pursuit of morality and good will behind it.  Secularism rejects that safety measure.  It is as reckless as an establishment of state religion.

In the pragmatic economic game of law and politics, of academic "ethics" there is seldom if ever a call for a generous extending of a benefit of doubt

IT IS INEVITABLE in doing this kind of commentary on a half-hour or longer lecture that, for reasons of length,  some of the breaks taken in the text work better than others.  Ideally Hauerwas's discussion of "meta-ethics" would have all been presented together but I decided to break it where I did.  Having done that I'll make use of it.  He continued:

My other worry about rights language is the moral psychology that is often presumed by those who use that language.  It was not by accident that I came to terms with some of the problems of rights language was in testimony before a congressional committee on experimentation with children.  

In a theory of justice John Rawls had admirably acknowledged that at least in relationship to  animals his account of justice did not require those lacking a capacity for a sense of justice were owed strict justice.  Rawls was clearly making a point about his understanding of justice but many draw a similar conclusion about the capacity which must be present in order to claim rights. The congressional committee therefore had trouble explaining why we should protect children against experimentation because children did not have the moral psychological capacity to claim rights.

Questions of the moral psychology necessary to claim rights are particularly important for how one thinks about the morality of abortion.  If the fetus lacks the characteristics necessary to be a person and is therefore not capable of being a rights bearer does that mean that abortion does not need to be justified.  Or even more radical, if the fetus lacks the capacity to claim rights do we need the language of abortion at all? "Termination of pregnancy" is a description that seems perfectly adequate if the fetus has no rights.  Of course, "termination of pregnancy" suggests that this is purely a medical procedure that raises no moral questions at all.

Perhaps like Hauerwas, I would be extremely skeptical about any philosophical position that rests on claims of any kind of psychology, whether a general demotion of the thinking of even very young children based on something allegedly like real science, which psychology is not and never has been, or on the assumptions of philosophers who have a really bad track record of evaluating the minds of children and animals to the highest significance in ways that are most congenial to their colleagues who want to do things like experiment on them or to fit with their own ideological preferences.  Pretending to use an alleged science, psychology, to do so only serves to cover up the real motives behind it.  The history of the use of science to commit crimes is full of that practice.

I do not recall those congressional hearings - and I was quite a junkie for that kind of thing in the past - but I would wonder exactly when a Congressional Committee based their deliberations on the musings of someone like John Rawls. I would ask just how that position on who is NOT due justice on the basis of their alleged incapacity to sense something like justice really works.  Certainly you cannot talk about "justice" as if its existence was an either-or thing, it is far more complex than that.  The benighted sense of "justice" mentioned yesterday that Robert Taft expressed and John Kennedy praised was such that it would have allowed letting off some of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed because the criminals had legalized them in the Nazi regime but I doubt John Rawls would have ever questioned the intellectual capacity or "sense of justice" of either Senators Taft or Kennedy.   Certainly not in the way I would, though I would never claim that either of them were rightly held to not have a right to have justice done to them, as I would not claim that the worst of the Nazi war criminals whose "sense of justice" is demonstrably lacking were not due a judicial hearing.  I would have not executed them being morally opposed to the execution of those not a present and serious danger to the lives or safety of others as those held in confinement are not.  Though I will confess that them being executed leaves me without any feeling of pity or, really, any negative feelings.  Their executions may be said to leave me with a sense of justice, though under my moral sensibility, I  shouldn't feel that.  To introduce another complication into the question of such vague, fugitive and elusive senses as a basis for who is due justice and who can safely be removed from that protection, who can be held to have rights and who cannot.  In the pragmatic economic game of law and politics, of academic "ethics" there is seldom if ever a call for a generous extending of a benefit of doubt.  Any talk of a "moral sensibility," especially in terms of justice which doesn't start with a sense of it for others, especially the least among us, strikes me as abortive and incomplete and bound to come out in the worst possible places.

If such philosophical musings led to members of Congress puzzling over whether or not children should be the raw material of researchers I'd think they'd do better to consider other areas of thought.  Though exactly what researchers wanted to do to them would make different kinds of research  have quite different characters as to moral or legal problems that arise from the general idea that would be what a law or regulation would be.  The terrible use of children and even older people in some pretty stupid and absurd psychological and other research which had no actual use that might justify risking that abuse should always put the burden of proof that no harm will be done on those who want to profit from doing the research.  And researchers ALWAYS plan on profiting from their research.  The supposed benefit against risk of harm to the child is certainly more likely to come out with a right choice with others than either the ill founded nonsense of psychologists, psychiatrists or their allies in branches of gross speculation prefixed with neuro- or cog- or the ideological program of a philosophy professor whose discernment is lax enough to consult those, deciding that.  I wonder what someone like Jonathan Kozol would say about that in a long discussion of the issues, perhaps as a middle position.  

Me, I'd trust the professionally or academically uninfluenced moral sensibility of twenty randomly selected people with no financial, professional or ideological motives who liked children and had some experience of them more than an entire board of high-status psychologists and philosophers to make such decisions.  Having read a number of current high-status ethicists, there is no branch of the philosophical trade I'm more skeptical of.

As to the question of the status of the psychology of the fetus in discussing the moral nature of abortion, that is, of course, unknowable.  Unlike children we have little to no evidence they do have psychological states.

The moral status of abortion in the abstract, as ironically Hauerwas must discuss it in a lecture like this, does what he warned about, abstracting morals or rights from "the practices they depend upon for their intelligibility from real life," and there is hardly any such issue, set in the very bodies of Women who make very different choices for themselves, in which such a removal from that most basic fact is typical of at least one side of those discussing it. Trying to use the typical tools of modern intellectual discourse which seeks a generalized truth is one thing, the question of what to do about it when it is very real and particular in its setting IN THE BODIES OF REAL WOMEN who make different choices in their use of their own bodies makes the legality of abortion quite another thing.  

If someone is opposed to abortion the only ways to prevent all of them - short of internment of all pregnant women in prisons or concentration camps -  whether legal or illegal, is to:

a. convince a pregnant woman who is willing to be convinced to maintain a pregnancy that she can carry to term, not an especially effective means of preventing most abortions and more likely to invade her privacy so the attempt will lead to to resentment and controversy that overshadows the intent.  And hard experience shows it will lead to violence against those who choose abortion and those who provide medically sound, safe abortions.  As Sheldon Whitehouse has pointed out that organized harassment of Women at health centers is related to the history of attacks on those inside those health centers.  

I will point out that the very same people who oppose abortions being safe and legal are very often those who so notably want to provide no financial support or services to Women and children and, for that matter, fathers who are the result of their legal policy.  Services which might serve to lessen the choice to have an abortion, another enormous lapse in the integrity of the anti-abortion side of things.  I guarantee you that I can accurately predict where the six Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court would come down on most if not all proposed spending bills to provide that assistance and it would not be on the side of children, women and their families.  We know where the anti-abortion side in the Congress, state legislatures, governorship and the presidency have been on that and they are the ones who slashed such funding and opposed raising it, not generally those who favor Women being the ones who make the choice of whether or not THEY will bear a child.

or

b. preventing as many unwanted or unwise pregnancies as possible, to promote a nation-wide, ubiquitous and effective media and public health campaign of effective contraceptive use which will greatly diminish the number of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies such as some of those in countries that do a far better job of that than the United States does, many of them also having legal abortion.  There was never any bar on those opposed to abortion taking this route for any of the years Roe was the law when they claimed they wanted to prevent legal abortions, there isn't now when illegal abortion and crisis ones are what will replace it. Such a reduction in the need or demand for abortion is the best  you're going to get, not an effective prohibition on abortions.  To demand what you can't get when you could try to get the other discredits the intentions of those who oppose legal abortion.

The moral status of an opposition to such a program of reducing the desire for or need for abortions is certainly far more worth discussing than the psychological status of fetuses or to pretend that a ban on abortion does, in fact, eliminate abortion.  Anyone who opposes abortion as immoral who does not favor such a program being up, in place and tweaked for maximum effectiveness is a hypocrite who deserves to have their motives and their sincerity questioned at every turn, whether as a philosopher, a theologian or any other identity.  

The moral questions being asked in this lecture on the matter of abortion are the wrong ones but, then, that has been characteristic of the arguments about abortion for the entire period it has been under discussion, not a little of that wrongheadedness due to the fact that men have been the ones conducting most of the discussion.  I think it was unfortunate that Stanley Hauerwas introduced it so heavily into this discussion because of all of the reasons above and for the ones I went into yesterday.  I think it distracts from some of the very important questions he brought up about the problems of "rights language" though if he feels the way about abortion he seems to, it is probably to be expected for him to see it as he does.

Those who oppose the legality of abortion and wish to see it made illegal should never be allowed to pretend or forget that even when abortion was nearly universally illegal and almost no LEGAL abortions were performed in the United States there were enormous numbers of illegal abortions performed and many Women were killed or maimed, tortured, traumatized and otherwise harmed in it.  Banning abortion has never meant there would be no abortions, it meant that abortions were performed and many of those were unsafe at the least and deadly at the worst.   

The very same people who opposed abortion being legal in that time and many today are exactly the same people who prevent an effective promotion of the use and availability of contraception which is the only way to prevent most abortions though not all of them.  Even the most unacceptably punitive bans on abortion will not stop all of them or even many of them.

A large number of abortions are medically necessary even when the pregnancy was welcomed or planned.  A number of them are necessary when Children and Women are raped and become pregnant, as we have already seen within weeks of the Roberts Court allowing Republican-fascist run states to ban abortions.  

The weeks since then have already started the horror stories of what happens when doctors and hospitals and others have to wait till a woman's life is in danger enough to keep a prosecutor on the make from using even life-saving abortions as a stepping stone in their career in a Republican-fascist state or district.  The morality of such opportunistic prosecutions of women, some of them having had quite involuntary miscarriages or having been through a hellish medical disaster is far more urgent a topic for discussion than some of the questions asked in the passage above.

The Elevation, Supremacy And Decay Of "Rights" And The Destruction Of The Meaning Of Words And The Defeat Of Truth

Continuing on with Stanely Hauerwas on rights:

Not that long ago one of the fundamental issues that characterized that strange activity called "meta-ethics" was rather right or good was the primary ethical notion on which all other ethical judgements could be justified. That fruitless debate was, of course, an attempt to choose between Mill and Kant on strictly logical grounds. The challenge to that way of understanding ethics was represented by philosophers such as Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, Phillipa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre  and Ray (Gaeteah. sorry, not familiar with that one) who directed attention to words such as "kindness," "honesty," "gentleness" as descriptions at least as important as the big words "right" and "good."

I'm trying to make a similar point about rights.  

Not unrelated to the over-determination of rights language in our current moral vocabulary is my worry that once the language of inalienable rights is introduced there is no way to control their multiplication. Once rights are divorced from the practices they depend upon for their intelligibility they multiply faster than rabbits.

I may well think I have a right to my body but it is not clear how that claim can be commensurate with people who think suicide is wrong. If I have a right to my body does that mean as some seem to think that I have a right to end my life when I so desire?  Not only does the unlimited scope of rights language seem uncontrollable once the cat of inalienable rights is let out of the bag, there is no way it seems to adjudicate mutually exclusive rights claims. The assumption that I have a right to my body is not that different from someone who thinks they have an unlimited right to their money.

The moral life conceived primarily in terms of rights turns out to produce people who end up shouting at one another by claiming their rights have been violated. John Millbank observes for example if rights for women only means women are to receive their respective shares of use in relationship to men and children the notion of women's rights in terms of self-possession can rebound to a further oppression of women. For example, if only women have rights over the fetus, Millbanks suggests, men as men will naturally  exercise their equivalent right to have nothing to do with childbearing or the nurture of children.

Here I disagree with Stanley Hauerwas, or those he makes reference to.  There are some real differences between ownership of one's body and ownership of money, the source and transferability of what is owned is different and the meanings of owning money and ones own body are quite different.

You can own money through earning it by your own labor (the use you put your own body to). The ownership of a boss or investor or slave-owner (I'd usually say slave-holder, but will use the common term in this discussion) of the money or wealth produced by those they hold power over, whether "free" workers of enslaved people by the use to which they put those workers of slaves bodies and not their own is a quite different kind of ownership.  What is morally indisputable when, as Lincoln pointed out, a Black Woman rightly eats the bread that her own labor has produced is far more disputable when a person who enslaves or holds her in wage-slavery exerts ownership over the very same thing, especially when leaving her starving or destitute.  

I will insert that in a very practical and real way, ownership of your money is dependent on ownership of your body but ownership of your body is first and primary whereas ownership of money is incidental to that. Our use of one word for the two kinds of ownership shouldn't lead us to believe that the two things are equivalent.  Lawyers and judges often use that confusion to do what they wanted, in the end.

The transfer of money to the ownership of someone else by the one who produced the wealth behind it is not only possible but it is common. You can own money through a gift from someone whose labor earned the money.  You you can receive it in a free exchange from the one who earned the money by selling them something or doing them a service (choosing to use their own body to do that).

Or someone can own money through theft, including through legalized enslavement or wage-slavery, which are not that much different from ownership of money through illegal methods such as the various forms of theft and cheating.  What is different between the legal and illegal forms of such transfer of money is not much when looked at plainly as a matter of justice or morality where those often are close or  equivalent.  

But if a practice of slavery is legal or wage-slavery or the various forms of coerced or dishonest swindling, cheating, deceiving and taking advantage of are legal, our legal systems and even those who are robbed themselves are led to pretend that there is something moral about it, that their enslaver or oppressor is "within their rights," which is little different from other sorts of conning of people to cheat them.  

Very often under the laws of the United States, under the Constitution, especially as it has been amended by Supreme Court fiat, the rights to the product of your own labor are transferred to those who didn't produce it and under any honest analysis stole it from the ones who did.  And when, especially, the investor class of unillegalized crooks and cheats are told they have to pay taxes on their ill-gotten billions to pay their share of maintaining infrastructure and a decent life which they benefit from more than almost anyone else, the whining and weeping and crying over that violation of their conventionalized, Constitutionalized "rights" is pathetic to hear. At least pathetic to the affluent and the media, to most working people and the destitute of any awareness, it's more than a little annoying.  At least unless they've been gulled into sympathizing with the rich and famous by TV shows like Celebrity Apprentice.

Money changes hands, its "ownership" is not intrinsic to any one owner.  There are certainly other aspects of the ownership of money that could be brought into this discussion that show it is really not much like the "ownership" of one's own body.  There is no limit on how much money someone can "own" there is exactly a limit of one body that the possessor of it can own and no one else can ever really own it in the same way.  There was a Civil War to establish that principle in U.S. law, the founders certainly didn't hold it and neither did the Supreme Court up to and during the Civil War.

That is in no way like the ownership of one person to their own body.  In the case of straight, white men I doubt such issues much come up except in the extreme of a question of suicide no matter how irresponsibly he uses his body, men being the origin of the very issue of abortion that Hauerwas used as an example. Before the overturning of "sodomy" laws, there were such restrictions placed on gay male use of their bodies, though, since the law was largely a product of straight, white, male creation, I doubt there was ever much enforcment of those when it was a straight male doing exactly the same things to women or girls.

I would also disagree with what is said about women's relationship with a fetus which she is carrying in her own body.  I don't think the issue of who owns the fetus is the primary fact of an abortion, it is the fact that a particular fetus is contained, inevitably, within a particular woman's body which body she has the primary interest in, unique to her.  Which is certainly superior to the interest of any other person, even a man who may have fathered the fetus she is carrying.  Even the fetus, if it has rights.  That interest does not transfer to any other person, it can't be transferred or said to be transferable except, perhaps, the right of a parent, guardian or other person who can act in the best interest of an incompetent minor Girl or mentally incompetent adult Woman to act in their best interest, health and even preservation of life.  Though I would more think that that decision falls more in the area of responsibilities than rights.

That said, I would never put it past men as a gender to try to get out of facing their responsibilities in the fathering of a fetus or child that they don't want to take responsibility for, using any excuse they can to do that.  The use of their body in having sex, regardless of the very knowable consequences, despite the consequences for the Woman they might well impregnate unwillingly, give an STD, or cause other harms generates responsibility for the consequences of that use.  But the fact is whatever interest OR RESPONSIBILITY that gives him in the bearing of the child, he can't have the same relationship to a fetus he fathered as the woman who is carrying it in her own body for nine months. Men get out of the responsibility for even children they claimed to have wanted and the law has, at times, let them get off.  The horrors of Victorian institutionalized infanticide, the "baby farming" referenced humorously in Gilbert and Sullivan was horrific and a direct result of all-male adopted Victorian laws that put all of the responsibility for children born out of wedlock on the woman which led to a long period of increased infanticide and a business in baby selling or, often, killing that was known enough to feature in the newspapers and enter into musical comedy.  

After birth, it is quite a different matter and the child has an entirely independent existence that the law can consider apart from the right of either the mother or father and their own bodily ownership but not apart from their use of their bodies in generating the child.  They have a responsibility to the child they made. Any attempt to greatly enforce the responsibilities of fathering a child on the male was relatively recent and, if what I've noticed is accurate, not that effective.

I do agree that viewing the morality of suicide solely in terms of the right of bodily autonomy of the one who is trying to end their life leaves out those who care about them, those who may depend on their support (a father or mother of young children) those whose own safety might be endangered by them killing themselves in their chosen manner, those who will be devastated emotionally for perhaps the rest of their lives.  Suicide is not an act understood exclusively as the self-determination of the person who chooses it.  

And, as I mentioned, the regularizing of assisted, medically administered suicide cannot but have consequences in questions well outside of self-determination, valuations of the worth of lives, the economic or other utility of their death to others, the coercion of that nagging fear of becoming a "burden" on their families, friends or, perhaps most perniciously, "on society."   I have no doubt that when "assisted suicide" or even self-administered suicide becomes normal and regular and is sold as a good the results will not be unrelated to those other 20th century "goods" of "the good birth," eugenics, or "the good death," euthanasia which was quite involuntary in almost every case where the state was involved.  When your conception of "good" jibes so closely with that of eugenicists and the early stages of the Nazi industrialization of murder, someone should at the very least bring those issues up for serious discussion.   

But even given that, I don't know how I feel about the legalization of suicide.  Not everything that is morally ambiguous or even a wrong should be the focus of legal prohibition. There are moral issues that the law is incompetent to address and which either should or cannot be legislated. The civil law is a very cumbersome and inaccurate set of tools with which to find, measure or use morality, the clunky manner in which it deals with "rights" is an active front where that not infrequent  incompetence becomes obvious fairly quickly.  Criminal law, even more so.

There is no interest of the state that is superior to the right of a Woman to decide what happens inside her own skin.  The power of the state should end there. Similarly, I think drinking alcohol is at best morally ambiguous and I think it is a bad enough problem that it probably rises to the status of being immoral - you don't have to be an alcoholic to do yourself or others harm by casual drinking - but the experience of prohibition showed that it was not possible to ban its use without a level of control on other behavior that no one should or will tolerate.*  In that case the actual drinking is not something that can effectively be regulated by law, though I think public drunkenness should never have been decriminalized.  The consequences of being drunk at home are bad enough, being drunk in public only makes that worse.  what someone who is drinking does because they are drinking is very much the business of the state and everyone who can be impacted by it. Bringing the question of money into it, the effects of drinking alcohol on other people is sufficient to regulate that and the behavior of those who sell and distribute the alcohol that has those effects, the use of money and who owns it very much a part of that.

I do agree with him about the problem of the multiplication of things designated as "rights" even when they are not called that.  I have mentioned the right to lie  that the Warren Court gave to the New York Times in the Sullivan decision, the effect of which has been most impactful and totally predictably even in 1964 in the permission to lie about liberals and Democrats in politics.  Building on that "right" the right of the rich to enormously fund and multiply and amplify that "right" to lie through the politically effective mass media in the Buckley v. Valeo case in which money was either turned into a "right" itself by the Court turning money into "speech" (named a "right" by the Bill of Rights)  ignoring that thereby the Court actually gifted the rich with probably the greatest bounty of such instantly created "right" ever bestowed on anyone, that right not available to those without huge fortunes, created it in such abundance it had to be measured by quantity instead of individually.  Put together those "rights" had the power to destroy equality and, with other Court rulings of the kind, democratic government through attacks on elections governed by truth. In later cases, the Roberts Court even extended that right to meddle in U. S. elections to foreign billionaires and even adversarial governments.  What the Supreme Court gave with rights such as those, it destroyed as those were applied politically and the Republican-fascists, first in the Congress, then with those put on the court through the results of that court-permitted atmosphere of anti-Democratic lying,  took what equality  had been won with the blood and lives of Civil Rights workers and others in the hard struggle to rest even the numerated rights listed in the Constitution for those who had not had them.  

Similar things can be said about rights created around guns made as previous Courts as well as the Roberts Court rulings have turned the United States into a shooting gallery and rendered policing impotent to do anything to stop it before dozens, scores and even hundreds are shot and killed.

Clearly, though there are problematic areas in this discussion.  the discussion itself cannot be avoided because in how they are actually adjudicated and created by courts and as they are commonly thought of and discussed by all of us "rights are divorced from the practices they depend upon for their intelligibility," and that severing has left them unintelligible and when that happens anyone can claim they have a right to do the most terrible things as well as those which are, by comparison, innocuous.  

There is no intelligible "right to lie" just as there is no "right to be stupid" or "right to make a fool of yourself," "get smash drunk," be excused from getting suckered by Trump or Alex Jones or anyone else into breaking the law, . . . or any of a myriad of other things I've heard declared to be rights in that multiplication not unrelated to Trump's telepathic rescission of document classification and other loads of bull shit which issues from the Trumpians and the Republican-fascists and the mendacious media that, even when they are officially opposed to Trump, cannot but echo their latest lines of fascist sloganeering.  

When lies are granted the status of rights, all meaning is bound to follow that nonsense into the abyss and democracy cannot possibly last or recover while that situation has the status of law.  

I think one of the biggest problems uncovered in this is that the very notion of "rights" inalienable or not, and their creation by courts and legislatures and, in the United States in the post-WWII period, anyone who wanted to invent one for themselves, dissolves them by making them an abstraction and then into a mere notion then a whim.

If legislatures or courts can create "rights" then they can uncreate them.  If the state of the law, whether legitimately made legislation or through dodgy Supreme Court fiat, determines what is a right and what isn't, then there is nothing durable about "rights".  The right to self-determination about what we do with our own body is no more secure than the rights of Jews to theirs in 1940s Germany.  I have mentioned the legalistic, moral atrocity of Robert Taft lauded by John F. Kennedy in his truly weird book, Profiles in Courage, when he condemned the Nuremberg Trials because what the Nazis did was legal in Nazi Germany. You would have to be a Harvard level trained lawyer to not see the problem with that kind of "courage."  

That's certainly something worth considering when you make the law of the land the arbiter of what is and what isn't a right.  Considering the ability of even elected legislatures and, especially, an out of control Supreme Court to do terrible things in that regard, the sloppy, ill defined notion of "rights" that seems to have gotten steadily worse as "rights talk" has abounded, we really need to come to some better notion of what rights are and where they come from.  And I don't think there is any better than sloppiness and ill definition to be had from secularism.  If that is an intrinsic part of secular governance as we understand it, we had better face the fact of it.  I am virtually certain that it is what happens under materialism, especially from seeing the state of "rights" in countries that have either explicitly or implicitly been governed under the ideology of materialism and scientism and societies without any concept that there is something higher than that.  

Where I completely agree with Hauerwas is that rights can be a shoddy make-shift for things that are far higher, far more durable and far more inclusive.  When "rights" are held to be as far as we can go in determining what is left of moral requirements and behavior, even as a matter of law, things will go to the kind of hell that lawyers and judges and "justices" can administer, give orders to execute, leaving the devastation and injustice thus created to stand as they go home to their affluent lives and the wealthy talking-heads of the media go home to theirs after selling it to a duped, confused public who sense something isn't right about things but who have been deprived of the language to say just what.  I never could begin to understand how Ruth Bader Ginsberg could be Antonin Scalia's best buddy on the Supreme Court, considering his depravity.  Collegiality is one of the most effective solvents for such a faintly written morality as is common at that level of power.  Especially in the Ivy League class.

* Exactly the kind of things that "fugitive pregnant woman" laws in Republican-fascist controlled states and with the blessing of the Roberts Court, putting a bounty on Women who leave abortion prohibitions states to get medical care have become a reality for many Women in 2022. We will, I am sure, see something like what happened in Prohibition reproduced as the post-Roe United States develops and the Roberts-Alito Court reenacts so much of the antebellum court style for us now.

that the only alternative to nihilism that is a real concern when "rights language" is questionable has already become manifest in the very Supreme Court First Amendment "rights" language and its results

THE SPEECH WHAT'S WRONG WITH RIGHTS a Christian perspective, by Stanley Hauerwas has some important questions, demonstrations and conclusions in it and I've decided to risk transcribing it to comment on it.  You should, of course, listen to it yourself because I'm sure Hauerwas is a far better resource than I am for inciting thinking and discussion on some little remarked on but extremely important problems we have with our laws and politics and, more so, our culture and society.  Being a political blogger, I'm most concentrated on the political and legal.  Though I think part of the problem is that the law and political thinking ignores that unless The People start out from an intention of good will, what Hauwerwas will eventually remark on as kindness, what Pope Francis has championed as mercy, no legal or political system will produce good ends.  Any politics, law, legal theorizing, government action that doesn't promote such good will contains the seeds of its own destruction.  Ours not only doesn't promote it, it actively inhibits such promotion.  Our media promotes cynicism, envy and distrust as well as selfishness and consumerism, which, even as its terrible and clearly predictable results come in mount and get even hundreds of thousands of us killed,  is A-OK with our ideological framing because "free speech-press."

Our ideological framing excludes questions of good intentions and seeking such necessary ends in a pose of enlightenment scientific inquiry that pretends to leave those questions open because the structuring of science cannot deal with them by the intentions of of its method and its narrow focus.  But life, politics, the law, never leaves such questions open, they end up answering them, or forcing what in effect is an answer and without the prerequisite good intentions, the results are, on balance, not good. What happens as a consequence serves bad intentions and the ends that those bring.  When a democratic republic ends up in the same places as despotic monarchies, something hasn't worked, as it clearly has not in so many a modern would-be republic.  

In the American context, the character and means of making money among the Founders is an intrinsic element in making that choice for a pose of scientific indifference.  

Given the role the imagination of 1776 has in our make-believe history, whether the mendacious cross-race-dressing pieties of "Hamilton" or the idiot fascists waving Gadsden flags as they try to overturn elections, and the real role that the Constitution has in our official politics and law (the insurrectionary voter suppression of the Roberts Court*) we cannot get away without going into the character defects of those rich, white men and the later rich, white men and women who share in their flaws and, so, rise in power.  Not until we replace the Constitution they wrote and the Bill of Rights with something that does not pretend such basic moral distinctions are not needed, something which takes the lessons of our terrible subsequent history as seriously as the Constitutional blue-print, the 18th century product of their amateur imaginations, many of which ideas changed in their imaginations even long before the framers died.  

Here's where his lecture starts.

I assume I'm here as a representative of that most modern of "atheists," namely those who do not believe in inalienable rights.  I take it to be a mark of our times that a theologian may have worries about whether God exists but we cannot call into question the status of rights.

The language of rights bloomed after World War Two in what seemed to be an absence of any unifying ideologies or religious belief systems necessary to bind individuals together. Rights are, therefore, regarded as a source of ethical and political values that was and is capable of binding people together short of violence.

The language of rights became and remains the language of high humanism many think necessary to maintain peace in a fragmented world.

Therefore, to be a critic of rights is close to  putting oneself on the side of terrorism. For example, some suggest the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel and Inhuman, Degrading Treatment,  a Convention of 1987, is a crucial example of the importance of the development of rights language.  

It seems if we did not have the language of rights we might, it seems, lack the moral presumptions for a condemnation of torture. Governmental and non-governmental agencies make frequent appeals to this Convention in support of political prisoners and their families around the globe. Accordingly rights as ideals and principles form the basis for liberal democracy that have assumed a value and authority without precedence in the history of the world.

It's hard to imagine why anyone, particularly someone like myself committed to non-violence would have any hesitation as to appeals to rights.  Yet I do have reservations which interesting enough involves how one thinks about torture. I will develop my worries as a broadside but let me put it succinctly this way.  

If you need a theory of rights to know that torture is wrong, or if you think you need rights to ground your judgements that torture  is morally wrong, then something has clearly gone wrong with your moral sensibilities. What follows is my attempt to defend that remark by giving you a list of what I regard as some of the disabilities associated with rights language.

Far from Stanley Hauerwas demoting the consequences that are whatever is virtuous about "rights talk" by noting the inadequacies of "rights,"  he is worried that thinking of things solely in such terms demotes the consideration of them and damages the outcomes from that thinking.  I have come to conclude, the dangerous inspecificity of "rights language" as to the moral consequences or immoral uses of it leaves even the cleverest people incapable of discerning the difference, or, rather, thinking or talking about the consequences of that.  

Perhaps even more so, the social and educational coercion to not admit to those problems or the inevitable moral nature of them or that we must find legal solutions to them or all that is good is lost, is an even more potent consequence of this situation. 

And their disassociation of rights from perusal of the moral consequences of such denatured "rights" which have and can support immoral consequences, the criticism of Hauerwas which I am supporting sees "rights" as an inadequate substitute for the kinds of better "moral sensibilities" that he mentions above.  

My criticism of "rights" in American democracy yesterday, of the rights enumerated in the Constitution, especially those foolishly granted to human created entities "the press" "religion." states and offices, those which can be used and are for the worst as well as the best of purposes "speech," and one even more ambiguous as even an heavily mitigated good "bear arms," is based in the actual history of such "rights" as performed under law.  That history proves that such talk is essential, not only to the humanist imagined liberal democracy mentioned above but to the Roberts-Alito court, the Republican-fascist, corporate media driven retreat into white supremacist American apartheid, 1950s era subjugation of Women, the Supreme Court taking away in LGBTQ+ rights which the Supreme Court  so recently "gave", etc.  

"Rights" in 2022 is as much the language of Trump, Trump's rent-a-lawyers, Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Republican-fascists, other lawyers and on TV liars of corporations and Neo-fascist-libertarian* billionaires and the ACLU that can be counted on to support their "rights" to lie themselves into power.   With their financial backing and head start in the culture of our indigenous criminal class, white supremacists, on the side of the current, perhaps permanent Supreme Court majority, there is no doubt where, in most cases, such "justice" will come down. 

The scientistic adoption of the merely secretarial practice of science shunting aside questions of morality, that artificial exclusion to do science adopted by government and the law is to guarantee that the courts will adopt that pose and to come out with exactly the legal conclusion as matters of "rights" that you would expect from any corrupt court anywhere under any form of government.  As Walter Brueggemann noted, Scalia never found an "original intent" that didn't agree with him.   

Obviously equal justice is not an essential and unavoidable logical consummation of "rights language."  That shouldn't surprise us as such phrases as "the divine right of kings" was the kind of language that the United States was formed to oppose. Even though nothing is clearer than that the aristocrats who formed the Constitution intended to exercise such rights over slaves and others.   What we may have missed in the adoption of the framings of rights as opposed to specific and necessary guarantees of moral life in the right kind of moral sensibilities was that rights divorced from those are as useful to those wanting to achieve other sensibilities that are quite immoral.

He certainly raises some thorny and not typically raised questions that I think are worth thinking about as the Supreme Court "rights" us into despotism and grotesque inequality.  But the problems he points out are far deeper than that.

I can illustrate what I mean by suggesting that rights language has become too powerful by calling attention to a remark by someone who I believe was in the Department of Justice during the Civil Rights campaign in Mississippi. Several Civil Rights Workers had been killed, the spokesman for the Department of Justice was appropriately outraged. In order to express his outrage he resorted to the moral vocabulary in which he most felt at home.  He said those who had been killed had had their rights violated.  When "rights" become a more basic moral description than murder you have an indication that your language has gone on a holiday.

Of course, one cannot help but have sympathy for the Department of Justice representative.  He was using the most significant language he knew to indicate what a horrible moral crime had been committed.  Yet the very appeal to the violation of rights as fundamental moral description may indicate a profound worry about such a morality.  For if confidence in the language of rights is lost it is not clear what the alternative to nihilism will be. I worry, therefore, that for many reasons some are trying to make the language of rights do more work than it is capable of doing.

This is an intensification of a point I've made in the past that the use of "rights" growing out of the Bill of Rights but not only due to that to support truly terrible things, now including a Supreme Court blessed "right to lie" which cannot but be destructive of a right for People to know the truth, one of the absolute prerequisites for having a real egalitarian or even a merely working electoral democracy.  Of course it's not called a "right to lie" but that is exactly what it is.  When Alex Jones had a leg to stand on citing "rights" as defined in the Constitution in court for what he broadcast to his large audience about the parents of the children murdered in a mass shooting, ATTACKING THE VICTIMS, OF THAT CRIME,  while there is some ground for appeal of the judgement against him within our Constitutional system as the judiciary has commanded it is, the worry of Hauerwas that the only alternative to nihilism that is a real concern when "rights language" is questionable has already become manifest in the very Supreme Court First Amendment "rights" language and its results.  

And what can be said about a Supreme Court, lower court created "right" to lie that swamps truth, as we found out in the experience of Trump and should have already known from the Gingrich era in the House and Republican-fascism in the Senate, can be repeated over and over again, not as a result of a loss of confidence in "rights" language but the language of rights being over-worked well past the point where it failed and broke long ago.  Yet the shoddy impoverished thinking of enlightenment secularism, stuck in the pose that the secular descriptions and categories and definitions are all you are allowed to make recourse to leaves the would-be explainer and definer without any language to even admit there is a problem.  There's a "level playing field" the "justices" only "call balls and strikes" the rules are in place, they're the only ones allowed no matter what the results are.  The Supreme Court rigged depravity we are experiencing proves that their adoption of "rights language" is as useful to those intent on committing murder as it is to those shocked by it, their recent gun ruling is an obvious example of that, as is their gutting of the Clean Air Act.  

The opinions of those like Scalia and O'Connor that say it's permissible for the state to execute innocent people on the basis of a failure to file papers on time should certainly have been called what they were.  Rights cannot even overcome the calendar of lower courts to save possibly innocent People from being executed, yet we depend on them even with the Court we have.  The Democrats in the House and Senate who believe that a legal codification of Roe would stand up against the Roberts Court, that People should depend on the Bill of Rights and the Constitution - in short, the courts - to protect them when it has not yet done so, are like a more intense example of how dangerously far we've gotten in depending on "rights language" against all evidence that it is not adequate in even many of the most exigent circumstances.
 
The old guard at the ACLU, largely white and from a background of affluence, is having to deal with younger lawyers, many of them lawyers of color whose personal experience will not permit them to do what the old guard did so well, ignore the consequences of their advocacy on behalf of morally corrupt People, groups and corporations, including our indigenous fascists, the white supremacists and Neo-Nazis.  I would add the tobacco, liquor, addictive and harmful pharmaceutical and gun companies to that list because they are all in the same business.  

I would not be surprised if the religious identity of the two groups of lawyers might possibly have some interesting information in it, though I don't have that information to see if that's true.  But even without that I agree with Hauerwas that secularism is part of the problem, I think I may go farther than he does in saying I think that secularism is one of the diseases at the heart of the problem which prevents any real change which will save us.  Secularism is incapable of resisting evil in even some of the most obvious and basic of moral distinctions.  The failure of rights language in the United States starts with those inadequacies of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, many of them placed there by slave-holders, financiers and genocidal land barons, many of those inserted problems exacerbated by the same on the Supreme Court from at least the time of John Marshall, certainly from the time of Roger Taney and today with the era of William Rehnquist and John Roberts and his stacked Republican-fascist majority.  

* Under the inadequacies of our thinking, our language, our legal system and our Constitution, the Roberts Court and Republican-fascist state legislatures will do more to destroy electoral democracy than those idiots who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, and the inadequacies of all of that list just given will facilitate them doing it under the Constitution.  When the Constitution didn't protect the voting rights OR LIVES of freed Black People as the Constitutionally, Electoral College installed Rutherford Hayes ended Reconstruction, that was certainly the decisive proof that the Constitution doesn't produce the good things it promised. Not even with a decisive win for the Union in the terrible Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.  The Roberts Court and Republican-fascists are reenacting the erection of the Jim Crow era under the Constitution.  American apartheid.  The Constitution cannot stand as it is forever, it will have to be replaced with something that does intend to produce equal justice because it hasn't and doesn't, even as amended. The Court and the Constitutional structure of governance will hand victory to the insurrectionists by more genteel means.

Update:  It is remarkable how, given the pose of scientific moral indifference that is part of the basic framing of U. S. Law, how the Courts have so institutionalized a legal indifference to even the most clearly valid and experienced findings of legitimate science such as in its recent billionaire enriching climate denying rulings.  Clearly rights language isn't the only problem with our out-of-control Supreme Court under the Constitution.

The Missing Of The People As They Live In The Dark Forest of "Rights" Talk - Hate Mail

 

WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT harder than we are encouraged to, the talk about "rights" that pervades our political, legal and social discussion is extremely bizarre and disconnected from the reality that we live in.  The present day reality of inequality in which People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, those with disabilities and chronic illness, those who live in families of long-term poverty, etc. live and always have lived should make that talk about things such as "equal justice under law" sound surreal but it doesn't because we consider that as an abstraction and not in terms of reality.  

In terms of Constitutional babble, both learned and the pervasive common nonsense about it, we talk as if the huge fact of the Constitutional order was that "the founding fathers" "gave" "us rights" and that all we need to do is to follow their ideas when the overwhelming fact of "rights" in terms of those mere mortals was that they had no intention of there being equal rights, certainly not for those they were murdering to steal their land, certainly not for Black People they were holding in slavery of a form forbidden by even the slavery provisions in the Mosaic Law,*  not for Women who, we are finding out right now, are no closer to equal rights in their daily reality unless they are quite independently rich, a condition which, in itself, defines inequality and nothing like equality even under the laws of the state.  As I pointed out in the post objected to, they certainly never denominated the most obvious of necessities of maintaining even the meanest of lives as "rights" concentrating on those of most interest to those who were not at a loss for food or clothing or housing because they already had more than sufficient for themselves and those they cared about.  And that is the state of the Constitution in what likes to think of itself as the premier example of "liberal democracy."  

Clearly our history AND OUR PRESENT in a period after the most promiscuous talk and insistence on and struggle for and reactionary push-back against equal "rights" proves that there are deeply problematic issues with the entire framing and notion of them.

It is exactly Stanley Hauerwas's skepticism about all of this "rights" language that has led me to read and consider more of what he said and to listen to his lectures.  And his skepticism is not only about the mandated secular framing of "rights" but even that which Jefferson gave in the Declaration of Independence, inherent rights endowed on us by our "Creator," something which Marilynne Robinson astutely asked what a secular framing of that idea would sound like.  I will point out that that brief mention of God, in denatured "enlightenment" terms,  in that document, some of the most morally potent language in our founding documents was certainly negated in the one that mattered in action and fact, the Constitution.  

I am certain that those slave-holders and Indian murdering, land accumulating financiers and wage-slave-holders. those most minutely and astutely considerers of the implications and consequences of what they were setting down on paper wanted to, by ensuring secularism as a requirement in it, remove any such notions of divinely mandated equal rights which, in fact, those subject to subjugation would notice and use to argue for their equality.  That struggle was already present and, in some of the States, pervasive at the time of the writing of the Constitution, it was certainly known to many of those who met in the Constitutional Convention, including those who held slaves. In every colonial and early American articulation of emancipation of slaves I'm aware of, that was made in explicitly religious terms.   While agreeing that equality in a pluralistic population required the government to be "secular" in its administration, its consequences when that is read as it also requiring it to be amoral in its goals is quite another matter.

Far from it being a grantee of equality, I think the effect, intended or not, has been for the secular framing and administration of our "supreme law" the Constitution, something that has impeded equal justice, not helped it in almost all cases.  I have repeatedly pointed out to atheists and those who insist that all of our political life be conducted under strict "separation of church and state" that when those held in slavery began to struggle against slavery, it wasn't the secular language of the Constitution they began their arguments with, if it was the founding documents appealed to it was exactly that statement about what God had given them in the Declaration BUT THAT THEY WERE MOST LIKELY TO APPEAL TO THE DOCUMENTS OF RELIGION claimed by those slave-holders and the large majority of other Americans, the Book of Exodus, most of all.  When The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. made his argument that there was an unpaid promissory note due in the Civil Rights struggle, he went to Jefferson's claim about rights endowed by God, not to the Bill of Rights, but he really turned to the Prophets of Scripture.

When I first read Hauerwas on the topic I was a bit shocked about it until I really listened hard to what he was saying.  That shock was due to the fact that the entire secular framing in which I had been educated to think about such things presented that conception of "rights" as complete and adequate in itself when that history AND PRESENT I had not only thought about but witnessed and experienced should have prepared me for the reality that that conception has failed, continually and, when the greatest steps were taken to correct that, quickly and successfully driven back by those who benefit from inequality and the denial of rights and, even more so, equal justice.**  

Most noticeably it has failed in the conservative - which can safely be read, as "racist" - reaction against equal rights being mandated and made real, by the Supreme Court destroying the Voting Rights Act, attacking the Civil Rights Act, the failure of the country to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment, etc. But the fact is that even under the law there has been a continual, pervasive and abject failure of the Constitution, perhaps especially the Bill of Rights to produce anything like equality. In fact, as can be seen by Supreme Court rulings from almost the beginning, that Constitution has proven more useful for the denial of rights, the denial of equality and the promotion of privilege for exactly those who resemble the framers of it in terms of race, gender, class, moral disposition, etc. than Black People, People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, the vicissitudes of being born into and raised in the economic underclass, etc.  Far from the pious civics class myths, under the Constitutional regime of "rights" the progress has not been a steady march towards equality and equal justice, nothing like that. And we are in a period of dangerous and serious reversal of any rights so gained under the very Constitution such ill-placed faith was put in.

Hauerwases thinking about "rights" is not simple or easily completely or accurately given.  There is something subtle and elusive about it, even more so to one educated into our most common and failed notions of secular rights under liberal democracy. I worry that that elusive quality will have to be made clearer before it can have any real impact.  And I suspect it should have much more of an impact because it is important.

The fact is that his conception of it isn't a demotion of what is due us and, even more so, imposed on us as a moral obligation, it is an elevation of the entire matter to a higher level.  I'm still in a relatively early stage of understanding what he thinks on the matter.  I may try to transcribe a lecture and Q&A on the topic I've downloaded and give my thoughts on that.  He does ask some extremely important questions about rights in terms of torture and sexual enslavement as not merely an assertion of "rights" which more than imply a requirement on those wronged to pursue justice for them, themselves, but which as a human possession are certainly not complete even as an endowment by God.  He says that when you discuss the wrongness of torture or a young girl being forced into prostitution merely in terms of right, you are demoting the issues instead of raising them to a level where the wrong is identified and measured in terms of the need to make them right.  He is far ahead of where I've been in trying to anticipate problems with even the most seemingly idealistic of abstract ideas of rights.

His argument as to the wrongness of slavery in a Christian framing is superior to that of secular talk, he puts it in terms of the body of those enslaved belonging to God not to any person, including the ones enslaved.  Which, if taken seriously by Christians, would have always precluded them from enslaving others and in those not enslaved to treat their own bodies and lives with less than great care.  I am a little troubled when he puts it in terms of baptism giving that status but suspect that would have to include a Christian obligation to ensure the opportunity of baptism that would grant that status, a Christian obligation to encourage in the strongest ways, such a baptism.  I still would insist that our embodiment by birth would instill that status on us.  But I suspect that he, also, sees something beyond the specifically Christian framing he gave in that argument against Christians participation in slavery.

One thing he talks about is what such an understanding of our bodies as being God's and not our own would call into question a right to commit suicide which I think is very important to think about.  I have mentioned Barney Frank once flummoxing the rather dishonest and stupid Henry Hyde on the question of a right to commit suicide.  Hyde used the anti-abortion language of "a right to life" which Frank effectively countered as to who possessed that right, that "rights" don't float around disembodied but that they had to be held by a person whose right was specific to them.  I remember often being impressed by that agile use of logic even as I wasn't certain I exactly bought it, having known suicides and the devastating consequences of them killing themselves.  I wasn't sure it was that simple.  I am not certain that the thought-out position on "assisted suicide" that is sweeping many a liberal-democratic polity will prove to not produce some pretty bad results, coming as it is bound to with issues of economic inequality, economic utility and the other issues that surround some of our other most terrible moral failures, slavery, wage-slavery, Women's subjugation, sexual bondage and enslavement, inequality in medical care and education, etc.  

My skepticism of secular thinking seems to be centering on there always and necessarily being something missing at the center of it, something which, without, the greatest intellectual strivings for equality and democracy and the common-holding of a decent life will always fall short.  I don't think it's possible to get closer to that if you insist on keeping God out of the picture. It certainly has worked that way in American history, as evidenced by the actual history of abolition, the civil rights movement, etc.  Eventually you have to believe what your eyes see, the testimony of others and what your experience of life has shown you.   Any of the supposed Christian persons or churches who participated in or colluded with that had to ignore the teachings of Jesus and Paul, the Law of Moses in order to do that.

The framing of the struggle for equality and a decent life under a secular regime of rights has had its run and the results aren't equality.  The intention to produce decency of life reached its high point about the time that Nixon began the turn back against the progress that had been achieved, even Nixon felt its pull when he proposed that still radical notion of a guaranteed income.  The Constitutional order under the "Bill of Rights" has been one of the most potent tools of those who attacked that progress as the decisions doing that by the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have proven, as have those which either found them inadequate to enforce equal treatment under law to, for example, Japanese citizens during WWII or in turning back demands of equality under Plessey while pretending segregationists were going to provide equality.  It is clear that that secularist legal framing has some basic and intrinsic problems with it, it certainly has never produced what it claimed to during any of its existence as the supreme law of the land.  

I'm less skeptical about some more modern Constitutions but am certain those will prove to have some basic problems, as well, some of which will turn out to be as dangerous as those contained in the U. S. Constitution.  There are court rulings under the modern Canadian framing that have produced some pretty bad results.  But I don't think the ultimate means of achieving equality and justice and a decent life rests on such documents but in the hearts and minds of a sufficient majority of People, sufficient to overcome the heritage of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and Court rulings.  

Our "rights" talk in which Neo-Nazis, Neo-fascists, Republican-fascists, etc. can adopt and use the very same language that they openly intend to never put into effect if they gain power to achieve their ends and which has been used by the ACLU to enable Neo-Nazis, etc.,  the corrupting, fascism promoting mass media, the gun industry, various other industries in their promotion of devastating addictions and other harms, etc. facilitated by judges who have no real or professional interest in justice, indeed, some of them fearing higher courts would overturn such good intentions, all of that shows that at the very least we really need to rethink hard what all of that is and has been about.  And secularism lacks the means to really do that.  Secularism is incapable of even identifying the superiority of equality and equal justice, in the end. In its most developed forms, it can't even support the reality of freedom of thought or choice.  When pushed to its logical conclusion, its most common basis in materialist determinism requires it to debunk any notions of moral truth and even the possibility of freedom. 

None of this is easy, in the lecture to linked above, Hauerwas notes, "If confidence in the language of rights it lost it is not clear what the alternative to nihilism will be."  I don't think you can find that alternative in secularism, but you can in Abrahamic religion and in many other religious traditions that insist on our equality under God.

* Certainly those are some of the Scriptural laws that existed due to the "hardness of heart" that is pervasive in the human population, with some provisions that would make that Mosaic enslavement far less absolute than that experienced by the Children of Israel described in the book of Exodus and which was practiced by the Greeks, Romans and other nations in their later experience.  Though I am sure that like all such law, its better intentions were often violated by those who professed them. The mention of slavery by Paul was, I'm sure, something similar, dealing with early Christians who came from and lived in a milieu of Greco-Roman style slavery with no escape to an equivalent to Canada or even, before Dred Scott, free territory possible.  It was Paul's attempt to deal with hardness of heart, habits and social conventions they lived in, so he gave a commandment that slave-owners were to treat those they held in slavery as brothers.  Which, if followed, would probably be better for those enslaved than the kind of rare willed manumissions issued by Madison, Jefferson, Washington, etc.  If the slave-holding "Christians" had taken Moses and Jesus and Paul seriously there would have been no fugitive slave law and other such Constitutionally permitted and Supreme Court encouraged laws under our secular order, there would have been ample provision made to those who were freed from bondage in exactly the way the Constitutional order of the United States never mandated and our government representative of the male-white majority didn't enact.  Slaves treated as equals and brothers and sisters are not slaves in any sense of it, whether chattel slaves nor wage slaves.  About the earliest abolitionist was St. Macrina the Younger who talked her mother into treating those enslaved by their family as family members and they more or less lived as members of a household, she took the teachings of Jesus seriously, about the least among you and those who were first being last, etc. Near the end of her life those who had been servants in her house tried to talk her into sleeping in a bed but she insisted on lying on the floor as she always had.  I think that kind of thing accounts for why her brilliant brother St. Gregory of Nyssa, the source of most of our knowledge about her, respected her as his teacher and, I gather from how he wrote about her, moral superior.  Given their time and place in history, their thinking is rather breathtaking in its egalitarian justice.

** I think the problems of the secular, Constitutional type of framing makes even the concept of equality problematic.  When a rich, racist, elitist hack such as John Roberts can use the language of "equality" to claim that the role of a Supreme Court "justice" like him is to apply the law equally, "calling balls and strikes" while maintaining and enforcing and reinstalling the monumental inequality in life that he and his Supreme Court, the Supreme Courts of the past have, that word has some problems to it.  

And under even the more seemingly benign style of U.S. Constitutional advocacy, the results of "equal justice under law," are hardly ideal.  When the ACLU style civil liberties law hacks can disclaim an interest in the results of their litigation that they are merely insisting on "an equal playing field" on which those with wealth, power, racism, amorality, etc. on their side will always kill the other team, the abstract concept of "equality" of "equal justice under law" such as our Constitutional system conceives things will always produce grotesque inequality in life.  I have long thought there would be an interesting tale to tell if the financing of such "civil liberties lawyering" was fully revealed as I have found the financial history of some of the great figures on the Supreme Court to be a revelation in understanding their allegedly disinterested rulings.

Abstracting such virtues out of any real context of life and morality is a guarantee that they will be perverted into the kind of virtue that "equality under the law" is in the United States under the secular framing of the Constitution.  It really doesn't seem to believe People really matter despite the frequently higher aspirations of many of the People who are led to put their faith in it.  Secularism guarantees that there will never be an adequate moral end to produce such results.  You need something more to do that, something strong enough to force you toward it.