Whose income depends on something to talk against it. Do you believe there is any truth to the battle between the allpro rich and everyone else . Guest it symbolizes a lot of good friends who are very wealthy multimillionaires who i know who are totally against what is happening in politics reformers trying to change things, they act in a very bipartisan way to solve problems. I think you have oversimplified. Host last call for michey Edwards Phyllis in california. Caller thank you, at cspan. Would you comment on the letter the 47 republican senators signed ended it will ultimately hurt the Republican Party . Host what do you think . Caller i think it is treasonous. Host thank you. Guest it is not treasonous. It is perfectly appropriate for congress to speak out the idea of a president in charge of Foreign Policy is complete nonsense. Is not the system. But i think it was stupid. If you want to send a matter say whether an agreement should be or should not be the we should do it is communicated to the president and the American People not to the iranians. Secondly, there was in place an agreement where you have a lot of democrats and republicans coming together to insist that the president submit this to congress for its approval and by having a complete the partisan letter signed by only the members of one party at torpedoes that. It is not treasonous it was just stupid. Host here is the book, the parties versus the people how to turn republicans and democrats into americans. Michey edwards is the author. He is now with the aspen institute. Thank you, congressman. Every weekend booktv offers programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. Keep watching for more on cspan2 and watch any of our past programs online at booktv. Org. Host joining us on booktv is Robert George professor of jurisprudence at princeton university. We want to talk to him about one of his most recent books conscience and its enemies, confronting the dogmas of liberal secularism. Doctor how you define liberal secularism . Is a view about human nature, human destiny and Human Dignity that competes with other views, some secular but not liberal, some religious. A few that is very common in places like the one where we are now, university communities. I would venture to say it is the predominant view in the elite sector of our culture prominent in europe as well which has become a very secular society. It embraces the ideas about liberty and personality, the nature of human beings, ethics, that are distinctive in our own time, associated with socially liberal views about matters of sexual, lifeanddeath issues, generally identity issues the spectrum of hot but morally charged issues in our own culture. That is the view that i am writing the book against. Although i hope respectfully because it has credible supporters and i want to to them the justice that they deserve. They put forward arguments and i want to put forward counterarguments. Host you write i have founded a barrel views are so widespread as to go largely unquestioned. As a result many in these elite sequels yield to the temptation to believe that anyone who disagrees with them is a bigot or a religious fundamentalist reason and science, they confidently believe, are on their side. Guest that is me. Any host anything you want to add to that . Guest i said what i want to say. I would be happy to defend it. I wasnt talking about the dominance of that particular view of secularism in culture generally. Is dominant in the elite sector of the culture. Our culture is divided. Popular opinion is different from elite opinion. By definition elite opinion is more influential and popular opinion. William f. Buckley once caught the spirit of that when he talked about his preference for being governed by the first 800 names in the boston Telephone Directory rather than being governed by a harvard faculty. What he was recognizing is on not range of morally important issues in our culture in our time, if you ask 800 people in the boston phone book or the trend to new jersey phone book or the lynchburg va phone book for their opinion about abortion, marriage, affirmativeaction, capital punishment, you name it you will get an answer very different from the answer you would get if you asked 800 people from a major professional association or university professors. That is the division we have in the country culturally. Host what are your callers of a Decent Society . Guest respect for the person and his fundamental dignity. In a Decent Society human beings, persons individuals will not be regarded as means to larger ends social ends going beyond the person. They will not be cogs in a collectivist wheel. But rather will be ends for which other things including the great institutions of law and the economy and the political system means. A view that persons are what ultimately matters and persons have a unique inherent profound and equal dignity. And that is the sake of which that we want there to be a productive economy. We want a fair legal system, we want the political system that respects peoples basic rights and gives them the right to participation, what we call democracy or republican governance. The second pillar is the institution of the family. The fundamental unit of society based on the marital that brings people into the world and gives people their fundamental care and nurturing and education at least until they reach maturity. For the first 16 or 18 or 21 years of their lives. State run operations for the family. The family in my view is the original and best department of education and welfare. Does better than any other institution can do. The fundamental job of delivering those services and transmitting to each new generation the virtues the resources, the traits of character and the understandings to be good citizens and to be good people. All the other institutions in society, the economy, the political system, the legal system depends on there be a fairly large number of people who are decent honorable, hardworking, who obey the law not because they fear punishment but because they believe it is the right thing to do. They will pay out of conscience and those institutions cant produce such people. Business firms need employees who are honest, managers who will be responsible, they need purchasers of goods and services who will pay their bill but they cant produce such people, they cant produce the virtues that enables them to draw on a pool of hardworking honest employees, managers, payers and bills for goods and services. Of those people ought to exist they have to be produced by another institution, namely the family. Same for the legal system, the political system. The political system, legal system depend on most people most of the time doing the right thing because they fear detection and punishment but because it is the right thing to do. President obama or president bush cant simply issue an edict saying there will be virtuous people. The Supreme Court cant hand down a ruling requiring people be virtuous. If people are going to have those virtues so they will do the right thing most of the time because it is the right fame, if theyre brought up in that tradition of richard by their families. Family is the second pillar of a Decent Society, a healthy functioning vibrant marriage and family culture. It is indispensable. Such a culture will not be only the family but institutions that support the family and its work. Religious institutions for example. The other institutions of what toqueville called Civil Society neighborhood associations unions, if nec clubs. Fraternal organizations, civic associations of every sort boy scout, a campfire girls. All these institutions have their fundamental social significance in assisting the family in Health Education welfare functions. What i said about the families not to denigrate the role of government in state. We could not get along with simply a community of communities or community of families without any policy. It is to say that there is a fundamental role for the family that cant be substituted for. When the state, sometimes it has to do steps in to take over the role of the family. The family is broken down in a community. It is going to do the best it can but it will not be able to do well with the healthy functioning family can do. The third pillar of decent societies is having a vibrant, productive fair, honest legal system and political system one in which peoples fundamental rights including their rights as individual persons be treated with respect and dignity or observed, honored, what people are protected against predation from private actors, where the government itself restrains itself from interfering where it shouldnt interfere for violating peoples right to reducing people to the status of mere means to leather ends or cogs in the machine, then things go haywire and you get tyranny. It could be of the left, the right communism, fascism, but where you dont have affair, the efficient system of government. Pretty soon you are going to lose those other pillars of society. These three pillars, a culture of respect for the individual person and a fair and effective system of government. Those of the pillars of Decent Society. Host is the respect of individuals dignity the same as respect for freedom for the individual . It includes respect for freedom of the individual. So long as we understand freedom to be not simply doing whatever you want whenever you want with whomever you want for whatever reason you want any time you want. What our founders distinguish from freedom respect for peoples hon. Liberties, basic civil liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of the press basic liberties we americans associate with our bill of rights, due process of law, equal protection of the law. Those are essential to the dignity of this human being and the role of government is twofold. It is to protect those basic civil rights and civil liberties, what we have taken to calling humanrights and also to respect them themselves. As James Madison famously said in a federalist papers the job of government is to restrain people from violating each others rights but also to restrain itself from doing the same fame so government has to operate within its own limits even as it tries to protect people from other people violating their rights. Host often people think of individual rights, they can think of topical issues such as abortion or euthanasia. Are those individual rights . I dont believe they are. It will be a moral argument in any case for any punitive right. If you want to indicate a right to freedom of speech we need a moral argument because that is immoral proposition, the idea that people have a right to anything including freedom of speech is immoral proposition. It has to be defended by a moral argument. We need to identify what the reasons are for it. Some people believe, i am not one of them, that people have a right to kill themselves or a right to assist others in killing themselves or they have a right to abortion. I want to know what the argument is for that and to present the counterargument. En conscience and its enemies bikers and the counter argument in both those cases. Host when it comes to family a marriage gay families. Are those included in the cabarrus family in your definition . Guest i think family is the unit based on the conjugal relationship of husband and wife so i criticize the idea that marriage is simply a romantic Sexual Partnership of any two persons of either sex. I dont think any argument can successfully be made for abandoning the conjugal conception of marriage as union of husband and wife in favor of the view that would recognize as marriage persons of the same sex that wont by the same token and tail as a matter of principles that three people a four people five people can be married in a sexual romantic partnership, raised children together, have a house hold together and so forth. I think if we recognize samesex partnerships as true marriages we have abandoned the idea of marriage we will loose any principal basis for offering to traditional norms such as exclusivity, permanence of commitment. Subject of the people may for whatever reason for traditional of habit, a field they want to stick with those norms. Not just two four but the sexually clothes rather than open should be a permanent commitment rather and temporary commitment. Those will be subject to these eyes, there wont be a principal reason for maintaining those norms. It will have to be in the idea of marriage as a conjugal partnership. They procreative the orient it and if not procreative the husband and wife. My argument is marriage is the union that brings together man and woman as a husband and wife to be father and mother to any children born of that union. Conferring upon those children the inestimable gift of being brought up the committed bond of the two whose union brought them into being. And giving to those children if all goes well if things work out, giving to those children both maternal and paternal influences and care. Not every marriage will have children but every child will have a mother and a father. And from a moral point of view is the best to ensure as many children as possible are brought up in the bond of a mother and father who brought them into being. That cant always be true and where it isnt able to be true, what cant happen because of death or desertion or marital breakup for what have you there are ways to deal with that the best we can, to do city extent possible to the children in the best possible situation but culturally our ideal should be structured to maximize the odds that children will be brought up in that bond. Host where did you come up with the title conscience and its enemies . Guest it is the title of one of the essays. The chapters are as a is that i have written over the past eight, ten years addressing a range of topics and constitutional law, political philosophy and related fields and the as a conscience and its enemies was a criticism of the report by the American College of obstetrics and gynecology which proposed placing strict limits the Ethics Committee report strict limits on the ability of physicians, nurses and other Health Care Workers to declined to participate in abortions and similar procedures they had moral objections to. That disrespect for conscience and the estate became title for the. Host who is john finnes . Caller guest professor of law and philosophy at oxford university, regarded as the worlds leading theorists of the tradition of national law, the thought about law and politics and morality that begins with the age of greeks with sophocles, with plato and aristotle that we find among the roman jurists, such as cicero, articulated in the middle ages like st. Thomas aquinas and other leading christian thinkers. And enlightenment thinkers the great protestant reformers, and leighton and thinkers like john locke which carries on to this day one of the leading competitors in the field of political philosophy for the role of being the right view the best view about law and morality and politics in the relationship among them. Dr. Finnes is one id learned an enormous about, i continue to learn from, very active as a scholar. Host you are a professor at princeton. What has been your Government Service . Guest i had three wonderful opportunities to contribute to Government Service 19921998. I served as a president ial appointee in the United States commission on civil rights. I was appointed on president george h. W. Bushs last morning in office. If not midnight appointment, it was the new appointment and it carried over into president clintons second term. And then in 2002 i was appointed by president george w. Bush to the president s council on bioethics when i had the pleasure of serving in the the great leon kass, the greatest by a weapons system of our time at the university of chicago until he stepped down as chairman and handed the chair over to edmund another distinguished biophysicist. Since 2012 on International Religious freedom, that is a bipartisan independent Government Agency in many ways like the u. S. Commission on civil rights. Their nine of a serving on commission, five democrat appointees i was appointed by speaker of the house john boehner and was elected by my colleagues to a term as chairman. I served on the United Nations commission, the World Commission of scientific knowledge and technology. Host the countrys most influential conservative christian thinker says the New York Times about you. Guest i am a conservative so i dont believe things the New York Times says so from claiming any credit for being an influential conservative christian thinker. Host george will call you one of contemporary conservatisms intellectual pinups. Guest im glad hes intellectual. I dont think he would one that word. Host you have a blurb on this book from elena kagan. People may be surprised. Guest i am delighted and honored to have Justice Elena kagans endorsement. Host is she a friend of yours . Guest we are not Close Friends but we are friends. I have Great Respect for her and honored she would say such a nice thing about me as what she said in that blur. I have never had difficulty having good friendships across ideological lines. I learn from people on the other side. I dont regard them as my adversaries. I regard them as my friends in a common project of truth seeking. For example regularly teach on teaching now with my colleagues and dear friend professor cornel west. Professor west sees the world rather differently from the way i doing very many ways, he is very much a man of the left among conservative side of the spectrum. Yet i learn a lot from him and pays me a compliment of learned a lot for me and our students learn a lot from the engagement they witness between the two of us. We have a bond stronger than what divides us and that is the bond of wanting to get at the truth. And wanting to engage with each other with the goal of getting closer to the truth, closer to seeing what is going on, deeper in our understanding of things. I can ventured to say so even to gain some wisdom from our interactions with each other. Very often i find i misunderstood a position that he holds because i hadnt yet heard him make the argument. And he says the same thing about his experience with me. To understand why conservative would hold a certain point of view until he hears the argument laid out carefully in a circumstance that is not a public debate, but just in the informal circumstance of the classroom or glass of wine late at night over dinner hearing the argument, presenting the argument and engaging with each other and i feel the same way about i was going to say been elena kagan, she was dean of harvard law school, but she and i disagree about most of the great issues in constitutional law and politics. She is a person that i learn from. Host is your joint class with cornell west sellout . It is oversubscribed. We do it as a seminar that is too bad because we restricted to 18 students. The seminar format does serve to enable us to engage each other in a very deep and serious way. I dont think we could do what we do if we were performing in front of a class of 700 or a hundred students which is what we would get if we turned it into a large undergraduate lecture type class so we kept the seminar knowing it means most of the students will not be able to participate but those who do will get the benefit of the dep engagement. You talk in your book about the Judiciary Branch has too much power . It is claimed too much power. The other branches of acquiesced in those claims. I incline more toward the views of jefferson particularly lincoln about the limits on judicial power. The founders of the nation of look at the federalist papers great commentaries that were published as i humans of the ratification of the constitution we see the judiciary there depicted as the least dangerous branch, the branch that would be weakest but would pay an Important Role nonetheless. I dont think the founders had any conception of the judiciary ,s powerful as what it has turned out to be. They use the power to do good and bad. And what i want to argue for is for every branch each of the three branches to strictly remain within the limits of their own power and avoid usurping the authority of the other branches of government and above all to avoid usurping the authority of the democratically constituted American People who are supposed to be sovereign in our constitutional system so i am with lincoln in rejecting the ideal of judicial supremacy. What we need is constitutional supremacy but that means all three of the branches of the federal government and ultimately the people themselves are going to take responsibility for the constitution and respecting scope and limits of the powers of different branches under the constitution. Host you have a chapter called liberal fallacies. What is a liberal fallacies . Im trying to remember what that particular chapter was about. Host you are supposed to know what you are talking about. Guest i know what it was. That was a critique of the late governor of new york who argued famously at notre dame at the university of notre dame that he is a catholic and a committed prolife person who could never know what support as he did support legal abortion, and almost any point in presidency for any reason and even the public funding of abortion. My argument was that was simply straightforwardly a fallacy. If you believe that abortion is fundamentally wrong, and just, violation of human rights would be the only reason you would have for opposing abortion because it is taking the life of a child in the one who is a creature being a human being, living individual member of the human species who has rights like anyone else. If you accept that as the premise for being prolife in the first place in the logic will take you to the need for that human being to enjoy the same equal protection as any other cuban being. If you dont accept that premise, if you think theres nothing wrong with abortion because it is not taking a life or you think it is taking a life but not a human life or you think it is taking a human life but not the life of a human person because you distinguish human being from person, not all human beings are persons only some human beings are persons, human beings are persons of they have achieved a certain age or Something Like that. If you take that view then you have a logically sound reason for your believe that abortion should be legal and even publicly funded but that is not his feeling. Governor cuomos view was he had good reasons for being personally prolife but those reasons were not sufficient to warrant him supporting the use of public law to protect the right to life of the unborn child and there i think was the fallacy. Host why are you conservative . Guest i grew up as a liberal in the oldfashioned sense, in the sense that we would call queue but humphrey liberal or john f. Kennedy or Martin Luther king liberal. I grew up in west virginia, my grandfathers began as coal miners one stayed in the minds his entire life, the other worked his way out of the mines into the Grocery Store business but they were believers in the Democratic Party, in the United Mine Workers of america and in Franklin Delano roosevelt. Maybe not always in that order. Roosevelt in my house was worshiped merely as a kind of any guide. That was a different kind of liberalism in those days. It did believe that government should be active in helping people, celebrated roosevelts new deal as having important to keeping peoples morale up in the depression and putting food on the table for people who were really needy in those circumstances and getting us out of the depression. I have come to doubt that story about the new deal. Is partially true but also partially not true. The new deal didnt get us out of the depression for example but that was the belief system in which i was brought up. I was active in the Young Democrats and twice elected for the democratic youth conference. In 1976, as an alternate delegate from west virginia, the Democratic National convention that nominated jimmy carter and i was a supporter of jimmy carter. So what got me moving in the conservative direction was a couple things. One was Democratic Partys embrace of social liberalism, in particular abortion. That was not part of the picture under people like Hubert Humphrey or john f. Kennedy or Martin Luther king. But it became part of the picture starting in the early 70s as the idea became democratic orthodoxies that womens rights to eat quality and liberty required legality of abortion and even public funding of abortion. That i thought was wrong, tragically wrong, putting the Democratic Party on the wrong side and the liberal movement on the wrong side of a profoundly important moral questions, one of the most vexing moral questions since slavery and one of the most divisive. The other thing was observing in my native appellation of the failures of Great Society, social programs that work very well intentioned, they were efforts to help people who were very much in need and yet often i had the opposite effects. That caused me to question my faith in the oldtime religion of new deal or Great Society liberalism and to look for other ways. I began while i was still young. I was in my 20s, reading work by Daniel Patrick moynihan, irving kristol, a commentary magazine and the Public Interest and listening to and considering in a serious way alternative ways of helping people who were in need that did not involve large staterun bureaucracies and especially in powering the institutions of Civil Society to deliver the Health Education