Moral Flexibility
Old-fashioned liberals pride themselves on championing the rights of the unpopular, especially the rights of criminals. For example, Saddam Hussein’s legal defense team includes anti-war activist Ramsey Clark. To non-lawyers this can be counterintuitive: “How could anyone defend him?” But the proper response is that everyone ought to have legal representation, especially those who are the targets of public hatred. The legal system doesn’t work if social pressure can effectively deny unpopular people or organizations from obtaining effective representation, so lawyers ought to push back against the public’s natural inclination to decide cases before they go to trial. It’s a way of defending the courts as the ultimate arbiters of legal disputes, rather than the media or town square. Everyone deserves their day in court, even the bad people. Especially the bad people.
But it’s funny how this principle evaporates when the “bad guy” is someone the Left hates. Consider the Catholic Church in its controversy with the State of Massachusetts over whether a Catholic charity may continue to help the state with adoption placements. The charity has decided that its religious principles forbid it from placing children with homosexual couples, while the state contends that this violates its anti-discrimination laws. (Kathleen Parker has more details here.) Religious freedom counts for little these days (unless you’re an atheist), so it seems likely that the Catholics will be driven out of the adoption business, the gay lobby will score a political victory, and the children will suffer.
In many liberal circles, the Catholic Church is about as evil an institution as one can imagine. Not only is it deeply conservative, but it also possesses a staggering amount of power, influence, and money. If they were true to their principles, you would expect the liberals to demonstrate their moral worth by leaping to defend this unpopular institution against what can easily be viewed as state discrimination against a religion. You might imagine that the Church would find a staunch defender in the Massachusetts ACLU, which claims that it “defends the rights of people to speak freely, to practice the religion of their choice and to be treated equally before the law”—and which denies that it chooses cases with a left-wing bias: “In fact, the ACLU is in many ways our nation’s most conservative organization. Our main job is to conserve America’s original civic values as written in the Constitution and The Bill of Rights.”
Instead, according to this story, some students at Harvard Law School—supposedly the nation’s best and brightest future lawyers—have pressured a Boston law firm called Ropes & Gray into withdrawing from representing the Church. This firm apparently has close ties to Harvard, and hires about 17 of them every year. The students were members of Lambda, the gay student group for Harvard Law School. Lambda threatened to boycott and picket this law firm’s annual recruiting efforts at Harvard. Naturally, the firm immediately surrendered, and no longer represents the Catholic Church.
And don’t imagine for a moment that these Harvard law students were unaware of the ethical implications of what they were doing. According to the news report:
Ropes’s work for Catholic Charities spurred lengthy discussions among Lambda members about complicated legal and ethical issues, since many students support gay adoption but realize lawyers must represent their clients regardless of whether they share their beliefs.
Probably more important was the fact that this firm had also been on the side of the gay agenda in other cases:
Many students felt conflicted because Ropes has done pro bono work for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders and filed a friend of the court brief in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the case that legalized same-sex marriage in Massachusetts in 2003. The brief examined international trends supporting civil marriage for same-sex couples.
But, as I’ve noted elsewhere, the Left tends to eat its own. It should surprise no one that the firm’s moderate-liberal positions counted for little. As any student of Communism should understand, the volunteers march leftward until they feel that a proper balance has been achieved—then the radicals put guns to their backs and march them further leftward.
This is just a tiny little story, unlikely to draw much press. But in it we can see the natural consequence of moral relativism: Without any sense of transcendent morality it’s easy to sweep aside any moral rule that becomes inconvenient, which effectively means that there are no moral rules—only power. Saddam gets a dedicated team of top-flight volunteer liberal lawyers for his defense, while the Catholic Church isn’t allowed to retain the law firm that it wants.