Give the Heave-Ho to Kelo!

For those of you following the Kelo v. New London fiasco, wherein the Supreme Court ruled that the powers of eminent domain can now be stretched to the point where private property can be seized by a city to turn it over to commercial developers, below are some good sources that cover what this may mean for Church property as well as religious owned property (ie, convents, monasteries).

This isn't just a threat to people who own homes. Property owned by churches and religious is tax-exempt. Therefore, this property is very very vulnerable to confiscation by the state for purposes of redevelopment. There is a LOT of very valuable property owned by churches and religious... prime real estate...and the history of eminent domain abuse is literally peppered with seizures of church property.

Mirror of Justice; The Reality Check; Professor Bainbridge; The Seventh Age;

Here are some pertinent legal docs:

Amicus Curiae filed with the Supreme Court by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

Supreme Court Collection (Opinion, Concurrence and Dissent)

If you need convincing that this might happen, here's an example, pulled from the Amicus:

In Normandy, Missouri, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd own a large parcel that serves as a convent, retirement home for aged sisters, and a shelter for drug-addicted women. The city, however, was not content with the good deeds of the sisters and instead sought to take the religious complex and replace it with a $53 million retail and commercial development. See D. Paul Harris, Nuns in Normandy Get Ready for Fight Over Redevelopment; Sisters Say Their Area Is Lovely and City's Plan Seems "Ill-Conceived," ST. LOUIS POST- DISPATCH , July 29, 2002 at 1

Legislation is reportedly being proposed in the US Senate (as of today, the 27th) to nullify this madness... so we really need to keep our eyes on this one.

Danforth holds forth

I've admired John Danforth, beginning from the time he served as a Senator from Missouri. He came to the fore in the public arena when he was a swing vote during the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. His replies to reporters, who would crowd around him as he emerged from the senate druing the vote, were interesting... but what was even more interesting was watching him as he interacted with the press. He would look around the room as the questions were asked and then occasionally land his gaze upon the questioner... and the look he always seemed to have was a "are you serious?" kind of look. He always answered the questions carefully, however, and his answers were always articulate and thoughtful. His vote and support apparently helped Thomas into the Supreme Court and I have never forgotten that.

He has penned a great editorial, which originally appeared in the NY Times on the 17th of June, dealing with the Christian right and Christian moderates. It's very good, very thoughtful, and something I'd like to hear more often.

OpenSolaris!

Solaris is now Open Source!

From the website:

The OpenSolaris project is an open source operating system, a community development effort and a place for collaboration and conversation about OpenSolaris technology. It is aimed at developers and users who want to develop and improve operating systems. The OpenSolaris technology represents cutting edge operating system design, but the innovation is just getting started!

HEY! Build your own Operating System! Huzzah!

The Legal Death of Terri Schiavo

This article, found at First Things and written by Robert T. Miller, a new professor of law at Villanova University School of Law, is the best treatment that I've seen on the Schiavo fiasco. He nails it on the head by identifying what was wrong with that mess and where we need to go from here, if we care about it.

Here is an excerpt:

In short, the courts followed the law precisely when they decided that none of Terri Schiavo’s rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States had been violated. How then could the result be so unjust? The answer is perfectly simple: The substantive laws of Florida expressly authorize a murderous result. Those laws, like the laws of most states, expressly provide that a guardian may starve to death a ward in a persistent vegetative state, defined in Florida to mean “a permanent and irreversible condition of unconsciousness in which there is (a) the absence of voluntary action of any kind, [and] (b) an inability to communicate or interact purposefully with the environment.” Substantively unjust laws, enforced in accordance with their terms and by due process of law, lead to substantively unjust results.


Laws authorizing a guardian to starve to death a ward are profoundly immoral, even as applied to those who would have wanted to die; we do not accommodate suicides. But in hundreds of cases around the country every year, such laws are enforced, and hundreds of people die like Terri Schiavo. The only extraordinary thing about the Schiavo case is that her parents have done everything in their power to prevent her death, with the result that Schiavo has received much more process and much more publicity than others to whom the same thing has happened. One commentator described the Schiavo case as the “crime of the century.” In fact it is a banal, run-of-the-mill crime of a kind that happens every day in the United States.


And for this, we cannot blame the courts. The fault lies not in our judges but in ourselves, for we have created a society in which the law allows the strong and healthy to determine that some of the weak and infirm have lives not worth living and then to kill them.

The remainder of the article very carefully covers the whole legal process and does an excellent job of illuminating a very emotional subject... something that needs to be done for such a vitally important issue.

Traitor's Gate, Watergate

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Revised: How to Harvest Stem Cells Without Losing Your Soul

I need to repost this in order to update it with some information. I have been reading about this ever since I posted it and I now have to say that the Wired story contains a factual error. The story reports that Dr. Hurlbut is in favor of "altering cloned embryos" in order to harvest embryonic stem cells and this is incorrect. The process he does advocate is Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, and the difference is explained in this entry found at the website of the American Association of Medical Colleges. The difference is that in SCNT you alter an unfertilized egg, NOT an embryo, and Hurlbut is proposing to use this process to produce an artificial teratoma, a sub-organism that contains embryonic stem cells. A teratoma is a naturally occuring tumor that will sometimes grow from an egg or sperm cell. The story is pretty good otherwise, but this factual error is huge... very huge, as anyone knows who has been following the debate over the ethical implications of such research.

According to the story "How to Farm Stem Cells Without Losing Your Soul" in the June Issue of Wired, Stanford scientist William Hurlbut has found a way to harvest embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. Here is an excerpt:

William Hurlbut clicks his laptop, and an x-ray pops up on the projection screen behind him. It's a picture of a tumor in a woman's ovary - a ghostly blob floating near the spine. In the middle are several strange, Chiclet-shaped nodules. "Those white opacities," Hurlbut says, "are actually fully formed teeth."

A few audience members blanch. Though we're in an ordinary conference room in Rome, it feels like church. The seats are filled with some of the Vatican's top thinkers, including a dozen men in clerical dress, a nun in a flowing brown habit, and a Dominican priest whose prayer beads quietly clatter. Hurlbut, a bioethicist from Stanford, has traveled here to tell them about a new way to create human embryonic stem cells.

I'm not sure that the solution is one that "even the Vatican will love", but at least this shows there are some scientists out there trying to find an ethical solution to it all... which seems to me to be a good thing. I do think, however, that what he is proposing is morally acceptable.

Paul Ricoeur, Feb 27, 1913 - May 20, 2005

Just discovered this, a bit late!

Paul Ricoeur, who died on Friday aged 92, was one of the most distinguished and prolific philosophers of his generation and published extensively on subjects ranging from structuralism, theology and phenomenology to psychoanalysis and hermeneutics; he was chiefly preoccupied with what is arguably the greatest philosophical theme - the meaning of life.

Full details are found here...

Libertarians for Life

I have discovered a new website that I thought I'd bring to your attention: Libertarians for Life. They have been around since 1976 so I'm a bit late in discovering them! Here is a clip from their self-description:

In 1976, when she became pro-life, Doris Gordon founded Libertarians for Life "because some libertarian had to blow the whistle."

As libertarians, LFL's interest in the abortion debate is in everyone's unalienable rights. LFL's reasoning is philosophical, not religious. Some LFL associates are religious; others, such as Gordon, are atheists.

LFL focuses mainly on two central points: personhood (what "person" means, and why all preborn children are persons); and parental obligation (how parents incur it). From our answers we conclude that prenatal children have the right to the protection of the law.

Check it out! There's some great stuff to read there!