Creation Stories: Stanley Hauerwas, Same-Sex Marriage, and Narrative in Law and Theology

When I think about--members of my own staff who are incredibly committed, in monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together. When I think about--those soldiers or airmen or marines or--sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf--and yet, feel constrained, even now that Don't Ask, Don't Tell is gone, because--they're not able to--commit themselves in a marriage ... At a certain point, I've just concluded that--for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that--I think same-sex couples should be able to get married. (1) President Barack Obama I INTRODUCTION On June 24, 2011 New York became the most recent, and largest, state in the United States to legalize same-sex marriage. (2) More recently, and perhaps importantly, President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, after a very public "evolution" on the subject. (3) Even more recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit held that the Defense of Marriage Act violated the Constitution. (4) Along with the recent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denying a rehearing of its decision invalidating California's constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage, a seismic shift has occurred in the gay marriage movement. (5) In some quarters, the successful push to legalize same-sex marriage is seen as the culmination of the movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) equality. (6) The success of the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage might be understood as the ratification of the LGBT equality movement's goal of making the lives of LGBT individuals less foreign to those within the larger political community. (7) The translation of LGBT lives to the larger public has been one of the most significant strategies of the mainstream LGBT equality movement. Advocates for LGBT equality have argued that eradicating prejudice against LGBT persons rests on the LGBT community's ability to undermine stereotypes of LGBT persons held by the straight community. (8) Narrative has been a central mechanism by which advocates of LGBT equality have sought to undermine stereotypes about LGBT people because of its capacity to draw others into participation in, and identification with, the LGBT community. (9) The turn to narrative is not unique to the movement for LGBT equality. In the areas of gender and race, proponents of progressive social reform have turned toward narrative as a way of providing a framework through which the experiences of "outsiders" might be understood by "insiders." (10) Advocates who have sought to highlight issues of racial and gender inequity have enlisted narratives through which the experiences of racial and gender hierarchies might be understood. (11) The commitment to narrative also represents an intellectual challenge to the capacity of abstract principles such as anti-discrimination, equality, or accommodation to embody the specificity of the experience of individuals who live without the presumptions that attend life as a male, as a white person, or as an able-bodied person. (12) Narrative challenges the capacity of legal or doctrinal categories to dislodge dominant, prejudicial perspectives and presumptions. (13) The recourse to narrative serves the twin goals of demonstrating the "outsider" status of certain identity categories and experiences, (14) and deploying the "outsider" perspective to undermine the dominant position of the "insider" perspective as it relates to the distribution of societal goods--including nonmaterial goods. (15) Within the academic community, the use of narrative had special significance in the work of a subgroup of progressive legal scholars, who had grown disillusioned by the limits of even transformative legal and social change. These scholars, whose work ranges across gender, (16) race, (17) and sexuality, (18) deploy narratives to call into question the success of commitments to formal equality in the contexts of race and gender.

Seeing Beyond Courts: The Political Context of the Nationwide Injunction

ProfessionalAcademi

Beyond Seperation in Federalism Enforcement: Medicaid Expansion, Coercion, and the Norm of Engagement

National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius may be known, in both the popular and academic commentaries, as the case about the Affordable Care Act\u27s Individual Mandate provision. History may record it as one of the most significant cases in the jurisprudence of cooperative federalism. In invalidating part of the Medicaid Expansion provision, the Roberts Court became the first to invalidate a federal spending statute as unconstitutionally coercive of state governments. This decision has the potential to impact federal-state cooperative arrangements such as No Child Left Behind, and others far beyond the health care context. This Article argues that lack of attention to the Medicaid challenge, and the judiciary\u27s previous inability to articulate a framework for coercion, indicates the inappropriateness of our dominant conceptions of federalism enforcement for an age of cooperative governance. To the extent that claims of coercion require us to take into account the national-state interaction over time, they offer the opportunity to transcend current frameworks in federalism enforcement, which disregard the bureaucratic dimension of policy implementation, and operate under a separatist paradigm with respect to national and state authority. Unfortunately, the Supreme Courts decision in National Federation exemplifies the extent to which federalism enforcement continues to be dominated by each of these conceptions of federalism enforcement. As a result, federalism enforcement remains institutionally and temporally truncated, focusing solely on Congress and legislative enactment to the exclusion of administrative agencies and post-enactment policy implementation. In this framework, the unrealistic norm of separation reigns supreme. This Article argues that a norm of engagement better exemplifies the relationship inaugurated between states and the national government in the context of cooperativefecleralism. Medicaid in particular stands as a model of the embedded interactions between states and the national government. This engagement of policy implementation takes place in administrative agencies. The national-state relationship at the agency level involves repeated interaction aimed at the achievement of policy objectives. These repeated interactions demonstrate the need for a norm of federalism enforcement that exemplifies the ways in which states and the national government remain vulnerable in their interaction with one another. Such a norm is available by looking to administrative agency practice and administrative law doctrine. This norm is capable of reorienting Tenth Amendment jurisprudence, and federalism enforcement, more broadly

Beyond Separation in Federalism Enforcement: Medicaid Expansion, Coercion, and the Norm of Engagement

National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius may be known, in both the popular and academic commentaries, as the case about the Affordable Care Act\u27s Individual Mandate provision. History may record it as one of the most significant cases in the jurisprudence of cooperative federalism. In invalidating part of the Medicaid Expansion provision, the Roberts Court became the first to invalidate a federal spending statute as unconstitutionally coercive of state governments. This decision has the potential to impact federal-state cooperative arrangements such as No Child Left Behind, and others far beyond the health care context. This Article argues that lack of attention to the Medicaid challenge, and the judiciary\u27s previous inability to articulate a framework for coercion, indicates the inappropriateness of our dominant conceptions of federalism enforcement for an age of cooperative governance. To the extent that claims of coercion require us to take into account the national-state interaction over time, they offer the opportunity to transcend current frameworks in federalism enforcement, which disregard the bureaucratic dimension of policy implementation, and operate under a separatist paradigm with respect to national and state authority. Unfortunately, the Supreme Courts decision in National Federation exemplifies the extent to which federalism enforcement continues to be dominated by each of these conceptions of federalism enforcement. As a result, federalism enforcement remains institutionally and temporally truncated, focusing solely on Congress and legislative enactment to the exclusion of administrative agencies and post-enactment policy implementation. In this framework, the unrealistic norm of separation reigns supreme. This Article argues that a norm of engagement better exemplifies the relationship inaugurated between states and the national government in the context of cooperativefecleralism. Medicaid in particular stands as a model of the embedded interactions between states and the national government. This engagement of policy implementation takes place in administrative agencies. The national-state relationship at the agency level involves repeated interaction aimed at the achievement of policy objectives. These repeated interactions demonstrate the need for a norm of federalism enforcement that exemplifies the ways in which states and the national government remain vulnerable in their interaction with one another. Such a norm is available by looking to administrative agency practice and administrative law doctrine. This norm is capable of reorienting Tenth Amendment jurisprudence, and federalism enforcement, more broadly

Private Pathologies and Public Policies: Race, Class, and the Failure of Child Welfare (Book Review)

As scholars and journalists focus their attention on the problems of racial profiling, increased incarceration among young black men, and their effects on the larger black community,1 Professor Dorothy Roberts calls our attention to the intersections of race and gender in modern interactions with the child welfare system. In an earlier work, Killing the Black Body,2 Roberts called us to think about how black women had become ensnared in the war on drugs, and its impact on racial equality and reproductive liberty. In her latest work, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,3 Roberts issues a clarion call for society to take seriously the issues of race, gender, and class in the child welfare system's removal of a startling number of black children from their families and communities. In a stirring indictment of the child welfare system as a "racist institution,"4 which "disrupts, restructures, and polices Black families,"5 Roberts calls for the abolition of the system "we now call child protection and [its replacement] with a system that really promotes children's welfare."6 Roberts's central purpose is to "provide the missing voice of Black familie

Regional differences in multidimensional aspects of health: findings from the MRC cognitive function and ageing study

BACKGROUND: Differences in mortality and health experience across regions are well recognised and UK government policy aims to address this inequality. Methods combining life expectancy and health have concentrated on specific areas, such as self-perceived health and dementia. Few have looked within country or across different areas of health. Self-perceived health, self-perceived functional impairment and cognitive impairment are linked closely to survival, as well as quality of life. This paper aims to describe regional differences in healthy life expectancy using a variety of states of health and wellbeing within the MRC Cognitive Function and Ageing Study (MRC CFAS). METHODS: MRC CFAS is a population based study of health in 13,009 individuals aged 65 years and above in five centres using identical study methodology. The interviews included self-perceived health and measures of functional and cognitive impairment. Sullivan's method was used to combine prevalence rates for cognitive and functional impairment and life expectancy to produce expectation of life in various health states. RESULTS: The prevalence of both cognitive and functional impairment increases with age and was higher in women than men, with marked centre variation in functional impairment (Newcastle and Gwynedd highest impairment). Newcastle had the shortest life expectancy of all the sites, Cambridgeshire and Oxford the longest. Centre differences in self-perceived health tended to mimic differences in life expectancy but this did not hold for cognitive or functional impairment. CONCLUSION: Self-perceived health does not show marked variation with age or sex, but does across centre even after adjustment for impairment burden. There is considerable centre variation in self-reported functional impairment but not cognitive impairment. Only variation in self-perceived health relates to the ranking of life expectancy. These data confirm that quite considerable differences in life experience exist across regions of the UK beyond basic life expectancy

The Cosmological Constant

This is a review of the physics and cosmology of the cosmological constant. Focusing on recent developments, I present a pedagogical overview of cosmology in the presence of a cosmological constant, observational constraints on its magnitude, and the physics of a small (and potentially nonzero) vacuum energy.Comment: 50 pages. Submitted to Living Reviews in Relativity (http://www.livingreviews.org/), December 199

The histology of ovarian cancer: worldwide distribution and implications for international survival comparisons (CONCORD-2)

Objective Ovarian cancers comprise several histologically distinct tumour groups with widely different prognosis. We aimed to describe the worldwide distribution of ovarian cancer histology and to understand what role this may play in international variation in survival. Methods The CONCORD programme is the largest population-based study of global trends in cancer survival. Data on 681,759 women diagnosed during 1995â\u80\u932009 with cancer of the ovary, fallopian tube, peritoneum and retroperitonum in 51 countries were included. We categorised ovarian tumours into six histological groups, and explored the worldwide distribution of histology. Results During 2005â\u80\u932009, type II epithelial tumours were the most common. The proportion was much higher in Oceania (73.1%), North America (73.0%) and Europe (72.6%) than in Central and South America (65.7%) and Asia (56.1%). By contrast, type I epithelial tumours were more common in Asia (32.5%), compared with only 19.4% in North America. From 1995 to 2009, the proportion of type II epithelial tumours increased from 68.6% to 71.1%, while the proportion of type I epithelial tumours fell from 23.8% to 21.2%. The proportions of germ cell tumours, sex cord-stromal tumours, other specific non-epithelial tumours and tumours of non-specific morphology all remained stable over time. Conclusions The distribution of ovarian cancer histology varies widely worldwide. Type I epithelial, germ cell and sex cord-stromal tumours are generally associated with higher survival than type II tumours, so the proportion of these tumours may influence survival estimates for all ovarian cancers combined. The distribution of histological groups should be considered when comparing survival between countries and regions