Law, Religion, and Ethics

Catholic Schools and Broken Windows

Mary McConnell — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 18:30:44 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to read a draft article by Notre Dame Law professors Margaret Brinig and Nicole Garnett (I am citing this article with their permission). The article, “Catholic Schools and Broken Windows,” examines the impact of Catholic school closures on inner city Chicago neighborhoods. The “broken windows” refers to the now famous theory, first posited by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, that small, seemingly insignificant signs of disorder, such as broken windows, litter, and graffiti, engender much more significant consequences, because such disorder “signals to would-be offenders that residents of a community cannot, or choose not, to control socially deviant behaviors, including serious crime.”
The authors present extensive evidence that neighborhoods that lose their Catholic schools descend into greater disorder and eventually experience increased crime. Obviously there are issues of correlation versus causation, which the authors acknowledge and attempt to address. And frankly, I lack the statistical sophistication to evaluate their analysis properly, though it seems persuasive to me. What got me thinking, however, was a different link between the broken windows hypothesis and Catholic schools.
It strikes me that Catholic school principals and teachers in fact embraced a version of the broken windows hypothesis long before this catchy phrase surfaced in academic discourse. More specifically, Catholic schools’ relentless insistence that students wear uniforms, walk in orderly lines, observe decorum in the hallway and generally obey a myriad of sometimes petty rules reflected a profound conviction that faithfulness in these small things would encourage learning. The link between enforced order and educational excellence may have been obvious to the nuns, but as the twentieth century progressed it flew in the face of an educational establishment that embraced creativity and individuality and eyed rules with increasing skepticism.
Since reams of evidence demonstrate – and even newly-converted educational choice opponent Diane Ravitch acknowledges – that Catholic schools produce superior educational results, especially for the most disadvantaged students, I am not going to defend the Catholic model now. But I would like to suggest that the broken windows theory, if it is correct, still plays out just a little differently within schools than it does within communities.
To quote the article, “communities that fail to curb physical and social disorder . . . become vulnerable to serious crime for at least two related reasons. First, unchecked disorder frightens law-abiding citizens, causing them to avoid public places and eventually . . . to move away. . . Second, disorder sends signals to would-be offenders that communities plagued by disorder are “safe” places to commit crimes: The community’s failure to check disorder suggests that residents cannot – or choose not to – control socially detrimental behaviors and conditions.”
This all seems quite plausible to me – but I don’t think this is quite how it works with children and young adults. Yes, many are frightened (if also titillated) by disorder, but in reality relatively few students want to be empowered to enforce the social norms that combat disorder. How many kids will ask the class clown to stop entertaining them with his or her antics so the rest of them can learn? How many teenagers will applaud the administration’s wisdom in encouraging them to trade in their low-slung, skin-tight jeans for ill-fitting khaki pants? My own experience as a Catholic middle and high school teacher suggests that one of the great virtues of Catholic schools is that students can engage in harmless bouts of anarchy, confident that someone else will enforce order. Broken windows theorists encourage a partnership between the police and the community, where they share responsibility for enforcing order. In Catholic schools, students know and accept that the grownups are in charge.
This may seem to be a hair-splitting distinction, but I think it has two important implications for the future of Catholic schools. First, for the traditional fix or prevent broken windows solution to succeed within schools, the grownups have to be perceived as legitimate enforcers. In other words, students may indulge themselves grousing about the school authorities, but they and their parents fundamentally accept that teachers and administrators have a right to impose their particular, perhaps rather persnickety, vision of order. Second, the grownups have to perceive themselves as legitimate enforcers. As any classroom teacher will tell you, students probe mercilessly for uncertainty and weakness – one reason why the first year of teaching is almost always an ordeal for all concerned. (Of course community police face many of the same challenges . . . but they carry guns and wield the punitive power of the state.)
Catholic schools now face a challenge on both grounds. Much of their teachers’ perceived legitimacy came from their religious authority, undergirded by a theology and church structure that accepted and even extolled hierarchy. Clergy sex scandals and the virtual disappearance of teaching nuns and brothers have undermined the religious basis of this authority, while the whole notion of hierarchy is increasingly under attack even within the church. Moreover, Catholic school educators – like all educators – are inundated with admonitions to transform themselves from classroom dictators into facilitators and coaches. Some of this neo-Rousseauian advice makes sense: Students do learn better when they are engaged in class discussion and believe their voices are genuinely heard. But by sending the signal to grownups that they shouldn’t always try to be in charge, the prevailing educational ethos still potentially undermines order in the schools.
It gets worse. Just as Catholic schools have been most disproportionately successful with disadvantaged children, these threats to the legitimacy of adult control of schools are likely to be disproportionately harmful in neighborhoods where children already live in a high degree of disorder and many of the adults in their lives have abdicated responsibility. Again, I was struck how in my Catholic school some of the students who benefited most from the enforced discipline were those who were living in very difficult family environments. Our assistant regularly held their feet to the fire. For some students, at least, this was a welcome sign that someone cared.
The Catholic Church, to its credit, is struggling to maintain this ministry to poor neighborhoods and endangered children. One strategy, which is being pursued in several cities including New York City, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis and Miami, is to transform Catholic schools into charter schools. The hope is that these schools can somehow retain the commitment to values, order and educational opportunity even as they relinquish the teaching, and trappings, of religion.
Maybe this strategy will work. I hope it will work, even though I would prefer to see school districts provide vouchers to preserve genuinely Catholic schools. My worry is that these ex-Catholic charter schools will succeed for awhile, as the existing staff preserves the Catholic school culture, and then gradually deteriorate. Will administrators and teachers be able to preserve their belief in hierarchy and authority without its religious underpinnings? Will they be able to resist educational establishment’s relentlessly anti-authoritarian message?
I’m afraid we’ll start to hear breaking glass.

Eco-terrorists, Anti-Abortion Terrorists, and the Media

Robert Cochran — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:49:54 +0000

The news today is full of stories of James Lee’s take-over of the Discovery Channel headquarters. The stories including earlier pictures of him carrying signs that say: “Discover Channel: Save the Planet.” My question is, why isn’t the news media calling in Al Gore and other leaders of the environmental movement, demanding that they condemn this attack and chastening them for their “intemperate” and “inflammatory” language? That is certainly what the media would do with pro-life leaders if this was an abortion clinic bombing. The media’s coverage shows who they like and who they don’t like. They are selective in who they want to silence. In my view, advocates should not be responsible for the actions of the kooks in their midst.

N.T. Wright on Slippery Slopes

davidopderbeck — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:52:50 +0000

This brief snip of a video interview with Biblical scholar and theologian N.T. Wright is geared towards evangelical Christians, but I thought it was worth sharing here. Wright is not addressing American Catholics, or other American religious people, in this clip. But it’s interesting (and frustrating) to me that evangelicals in the U.S. tend toward “right-leaning” political positions borrowed from Catholic Social Teaching but at the same time usually ignore CST when it comes to economics and the poor.

Calling politicians out—dilemma, duty, or disaster?

mariefailinger — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:53:12 +0000

My governor, Tim Pawlenty, is at it again. Years ago, after September 11, he used immigration as a “wedge issue,” linking it to terrorism to scare and upset the voters of Minnesota. Now, he has not only waded into the question of revising the 14th amendment on birthright citizenship, saying, “ I think we’re the only, or one of the few, developed nations in the world that allows somebody to come here illegally, give birth to a child, and then have the child be a legal citizen of our country. The procedure around amending the Constitution is very difficult, but I would be in favor of a rule that says you have to be here legally in order for your son or daughter to be deemed legal here if they’re born here.” He has also inserted himself, with no vested involvement, into the New York mosque controversy, noting, “[Ground Zero] it’s hallowed ground, it’s sacred ground, and we should respect that. We shouldn’t have images or activities that degrade or disrespect that in any way.”
Gov. Pawlenty is a professed Christian, and so am I. I recognize that we have divergent views on lots of matters, economic and not. But it is abundantly clear to me that some of the positions he stakes out, such as these, are not matters of personal conviction but selected with the sole (or at least primary) purpose of getting himself elected to higher office, and the divisive effect on our common community be damned.
My problem is to think about what I owe Gov. Pawlenty and my country, as a Christian. The child of a mixed marriage—my father’s family were Republicans, my mother’s Democrats—I believe and try to put into practice the Golden Rule, or as Atticus Finch would say, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” And, I live in a culture in which prophetic engagement with others is considered rude, bigoted, or even kooky. Even if I completely disagree with their assumptions and sometimes even question their motives myself, do I really want to get in league with those who label our religious leaders who suggest that God might have some message for us in connection with current events—even September 11, Hurricane Katrina, or global warming—as mentally unbalanced or socially reprobate?
My “better” instinct is to debate these issues like immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment on the merits with those who are willing, citing Leviticus on our duty to care for the stranger as for the citizen. And yet, if Tim Pawlenty is using human suffering as a means to gain political power, isn’t it my duty, like Nathan, to remind him of his sin, Christian to Christian? And to remind him—and if he cannot be convinced of it—to remind our polity of the consequences of failing to invite in the stranger, as Matthew 25 warns us? I don’t know why I should be exempt from the responsibility of prophetic criticism, at least if offered with the humble representation that I speak from uncertainty, when I find myself compelled by the evidence of the horrible fruit of such political demagoguery.
And yet, on the other hand, we know only too well how quickly “Bible bullets” and any sort of criticism that relies on religious argument can turn into self-justification of the speaker’s views or be twisted into a claim that my voice is God’s when I may be completely wrong. Are the consequences of the attempt to speak critically to a politician from a position of faith worse than the behavior that gives rise to this dilemma? I don’t know the answer to that.
Finally, there is the question of efficacy. I don’t think Tim Pawlenty would bother to listen to me, even if I camped at the governor’s residence (when he’s there for weeks on end. I am not sure his heart can be turned, even by Matthew (which he surely knows.) I don’t think my local newspaper would print a critical letter that relied on a prophetic religious argument. Perhaps the dangers of critical engagement are not worth it when compared with the likely impact of such criticism. Even if he is making me crazy. . . . .

Brandeis and Fasting

Robert Cochran — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:26:12 +0000

A project has sent me to reading all things Brandeis. I ran across an interesting statement by Brandeis that may capture an important aspect of the religious practice of fasting. This may seem strange to those who know much about Brandeis. Brandeis lived a very modest lifestyle, but I know of no instance of his fasting. Brandeis was morally Jewish (very Jewish), but not religiously so. However, in a letter to his future wife Alice, written a few months after they met, he expresses in a human-to-human relationship some of what fasting does for the human-to-divine relationship. He says:

If only you were near me. It was a pleasure today to feel you in refraining to smoke that after-dinner cigarette, because you do not like it. That made you almost physically present.

Sept. 7, 1890, LDB to Alice Goldmark (Urofsky and Levy’s The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis).

Thanks to Dallas Willard’s Spirit of the Disciplines, I fast for at least part of the day on Sundays. The practice makes me feel a stronger presence of God (though I think, in general, he likes food).

Great Speech, Best Defense of the Mosque Near Ground Zero

russellpearce — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 05:06:21 +0000

Mayor Bloomberg’s speech tonight may go down in history as one of the great American speeches that people are reading a hundred years from now. Time’s Mark Halpern describes it as “best defense, speech of a lifetime.”

Polyamory: A New Protected Sexual Orientation?

Robert Cochran — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:39:54 +0000

It has long been my sense that most men’s sexual orientation is attraction to numerous female partners. Most, at least after marriage, do a pretty good job of controlling that inclination. Even those who cannot control themselves generally profess to believe in the moral and social responsibility to remain monogamous. This may be changing. A new category (or maybe an old category with a new name), polyamory, may be emerging and has made its way into the law school literature.

I first heard of this category several months ago when a friend’s husband announced that he was “polyamorous.” He claimed that he was attracted to and had the capacity to love numerous women. His job consistently took him to various cities throughout the world and he had (or hoped to have) regular relationships in each of them. My friend was unwilling to go along and they are now divorced. My friend and the children are experiencing the host of emotional and financial challenges that women and children generally bear upon divorce. That story is all too common. The unusual aspect of the story (for me) was that the husband defended his actions based on his claim to be polyamorous.

A recently posted SSRN article argues that “anti-discrimination protections for polyamorists are warranted.” See “Polyamory as a Sexual Orientation” by Ann E. Tweedy.

It argues that “the current definition of ‘sexual orientation’ is very narrow, being limited to orientations based on the sex of those to whom one is attracted” and that (quoting numerous behavioral scientists) “sexual orientation” should be expanded to include any “settled ‘sense of direction or relationship…’ or ‘choice or adjustment of associations, connections, or dispositions…’ that relates to ‘libidinal gratification.’”

After discussing a variety of sexual orientations that could be given legal protection, the article argues:

Given the potential difficulty of arriving at an overarching principle by which to distinguish genuinely harmful sexual preferences from those that are disfavored because of prejudice, it may be more feasible to expand the definition of ‘sexual orientation’ in a piecemeal way to include at least some of these preferences within the realm of antidiscrimination statutes. Some of the more promising possibilities include preferences for partners of other races, preferences for transgender partners, preferences for polyamorous relationships, and preferences for sadomasochistic (S/M) relationships, to name a few.

As I mentioned, it is my sense that most of the men I know are polyamorous (whether they act on it or not). This view is expressed (without the fancy terminology) in somewhat crude terms in an exchange in the movie “When Harry Met Sally”:

Harry (Billy Crystal): [N]o man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally (Meg Ryan): So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Harry: No. You pretty much want to nail them too.

Though polyamorists speak in high-minded terms about personal autonomy, consent, and respect for natural inclinations, I think that their idyllic world, like so many of the social experiments that we have tried in the last 50 years, would ultimately damage women and children. In my friend’s case, she and the children were the primary victims of the husband’s expression of his sexual orientation.

Not only will women and children suffer, I think that (back to Harry and Sally) friendship will suffer when every relationship has the potential of sexual consummation. Friendships work well in a marriage and in relationships where there is not the potential of sexual intimacy. They do not work well when either party has a sexual agenda or suspects the other of a sexual (or other) agenda.

At some point, people need to sacrifice their sexual desires for the greater social good, as well as the more immediate social good. I am coming to believe, however, that once religious teachings concerning sexual practices are left behind, there is no stopping place.

Why Not a Convent at Auschwitz? A response to “A Mosque Near Ground Zero”

russellpearce — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:36:49 +0000

I want to follow up on Perry’s post and explain why the debate over the Islamic Center at Ground Zero has changed my view of the Convent at Auschwitz. I use prejudice rather than offense as the starting point. It would be bigoted to oppose a Convent because it’s Christian or a Mosque because it’s Muslim. So why oppose the Islamic Center at Ground Zero or a convent at Auschwitz? What justifies the discriminatory treatment? Opponents of the Islamic Center claim that it insults the victims of 9/11 because the perpetrators of 9/11 were Muslim. Like many Jews, I opposed the convent at Auschwitz. I felt that it insulted the victims of the Holocaust because the perpetrators of the Holocaust were for the most part Christians and the victims were for the most part (but not exclusively) Jews. I did not parse the story as finely as Perry and I believe that like many Jews I opposed the Convent without knowing of the specific allegations of anti-Semitism associated with some of its proponents. But assuming as I do that the Carmelite nuns were not acting out of anti-semitism, I realize now that I was wrong. Fareed Zakaria changed my mind. In returning his Freedom Prize to the ADL, he asked, “is “bigotry . . . OK if people think they’re victims?” Zakaria’s answer – and mine — is no. And, of course, I had forgotten that was one of the lessons that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had taught us as well. He urged that despite the hundreds of years of murder and suffering at the hands of White people, Black people should not hate them. King explained, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Another analogy?

richardgarnett — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:22:21 +0000

Perry has, in his usual measured and thoughtful way, discussed the analogy that some have proposed between the controversy over the convent at Auschwitz, on the one hand, and the Cordoba Project near Ground Zero, on the other. I think there’s a bit more to the analogy than he does, but I’d like to put that aside, for the moment. Walking in to work this morning (ed.: are we supposed to be impressed? You live less than a mile from work), another not-an-analogy-but-perhaps-in-some-ways-instructive-case came to my mind, the other big law-and-religion controversy this summer: The Christian Legal Society at Hastings.

As I see it, the Christian Legal Society was not recognized by the law school at Hastings because, at the end of the day, the Christian Legal Society’s message of “exclusion” — its practice of “discrimination” — was offensive to the administration (and much of the community) at Hastings. To be sure, everyone admitted that Christians at Hastings are welcome, and that they are allowed to meet . . . but they should meet somewhere else, out of respect for Hastings’ very different values, and because the recognition by Hastings of the CLS would interfere with the messages that Hastings wanted to express. Yes, all agreed, the Christian Legal Society has the “right” to discriminate — to do something that many in the Hastings community find deeply offensive – but Hastings wanted to avoid symbolically endorsing that discrimination, notwithstanding its affirmation of the right.

The cases are different, of course. But are they entirely different? I don’t think, by the way, that it is enough to say, “well, in the Hastings case, it would, in fact, distort Hastings’ message / vision to recognize officially a group that discriminates on the basis of religion, whereas in the New York case, it would not, in fact, detract from the meaning of Ground Zero if the Cordoba Project moved forward nearby”, because the “in fact”-ness of these claims is, in each case, what is in dispute.

Thoughts?

A Mosque Near Ground Zero (Postscript)

Perry Dane — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:40:41 +0000

In 1657, Peter Stuyvesant, the Governor of New Netherland (now New York), who had no patience for religious diversity, got wind of the presence of Quakers in the settlement at Flushing. He ordered the town officials in Flushing to hand over the Quakers for arrest. The officials refused. They wrote Stuyvesant a letter, the Flushing Remonstrance, which is now remembered as one of the great early documents articulating the American vision of religious liberty.

In the Remonstrance, the leaders of Flushing emphasized that God’s “law of love, peace and liberty” (that phrase thrills me every time I read it!) extended even to “Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam.” These folks had almost certainly never met a Jew, or a Muslim. But their breadth of vision was still remarkable. And it was prophetic.

I wonder what the authors of the Remonstrance would think of the objections (not mainly by New Yorkers, incidentally) to building an Islamic Center in lower Manhattan, not far from Ground Zero but also not far from Peter Stuyvesant’s old haunts in what was once Fort Amsterdam. More to the point, I guess, I wonder what it would mean for all of us if we took seriously — really took seriously — their commitment to the “law of love, peace and liberty.”