St. Maximos' Hut

An interesting item in Opinion Journal's Best of the Web Today (you have to scroll down) from Friday contrasts the complaints of an atheist and an atheist group's efforts to remove roadside crosses as a violation of the Establishment Clause.

A very interesting discussion at Volokh on why people believe and why they don't in the comments to these posts: believers and nonbelievers.

You just don't see such high quality discussion of faith and the lack of faith that often.

Not a bad film, not great - good performance by Willem Dafoe, one of my favorites; nice period piece set in medieval times, but not in Medieval Times. Priest on the run from adultery and murder falls in with a band of traveling players, helps put on a play about a local crime, unwittingly stumbles into a nefarious set of circumstances and so on. But... lots of gratuitious slaps at the church. Wholly unnecessary to the plot, and which detract from the authenticity of the film - would people talk in such modern terms in medieval times? Of course not.

Complete authenticity is not required, of course, but gratuitious anti-Church comments that don't advance the plot are simply silly.

Two possible explanations come to mind - 1) the makers of the film are anti-Christian and so naturally think this way; adding such comments helps them express themselves or 2) the makers of the film think the comments will make the film more popular. Both might be true, or perhaps just one. Or maybe there is another explanation.

But it seems to me that no one would get away with gratuitious slaps at Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. in a movie today without a ruckus being raised.

According to multiple media reports (the Washington Post version here), a big story is FCC Chair Kevin Martin's efforts to "persuade" the cable industry to adopt "a la carte" pricing for cable TV, in which consumers would pay only for the channels they selected. This would, Martin says, allow parents to purchase only the cable channels they want, eliminating the potential exposure of their kids to channels with material the parents find objectionable.

Let us set aside the fact that the FCC (at least according to most reports) does not have the legal authority to impose such a pricing rule, that Congress does not appear to be interested in giving the FCC such authority, and that industry observers think that market pressures from satellite TV, phone companies, and video iPods are all pushing the market toward such pricing. (Martin's power to coerce cable companies comes because a major deal involving 3 cable companies is pending before the FCC on unrelated grounds and is currently not moving as rapidly through the regulatory process as the cable companies might like.)

The interesting issue is whether the government is justified in forcing a regulatory change to enhance parental control to allow parents to more easily (and the "more easily" part is important) control the TV their kids watch. Parents have the option, of course, of controlling TV in a lot ways - they can simply not have a TV (or not have cable), they can be at home to monitor what their kids are watching, they can make sure there are not TVs in the kids' rooms, etc. All those are more costly ways in terms of parental resources (not having cable might be a less costly monetarily method, depending on what you do instead). Can the government impose costs merely to make life easier for some people? Impose costs is just another way of saying "take someone's property" when it is the government that is doing it. Which, I think, makes the question "Should the government be able to take A's property to make it easier for B to exercise some control over B's children's television habits?"

The answer to that one seems easy to me: No.

For all who blog, an interesting opinion piece popped up over at the Accuracy In Media website. Addressing the Free Flow of Information bill currently pending, the article notes:

Senator Richard Lugar, main sponsor of the shield law in the Senate, has said that bloggers would "probably not" be considered journalists under the bill. On the other hand, Rep. Mike Pence, the main sponsor of the bill in the House, says some bloggers will be covered, but only those involved in "gathering news." He says those covered by the bill would have to be evaluated on a "blog-by-blog basis."

I confess that I have not been following the case law surrounding blogs and free speech, but there have been incidents of members of academia and the corporate world being punished for statements made in blogs they produce on their own time and dime. Indeed, we have several folks that are friends of "The Hut" who blog anonymously in light of the fact that the happy rainbow of inclusiveness is not really as all embracing as it is portrayed.
I wonder whether any of our dwellers in the Hut have any thoughts on the proposed legislation or related issues or cases.
The economic issues-potential suits and loss of livelihood-are pretty obvious. Perhaps the religious dimension is too, particularly as "hate speech" provisions are used selectively to muzzle free expression of certain religious ideas. Anyone care to light a torch on this?

The founder of Chik-Fil-A is a devout Christian who has always followed a policy of closing the stores on Sunday. As far as I know, he has not lobbied the various state legislatures to shut down the other fast food restaurants on Sunday. Also, as far as I know, this policy has not interfered with the company's success. For more information, see http://www.chick-fil-a.com/

Juan Non-Volokh provoked a lengthy exchange in the comments to his post on the Ave Maria law school's plan to move to Florida, to a community where Tom Monahagn plans to use property rights to provide a Catholic-values community:

"We'll own all commercial real estate," Mr. Monaghan declared, describing his vision. "That means we will be able to control what goes on there. You won't be able to buy a Playboy or Hustler magazine in Ave Maria Town. We're going to control the cable television that comes in the area. There is not going to be any pornographic television in Ave Maria Town. If you go to the drug store and you want to buy the pill or the condoms or contraception, you won't be able to get that in Ave Maria Town."

Juan, and Ann Althouse, referred to this as "creepy".

There are several issues involved here and I want to only focus on one. First, whether Ave Maria should move or not is not an issue I have a strong opinion about. At least some of the students, faculty, and alumni object to the move and it may or may not be a good idea. I wouldn't rule out it being a reasonable move (the legal job market in Michigan is not as good as in Florida in general and that matters to some extent), but let's leave that aside.

Second, whether any particular person wants to live in Ave Maria town seems to me to be besides the point. So long as we don't all have to live in any particular version of Utopia, I am happy to let everyone sort themselves into whatever Nozickian communities they want.

The interesting issue here - i.e. the one I haven't puzzled out yet - is why people with whom I usually find myself in agreement think it is a bad idea to move the law school into Ave Maria town independently of whether they think that moving the law school at all is a bad idea. Those who find it "creepy" (like Juan) seem to do so because they object to the closing off of the community from the wider community. The very idea of a university, however, is to some extent a place where people are to a degree sheltered from the "real world" to allow them to focus on learning. What's particularly creepy about people wanting to be in an environment free from pornography, etc.? This doesn't strike me as any different from, say, people at a law school in a rural town touting the atmosphere available from rural living. Given UPS, the internet, Amazon.com, Netflix, and so on, I don't think "Ave Maria town" is likely to be particularly more closed off from the "real world" than most small towns in rural areas are today. What will be different is that it will be a community that shares values, Catholic values as it turns out, and that, in turn, strikes me as sounding a bit like what you might find in a monastic community.

Ave Maria town is going to be a lot more open than most monastic communities, of course. But monastic communities were (and are) wonderful places to learn, think, pray, and live. Spending law school in a community of shared values doesn't strike me as a bad thing. Indeed, I went to law school at the University of Texas at Austin and Austin (or, the university portion of it anyway) was about as monolithic in terms of its "progressive politics" and so forth as Ave Maria town is likely to be in a different direction. Of course, I presume that the education that the Ave Maria students get in Ave Maria town is not closed off - they'll be studying the law as it is, as well as the law as it should be. By all indications, however, Ave Maria is doing a tremendous job training new lawyers already and there is no reason to expect that to stop.

So, I'd particularly welcome comments on why it is "creepy" or otherwise undesirable to create a community of shared values in which to study law (or anything else). Any response, Juan?

I'm watching The United States of Leland on the exercise bike (I'm only half way through, so I don't know if I actually like this movie yet.) A character's comment - which was the comment from the preview that led me to watch the movie in the first place - seems worth passing on. (This is a paraphrase because it has been a few hours since I saw the scene).

During a conversation one character says "I'm only human" in response to being caught in some immoral behavior.

The other responds: "How come people only say that when they do something bad? You never hear people say 'I'm only human' after they run out of a burning building carrying a child they've saved."

Update: Here's the actual quote, which is on IMDB's web site (link above):

Pearl Madison: I'm only human, man.
Leland: It's funny how people only say that after they do something bad. I mean, you never hear someone say, "I'm only human" after they rescue a kid from a burning building.