Religion & Law

This is likely my last post for Mirror of Justice.  I wanted to thank the other participants and readers here for their dialogue, from which I have learned a great deal.  I hate to leave, but with two young kids at home, I simply no longer have time to spend blogging on a regular basis.  I'll continue to blog periodically at dotCommonweal, and I'll do the occasional visiting stint at other law blogs, but the time I've put into MOJ over the past few years has become unsustainable for me. 

In the spirit of the give and take that characterizes this blog, I didn't want to leave without at least observing that Richard has not provided any evidence to support his repeated assertion that the republican government somehow approved of the violence directed at the Church, even the violence that occurred in the months leading up to the military's uprising.  It's ludicrous to me to suggest that the republican government somehow bore the blame for violence that resulted from its ability to maintain order when that inability was calculatedly fostered by its enemies, including those on the far right and the far left, who wanted to see it fail.  Of course, with fascist help, the disorder got worse as the military uprising approached and the government's grip on events slipped, but to suggest that that violence somehow served as a justification, apparent or otherwise, for the military's actions, is a strange argument indeed.  And, as a descriptive matter, that this violence motivated or justified the military's actions was never the case, as the Basque experience amply demonstrates.  The Spanish far-right's designs on the Republic had been set long before those last few months and therefore could not rely on events in that time period for their justification.  And it should not need to be said, though I'll say it anyway, that the limited violence directed against the Church prior to the uprising can in no way explain or justify in any moral sense the utter brutality of the nationalists' tactics.