Republican candidate for Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is a former Rhodes Scholar who's done some interesting scholarship. Back in 2003, for example, I wrote:
So there I was peacefully reviewing what the editors had done to one of my law review articles, feeling quite content because they hadn't changed much and the changes they had made were generally improvements, when I suddenly realized that I had cited an article by recently defeated GOP Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal (Relativism, Neutrality, and Transcendentalism: Beyond Autonomy, 57 Louisiana Law Review 1253, 1253 (1997)) for the proposition that: "Because all conceptions of the good necessarily invoke non-derivable moral assumptions, we cannot avoid an inquiry into the morality of an act we propose to regulate." Later in the article I also cited it for the proposition that: "Laws mala in se derive their legitimacy from ideals—justice, love, liberty—that have traction precisely because they are based in a common belief in the truth of some abstract principle." When I wrote this article 2 years ago I had no idea who Bobby Jindal was, of course, and the editorial process had taken so long I had forgotten all about those footnotes. But now, these citations are quite literally footnotes to history. Or something like that.
It appears that Jindal also wrote an essay for the New Oxford Review, in which he rehearsed the claims Roman Catholicism to be the one true Church.
This prompted Dailykos founder Markos Moulitsas Zúniga to leap to the defense of Protestants. Of course, Zúniga is an outspoken atheist, which makes one wonder whether Markos' concern might be more partisan than theological.
Which leads me to a Crooked Timber post by Henry Farrell. I don't agree with much of Henry's politics, but I admire his intellectual honesty. This post is a classic example:
There’s a lot of excitement in the netroots over a piece written by Bobby Jindal in which he tries to persuade Protestants of the benefits of Catholicism. After reading the piece in question, I’m at a loss to understand what all the fuss is about. It seems to me to be a standard – even banal – exercise in Catholic apologetics. That the Catholic church considers itself to be the one true church, to hold the apostolic succession, to believe that works are important as well as faith etc etc … isn’t news. Nor is it news that a conservative Catholic politician would believe these things. ...
But if the netroots are blowing it out of proportion, the ‘Jindal on Religion’ website and accompanying TV ad, put up by Louisiana’s Democratic Party, are actively dishonest. The website says that Jindal argues that
Jindal states non-Catholics are burdened with “utterly depraved minds” and calls individuals who ignore the teachings of the Catholic church intellectually dishonest.
The actual quotes in their proper context are:
the alternative is to trust individual Christians, burdened with, as Calvin termed it, their “utterly depraved” minds, to overcome their tendency to rationalize, their selfish desires, and other effects of original sin.
and
I trust I have provided enough evidence to indicate that the Catholic Church deserves a careful examination by non-Catholics. It is not intellectually honest to ignore an institution with such a long and distinguished history and with such an impressively global reach.
The first rather obviously isn’t a claim that non-Catholics are utterly depraved. It’s a mildly clumsy attempt to hoist Protestants on their own petard, building on earlier discussion of how Reformation Protestants believed people to be depraved, and saying that it’s a bit odd then that Protestants should trust them to interpret religion on their own. The second is a claim that it’s intellectually dishonest to ignore the Catholic Church, and that Protestants should consider converting to it very carefully. This manifestly isn’t a claim that those who don’t follow the Catholic church’s teachings (which is the everyday meaning of “those who ignore the teachings”) are ipso facto intellectually dishonest.
Henry concludes:
I don’t know very much about Jindal’s politics, and I imagine that there’s a lot that I would disagree with. He may indeed have taken political stances that I would find absolutely reprehensible. That doesn’t change the fact that this is an obviously dishonest attack.
This is the sort of thing that keeps Crooked Timber high on my list of daily reads. They call it like they see it, even when it's not to their short-term partisan advantage.
