Law and Magic Blog

"I Am Not a Witch"

Delaware Republican Senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell's new ad begins "I am not a witch." Somehow I think that's an unfortunate way to start a political ad. It reminds me of the late President Richard Nixon's "The American people need to know if their president is a crook, well I'm not a crook." Ms. O'Donnell's ad ends with "I'm you." Saying it doesn't make it so. I also think she doesn't have that kind of magic.

Update: Comment here from Lawcom's Legal Blog Watch.

 

Wiccan Takes Up Defense Of Beliefs Against Christine O'Donnell (Since Apparently Few Others Will)

A Wiccan priestess is countering Delaware Republican Senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell's comments about witchcraft. CNN reports that the Reverend Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary of Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, says about Ms. O'Donnell's unfortunate linking of wiccan beliefs and Satanism,

“It’s an opportunity to get some correct information out there. That’s how I see it. There’s comedy about it, hot debate about it, lots of pundits weighing in. But one of the things that really hasn’t gotten through is how ridicule and defamation can harm people."

Um, that would be group defamation. And yes, it can harm people, especially those who didn't think they were in the line of fire, but were just sort of ambling by, minding their own business.

For those interested, Mt. Horeb was until last year also the site of the National Mustard Museum, founded by lawyer Barry Levenson. It moved to Middleton, Wisconsin in search of more room for mustard. Mr. Levenson (not the actor/director) is also the author of the food/law book Habeas Codfish (University of Wisconsin Press). (As I do all too often, I digress).

 

Double, Double...

So Christine O'Donnell, the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware "dabbled" in witchcraft when she was in high school. This was, I presume, just before she went celibate?

"Those fingers in my hair/That sly, come hither stare/That strips my conscience bare/It's witchcraft."

Law, Religion, Democracy, and the Purpose of Governments

Steven Menashi, Georgetown University Law Center, reviews Ian Buruma's Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (Princeton, 2010), in Religion of Doubt, 129 Commentary 43-45 (June 2010). Here is the abstract.

 

Liberal democracy and religion enjoy a strained relationship, Ian Buruma writes in "Taming the Gods," because democracy is about "resolving conflicting interests through negotiation and compromise," while religion claims to represent "absolute or divine truth" and therefore cannot compromise. Democracies, he says, must find a way "to stop irrational passions from turning violent" and to prevent "religious irrationality from interfering with rational inquiry." Because Buruma regards the claim to absolute truth as the quintessential characteristic of any religion, the main opposition one finds in his book is not really between religion and democracy but between certainty and doubt. At the outset of the book, Buruma compares some political ideologies to religious beliefs and notes the danger that arises when "the state claims to be the source of absolute truth." Such claims, he writes, "are always lethal, whether they are enforced by commissars or by priests." Democracy is different: "It is not the task of a liberal democratic state to provide answers to the deeper questions about life, let alone impose metaphysical beliefs on its citizens." Well, yes — and no.

Download the review from SSRN at the link.

Keywords: Religion, Democracy

Accepted Paper Series

Date posted: June 07, 2010 ; Last revised: June 07, 2010

Suggested Citation

Menashi, Steven, Religion of Doubt (June 4, 2010). Commentary, Vol. 129, No. 6, pp. 43-45, June 2010. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1620461

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Contact Information

Steven Menashi (Contact Author) Georgetown University Law Center ( email ) 600 New Jersey Avenue NW Washington, DC 20001 United States 202-596-7375 (Phone) 202-315-3462 (Fax)

Will Health Care Insurance Plans Include Complementary/Alternative Medicine Coverage?

So, have you thought about whether any of the health care bills would require that insurance plans cover alternative or complementary medical treatments? No? Check out this story from Newsweek magazine, which suggests that the CAM lobby has already made its arguments to the Hill.

Requiring insurers to cover therapies with unknown outcomes runs counter to the White House's push for medicine with a proven track record. The basic idea behind evidence-based medicine is that doctors ought to use treatments that have the best possible evidence that they work. What counts as the best possible evidence? Randomized clinical trials.... Clinical trials work fine for drugs, where trials can quantify and compare outcomes. But for alternative treatments, things like prayer or even yoga, the evidence gets much less clear; randomized trials are more difficult to conduct. "For drugs you have placebos and double-blinded studies," says Timmermans. "But you cannot have a placebo for testing behavioral interventions." So alternative treatments are essentially on an uneven playing field when it comes to evidence-based medicine. Timmermans admits that "it's not an equal-opportunity methodology."

...

Requiring insurers to cover prayer treatment may be a bit too extreme for health-care reform. More interesting to explore though, are other forms of nontraditional medicine, floated in reform bills, that have a stronger claim to an evidence base. Take, for example, complementary and alternative medicine, a field often criticized for unproven therapies. Some 38 percent of Americans use some form of it. Moreover, the field has increasingly embraced traditional research methods. Just a decade ago, the government established a National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The center studies "alternative healing practices"—anything from the use of echinacea to treat colds, to acupuncture for irritable bowel syndrome—"in the context of rigorous science." They use that gold standard Timmermans mentioned: randomized, clinical trials.

Here's a link to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Now, I admit to practicing yoga, off and on, and I think (I think) it helps me feel less stress and it helps me calm down after a long day of magical legalizing. I know it helps my flexibility, but then so would, I suspect, going back to my ballet exercises. I do feel better when I downward dog and make like a tree, even though I don't Om. It annoys the felines. But I don't try to bill my health insurance company for my trips to the yoga studio. I'm not certain there's cause and effect there. Hey, I tried feverfew for my migraines, too, but I didn't see any amelioration there. Zippo. One of my primary care physicians explained that outcome--there's no quality control in the feverfew you buy OTC. Better to rely on the meds the neurologist prescribes, and mirabile dictu, my migraines have decreased significantly over the past few years. Hooray for modern medicine and Big Pharma (waving imaginary flag).

Staring At Goats, Big Screen

The Guardian's Andrew Pulver has this "first look" at George Clooney's adaptation of Jon Ronson's "The Men Who Stare at Goats," which premieres at the Venice Film Festival, and is set to open wide this fall. The film centers on a U.S. army unit that investigates (and seems to believe in) psychic powers.

Thomas Sowell On Magic Words

In a new article for National Review Online, Thomas Sowell discusses what he considers to be the fallacies of magic words in politics (and one would assume, law). Indeed, he links the uses of magic words and magical thinking.

Some of our biggest political fallacies come from accepting words as evidence of realities. “Rent control” laws do not control rent and “gun control” laws do not control guns.

The big cities with the tightest rent control laws in the nation are New York and San Francisco. The nation’s highest rents are in New York and the second-highest are in San Francisco.

There is a very straightforward explanation for that. Strong rent control laws can bring residential building to a screeching halt. Once politicians have milked the political advantages of passing rent control laws, they have to avoid a backlash if all building of apartments stops.

That leads to an escape hatch in the rent control law. Luxury apartments with rents above a certain level are exempted. That leads to the shifting of resources away from building affordable housing to building housing that is unaffordable.

Read the rest of his article, Magic Words in Politics, here.

Lawyer/Magician At an Inaugural Ball

Lawyer/magician Kenneth Trombly strolls into history at the Salute To Heroes Ball January 20, 2009.

He tells me that's a card springing flourish. 

[Photograph courtesy Ken Trombly].

Lives Without God

For the Chronicle of Higher Education, Philip Zuckerman excerpts from his new book Society Without God, in which he notes that an industrial society in which most people do not believe, or believe actively in a personal God, can still live moral and ethical lives, and prosper, and he reflects just how that can be done, using Denmark and Sweden as preeminent examples.

The connection between religion — or the lack thereof — and societal health is admittedly complex. It is difficult to definitively establish that secularism is always good for society and religion always bad. However, the often posited opposite claim is equally difficult to substantiate: that secularism is always bad for a society and religion always good. To be sure, in some instances, religion can be a strong and positive ingredient in establishing societal health, prosperity, and well-being. And when considering what factors contribute to the making of a good society, religion can be a positive force.

Here in the United States, for example, religious ideals often serve as a beneficial counterbalance against the cutthroat brand of individualism that can be so rampant and dominating. Religious congregations in America serve as community centers, counseling providers, and day-care sites. And a significant amount of research has shown that moderately religious Americans report greater subjective well-being and life satisfaction, greater marital satisfaction, better family cohesion, and fewer symptoms of depression than the nonreligious. Historically, a proliferation of religious devotion, faith in God, and reliance on the Bible has sometimes been a determining factor in establishing schools for children, creating universities, building hospitals for the sick and homes for the homeless, taking care of orphans and the elderly, resisting oppression, establishing law and order, and developing democracy.

In other instances, however, religion may not have such positive societal effects. It can often be one of the main sources of tension, violence, poverty, oppression, inequality, and disorder in a given society. A quick perusal of the state of the world will reveal that widespread faith in God or strong religious sentiment in a given country does not necessarily ensure societal health. After all, many of the most religious and faithful nations on earth are simultaneously among the most dangerous and destitute. Conversely, a widespread lack of faith in God or very low levels of religiosity in a given country does not necessarily spell societal ruin. The fact is, the majority of the most irreligious democracies are among the most prosperous and successful nations on earth.

Read the rest of the passage, The Virtues of Godlessness, here.

Sanjay the Fire Eater

I'm not sure how I stand on the possible appointment of Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General, but he's learned to eat fire, which is rather interesting.