Apr

Joe Biden visits Georgetown Law

As some of you may already know, I have been taking night classes at Georgetown University Law Center here in Washington (towards an LL.M.). Georgetown is a popular place of late – President Obama visited the main campus last week, and Vice President Biden visited the Law Center campus today.

VP Biden was visiting to deliver a speech to a one-day symposium on the 15th Anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act. The symposium is co-sponsored by the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law and Legal Momentum. The latter organization presented its Hero Award to VP Biden this morning immediately preceding his remarks.

The Cardinal Newman Society, an organization dedicated to promoting orthodoxy at Catholic institutions of higher education, has issued a critical press release, saying, “On Wednesday, April 22, Georgetown University Law Center will host an event honoring Vice President Joseph Biden with the ‘Legal Momentum Hero Award,’ in direct violation of the U.S. bishops’ 2004 policy against such honors to pro-abortion politicians.” See also LifeNews and The Bulletin.

I actually thing this is the wrong framework through which to approach the question. Legal Momentum is a separate organization from GULC, it is not a student organization, and it is their award being conferred on VP Biden. I think at most one could argue this is a “platform” for VP Biden, one that lifts him up to the students of GULC “as a model of a Catholic in public life.”

Just because the event does not fit the USCCB’s policy does not excuse GULC’s leaders from a more general prudential judgment about Ex Corde Ecclesiae and Catholic education.

It is important to start by looking at Legal Momentum as an organization. Founded as the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense Fund several decades ago, today Legal Momentum identifies itself as “the nation’s oldest legal advocacy organization dedicated to advancing the rights of women and girls.” Legal Momentum supports same-sex marriage and files court briefs in support of court-imposed same-sex marriage, like in MA’s Goodrich case. Legal Momentum believes that “legal abortion is essential to women’s equality,” and litigates in support of expanded access to abortion, including supporting court-ordered federal taxpayer funding of abortions through Medicaid. Finally, Legal Momentum engages in vicious attacks on Crisis Pregnancy Centers, saying they “are run by extreme anti-abortion groups” and “they put women’s health at risk and undermine their reproductive autonomy.”

Some analogy may be made here to the reaction of Bishop McManus of Worchester, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Education, to the rental of conference space by the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy at the College of the Holy Cross. He was strongly critical because the MATP conference included presentations by officials from Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice MA. “Any association with these groups can create the situation of offering scandal understood in its proper theological sense.”

However, this must be compared against the fact that the situation at Holy Cross was space rental, whereas this is co-sponsorship of a symposium with a law review. That fact makes it both better and worse: better because it brings it under the wing of academic freedom, worse because co-sponsorship is much closer association than merely space rental. One should also note that the symposium was focused on the Violence Against Women Act, and not a more morally charged issue.

Ultimately, I don’t think Georgetown broke any hard and fast rules here, or necessarily even did something wrong. I would not have made the choice to cosponsor the symposium with Legal Momentum if I were editor in chief of the Gender Journal, but I don’t think I would have intervened to stop it if I were the dean either. Rather, I think this may be an interesting launching point for a broader discussion about women’s and gender studies programs in Catholic universities, and whether they promote an authentic Mulieris Dignitatem vision or are closely allied with the institutions of the liberal feminist left.

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