Author: Andrew Sullivan

Annalise Fonza, a former United Methodist clergywoman who now identifies as an atheist, reveals the unexpected trouble she encountered after performing a wedding in Atlanta, Georgia, as a licensed humanist chaplain:

A few days after the wedding, the bride called to inform me that they were at the Fulton County Probate Courthouse where a clerk had a question about my credentials. After several minutes of troubling conversations with the clerk and her supervisor, I was told that Judge James Brock had refused to sign the certificate. “Who are you?” the clerk asked me in reference to the title “Humanist Celebrant,” which I was required to provide on the license. Obviously, the clerk and the rest of the Fulton County Probate Court had never heard the term, nor had they heard of the Humanist Society. After a few more phone calls, I was informed that it was Judge Brock’s final decision to deny the certificate and, hence, it was clear that the couple would have to be married again.

The couple decided to get married again that same day, this time in the Fulton County Probate Courthouse, but after a few weeks of wrangling the judge did confirm that Fonza was qualified to officiate weddings in Georgia. What she takes away from the episode:

The truth of the matter is that anyone who openly identifies as I do must expect public scrutiny and possible rejection. People in the United States still discriminate against atheists, even though more and more people are using the word “atheist” to self-identify. In other words, just because one uses the term openly and proudly, doesn’t mean he or she will be accepted without question or won’t face rejection. In addition, the religious bigotry and social entitlement here in the South is so pronounced—by people of every color and background. Many, including African Americans, openly discriminate against or exclude other black people from social and professional circles when they learn that those others are atheists. …

My first time navigating the courts in Atlanta, Georgia, as a humanist celebrant was far from loving, and it taught me the value of being good and godless in a world that is dominated by systems and people who put their faith in gods, but who don’t seem to have the slightest idea of what it means to be loving and accepting of anyone who doesn’t adhere to their religious beliefs.

Reviewing Richard Epstein’s The Classical Liberal Constitution : The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government, Stephen Rohde describes how the libertarian-leaning law professor offers an an approach to constitutional interpretation “which ‘starts from the twin pillars of private property and limited government’ and emphasizes federalism, separation of powers, and economic liberties.” Despite such concerns, Epstein is no originalist:

Epstein takes “originalists,” such as Justice Antonin Scalia, to task for their insistence that all constitutional issues must be based on the text of the Constitution as publicly understood in 1791. Sounding very much like the “living Constitution” proponents he’s about to criticize, Epstein points out that conservative originalists cannot remain faithful to the text because “the Constitution is written in broad bold strokes, which at some points confer vast powers on government and at others impose major limitations on their exercise.”

He rejects the originalists’ “cramped mode of interpretation which, ironically, is not faithful to the dominant interpretive norms of the Founding period,” because “in no legal system at any time could the question of construction be reduced to a search for original public meaning of terms that are found in the constitutional text.” Epstein also observes that the originalist view “offers no basis for the implication of additional constitutional terms that are dependent on either government structure or the nature of individual rights.” Consequently, “a bare text raises more questions than it answers,” which make it imperative “to isolate the general theory that animates the text — usually the protection of personal autonomy, liberty, and property.”

In an earlier review, however, Cass Sunstein reminded us that progressives are the real enemies of Epstein’s vision:

To give content to what he calls (controversially) “the classical liberal vision,” Epstein offers a foil, the villain of the piece, which he calls the “modern progressive” or “social democratic” approach. He identifies that approach with the 1930s, when, he urges, policymakers jettisoned “the traditional safeguards against excessive state power.” As a matter of law, their ill-advised, and constitutionally illegitimate, reforms became possible for two reasons. First, the progressives saw ambiguity in the constitutional text, thus licensing those reforms. Second, the progressives insisted that unelected judges should recede in favor of We the People, acting through elected representatives. Epstein does not deny that the Constitution is sometimes ambiguous. Importantly, he acknowledges that “our basic conception of the proper scope of government action will, and should, influence the resolution of key interpretive disputes.” But he emphasizes that a “detailed textual analysis” has priority over our preferred views about political theory.

Much of his book consists of comprehensive and exceptionally detailed accounts of how constitutional provisions ought to be understood. In many places his discussion is highly technical, but in some important respects—of course not in all—you can take it as a careful and sophisticated guide to Tea Party constitutionalism.

(Image of first page of the US Constitution via Wikimedia Commons)

Grace Boey explores the morality of a number of forms of sexual deviancy, using Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita – in which the thirtysomething professor Humbert Humbert narrates his sexual relationship with a 12 year old girl named Dolores – as a case study of our “unresolved thoughts and feelings” about perversion. She especially notices how many readers of the book simultaneously condemn pedophilia while harboring complicated feelings about Humbert:

[I]t’s easy for readers to experience spurts of sympathy for Humbert. Dolores, after all, was the one who initiated the affair, and she was hardly unacquainted with sex when she did it, having lost her virginity at a summer camp to a young man named Charlie Holmes. Humbert paints a portrait of himself as an unwitting accomplice to the entire affair, seduced by a manipulative nymphet who was all too good at getting what she wanted. He appears, as well, to fit the criteria for pathological pedophilia or hebephilia, having exclusively been attracted to young girls from the start. Humbert, it seems, was set up for depravity from the start. It is completely natural to pity anyone set up for desires that are so strong, yet so utterly wrong and harmful.

Yet make no mistake:

despite his efforts to portray otherwise, Humbert knew exactly what he was doing when he acted upon his desires, and had numerous opportunities to remove himself from the situation long before his temptress made her advances. And the fact that she advanced upon him is of no consequence: she was still a child with a child’s mentality (as he himself observed numerous times). As the party with more experience and more power, Humbert should have known better than to succumb—and it is here that the immorality of Lolita lies.

As the novel progresses, it becomes sadly obvious that young Dolores was not fully cognizant of her best interests when she initiated the affair. Along the way she becomes irreparably damaged by their relationship: she learns to view sex as a transaction, and enters a confusing cycle of resentment and dependence on Humbert that characterizes so many real-life cases of child sexual abuse. Dolores, in the end, escapes to land up broke and pregnant in a clapboard shack, dying at the age of 17 after a stillbirth on Christmas day.

(Video: Scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation)

When Richard Norris was 22, he shot himself in the face. In 2012, he received a full facial transplant from a recently-deceased 21-year-old man. In a fascinating profile, Jeanne Marie Laskas describes meeting Norris:

He seems nervous. His hands tremble, bringing constant sips of water to his mouth. His lips can’t quite grip the bottle, so each sip is more a little pour. He fights a constant drool with the help of a towel. His new face is a marvel nonetheless. It’s a new face. Wide and open, the cheekbones of an Irishman and the wrinkle-free complexion of a college kid. It’s difficult to reconcile the youthful face with the body of a man nearly 40. I am trying not to stare. I am trying to stop looking for the seams, where the new connects to the old, the eyelids, the neck, the scar in front of his ears. I am trying to stop thinking about his beard, which isn’t really his beard, except now it is, and it grows. I’m distracted by a thousand little thoughts like these. Coupled with his lack of facial expression—a solid, largely unmoving veneer—in all these ways the barrier to getting to know Richard feels to me immediately and appreciably steep.

Norris now takes medicine “to keep his immune system at 50 percent strength—just enough to ward off common viral and bacteria infections but not so strong that his own antibodies attack his new face”:

“He’s not supposed to smoke,” his mom says. He can’t get sunburn. He can’t get a cold. He can’t drink. He can’t fall and risk injury. He can’t afford to tax his immune system at all. Even a cut could trigger rejection. It starts as a blotchy rash; it means his body is winning the fight to reject the transplant, and Richard has to be flown to the hospital to receive rounds of emergency drugs intravenously. Uncontrollable rejection would mean an almost certain death; the only things left of Richard’s old face are his eyes and the back of his throat. Everything else is now gone for good. “I have to keep watch that his face doesn’t go yellow,” his mom says. “He’s had two rejections so far.”

“I’ll leave you two talking,” Richard says, and he heads outside for a smoke.