Watch more of our interview about religious services of commitment with UCC minister and retirement community chaplain Ann Abernethy, who says, “One of the great gifts of being a clergy person is that we are really invited into people’s lives at a time of blessing.”
“Buddha” is a title meaning the enlightened or awakened one. Inspired by Tricycle magazine’s Buddhafest Short Films Showcase invitation for video responses to the question “What does it mean to be awake in the world?”, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly asked everyday people—tourists, businessmen, students, and others—along with Buddhist monk Nicholas Vreeland what it means to be “awake” in the world. Filmed and edited by Lauren Talley and Fred Yi. Music used with permission of Talkfine.
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Interview done in the Victoria Theater at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: There are songs about God and his son. Angels, creation, pilgrimage, prayer, and the afterlife too. Paul Simon says there’s always been a spiritual dimension to his music, but the overt religious references in his most recent album, “So Beautiful or So What,” surprised even him.
PAUL SIMON, singer/songwriter: There seems to be a theme in the album, not intentional, and it’s funny because for somebody who is not a religious person, God comes up a lot in my songs.
LAWTON: Simon may not describe himself as religious, but he admits he’s fascinated by the spiritual realm.
SIMON: I think it’s a part of my thoughts, on a fairly regular basis. I think of it more as spiritual feeling. It’s, it’s something that I recognize in myself and that I enjoy and I don’t quite understand it.
LAWTON: He may not understand it, but he’s been writing and singing a lot about it, and that has generated attention. One Irish blogger suggested “So Beautiful or So What” could be the best Christian album of the year. Cathleen Falsani, an evangelical who writes frequently about religion and pop culture, called it one of the most memorable collections of spiritual musical musings in recent memory.
CATHLEEN FALSANI, Sojourners: It’s fascinating. It’s a stunningly beautiful new album and he’s a great surprise to me and frankly a huge blessing.
LAWTON: Simon comes from a Jewish background.
SIMON: I was raised to a degree, enough to be, you know, bar-mitzvahed and have that much Jewish education, although I had no interest. None.
LAWTON: Now at 70, he says he’s very interested in questions about God. In his song, “The Afterlife,” he speculates about what happens after death. There’s a humorous aspect where he imagines waiting in line, like at the Department of Motor Vehicles. But there’s a serious aspect too.
SIMON: By the time you get up to speak to God and you actually get there, there’s no question that you could possibly have that could have any relevance.
LAWTON: One of the most unusual songs on the album, “Getting Ready for Christmas Day” includes parts of a sermon preached in 1941 by a prominent African-American pastor, J.M. Gates. Simon heard the sermon on a set of old recordings.
(To Simon) What was it about the sermon that caught you and influenced you?
SIMON: I liked the rhythm of the call and response between the pastor and the congregation. What he was saying was very dark. It was a very pessimistic sermon. You don’t know where you’ll be, you might be in a lonesome grave. Here as a songwriter I’m not only writing words, I’m also writing sounds and music. So to take a modern, digitally recorded record and combine it with something from 1941 had a very interesting effect for me. I liked it a lot. It might be my favorite track on the record.
LAWTON: Simon says when he’s writing a song, he doesn’t start out with a theme or a message. He lets the story evolve.
SIMON: Usually the first sentence is, or the first line is, what I’m interesting in finding, because that will launch me on, on a trail that often becomes a story. And then I’ll find out whatever it is that’s on my mind, my subconscious mind.
LAWTON: The song “Love in Hard Times” begins with God and his son visiting earth.
SIMON: To begin with a sentence that is the foundation of Christianity is, I said, ‘This is going to be interesting. Now what am I going to say about a subject that I certainly didn’t study’?”
LAWTON: The song ends with a love story, which he says is really about his wife.
SIMON: When you’re looking to be thankful at the highest level, you need a specific and that specific is God. And that’s what that song is about.
LAWTON: He says the beauty of life and of the earth lead him to thoughts about God.
SIMON: How was all of this created? If the answer to that question is God created everything, there was a creator, than I say, great! What a great job. And I like the idea. I find it very, I don’t know, I find it comforting in some way. But if the answer to that is there is no God, I don’t feel like, well, what a jerk I’ve been. I feel, oh fine, so there’s another answer. I don’t know the answer. I’m just a speck of dust here for a nanosecond, and I’m very grateful.
LAWTON: Simon says he’s fine with not knowing the answers, but he has sought input on his questions. He has spoken with the Dalai Lama, and he once spent hours talking with British evangelical theologian John Stott, who died last year.
SIMON: I talked about everything that was on my mind about things that seemed illogical, and he talked about why he had come to his conclusions and I think both of us enjoyed the conversation immensely. And I left there feeling that I had a greater understanding of where belief comes from when it doesn’t have an agenda.
LAWTON: Many of Simon’s songs raise universal questions about things like destiny and the meaning of life.
SIMON: Quite often, people read or hear things in my songs that I think are more true than what I wrote.
FALSANI: He looks at the world and kind of wonders what the heck is going on, like many of us do. And he asks good questions, and sort of seems to have his finger on the heartbeat spiritually of a culture, then and now. Sort of a God-chronicler by accident.
LAWTON: Simon says he’s gratified, and somewhat mystified, that some people have told him they believe God has spoken to them through his music.
SIMON: Is it a profound truth? I don’t know. I don’t know, but it sounds nice and the combination with the music and the words and all that produces a certain effect and I feel I’m like a vessel and it, it passed through me and I was the editor and I’m glad that people like it and yeah, that’s it. I’m glad.
LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton reporting.
LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, the military’s largest and most advanced medical facility. It’s where doctors send some of the most seriously burned and wounded soldiers to recover, sometimes with artificial limbs. Since the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, thousands of soldiers, like Private Carlos Gomez, have suffered injuries like his. He was on a scouting mission and was seriously wounded when his vehicle ran over a roadside bomb in Afghanistan earlier this year.
PVT CARLOS GOMEZ: Well, the blast, it shot us straight up in the air so the impact actually broke my left leg. It shattered my heel and my bones down my right, left leg, I mean, and my right leg got crushed. They couldn’t save it anymore so they had to amputate it here at Brooke Army Medical Center.
SEVERSON: Two other soldiers were wounded in the blast. One was killed. At first Gomez wasn’t sure he wanted to live.
PVT GOMEZ: I woke up, you know, not really knowing what happened still. I didn’t know that my leg was amputated, and when I was fully, you know, aware of what’s going on, I saw my leg, yeah, I broke down in tears, you know, and I hated my life, and I didn’t want nothing to do with it.
SEVERSON: The first battle many seriously wounded soldiers face is whether they want to go on with their lives and then endure the long, painful process of healing, often alone. Doctors have learned that wounded soldiers heal faster and more completely when they have family around them. That’s what happens here at the Warrior and Family Support Center in San Antonio. It is the only one of its kind. It was the dream of Judith Markelz, and now she’s the director.
JUDITH MARKELZ (Warrior Family Support Center Program Manager): We attempt to form a home away from home for wounded warriors and their families, to help them feel some kind of connection to each other, things for them to do every day to take them outside of their own world and help them transition back to active duty or to the civilian community where they’re going to have to adjust and make a lot of changes.
SEVERSON: Although it’s located on an army post, the Warrior and Family Support Center is funded entirely from private donations and staffed by about 150 volunteers. Families live in apartments close by, so they can help soldiers accept what is called “the new normal,” which means their life will never be quite the same again. Sometimes family is as important as the medical care.
MARKELZ: To know that someone is there, that someone that comes from home to take care of you makes a tremendous difference for our warriors. If you believe in the triad of the healing of the mind, body, and spirit, then we probably fall in the category of the healing of the spirit.
SEVERSON: Bryant Casteel is a Baptist chaplain at the center. He says the most important part of his job is simply to be there.
CHAPLAIN (CAPT) BRYANT CASTEEL: You know, sometimes you want to find the right words. I found many times when dealing with soldiers there’s not a right word. There’s no right way to tell someone you’re going to be okay. And some say, hey, can you pray for me chaplain? You know, can you let me know things are going to be all right? I can’t promise you, but I can promise you I’ll be here to support you.
SEVERSON: One of the favorite nights around here is bingo night. For a while they forget that the war for them is not yet over. For those who think this must be a very sad place, Judith Markelz says the opposite is true. She says it’s a place of hope, which is the name of the sculpture hanging in the center which was created by a staff sergeant who had 29 surgeries while he was at Brooke. She says the wounded may cry in their beds at night, but never in public.
MARKELZ: These young men and women do not want your sympathy. They want your support and in the help of their healing, because they’re going to be okay. They did what they were commanded to do, and they did it with great integrity and honor.
SEVERSON: And many paid a huge price, like Master Sergeant Doug Reed with the Ohio National Guard, critically wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan in 2010. He’s the father of seven kids, here with his wife, Jana.
MSG DOUG REED: The angel of death had me in his arms, and Jesus said, “No, I’m not done with you.” So they fought over me, and my jaw came off.
JANA REED: He was very close to death, in the fact that I mean with every surgery they didn’t know if he would ever wake up or ever become independent. And so that’s when I just had to say, “Okay, God, I am not in control. The doctors are not in control. But you are in control, and you are going to have to fix this, if this is what you want.”
SEVERSON: And when he finally did wake up, for two months he didn’t know his wife. He didn’t even know who he was.
JANA REED: But when our kids walked in the door he gave them a hug, and he called them all by their pet names, and so the kids began to cry, not because of what they saw, but because it’s dad, he does know me, when the doctors were saying we don’t think he’ll know you.
MSG REED: I didn’t know what I looked like. It couldn’t have been good, and they don’t see that. They don’t care if I have teeth or not or my jaw is out of shape now or anything else. What they cared about is I was still alive. I was still with them.
SEVERSON: Judith Markelz says the families themselves need support.
MARKELZ: This is not a singular effort. It involved families, children, wives, mothers. An injury or a death is like dropping a rock in the water, and the ripples go forever, and they affect everyone with whom they ever came in contact.
SEVERSON: Private Gomez has two children, and he says he knows things will get better when he gets his prosthesis, but in the meantime his seven-year-old son is having a hard time.
PVT GOMEZ: It’s affecting him. I know definitely it’s affecting him. You know, he has to help out his dad a lot with stuff that I can’t do, like picking stuff up for me, you know, putting on my shoes, stuff like that.
SEVERSON: Gomez says he’s always been religious, but one of the few times he didn’t have time to pray was when he rushed out on a mission in the middle of the night, the mission that cost him his leg. He says the war has not cost him his faith.
PVT GOMEZ: I don’t question God, not one day, you know, why this happened to me. I thank him actually, because it could have been the opposite, you know. I could have paid the ultimate sacrifice and passed away. It was because of him I’m still sitting here talking to you right now.
SEVERSON: Jana Reed says her faith and her husband’s are actually stronger.
JANA REED: Because every day we have a miracle that has been answered, and some people might say, oh, it’s a coincidence, but we’ve just had too many coincidences in the pasts 16 months that I do not accept it. It is not a coincidence.
SEVERSON: Chaplain Casteel says he has seen how the Warrior and Family Support Center has helped soldiers get better quicker. But he worries about what happens when the soldiers go home.
CH CASTEEL: When you walk around here, you don’t feel like you’re different. You don’t feel like, wow, someone’s staring at me or looking at me like I’m strange, and so I think here for a soldier it can be safe. Now when they leave this environment, going back to their home of record, then it could be a little more challenging, and I think that anxiety rises again for the soldier: Hey, will I be accepted?
SEVERSON: There was a time when wounded soldiers returning from the Vietnam War received more hostility than community support. But times have changed.
MARKELZ: Whether you agree with what these young men and women did is of, frankly, no concern to me. If you don’t like the war, it is not an issue for me. The issue is that we continue to support these young men and women for the rest of our days and theirs, because this doesn’t end tomorrow.
SEVERSON: She says that there are now other warrior and family support centers being built around the country modeled after the one here.
For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Lucky Severson in San Antonio, Texas.
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BOB ABERRNETHY, host: In a coordinated effort, 43 Catholic institutions filed federal lawsuits to stop the Obama administration’s plan to require free coverage of contraceptive services. Among the plaintiffs were Catholic dioceses, hospitals, social service agencies, and universities, including Notre Dame. They say the requirement would infringe on their religious freedom. Supporters of the coverage plan say a proposed compromise would avoid religious liberty concerns, but the Catholic bishops reject that compromise. Meanwhile, a new Gallup Poll found that 82 percent of US Catholics believe birth control is morally acceptable. Fifteen percent said it was morally wrong.
Joining me now are Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Kevin Eckstrom, editor-in-chief of Religion News Service. Kevin, Kim, welcome. Kevin, what do you make of this?
KEVIN ECKSTROM: Well, the Catholic institutions that filed suit are basically fighting over whether or not they have to provide birth control coverage to their employees in their insurance plans. That’s what the root of this is all about. The fact that they, 43 groups, came together and filed a dozen lawsuits shows that they are trying to come at this with the full weight of the church, to show that this is not just an isolated diocese or a small group, but that the whole range of the church is really upset about this. And it also signals, I think, that they don’t see any other alternative, that they don’t see a political compromise in the works with the White House. They, I think, in a lot of ways, feel like they have no other choice but to go to court.
KIM LAWTON: And they feel that the compromise that the White House has offered which some more progressive, liberal, moderate Catholics say that’s okay— these groups are saying no, it’s not okay. It doesn’t cover us, and for them it’s a matter of religious freedom, and they very clearly said, this is not about contraception, really. It’s about religious freedom and our ability to practice our beliefs and the government not telling us what to do, what we have to do, and the government not also saying who is a religious group that qualifies for an exemption from the policy.
ABERNETHY: And how representative do you think these groups are?
ECKSTROM: Well, they’re representative in that it’s a broad range. I mean, it’s schools, it’s groups, it’s dioceses, it’s big dioceses and small ones. But it’s only a handful of dioceses, I think, you know, less than 12 dioceses out of 200 or so in the country, so the vast majority of local dioceses did not join this suit.
ABERNETHY: But that doesn’t mean that they like, what’s going on.
ECKSTROM: Right. And a lot of them support what the bishops as a whole are trying to do, but there is some dissension in the ranks about what the best legal strategy is, and a lot of people, a lot of bishops, or some bishops think that this was a bit premature.
ABERNETHY: The fury of the opposition and the breadth of it suggest that the administration might have miscalculated when they presented this in the first place. Do you see that?
LAWTON: Well, the first policy, the first iteration of this policy got very widespread disapproval from a lot of Catholics, and we’ve heard that inside the administration there were people saying, warning the administration that this would not be popular. Now, more people, more Catholics have approved this, the compromise that the Obama administration tried to work out, but there are some suggestions that maybe they weren’t prepared for this and that the religious outreach wasn’t what it should have been in order to figure out how to maneuver this.
ABERNETHY: Quickly, you agree?
ECKSTROM: Yeah, and a lot of Catholic bishops said that they were basically blindsided by this. They were never consulted beforehand and say hey, this is what we’re planning to do, what do you think? Can we find something that works? Instead, they were just handed this and said take it or leave it, and the bishops basically have said no, we’re not going to take it.
ABERNETHY: Right in the middle of an election year.
ECKSTROM: Right. And there is some concern both within the bishops’ conference but also without that the bishops risk appearing to be anti-Obama or perhaps too Republican and that the timing on this needs to be very, very sensitive.
ABERNETHY: Kevin Eckstrom. Kim Lawton. Many thanks.
KIM LAWTON: Graduation day at Union Theological Seminary in New York. This multi-denominational Christian institution describes itself as “progressive and evangelistic,” and its stated vision is that graduates will change the world by practicing their theological vocations. That vision explicitly includes women, such as Itang Young. Young grew up in Houston. She says she never saw herself becoming a pastor or religious leader.
ITANG YOUNG: The leadership roles in church were typically held by men, and the women who did work in the church were either Sunday school teachers or they worked in the kitchen or they worked in the nursery. Very rarely was there a woman in the pulpit.
LAWTON: Young became an engineer and took on a high-powered corporate job. Then, she started questioning the purpose of her life.
YOUNG: I needed to do something to help improve the lives of the people around me.
LAWTON: She concluded that seminary would help her get there, and at Union, she found a place especially open to female students.
Nationally, women make up about one-third of all seminary students. But here at Union Theological Seminary, they’re more than 50 percent of the student body. Women have been coming here for 100 years, but as recently as the 1960s, more than 90 percent of the students here were men.
PRESIDENT SERENE JONES: I think right now at this moment in history we’re in the midst of something of the magnitude of the Protestant reformation.
LAWTON: Serene Jones is Union’s first female president. She believes the rate at which women are entering theology and ministry is one of the biggest changes in 2,000 years of Christianity.
JONES: There are communities in this country in which if a woman says she wants to be a minister, she’s not going to be looked at like she’s stark raving mad. To have a situation in which we recognize the fullness of life of women, the full equality of women changes everything.
LAWTON: Women with seminary degrees are becoming ordained pastors. But they are also becoming chaplains, social workers, counselors, authors, scholars and professors. Despite the new opportunities, limitations do remain, even in denominations that support female leadership.
JONES: The number of women from Union and the number of women in this country who are the senior leaders of large congregations is so miniscule, and it still is sort of the, what they refer to as the stained glass ceiling. You can only go so far.
LAWTON: Jones says the challenges can be subtle.
JONES: There are obstacles I think in the church, of people who don’t even know they have a prejudice against women. But they’ll say things like, “You know, she just, I just, I can’t hear her voice in the back of the sanctuary. I want a minister who can talk loud.” Or “You know, she just looks a little too awkward in the pulpit.”
LAWTON: Then, there are more overt limitations. The Roman Catholic Church and certain evangelical denominations oppose female ordination.
PROFESSOR JANET WALTON: I am a Roman Catholic woman. I have no place at this table. This table is for men.
LAWTON: Janet Walton is a Roman Catholic nun who has been professor of worship at Union since 1981. She’s one of several Catholic women on the faculty here.
PROF. WALTON: It’s very difficult for me to imagine that millions of Catholics never experience a woman leading the liturgy. Because I think it matters. It’s not essentially that I think it makes a difference whether a woman or a man does it, but that no women can do it is a very big problem in the Catholic Church.
LAWTON: Part of how it matters, she argues, is in portraying a fuller vision of faith.
PROF. WALTON: There are lots of ways in which the, being a woman and having the experiences that go with being a woman do affect the way one understands God.
BARBARA RICE: It’s not just about having the same place as men in ministry. I mean, certainly we need all those same rights and need access to as many of those positions, absolutely, and equal pay, for sure, but it’s also about bringing all of our uniqueness as women into those positions. We have gifts. We have gifts that are uniquely women gifts and that those don’t get checked at the door
RICE: What is sacred?
LAWTON: Barbara Rice is a second-year masters of divinity student who says she has wanted to be in ministry her entire life. She grew up in a conservative evangelical church in North Carolina, and as a woman and a lesbian, she felt her opportunities for ministry were restricted. But she believes women have much to contribute.
RICE: We have an ability to listen to our intuition. And I think, as far as spiritual matters go, that that’s incredibly important. Whether that’s the way we’re socialized or whatever it is I think that we tend to have a sense of things, that if we can learn to trust it, especially with the discernment of a community, it can be a really spiritually enlivening thing.
LAWTON: Jones believes women bring to theology what she calls a sense of spirituality wedded to the ordinary.
JONES: It’s about breaking bread and putting on Band-Aids on a skinned knee, and about being angry and standing up for justice in a community. Those aren’t things that men don’t do, because they do. It’s just that women somehow bear that in their souls with a depth and a persistence that brings freshness to ministry.
CHARLENE SINCLAIR: The journey for women has been a journey that’s been so difficult so that when they finally are able to step on this path, there’s a level of just like deep joy and gratitude.
LAWTON: For Charlene Sinclair, a 4th year PhD student, seminary has been a way to enhance her work as a community organizer.
SINCLAIR: Seminary actually not only gave me permission to engage my head in this process, but showed me that engaging my head was critical so that I wouldn’t be a reactionary pastor or a reactionary spiritual person, but I can do it out of a place of, not just deep love, but deep, thoughtful love.
LAWTON: Jones found her own passion for theology early on.
JONES: Studying theology, reading Augustine and Calvin and learning about scripture and reading about women’s leadership, it was like eating chocolate all day long. It was so delicious. And that’s when I, when I stumbled into that world I realized I’d found my home.
LAWTON: She grew up in the Disciples of Christ denomination and says her family encouraged her to pursue that passion.
JONES: The struggle along the way was, it’s one thing to imagine yourself doing something and it’s another thing in the broader world to have this, the confidence and the strength to believe you actually can do it.
LAWTON: Jones says it’s important for women to have role models and people to encourage them. She mentors younger women. And, she says, men can also play an important role.
JONES: As women go into the ministry it’s often going to be men that are their biggest supporters. It’s not just women that are out there cheering and you know, giving sustenance.
LAWTON: Itang Young says her time at seminary vastly expanded her vision of how God may use her in ministry. She says it’s actually not all that different from her work as an engineer.
YOUNG: As an engineer, we build things better. We deconstruct and reconstruct items, objects, in a way that helps to improve the lives of other people. And within a ministerial context, the function is the same. We’re doing church in a new way. We are building God’s people. So I went from building things to helping build God’s people.
LAWTON: For now, Young is still deciding whether or not she’ll pursue ordination. She’s not at all worried that as a woman, her ministry options may be limited.
YOUNG: There’s one thing that I learned here at Union that is to create opportunities where none exist. So if there’s not a position available, market yourself and perhaps one could open. The word of God says that your gifts will make room for you, and I believe that.
LAWTON: Jones says that’s the vision she has for all her students.
JONES: If you can come to believe that God wants you to succeed and flourish and lead, that’s unstoppable.
I’m Kim Lawton in New York.
“There is a whole historical world of women who have risen as leaders in religious communities because they were called to do it, not because someone said they could,” according to the first woman president of Union Theological Seminary. Watch additional excerpts of correspondent Kim Lawton’s interview with Serene Jones on women in theology and ministry.
TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: The Alabama case before the Supreme Court stems from the brutal killing of 52-year-old Cole Cannon, whose body was found in the charred ruins of his mobile home nine years ago. Authorities first thought it to be an accident, but bruises on Cannon’s body and his broken ribs prompted them to investigate further. It turned out to be a murder committed by a neighbor, Evan Miller, who was only 14 years old, and his 16-year-old friend, Colby Smith. It was in the early morning hours; the three had been drinking heavily. When Cannon appeared too drunk to resist, the teenagers tried to rob him, but a fight broke out.
Children are capable of committing horrible crimes, even 14-year-olds like Evan Miller, who beat his victim over the head with this baseball bat and then crushed his ribs with it. He then placed a sheet over his head and told him, ‘I am God. I have come to take your life.’ A fourteen-year-old.
Candy Cheatham is the victim’s daughter.
CANDY CHEATHAM: Even with that, he did not stop beating him, and they set the trailer on fire—there were at least three or four points of origin—and left my Dad there to die. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, and he had about seven or eight broken ribs in combination with the smoke inhalation. Then they proceeded to brag to friends about what they did.
O’BRIEN: Murder in the course of another felony—in this case arson– is a capital offense in Alabama, as it is in most states. The Supreme Court threw out the death penalty for juvenile offenders in 2005, so when the jury returned its guilty verdict, the judge could only sentence Miller to life without parole. The Supreme Court won’t allow more, and Alabama law doesn’t allow anything less for one convicted of capital murder. Prosecutors say Miller got what he deserved.
ROBERT LANG (Prosecutor, Lawrence County, MO): Our legislature and the people of our state believe that if you commit these type of crimes, there are only two punishments that are fitting, and that is either the death penalty or life in prison without parole. So his protection is he’s not going to get the death penalty, but he’s going to be put away for the rest of his life.
O’BRIEN: The Supreme Court is now expected to use the Miller case to determine whether states are required to consider giving juveniles a second chance, no matter what they did. And each side is giving up a little in this case. Alabama is not arguing that all juvenile murderers should be ineligible for parole, only those who commit the worst crimes—crimes that would bring a death sentence if the defendant were an adult.
Evan Miller is represented by the Equal Justice Initiative and its founder and executive director, Bryan Stevenson, and Stevenson isn’t asking anyone actually be given parole, only that when offenders are so young that at some point far down the road, they at least be allowed to demonstrate they are entitled to be set free.
BRYAN STEVENSON (Equal Justice Initiative): I think everyone is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done, and I think that policy makers can make decisions about how to punish them. But I think children are uniquely more than their worst act; they have quintessential qualities and characteristics that a decent society, a maturing society, an evolved society, we believe, is constitutionally obligated to recognize and protect.
O’BRIEN: An argument Stevenson pressed in court to a skeptical Justice Antonin Scalia.
STEVENSON: I think the easier rule to write would be that there is a categorical ban on all life without parole sentences for all children up until the age of 18.
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: How do I come to that decision? What, do I just consult my own preferences on this matter? Something like 39 states allow it. I mean, the American people, you know, have decided that’s the rule. They allow it, and the federal government allows it. So I’m supposed to impose my judgment on what seems to be a consensus of the American people?
O’BRIEN: John Neiman, Alabama’s solicitor general, says life without parole is a reasonable alternative to the death penalty, even for juveniles.
JOHN NEIMAN (Solicitor General, Alabama): The theory and the thought is that if someone doesn’t deserve the death penalty for that particular crime they deserve life without parole. That’s the appropriate way to express society’s outrage at these sorts of aggravated murders.
It is reasonable for legislatures to conclude that they’re going to draw a line in the sand with respect to aggravated murder, such that as a floor in terms of the appropriate punishment the defendant is going to get, at the very least, life without parole, a punishment that’s no doubt severe, but one that is less severe than the impact the crime has had on society.
O’BRIEN: But Attorney Bryan Stevenson reminded the justices that they have acknowledged in their past decisions that because children do not think like adults, they are less culpable.
STEVENSON: And the decision-making of children, the thinking of children is categorically different. They’re not thinking three steps ahead. They’re not thinking about consequences. They’re not actually experienced enough with the world to understand how they deal with their frustrations in the same way that an adult is, and so their judgments about what they intend to do, their declarations mean something very, very different.
O’BRIEN: At one point, the state’s demand for retribution appeared to give way to a justice’s concern for a child.
KENT HOLT (Assistant Attorney General, Arkansas): The principle justification in this case lies with the retributive principle. The punishment for this crime reinforces the sanctity of human life, and it expresses the state’s moral outrage that something like this could happen.
JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG: You say the sanctity of human life, but you’re dealing with a 14-year-old being sentenced to life in prison, so he will die in prison without any hope. I mean, essentially you’re making a 14-year-old a throw-away person.
CANDY CHEATHAM: Society needs to be protected, and it’s not throwing away a juvenile. If he wants to be rehabilitated, that can happen behind bars. It’s just too high of a cost to risk.
O’BRIEN: Candy Cheatham remembers her father as a “good man” and says how he died will haunt her for as long as she lives.
STEVENSON: If we win, the United States will still have the harshest punishment scheme for children in the world. We will still have very severe punishments in place to punish any offender who commits an aggravated crime.
O’BRIEN: The court was sharply divided in 2005 when it found the death penalty unconstitutional for juvenile offenders. Whether juveniles may also be spared life in prison with no parole when they commit murder isn’t any easier. Although some justices were sympathetic, others are known to feel that these decisions are best left to juries and state legislatures, not federal judges. The court’s opinions, and there will surely be several, are due in the next month.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien at the Supreme Court.
