Arkes on the Red Mass & the Supreme Court

“Praying for Justice Kennedy could indeed become the main work requiring and justifying the need for the Mass. The Mass used to be, for some of us, the occasion to stir hope for the New Year. But the Mass has become by now the Harbinger of Hopes Disappointed, of sadder days to come,” writes Hadley Arkes, in a gloomy description of this year’s Red Mass and the upcoming term of the Supreme Court.

Much of the column is a description of the rulings and statements of a foolish judge (my term, not Hadley’s) named Richard Kopf. He was the one who struck down the Nebraskan legislature’s law banning very late term or partial birth abortions because other forms “routinely ‘deliberately and intentionally’ deliver ‘vaginally’ a ‘substantial portion’ of a living fetus in order to kill it.”

Kopf comes up for his apparent disgust that the Hobby Lobby decision was made by five Catholic justices, as a sign of the kind of thing Catholics face. “To the average person,” he said, “the result looks stupid and smells worse.”  No, Arkes replies,

the average person is more likely to wonder why women cannot afford contraceptives and abortifacients for themselves. Or why the provision of these devices should become the obligation of an employer — and  why they should be forced on a generous employer who has moral objections to them.

Readers who are like me admirers of Professor Arkes will want to check out the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding. It includes, for example, a debate over the Hobby Lobby decision with Libertarian Catholic Robert Miller and his recent reflections on that debate.