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1/ It’s summer; I have nothing to do except bake a cake for some needy local children (and write a book). And this whole Mike Pompeo human rights commission thing is in my (very small) wheelhouse. politico.com/story/2019/07/…
2/ In the immortal words of @KevinMKruse: “Let’s do this.” This thread provides background on the commission chair, Mary Ann Glendon. The next runs down the other members. The last assesses the significance. Bottom line: don’t drink this Kool-Aid; drink mine instead.
3/ Mary Ann Glendon: first up. I tread carefully: she is my former colleague @Harvard_Law and, before, my 1L property teacher, from whom I learned everything I know about the subject. (Is there anyone out there who knows how to write a will?)
4/ Glendon was once a great scholar, a pupil of Max Rheinstein, the German emigre to the University of Chicago law school who helped introduce Max Weber to American academia, and Glendon followed him into comparative law.
5/ She has interesting personal background: from Western Massachusetts, she was involved in the civil rights movement, had a child with an African-American in the 1960s and, later, was married to a Jewish labor lawyer for decades. nytimes.com/1995/08/29/wor…
6/ Glendon slowly joined right-wing Catholic intellectual life, developing an interesting attitude towards rights: criticizing their proliferation and progressivism, while also reclaiming their origins in Christian conservatism after World War II. theamericanconservative.com/articles/whats…
7/ Her book on the Universal Declaration, “A World Made New” (2001), stood out in its time for emphasizing the conservative and religious origins of the UDHR, and was a direct template for Pompeo’s discussion yesterday. penguinrandomhouse.com/books/60804/a-…
8/ By the way, Glendon was completely right about these origins, as I have argued myself in my own “Christian Human Rights,” albeit drawing a different set of morals. (It’s still for sale!) upenn.edu/pennpress/book…
9/ At that stage, Glendon initiated an attempt not to reject human rights (as others at the Christian conservative magazine @firstthingsmag for which she has frequently wrote did and do) but to reclaim them.
10/ To her credit, given the presence of economic and social rights in the UDHR and the Christian embrace of welfare in social thought and post-World War II West European states, Glendon once emphasized their importance.
11/ But Glendon has in the long run proved a conformist member of the “theocon” right, especially in recent years, albeit sticking with her strategy of reclaiming human rights for it—a strategy which finds fulfillment in Pompeo’s initiative.
12/ Further study is warranted on her evolution, but recall that Glendon was last in national news for backing out of a @notredame award because the university had the temerity to award @BarackObama an honorary doctorate, enraging the right. ncronline.org/news/politics/…
13/ As others will emphasize later, her recent piece with conservative Seth Kaplan continues her original strategy but masks not just continuing skepticism about abortion and gay rights but also of economic and social rights-no longer on her list. firstthings.com/article/2019/0…
14/ What is really worth looking out for, however, is whether this commission reflects the growing accommodation of the religious and especially Catholic right with the alt-right. The list of other figures on the commission suggests as much, as my next thread shows.
15/ In this regard, note that Glendon’s son-in-law Thomas D. Williams, a former Roman Catholic priest (and Legionary of Christ, if you know what that is) who married Glendon’s daughter from her first marriage, has long worked for Breitbart. insidethevatican.com/magazine/edito…
16/ No guilt by association, but the fact that William is “Breitbart’s man in Rome” and linked to the Steve Bannon-ish attempt to connect the alt- and Catholic Right is undoubtedly a data point in understanding our time. nytimes.com/2017/01/10/wor…
