Thursday, December 27, 2018

The Constitution and Doctrinal Development

It is fascinating four of the five justices who are supposed to deliver this "strict constructionist" interpretation of the Constitution and bring us back to what the Constitution is supposed to be are Roman Catholics. Scalia was, before he died, as are Thomas, Roberts, Alito, and Kavanaugh. But Catholics have a theory as to how you can get the claim that Jesus was of one substance with the father into the Nicene creed even though the Bible says nothing about substances, how Mary can be ever-virgin even though the Bible at least appears to talk about Jesus's brothers, how Mary can be immaculately conceived and assumed into heaven even though there's nothing in the Bible about that, and that is the conception, developed in Newman's famous work, or doctrinal development. If you accept doctrinal development for Christian doctrine, then why not for the Constitution as well. Hence, the right of privacy isn't spelled out in the Bill of Rights, to be sure, but, as developed in Griswold v. Connecticut, isn't it a reasonable development from Constitutional ideas that ought to prevent state governments from outlawing birth control? And the next step from there is the application of privacy to the case of abortion in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Of course this argument wouldn't work if the Court had decided that fetuses had a knowable right to life that overrides the right to privacy, but the majority argued that we couldn't know whether a fetus has a right to life, so the right we know (privacy) overrules a right of which we are reasonably uncertain. Remarkably, the so-called "pro-life" arguments against Roe actually attack the absoluteness of the privacy right, rather than arguing in favor of a fetus's right to life. Development of constitutional doctrine undercuts the central originalist argument against Roe. If you undercut the absoluteness of the woman's right to privacy, then neither the right of privacy nor the right to life takes precendence on Constitutional grounds, and it can be up to the states whether there are laws against abortion or not. But pro-life defenders argue that we can know that fetuses have a right to life, and if they argued that against Roe, they could get the court to actually outlaw abortion across the board. Making abortion a state decision seems to me to violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which was designed to eliminate the possibility that, for example, Dred Scott could be a slave in a slave state but free in a free state. Claiming that fetuses can be persons in Alabama but nonpersons in New York strikes me as incoherent, regardless of what you think about abortion in general. But that is the legal result that pro-life defenders seem to want. I suppose going for state decision may be the most pragmatic way to save fetuses, but it strikes me as incoherent and intellectually dishonest. 

11 comments:

bmiller said...

Christological and Marian doctrines did not develop out of thin air. They were always believed, but the exact formulation had to be formally developed due to heretical groups claiming orthodoxy in the early Church.

That's quite a bit different than the post Civil War amendments to the Constitution which eliminated a practice that had been tolerated and that granted citizenship to slaves who formally did not have it.

It's a mistake to confound theology with government.

oozzielionel said...

Your thesis seems more to support a linkage if the approaches in liberal theology and liberal politics. Both are willing to jettison the author's meaning to discover something new and even contrary.

Starhopper said...

I am a Catholic, and I have zero sympathy for strict constructionists and even less for original intenters. I can find no justification for holding the entire nation hostage in perpetuity to the opinions of a non-representative and rather small group of long-dead men.

The Constitution ought to be regarded as a living document.

bmiller said...

The Constitution ought to be regarded as a living document.

That is precisely the view of the founders. They included provisions for amending the constitution and it's been done 17 times since the document was first ratified.

For instance the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments abolished slavery and gave former slaves full rights of citizenship. Before these amendments it was legal to own slaves in certain states. Now no one can legally own slaves.

Starhopper said...

Constitutional amendments are not what I was referring to. The actual, unaltered text needs to be continuously reinterpreted from year to year as circumstances change. It ain't Holy Writ, after all, but the work of men with an extremely outdated view of the world. They had no inkling that there would ever be anything like machine guns, the internet, radio frequency allocation, mobile phones, frequent flyer programs, and grocery store loyalty cards. And that's just for starters.

And as to amendments in general, I firmly believe we have seen the last of them, possibly forever. There is no way on God's Green Earth that we'll ever get two thirds of both the house and senate plus 34 state legislatures to agree on anything. Ain't gonna happen.

Victor Reppert said...

Actually we're one state away from getting the Equal Rights Amendment ratified. On the other hand, the fact that we couldn't get that one ratified supports Starhopper's position as much as anything does.

As for liberal theology, what doctrinal development was supposed to defend was such things as including the homoousion in the Nicene creed. Not exactly a liberal development.

Newman had seven tests for true doctrinal development.

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/development/chapter5.html

bmiller said...

Well if you believe that the system of government established by the Constitution has stopped working, why even pretend that the Constitution has any relevance at all?

The only reason for you to pretend that we should "follow the Constitution" is to fool the rubes who mistakenly think you are sincere.

Maybe the experimental form of government set up by the founders has proven a failure and we should return to the Ancien RĂ©gime.

Starhopper said...

"Maybe the experimental form of government set up by the founders has proven a failure"

Considering that we now have Individual One as our current president, you may be right.

bmiller said...

As for liberal theology, what doctrinal development was supposed to defend was such things as including the homoousion in the Nicene creed. Not exactly a liberal development.

Well the Nicene Creed was composed to explicitly expose orthodox beliefs from the unorthodox by using that word. The Arians wanted the Creed to use the word Homoiousios rather than Homoousios. There was more than
one iota of difference between the 2 words. According to the first, Christ was of the same substance of God the Father and the second would mean he was of a similar substance (a belief similar to the Jehovah Witnesses).

Now it would have been a liberal development if the iota had been included.

bmiller said...

Starhopper,

When Obama was president many people on the other political side felt the same way.
We didn't get here over night.

Have you ever read Plato's Republic? All forms of government have inherent weaknesses and I'm afraid that our educational system has not done a good job of helping our citizens understand the weaknesses of our system and how to protect against those weaknesses. Our run has been over 200 years now and that's about average for democratic based systems.

bmiller said...

Correction to my Homoiousios/Homoousios post. I got them turned around when I referred to the first and second. The iota indicates similar substance.