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Posts authored by Gretchen

Failing to please

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In the comments for a Pharyngula post about online harassment of women journalists, Rachel Kiernan wrote:

This insanity isn’t just levered against female writers. Female politicians receive even more vitriol than their male coworkers or females in other lines of work. Otherwise secular and liberal Germany is filled with men who have something pathological against Angela Merkel, usually about her appearance and based in an absolute hatred against any female politician. An Italian newspaper called her a “lard ass,” in spite of the fact she’s considered to be the de facto leader of the E.U. and has bailed out their banks. In addition to the problems associated with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, France has a problem with male politicians molesting their female staff members while female politicians must endure cat calls just to show up to work. Of course, the news also recently broke about a male politician in Bolivia raping a female politician at a party after she passed out from drinking. So… it would seem as though a photo equals consent, clothing equals consent and the inability to say “no” is also consent. The constant threat of rape is just one example of what can and will happen to women if they dare make themselves seen and heard.   The ugly reality is that “male machismo” is considered a basic human right for most of the world, including many liberal and secular countries. It’s meant to silence and hide women who otherwise might not “know their place” in society, reminding us all that if we ever fail to please, we can and will be humiliated, threatened, hurt and much worse.

The words “if we ever fail to please” stuck out to me. When trying to formulate a simple and coherent concept of everyday sexism– the kind practiced by generally good people, just people who have spent little to no time thinking about sexism as a concept to begin with– I end up falling into a Jeff Foxworthy-like game of “You might be sexist if…..” And what I often end up with is something like “You might be sexist if you think the most important thing about a woman is whether she’s sexy.” If you’re talking about a woman who is notable for something other than being sexy (such as, for example, winning an award, writing a book, running a business, inventing a product, etc.) and the main or even the only thing you can manage to say about her involves how attractive (or not) she is….you might be sexist. If you think a woman’s primary job is to be sexy and her actual job is something other than porn star, exotic dancer, or prostitute…you might be sexist. (Which is not at all meant to disparage actual porn stars, exotic dancers, and prostitutes)

But I like “failing to please” because that encompasses being sexy, but also leaves room for subservience. For the ways in which a woman who isn’t yet sexy, is long past being sexy, or never could be sexy might still yet please. You know, like being properly deferential– not presuming to argue with a man publically, or otherwise exert authority over men. Accepting one’s non-sexiness as a character flaw and attempting to make up for it in other ways, such as being a good cook. After all, ideally all women would be both sexy and good cooks, but if you have to choose between the two, go with the good cook because then you’ll get the best of her talents without having to fight your mates off to keep her! And so on.

So yes, “failing to please” is a good catch-all. It sums up very well the general notion that women must live for men rather than for themselves, or at least before themselves, and those who don’t are to be shunned and ridiculed if not worse– sometimes far worse.

Aping Morality: video

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As a follow-up to yesterday’s discussion, here’s Frans deWaal’s plenary talk from the 2010 American Academy of Religion conference in Atlanta. Ann Taves was president of the AAR that year and introduces him.


A30-140 Plenary Address: Frans de Waal from American Academy of Religion on Vimeo.

Aping morality

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Whenever I’ve been involved in a discussion of the evolution of morality, the English language trips things up a bit. Due to the fact that “morality” could mean “being good” or “the capacity and tendency to distinguish right from wrong,” it’s always important to note which, specifically, you’re talking about. Generally speaking, it would seem that the latter entails the former– if you have an idea of what it means to be good, then you can probably be good. We all have our failings and occasionally fail to live up to our own standards of morality. But when asked what it means to be a good person, we usually give a description that most human beings could live up to, if they put their minds and consciences to it. By contrast, if a being doesn’t distinguish right from wrong, we generally don’t hold him or her responsible for doing things that would normally be considered wrong. I touched on this last week when talking about what agency means in terms of moral responsibility. An entity with a concept of right and wrong has the capacity to behave morally– this concept is sometimes called a moral sense. Having a moral sense is not the same as being moral, any more than having a car is the same as driving.

Are we good so far? Not moral, I mean, but clear? Okay.

Whether non-human animals can have a moral sense, and to what extent, is a very hot topic. It calls into question our own capacity to make these determinations, where that capacity comes from, and how we can recognize it. Maybe other animals have a moral sense, but it’s so different from ours that we wouldn’t know it if we saw it! Maybe other animals make judgments about all kinds of things that humans just don’t care about. Humans certainly don’t share all of our moral views about things– moral standards can vary significantly from culture to culture and from individual to individual– but most of us have both an extensive repertoire of ways to express moral approbation or disapprobation and an adeptness for registering when others approve or disapprove of something. We’re excellent communicators, both vocally and non-vocally. We’re actually so good at communicating that we sometimes betray feelings we’d rather not. I’m particularly bad at lying about or otherwise misrepresenting how I feel about something, which is why my career as a professional poker player ended before it began.

Our means of registering how other people feel without their telling us, or even in spite of their telling us something to the contrary, is called empathy. It’s what enables us to “read minds”– not via literal ESP, but by  interpreting patterns of behavior and comparing the situation others are in to our own past experiences, and extrapolating from that how they must feel, what they must be thinking. The simplest form of empathy is emotional contagion– imagine a nursery in which one baby starts crying, and the sound sets off others as well. This form of empathy is reflexive, which means there’s no point at which you actually think “This person must be feeling/thinking ______.” There’s a scene in the movie Clue where Mrs. White describes how her husband was murdered: “His head had been cut off, and so had his…you know.” Cut to three men listening while sitting on the couch, all simultaneously crossing their legs at the knee.

With reflexive empathy, you are effectively projecting yourself into another person’s body and situation and feeling what you imagine they feel, whether you want to or not. This is generally referred to as sympathy or a sympathetic reaction, and it’s very effective in terms of getting us to care about the welfare of others. It’s the reason that witnessing suffering bothers us, and it inspires us to help those who are suffering and be angry with those who cause it. If the person who is suffering is familiar to us or similar to us, our sympathetic reaction to their suffering is both more likely and stronger when it happens. If you want to prevent someone having a sympathetic reaction to another’s suffering, a good way to go about doing it– after attempting to disguise the fact that there’s someone suffering at all– would be to make the person suffering seem as unfamiliar and/or dissimilar as possible, so that it’s harder to relate to them.

Hume characterized empathy as the origin of morality. That is, he said, how we become moral– we are moved by the pain of others because we associate them with ourselves, and from this we extrapolate general dispositions about how others should be treated. We derive a moral sense.

So if other animals have empathy, does that mean they have a moral sense?

I think the answer from Frans deWaal is “yes” and “yes.” That is, yes he believes that some non-human apes have the capacity for empathy, and that this constitutes a capacity to form moral judgments. That’s what I expect him to argue in the new book he has coming out, The Bonobo and the Atheist.

A primatologist– and one you should read, if for some reason you haven’t already– deWaal has decades of experience observing the behavior of captive chimpanzees and bonobos, and has written copious books and articles on the topic, especially the ways in which that behavior is similar to our own. And then he began writing books and articles defending his emphasis on the ways in which their behavior resembles our own. The charge, as you might expect, was anthropocentrism– an insistence on incorrectly interpreting things (in this case, non-human primate behavior) in terms of human thoughts and behavior. To this, deWaal responded by accusing his accusers of “anthropodenial”– an insistence on refusing to interpret things in terms of human thoughts and behavior, even when it’s correct (accurate) to do so. You can see this exchange take place explicitly in Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, where deWaal argues basically that chimpanzees and bonobos have the ability to empathize and therefore at least a precursor to a moral sense, which can be recognized in their behavior by its similarity to human empathy– and there’s nothing hasty or unparsimonious (i.e., inaccurate) about  it.

That’s not what this post is about, though. Nor is it, really, about the general topic of morality in non-human primates or other non-human animals. It’s really about the fact that The Bonobo and the Atheist will be deWaal’s first book addressing religion specifically, and what I’m afraid he’ll say about it. See, his books to date have (largely) been about the possibility and extent of a moral capacity in the great apes, non-human primates, particularly chimpanzees and bonobos. Now my concern is that he’s going to use this body of data to argue that we– human beings– don’t need morality to come from God, because we’ve evolved it. That our closest living primate relatives are, in effect, secular humanists (or at least capable of being such), and therefore we humans might as well be, too.

This position– if indeed that’s what deWaal argues, and I don’t know if it will be– doesn’t bother me because it’s false. It bothers me because it’s beside the point.

Let me back up.

If Great Apes-Who-Are-Not-Humans (that would include chimpanzees and bonobos, but also gorillas and orangutans) do indeed have the capacity for empathy, then I would say that “precursor to morality” is a fair description for it. It would seem, on the face of it, that if nonhuman primates  have the capacity for empathy, then it is indeed evolved. I expect deWaal to argue this– he has before. (However, this isn’t necessarily the case. It could be, for example, that the great apes have evolved to have the kind of brains which make it possible for us have an empathetic response, but not be “wired” for empathy per se. To continue the clumsy analogy I began with, this would be like saying that just because you have a car, doesn’t mean you have a drive-to-the-store device. You have a device which you can drive to places, including the store if you so desire. This distinction goes to the heart of the “general learning device” vs. “kludge” discussion of how our brains have evolved, which I do not have any desire to get further into here.)

But even if other Great Apes have the capacity for empathy and hence morality, that is not a good point of evidence with which to oppose a theological insistence that morality must come from belief in God. That’s why I think, if this is the arrow deWaal will be firing, it will miss the target. Because we don’t need to have evolved morality (that is, to have inherited a moral sense) in order to have it– both the capacity to be moral, and the tendency to exercise it. Clearly, however we came by these things, we have them. And they are universal, and they do not require belief in a deity.

Now you may ask, why does this matter? Shouldn’t demonstrating that we have evolved a moral sense answer that question just as well, if not better? I say no, for a few reasons. First, because a lot of the people who believe that if your morality doesn’t come from God you don’t have morality at all, don’t believe in evolution. They very likely don’t have a good grip on what evolution is. And plenty of people– theist and atheist alike– who do know what evolution is, and are fully onboard with it, nevertheless have a distaste for evolutionary psychology or anything that smacks of it. And even those who don’t have such a distaste at all but have a dedication to scientific rigor (which all of us should, presumably) will need to be convinced. And I’m saying this convincing is important– very much so– but also beside the point.

You don’t need to demonstrate that morality is evolved in order to show that it doesn’t need to come from God, or at least a belief in God. The reality of nonbelievers being moral now, and the immoral behavior of not only believers but by believers in the name of the deity who is supposedly the origin of morality (not just the capacity to be good, but Good itself), accomplishes that.

I think of this every time I see, for example, someone claiming that those who oppose him or her politically are opposing morality itself. As if there’s a monopoly on morality: it only comes in one brand, and anyone who doesn’t have that brand doesn’t have morality at all. No knock-offs, even. Fellow nonbelievers– you’re not the only ones who, it’s being maintained, are not just insufficiently moral but incapable of acknowledging morality itself because your concept of it is somewhat different from that of the person making the accusation. Often that person will pretend that members of the morally bereft group he/she is describing are nonbelievers, because no “true” believer would support the right to an abortion/separation of church and state/feminism/sex before marriage/ending school-sanctioned prayer/supporting the teaching of evolution/ending the War on Drugs/ending war, period etc. But realistically speaking, there are nowhere near enough nonbelievers to accomplish any of these goals. And yet there is ample support for them. Hmmm.

So…yeah. Perhaps I’m flailing at windmills, and in fact deWaal’s book will not go anywhere near making the we-evolved-morality-therefore-we-don’t-need-God argument. But since this argument exists, and is actually relatively common to see whenever a believer challenges a nonbeliever regarding where he/she finds his/her foundation of morality on the basis that if God does not exist we should all be out murdering, raping, stealing, etc., I think it’s worth discussing why this approach is not actually the best one.

The best one is far simpler: There are loads– loads– of moral standards which are not based on divine mandate. Many of them were endorsed by Greek philosophers before Jesus ever set foot in Bethlehem. It’s not possible to show that morality didn’t come from God, because God’s existence itself is non-falsifiable. Fine. But it’s easy to evaluate whether the morality that is claimed to come from God, is in fact, moral or not. This will very likely get a person accused of “judging God” (and who has a right to do that?), but since the person making these proclamations is invariably not God, but a man…well. It carries just as much weight as anything else said by man.

I’m really looking forward to deWaal’s book, despite my misgivings stated here– and hey, for all I know, they might be totally off-base. I hope so. And if you aren’t familiar with his books, go get Chimpanzee Politics when you can. Everybody should read that one, and will likely enjoy it.

————————————-

Prior relevant writing: Is Darwin Responsible for the Chimp Attack?

Update on “contempt of cop” cases

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People sometimes find my blog by searching for some variation on “Is it okay to be rude to a cop?” It leads them to the post Being rude to the police: dumb, not criminal, which is about the case of a Colorado man who gave the finger to a state trooper while driving by. The man was stopped and given a criminal summons to appear in court to face a charge of harassment, which carries a penalty of up to six months in prison. Six months in prison, for expressing something to a police officer something which you could express to any civilian with no penalty whatsoever. In this case, the ACLU went to bat for the man, arguing that what he did was protected under the First Amendment, and the charges were dropped.

There have been a couple of similar cases lately which have come to the same conclusion.

Last June in Ohio, a woman honked and gave police chief Roger Moore, who was driving his personal car, the finger after he’d attempted to change lanes into the one she was currently occupying. Instead of being embarrassed for his poor driving, Moore decided to pull the woman over and charge her with disorderly conduct. Moore’s lawyer argued in court that the woman’s behavior effectively constituted “fighting words,” but the judge ruled against that. The lawyer said she’s considering appealing.

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that giving a police officer the finger is not grounds for the officer to pull you over and arrest you. A married couple had both been arrested for– you guessed it– disorderly conduct after they’d driven by a police officer using radar, whom the husband flipped off. In its opinion, the court held that the “ancient gesture of insult is not the basis for suspicion of a traffic violation or impending criminal activity.”

So it appears the title of my previous post stands. Dumb, not criminal…and only dumb because it’s likely to get you treated as a criminal.

I must have missed that part of PCU…

I must have missed that part of PCU… published on 1 Comment on I must have missed that part of PCU…

Yesterday in my hometown, a man received seventeen life sentences for the repeated rape of two minor girls, some of which occurred while they were as young as 11 and 12 years old, respectively. Complicit in these rapes was the girls’ mother– actually no, she was far more than complicit. She arranged for it to happen, and on at least five occasions actually sat and watched this man, who is now 49 years old, have sex with her two daughters. She received a life sentence with no chance for parole for 25 years.

Something else I heard yesterday? That this man, and that woman, are just like people who support gay marriage. Yep:

There is a movement on to normalize pedophilia, and I guarantee you your reaction to that is probably much the same as your reaction when you first heard about gay marriage. What has happened to gay marriage? It’s become normal — and in fact, with certain people in certain demographics it’s the most important issue in terms of who they vote for. So don’t pooh-pooh. There’s a movement to normalize pedophilia. Don’t pooh-pooh it. The people behind it are serious, and you know the left as well as I do. They glom onto something and they don’t let go. […] What is their objective? They want us to all think that pedophilia is just another sexual orientation. You know who’s gonna fall right in line is college kids, just like they have on gay marriage, just like they do on all other revolutionary social issues. Their own definition of the cutting edge, civil rights, freedom, understanding, tolerance. So I’m just warning you here. You think it can’t happen. “Impossible! Don’t be nutso and wacko on us, Rush.”

Pedophilia– all of the college kids are gonna be doing it!

At Dispatches, Ed points out that in this insane rant, Rush Limbaugh doesn’t clearly articulate who “they” are– presumably “the left” in general (to be defined here as anyone whose politics do not align with Rush Limbaugh), those bleeding hearts who are ready to take up “revolutionary social causes” whatever those might be, because they’re just into…normalizing stuff. Stuff that Limbaugh doesn’t like, which usually has something to do with women’s and minority rights and sexual practices he personally doesn’t want to engage in. And hey, pedophilia falls into that latter category for him, certainly, so why not for liberals? Because after all, liberals stand for the interests of people Rush is not and the ability to do things Rush doesn’t want to do, and they are therefore the enemy!

No, right wingers are not narcissistic. Not remotely.

But yes, there’s a movement to normalize pedophilia– it’s called NAMBLA; it has been around for a very long time; and despite its self-description as a “civil rights” group, their efforts have mysteriously not resonated with left-leaning people generally, possibly because– going out on a limb here– having sex with underage boys isn’t something they consider to be a civil right.

Because of the consent thing, and all.

Given the slew of jaw-dropping comments made by conservative politicians in the news lately regarding rape, however, my confidence in right wing comprehension of what consent means, let alone their regard for it, is on seriously shaky ground. In case you’re having trouble keeping track (and I know; it’s like trying to keep track of who’s been caught with a rent boy most recently), here’s a handy infographic:

Credit: The Frisky

Now, it’s not at all news to see a right winger, especially someone like Rush Limbaugh, compare homosexuality to pedophilia. It’s beyond common– Rick Santorum has practically built his reputation on it, Rick Warren has done it and then issued “notpologies” for it…heck, in the (continuing) wake of child molestation scandals in the Catholic Church and Jerry Sandusky’s locker room, homosexuality and pedophilia have been directly equated: If you’re a homosexual, you’re probably a pedophile, or at least there’s nothing stopping you (and please don’t mention that the vast majority of child molestation and rape cases are like the one which begins this post– straight adult man and female child).

But…do they realize what they’re saying?

Do they realize that they’re saying that they, personally, don’t grasp the importance of consent? Especially the female kind?

I don’t think they do.

Secret Agent Woman

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Jennifer Shewmaker, a psychology professor at Abilene Christian University, has a blog post blaming the Steubenville rape case in part on objectification of women. You should go read it, but first read about the Steubenville matter if you haven’t already. I have some theories about what would possess teenagers to create videos of themselves mocking a fellow student for getting repeatedly sexually assaulted at a party and then post the videos online, but they’re half-baked. And right now I want to talk about the aspect Shewmaker focuses on.

First, I agree that objectification does contribute to this, but a “me too” isn’t good enough here. “Objectification” has become to pat a word, too cliche. It’s not wrong, but it’s so commonly used that I think the meaning has been largely sucked out of it and people’s eyes tend to glaze over when they see it. And I say this having written about objectification and the problems with it multiple times before, each time cringing a little internally while thinking about how the word, a very important word, has become a slogan.

So let’s focus instead on the opposite of sexual objectification– sexual agency. Or just, you know, agency to start.

An agent is a being with a will, desires, motivations, and responsibility. An agent does things for reasons, and can be blamed or praised when those things are wrong or right, respectively. In order to be a fully realized agent, you need to be capable, adult, mature.

An agent, when it comes to legality, is someone who can be party to a contract. We do not hold a person to a contract if important information was withheld from him or her in the contract’s arrangement (that would be fraud), or if the person him/herself was for some reason not mentally competent to enter into such an agreement, because these are factors that diminish agency. They make a person less capable of making an informed, responsible decision. And it’s wrong to deceive people into doing things against their best interest (that’s taking advantage of them), and it’s wrong to blame people for behavior that either wasn’t immoral or over which they had little or no control, or both.

When a child or someone with a severe mental disability does something bad, we temper our judgment according to their diminished agency. When an animal does something bad, we blame it scarcely at all. Children, the mentally disabled, and animals are placed in the care of rational, caring adults, fully-realized agents, who make decisions for them. Even though they are not fully-realized agents– especially because of this– we consider it wrong to abuse them. Though they are not moral agents, they are moral patients– beings we should treat morally, even though they may not be able to treat us in that same manner.

There are men who think that women are like children, the mentally disabled, or animals in this regard. No, they probably don’t think in terms of moral agents and moral patients, but to them the only people who can be fully responsible, mature actors are adult men. To this sort of person, sexually assaulting a woman is wrong– but primarily because it goes against the interests of whatever man is in charge of her, her husband or her father. A woman’s sexual “purity” (scare quotes here because having sex is not like dropping a bit of black paint into a can of white, or a fly into a pitcher of milk) is a commodity, the strength of which determines her value to these men. In that regard she hovers somewhere between child/mentally disabled person and animal, because children/the mentally disabled aren’t expected to provide a service, whereas animals often are. It would be more accurate to say, actually, that they are used for something– dogs for hunting or sniffing out drugs, horses for pulling carts, various livestock for eating, and so on. Women are used, to this mindset, for sex and baby-making. If they can no longer be used for these functions or nobody wants to use them for these functions, they are irrelevant. As Tina Fey said, “crazy” is a woman who keeps talking when nobody wants to fuck her.

To this mindset, rape is only as wrong as theft– and it’s theft not at her expense, but at the expense of another man. If no man is in charge of a woman, or if she’s been “used” too much, then….eh. If you take someone’s dog and beat it with a stick, you’re in serious trouble. If you take a stray dog and do the same thing, not nearly as big a deal.

A study performed earlier this year indicated that people, male and female, literally see women as more like objects and men as more like people. Of the images that Shewmaker used to accompany her blog post on objectification of women, the worst one to me is an ad depicting a woman in her underwear lying on a bed, with a Playstation controller lying nearby, its cord leading directly into her belly button. With this, you can control the woman, haha. The caption reads “Keep on dreaming of a better world.” Of all depictions of woman-as-sexbot in media– and there are so many the idea is well past cliche at this point– that’s certainly one of the clunkiest. Congratulations, Che Men’s Magazine– you’re even lousy at sexism!

But even so, even in spite of these, I find it easier to focus not on how women are turned into objects, but how they’re denied having agency. It seems more accessible to take what a man is generally considered to be, and then examine what is subtracted for a woman (“How do you write women so well?” “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability”). And then look at the ramifications.

There are people, and then there are women. 
There are two kinds of people: men and women.
There are people, and amongst them are men and women.

Yes, that’s better.

“Governor brings religion into the public sphere”

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KS governor Sam Brownback. Photo credit: Brent Wistrom, The Wichita Eagle

Fearing terms is odd. But in terms of terms to fear

I’d suggest “public square” and “public sphere.”
When it comes to church and state separation
these words are oft used for equivocation
of an individual’s right to express a thought
and a government’s ideological onslaught,
to swap the former for the latter.

The “public square” or “public sphere,” you see
can refer to a literal town square or public access TV
or to the podium where a governor stands
issuing edicts and waving his hands.
It’s not a difference of ideas transmitted
but the weight of actual law permitted
to enforce their content that matters.

A religious politician is no pioneer.
All people are religious in the public sphere
if they are religious, that is, and openly so.
No laws prohibit prayer in school, and no
rules forbid statements of faith in the street.
But you won’t hear this from theocrats you meet
who confuse gov’t endorsement with speech.

They say God has been forbidden from class
if the teacher can’t make you get off of your ass
and pray to a god you might not believe in
or a different version than you were conceiving.
Your personal faith, though, is perfectly kosher.
It’s mandated worship that we should be so sure
to avoid, for that’s overreach.

Likewise, pols wanting laws made at God’s behest
would do well to consider the lemon test:
legislation must have a secular reason.
This means that those who contemplate seizing
the power of office to make us obey
their faith fall afoul of what their own laws say;
their job is to govern, not preach.

I know when it comes to private and public
it’s hard to determine the best way to stick
to church/state separation. But really, these
efforts to conflate, trick, and tease
make it harder. Jurisprudence and God
must be distinguished. Brownback has trod
on a freedom that we now must teach.

Freezepeaching the WBC

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Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds came up with an excellent t-shirt idea: an image of a peach, half-frozen in a block of ice, with the slogan “Freeze Peach! Not sure what it is, but it’s mine.” This is in reference to the continual shouting of “free speech” in order to defend speech which is not in fact “free”– objectionable speech made on private venues by people who participate in those venues but do not own them, are not in charge of them. Speech like Michael Brutsch aka Violentacrez posting bigotry and photos of scantily clad minors on Reddit. Speech like hassling feminist bloggers on Freethought Blogs and then complaining that the network doesn’t actually support freethought if it bans you. Speech like sexual harassment at conferences.

The defense is so common that the words run together after a while (hence “freeze peach”): “Free speech! We have the right to say these things, so there’s nothing wrong with saying them!” “Free speech! Preventing speech you don’t like promotes a hive mind mentality and squelches reasonable debate!” The answers to these, of course, being: 1. No, you don’t, not on someone else’s blog or forum or at someone else’s conference, and 2. No, it doesn’t– not when the speech in question amounts to harassment  Harassment has a silencing effect on other people, people who actually have something useful to say.

“Freeze peach” is not a condemnation of actual free speech, of course, but a mockery of how people who clearly are a bit fuzzy on how the concept works try to manipulate it in order to justify…well, being douchebags. Basically, that’s what it boils down to. It encapsulates two unfortunate but very common conclusions:
1. Free speech is the concept of people being able to say whatever they want, when and wherever they want. People have an obligation to let us– if they don’t, they oppose free speech.
2. The law is a direct reflection of our societal morality. If something is wrong, it should be illegal. If something is not illegal, it must be okay.

I don’t think it’s necessary to explain why these two unfortunately very common notions are mistaken. I do think they illustrate, however, why it’s important to see that the people who make “freeze peach” arguments using these assumptions are not anarchists as they may seem, but authoritarians. They look to an authority– the law, in this case– to dictate right and wrong, and assume that what they’re doing is right if the law doesn’t forbid it and in fact seems to advocate it (“that which is not forbidden is compulsory”). That if something is entrenched in law, it is not only up to the government but individual citizens (as in bloggers, forum moderators, conference organizers, etc.) to support and uphold it.

But really, requiring that such private individuals should uphold freedom of speech does as much for the concept as requiring that individual citizens should uphold the Fourth Amendment would do for private property– that is, it would destroy all meaning in the notion. Any “search and seizure” of one person’s property by another (without consent) would indeed be unreasonable, and any use of another person’s private ability to express him/herself (regardless of media) without consent would be a violation of that person’s own freedom of speech. If you want to claim freedom of speech to say something reprehensible,  you can find a sympathetic place to express such a thing, do it via your own means, or don’t do it at all. Those are your options. You do not get to pirate someone else’s platform in order to proclaim some sentiment they don’t agree with.

Freedom of speech does not entitle one individual to use another individual’s mouthpiece (whatever it may be) to speak. It prevents the government from deciding what that individual may or may not say, regardless of how brilliant and useful, or offensive and pointless, that individual’s speech may be. Regardless of the content of the expression, we may not be prohibited from expressing it in public– unless, that is, it violates one of the tightly conscribed laws in place to protect intellectual property and, in some cases, prevent the expression of outright obscenity (I’m not a fan of obscenity laws, but they do exist).

This is what free speech means. This is what I passionately defend. But because there are so many Americans who either don’t understand or don’t agree with this (or both), I’m reluctant to don a “freeze peach” shirt. I don’t want to mock the people who think free speech defends their ability to be offensive wherever they want by appearing to support some form of government crackdown on offensive speech. Not when there’s no shortage of people who support exactly that.

Not when they are signing petitions asking for that:

Users of the White House’s “We the People” digital petition platform have flooded the site in support of an effort to officially designate the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group.
The most popular petition was submitted on Dec. 14, the same day as the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., an incident that Westboro responded to by announcing its intent to picket the funerals of the 26 victims, including 20 young children. This plan made them a prime target of hacktivist group Anonymous and eventually drew a well-attended counter-protest to block the church’s followers from disrupting the services.
The individual push has since received the support of nearly 250,000 signees, making it the most popular single petition ever created through the White House initiative. 

The thing is, there is no such thing as a federally recognized hate group. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a list of groups that it recognizes as hate groups, which is fine because– you can see this coming– it’s a private organization. But the government has no interested in determining whether a group is “hateful” or not– not officially, at least– because hate speech is not against the law. What they do have an interest in monitoring is possible terrorist tendencies, and WBC has bent over backwards to show that they have no interest in committing actual violence against anyone. They have succeeded in becoming almost a caricature of moronic spite, but that isn’t illegal. As a sad irony, one of the effects of Anonymous publishing the personal information of Westboro members online was that people took the opportunity to threaten them, which is illegal. And yes, I would say that threatening a hateful person (or who you assume to be a hateful person– not everyone who was threatened actually is a member of the WBC) with death is worse than being a hateful person.

Am I defending the WBC’s beliefs and actions? Not in the slightest. Not any more than the ACLU was defending white supremacy and antisemitism when they defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie IL in 1978, a move that cost them enormous support from people who confused the defense of freedom of expression with defense of the ideas expressed. It’s incredibly disturbing to see that when it comes to the WBC, at least a quarter of a million Americans are confused in just this way. Disturbing, but not surprising– it’s not at all uncommon to see people promote freedom only for those who are on their side, ideologically. Nor is it uncommon to see them go into authoritarian mode when an opportunity like this arises, asking the government to violate the rules it set for itself, so long ago, in order punish people they dislike. And no, it doesn’t matter whether that dislike is legitimate or not, or how fervently it’s held. It’s still called injustice when the law is violating someone’s freedom in your favor.

Their actions have been directed at many groups, including homosexuals, military, Jewish people and even other Christians. They pose a threat to the welfare and treatment of others and will not improve without some form of imposed regulation.

So people…stop demanding precisely that. You actually have more power than the government when it comes to the speech of hateful organizations, because you don’t have to allow them on your space. The government does, because its space is public. Its space is for all of us– including the morons and the bigots. If you don’t like it, take a deep breath and contemplate how many people would be happy to count you amongst the undesirables for your beliefs. Trust me, there are loads.

There are better ways to fight bigotry than by whittling away at the freedoms of bigots, because those are our freedoms as well. Let’s remember that.

*Yes, I did narrowly avoid titling this post “I could eat a freezepeach for hours” in honor of the worst Nicholas Cage movie ever.

Business model

Business model published on 5 Comments on Business model

I have an idea for a business.

It’s a delivery service.

It delivers to hospital patients.

Not flowers. Not Mylar balloons. Not stuffed animals. Not baskets of waxy fruit. Those things are all well and good, and plenty of people like and appreciate them. But that’s not what my business would deliver.

My business would involve sending a person to a grocery store nearest to the hospital in question on the day of delivery, where they would pick up the following:

1. Three current issues of the recipient’s favorite magazines (commonly available– unless there’s a Barnes and Noble nearby, which could be visited for an additional fee if the recipient really wants his/her Skeptical Inquirer or Utne Reader).
2. Five assorted pastries from the bakery.
3. A bottle of red wine in the $12-15 price range, with a screw cap lid.
4. A deli tray. Something with an assortment of cheeses, possibly meats as well, and some nice crackers. If not all of these are available in one package, the runner could pick up a box of Wheat Thins.

The runner would then purchase these items, place them all in a big paper bag with the recipient’s name on it, and deliver them to the recipient– with a note from the sender explaining how much he or she would really like to be there, having picked up these things him or herself, but unfortunately distance, time, and/or finances are just too much of an impediment.

This service would be reasonably priced, to offset the latter concern.

It would be called Send-a-Friend.

Oh, and there would have to be an app for it. You know, because.

Marching, not racing

Marching, not racing published on No Comments on Marching, not racing
Item #3, “Make you like us,” conspicuously absent.

So the Supreme Court has some consideration of gay marriage coming up, in two different forms. First there are a number of cases involving the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which may be added to the docket, which specifically would entail addressing whether the act violates equal protection guarantees under the 5th Amendment’s due process clause when applied to same-sex couples legally married under the laws of their own state. Then there’s Hollingsworth v. Perry which address Prop 8, the California ballot measure which denies legal marriage to same sex couples in that state. The issue there is whether such a provision on the part of an individual state counts as a violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee to equal protection under the law.

(Both of these case make me fervently wish that there was a Supreme Court channel. C-SPAN, make it happen. All SCOTUS, all the time. I’d watch it. I’d totally settle for a livestream, if it’s a good one. Just saying.)

Given the current makeup of the court, there’s little reason to be optimistic. They might declare DOMA unconstitutional, but they might not. And it’s very unlikely that they will declare that state measures banning gay marriage are a violation of equal protection across the board.

Some recent advances in civil rights which can be attributed to SCOTUS:

  • Desegregation: With Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the court decided against racial segregation in schools. 
  • Interracial marriage: With Loving v. Virginia in 1967, the court declared that laws against miscegenation are unconstitutional. 
  • Abortion: In Roe v. Wade in 1973, the court ruled that there is a right to personal privacy which renders unconstitutional laws prohibiting abortion.
  • Homosexuality: With Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, the court ruled against state laws banning sodomy. 

And of course, along the way the court has had several misses– it has frequently ruled against civil liberties before it has ruled for them (see Plessy v. Ferguson, Pace v. Alabama, and Bowers v. Harwick). It will not be a surprise if it does so again in these cases. When it moves toward freedom, the court moves slowly. And it does not always move toward freedom.

Still, it’s disturbing to see a position like the following:

Here is a movie plot you have never seen and never will see: a disadvantaged athlete struggles against the odds, makes it to the Olympics by sheer force of grit and talent, and is ahead in the race for gold—when, with the finish line in sight, the referee calls off the competition, hands the hero a medal, and everybody goes home. Gay Americans are in sight of winning marriage not merely as a gift of five referees but in public competition against the all the arguments and money our opponents can throw at us. A Supreme Court intervention now would deprive us of that victory. Our right to marry would never enjoy the deep legitimacy that only a popular mandate can bring.I tell my gay friends: imagine if the Supreme Court had ordered gay marriage this past June, at the end of its 2011-2012 term. November’s game-changing electoral victories would never have happened. Gay marriage advocates would be forever stereotyped as political losers who won by running to mommy. Our opponents would mock and denigrate our marriages as court-created, legalistic fictions. The country would never have shown how much it has changed. If we have come that far in five years, imagine where we might be in five more. Imagine, then, the opportunities to extend and consolidate support that we will lose if the Supreme Court steps in now. Strange but true: a favorable Supreme Court intervention next year would make us weaker, not stronger.

This piece, by Jonathan Rauch at The New Republic, makes me wonder how Rauch’s gay friends haven’t strangled him.

So does desegregation not have “deep legitimacy”? Interracial marriage? Reproductive freedom? Because these rights were acknowledged by the Supreme Court, does that mean they’re less legitimate, and amount to being handed a prize by a referee before you’ve actually earned it?

Because we know, after all, that rights are earned by minorities. It should be a matter of popular opinion, because getting everyone to like you should be the foundation of “legitimate” personhood.

What?

This is an argument that could only be made by someone who doesn’t believe that marriage equality is a civil right. It is, for that matter, an argument I’ve heard many times over by opponents of marriage equality, because they think it is somehow up to gays and lesbians to convince the rest of us that they’re charming enough to be allowed to marry the person they love, just like anyone else. The way a minority “wins” is to win the affection of the majority, and eventually by popular appeal the majority will grant them the status of equals.

And yes, that would be great. Except you know what? The unwillingness of majorities to recognize the equality of minorities is called bigotry, and minorities shouldn’t have to cure bigots of their bigotry to get that acceptance in order for that to be the basis of their legal recognition as equals. In the Olympic race analogy, that would be like the runner having to stop along the way to make sure that a majority of the fans lining the track with their arms outstretched are willing to give him/her a high five, before the referee is willing to acknowledge that he/she made it over the finish line. For the race is not to the swift, but to the likable…

No. Gay rights are legitimate because they are civil rights, and civil rights should not be up to a popular vote. It would be nice if there was popular acknowledgement of the legitimacy of gay rights, but a) it’s not a requirement, and b) there is ample evidence that such acknowledgement can follow a SCOTUS decision rather than needing to precipitate it or render it unnecessary. In that regard, SCOTUS is more like a teacher who steps in and prevents all of the straight kids from bullying the gay kid. Sure, it would be great if the kids would just stop bullying the gay kid on their own, but…let’s not hold our breath that they will. They can go through catharsis and character development on their own time– it’s not the responsibility of the gay kid to make them.