The Deserving Underclass: a Focus for Social Work Policy in the Year 2001

The Supreme Court decision in the case of Jane Lib vs. the State of Connecticut (1999) held that the institution of matrimony is unconstitutional because it violates the Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. This decision, while freeing some people from bondage, has generated a new type of sexual underclass. The social work profession needs to develop policy guidelines to serve this new underclass.     

THE CONFLICTING LOYALTIES OF STATISM AND GLOBALISM: CAN GLOBAL DEMOCRACY RESOLVE THE LIBERAL CONUNDRUM?

Abstract: The cosmopolitan ideal of liberal universalism seems to be at odds with liberalism's insistence on national borders for liberal democratic communities, creating disparate standards of distributive justice for insiders and outsiders. The liberal's dilemma on the question of cosmopolitan justice would seem to be an extension of this broader conundrum of conflicting loyalties of statism and globalism. The challenge for liberalism, then, seems to be to show how the practices of exclusive membership embody the principle of moral equality. While discerning a variety of liberal reasons to give some scope to the claim that statism and globalism need not be an irreconcilable dilemma within liberalism, the essay argues that these reasons fail to provide a satisfactory resolution. Instead, the essay points out, global democracy can be the direction for both a statist and a cosmopolitan liberal, and the two camps a case not of conflicting loyalties but of multiple loyalties.