Cross-posted from State of Formation.

That the band R.E.M.’s break-up and Troy Davis’ highly controversial state mandated execution would have taken place on the same day is probably an interesting coincidence to no one but me. You see, it was at an R.E.M. concert during their “Monster” tour back in 1994 that I, as a high school student, first lifted a finger to take part in a political cause– opposing the death penalty. Someone had a booth and a petition to sign, a mailing list to be on. While my parents appreciated my interest, I doubt they were too enthused about receiving periodic notices in the mail about the death penalty addressed to me for the following decade or so.

According to Gallup, in the year I attended that concert more Americans supported the death penalty than they had before (at least, back to when Gallup started polling on the question in 1936) or since. 80% answered “yes” to the question “Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?” whereas by last year the number had fallen to 64%. And Troy Davis was executed, presumably because the state of Georgia is where a good number of those who answer “yes” to the death penalty reside.

 

My opposition to the death penalty, and my reasoning for opposing it, hasn’t changed since the day I signed that petition– I still believe that we as a society gain nothing from it, and we risk losing something which should always be significant: the life of an innocent. The Innocence Project, which was founded in 1992 to examine the cases of imprisoned convicts using DNA testing, has exonerated seventeen convicts from death row in eleven states. Collectively, they served over two hundred years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.  But because they had not been executed (yet), it was possible to release them and allow them to have something of their previous lives back.  Nevertheless, this doesn’t appear to be a compelling thought at all for many Americans. From another Gallup poll:

However, for many Americans, agreement with the assertion that innocent people have been put to death does not preclude simultaneous endorsement of the death penalty. A third of all Americans, 34%, believe an innocent person has been executed and at the same time support the death penalty. This is higher than the 23% who believe an innocent person has been executed and simultaneously oppose the death penalty.

This result is shocking to me. I had no idea that there were so many people who grant that innocent people get placed on death row and are eventually executed, but consider that acceptable collateral damage in order to put the guilty to death. Was Troy Davis one of those innocents who was sacrificed? Perhaps– he professed his own innocence right up until the point of execution, and there’s a range of concerns with the entire course of his case. Davis’ race and the circumstances of his crime raise persistent questions about whether his case could have been decided fairly:

The finality of Mr. Davis’s sentence, and the outpouring of protest worldwide, leaves in its wake more than its share of questions — many that go beyond the facts of the case to encompass fundamental issues of capital punishment. Because Mark MacPhail, the Savannah, Ga., police officer he was convicted of killing in 1989, was white and Mr. Davis, above, was black, the progress of Mr. Davis’s case over two decades widened fault lines on the death penalty and, in particular, over the question of whether a black person in the South could be guaranteed the same justice as a white one.

A New York Times editorial refers to a series of “grievous errors” and notes that over 630,000 letters pleading for clemency were delivered to the Georgia pardon and parole board to no avail, resulting in a “tragic miscarriage of justice.”  Director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project Danny LeBoeuf condemned the outcome in no uncertain terms: “The execution of an innocent man crystallizes in the most sickening way the vast systemic injustices that plague our death penalty system.”

So here’s my question: what was the rush? The alternative to putting Troy Davis to death wasn’t to let him go free, to send him on his way with his old clothes back and money for cab fare. If he had not been executed we would have had the rest of his life, with him sitting patiently in prison, to decide to put him to a more obviously justified death. To analyze the circumstances of his accusation in a way that doesn’t provoke every human rights organization in the country, as well as death penalty supporters like former F.B.I. director William Sessions, to proclaim the injustice of it. Someone like me who opposes the death penalty outright would still not be satisfied, but we could do more to make sure that the people we put to death are obviously deserving of it. Could we not? Is that not in the death penalty supporter’s best interests, the single best defense of hanging onto such a practice?

Because after all, America is rather a stand-out in the fact that we do hang onto it. Not only does the U.S. have more of its population incarcerated than any other country in the world, we’re also willing to kill them whereas no other Western democracy will do so. Just speaking for myself, I would rather die than spend the rest of my life in prison. If the options are a life sentence or the death penalty, I would opt for the death penalty without hesitation. But Troy Davis is not me, and he was not given an option. Maybe he would have preferred to spend the duration of a life sentence (or as long as it would have taken) working to demonstrate his own innocence…and maybe he would have succeeded.  I don’t see what we would have had to lose by giving him the chance, and we would’ve had a greater system of justice and national dignity to gain.

Cross-posted from State of Formation.

The title of this post might sound a little obvious to many who have concluded already that Santorum is a bigot for his anti-gay sentiments. But I think it’s important to take a look at why he was wrong, specifically, when he said this in an interview with Piers Morgan:

I think just because we disagree on public policy, which is what the debate has been about — which is marriage — doesn’t mean that it’s bigotry. Just because you follow a moral code that teaches that something’s wrong doesn’t mean that — are you suggesting that the Bible and that the Catholic Church is bigoted? If that’s what you believe, fine. […] Well, I shouldn’t say — not fine. I don’t think it’s fine at all. I think that is contrary to both what we’ve seen in 2,000 years of human history and Western civilization, and trying to redefine something that has been — that is — seen as wrong…I think is in itself an act of bigotry.

Okay, let’s unpack. Santorum is saying that the Bible and Catholic Church cannot be bigoted because of “2,000 years of human history and Western civilization,” which could mean one of two things:

1. Over the past 2,000 years, homosexuals have justified the belief that homosexuality is immoral, and therefore that belief is not based in bigotry.
2. The Bible and the Catholic Church have maintained that homosexuality is immoral for 2,000 years, and therefore can’t be wrong.

What is bigotry? A good definition would be: a determination to ascribe to a group of individuals a characteristic(s) which is/are not logically required by the characteristic(s) which they do actually have in common. This would include the belief that black people are untrustworthy, which is particularly noxious considering that skin color is a circumstance of birth, and we tend to be most offended by the insistence that a people must share some undesirable trait based on something they were born with and can do nothing (or almost nothing) about.

But a trait doesn’t have to be a circumstance of birth in order for someone to form bigoted beliefs about it. If I said that people who like to play Dungeons and Dragons are idiots, that would be a bigoted claim on my part because there is no evidence at all to show that there’s a particular attraction between that game and people of low intellectual caliber, let alone a necessary connection. If there was a connection but it wasn’t absolute, then I would still be guilty of making a false generalization. But the more I insist that individuals in a group must share a negative quality because of something else that they have in common, the more offensive I become because of how much more unfounded my insulting statements clearly are.

If the first statement– that time has justified the belief that homosexuality is immoral– was Santorum’s intended meaning, would it be a good defense? Maybe…if it were true. If, over a period of 2,000 years, we could observe that sexual intercourse between people of the same gender resulted in something catastrophic every time, it might be fair to say that it’s immoral. Say, if sex between two women caused nearby buildings to explode. That would be pretty bad. We would have good reason to tell those lesbians to cut that out, and think poorly of them if they refused to.* But of course, there is no foundation for such a belief. Sexual intercourse between two people of the same gender does notinevitably result in anything unfortunate happening. And what’s more, the Bible and the Catholic Church (I’m going to continue grouping them that way in spite of the distinctions a person might want to point out, because it’s part of Santorum’s claim) do not claim that homosexuality is immoral based on any such observation, over 2,000 years or two months. Rather they claim it by fiat on God’s part, which strongly suggests that this is not what Santorum meant.

So let’s assume that Santorum is in fact saying that the sheer length of time that the Bible and the Catholic Church have been claiming that homosexuality is immoral demonstrate that it is.  That the Bible has been claiming it for that duration isn’t exactly impressive– it’s a book, albeit one with a large number of translations and interpretations which nonetheless haven’t much altered the statements regarding the morality of sex between two men or two women. That the Church has maintained that homosexuality is immoral for that period of time, on the other hand, demonstrates….what, exactly? That the Church is tenacious in this belief. Does its tenacity demonstrate the truth of the belief? Not remotely. The claim that the sheer amount of time that you’ve held onto something demonstrates its worth or validity is an appeal to tradition, and it’s a fallacy.

So we see that the allegation that the Bible and the Catholic Church are bigoted for calling gays immoral is not rendered unfounded by the reality of homosexual intercourse being immoral or the fact that they’ve been making this claim for a very long time. Santorum’s last objection is to “trying to redefine something that has been seen as wrong.” In other words, he objects to people saying that a previously held claim of something being immoral is mistaken. Really? So is there no such thing as moral progress– society did not advance in any way by the willingness of people being willing to say loudly and clearly that slavery, for example, was wrong? After all, there was (and still is, in some parts of the world) a long-standing belief to the contrary. When miscegenation was legalized in the United States, there was definitely still a widespread and firmly held belief that that was wrong. Would Santorum argue that this “redefinition of something that has been seen as wrong” was therefore a bad thing?  I doubt it.

Finally, there is Santorum’s allegation that believing that the Bible and Catholic Church’s insistence that homosexuality is immoral constitutes bigotry is itself a form of bigotry. Well, Rick, show us your work please…because that doesn’t hold by the definition of bigotry I’m using, or indeed any definition I know.

For a start, neither the Bible nor the Catholic Church are a group of people. The Bible certainly isn’t, and the Church is an institution with identifiable agreed-upon doctrines. It might be mistaken to say that the Church is bigoted, but that could not be a bigoted statement in itself simply by definition. And there is no association being made which could constitute correlating an unfounded trait with a unifying trait– nobody is saying that the Bible and the Catholic Church say _______, therefore they must consider homosexuality immoral and are therefore bigoted. They say openly that homosexuality is immoral, and that is being evaluated as bigotry.  Rightly so, I have argued, whether homosexuality is considered a circumstance of birth or not.

* If they agreed, however, and became sexually inactive or were willing to have sex with men instead, they would not cease to be lesbians. I know this. I am not at all combating the notion that sexual orientation is a matter of identity, not behavior. I am simply for the purposes of this post treating it as a behavior in order to point out that negative associations on that basis still qualify as bigotry.

 

…also known as one of the more offensive and stupid ways of thinking about policy I’ve heard. Offered, surprisingly, by Steven Levitt who co-authored Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics:

Most of the time there is broad agreement as to which activities should be made criminal. Almost no one thinks that theft or violence against innocents is socially acceptable. There are, however, a few activities that fall into a gray area, like illicit drugs, prostitution, abortion, or gambling. Reasonable people can disagree as to whether it is appropriate to prohibit such activities, discourage them through taxation or other means, or simply let them flourish. A common feature of these gray-area activities are that they are typically “victimless” in the sense that, unlike a theft or murder, there is no easily discernible victim of the activity. When a drug dealer sells to an addict, both are happy to have carried out the transaction. I’ve never really understood why I personally come down on one side or the other with respect to a particular gray-area activity.  Not that my opinion matters at all, but despite strong economic arguments in favor of drug legalization, the idea has always made me a little queasy. Conversely, although logic tells me that abortion as practiced in the U.S. doesn’t seem like such a great idea (see the end of the abortion chapter in Freakonomics for our arguments on this one), something in my heart makes me sympathetic to legalized abortion. It wasn’t until the U.S. government’s crackdown on internet poker last week that I came to realize that the primary determinant of where I stand with respect to government interference in activities comes down to the answer to a simple question: How would I feel if my daughter were engaged in that activity? If the answer is that I wouldn’t want my daughter to do it, then I don’t mind the government passing a law against it. I wouldn’t want my daughter to be a cocaine addict or a prostitute, so in spite of the fact that it would probably be more economically efficient to legalize drugs and prostitution subject to heavy regulation/taxation, I don’t mind those activities being illegal. On the other hand, if my daughter had good reasons to want an abortion, I would want her to be able to have one, so I’m weakly in favor of abortion being legal, even though I put a lot of value on unborn fetuses.

This position isn’t even internally coherent. Of all of the things you could say about it, and Ed Brayton and Jennifer Abel have pointed out many, the first thing that jumps out is that Levitt’s argument doesn’t even agree with itself. It conflates too many things. First it conflates what he would want his daughter to have/do, and what he would want her to have if she needed it. Nobody, even the most pro-choice of us, wants their daughter to have an abortion. We want daughters– and every woman– to have that option available should she need it, in the same way we want people to be able to have surgery after a heart attack, or an air bag in the steering wheel of their car to inflate in the event of an accident. That doesn’t mean we want abortions, heart attacks, or car accidents for our daughters or anyone else.

Is that linguistically picky? Fair enough, but how about the fact that he also conflates doing something with doing it to excess?  It’s not uncommon for people to assume that all use of recreational drugs is tantamount to abuse, but most don’t feel the same about alcohol. Not everyone who has a glass of wine is an alcoholic. Nor is every poker player a compulsive gambler, but they might become one. Does Levitt acknowledge this in his acceptance of gambling but not drugs? Not in the slightest.  Why is he content to equate cocaine with addiction and therefore be okay with banning it, but not poker?

These are logical inconsistencies that make Levitt’s position grating, but they aren’t offensive. What’s offensive is, as Abel points out, the fact that “if he doesn’t want his (cute young) daughter doing it, anyone who does belongs in prison.” It is not uncommon for people who have not thought very much about prostitution at all to conclude “I wouldn’t want my daughter to do it; therefore it should be illegal.” However, Steven Levitt is not a person who has not thought very much about prostitution at all– there is a large section discussing it in Superfreakonomics, including data about dangers that prostitutes experience in large part because of the occupation’s illegality.  This does not automatically lead to a position on whether it should be legal or not, but you would think it would have occurred to him at some point that if his daughter did decide to become a prostitute, she would be better off if it were legal (just as if she need an abortion, she would be better off if she could have access to one). Less likely to be attacked by clients. Better recourse if such a thing should happen, because she could go to the police without further endangering herself by admitting to illegal activity. Safer from disease if brothel standards in Nevada are anything to go by, since they are very strict about testing and protection in the interest of protecting the health of both workers and clients. There is no question that prostitutes would be better off if it were legalized. But Levitt does not care, because he doesn’t want his daughter to become one in the first place.

Oh yes, his daughter. His adult, presumably mature daughter, capable of making decisions for herself in accordance with her own happiness. Maybe instead of becoming a prostitute, she wants to work at McDonald’s for the rest of her life. Enter the Army and go on an extended and highly dangerous tour in Afghanistan. Join a polyamorous cult and live in a commune. Live as the de facto slave of an overbearing husband. Become a lobbyist with a dim view of everything Levitt himself stands for, attempting to have it banned. All perfectly legal. And one hopes Levitt would support these things being legal, even if he also wouldn’t want his daughter to choose any of those options for her life.

A person could not formulate a better standard for policy that defines paternalism if they tried. His stance is literally paternalistic, and it’s hard to escape the characterization of misogyny as well. He doesn’t just reserve this particular outlook for prostitution, by thinking of his daughter. He applies it across the board to all of us, for all “gray-area activity.” We are all to be treated in the eyes of the law as if we were Levitt’s daughter, and he the government. Nanny state, meet Daddy Levitt state.We are all daughters in need of guidance.

No thanks; I’ll pass. As Abel remarks,

As a writer, few things annoy me more than penning something favourable about a public figure who later says something so asinine that I feel compelled to mumble excuses for my prior support: “Um, yeah, about that…”

Right. Levitt himself admits that he has “never really understood why I personally come down on one side or the other.” Perhaps he ought to think on it some more.

Also:

If there is no bulb, do not turn on the light.
If you have no car, do not drive.
If there are no clothes, do not get dressed.
If there is no food, do not eat.
If you have no voice, do not speak.

The ACLU of Michigan has filed a brief on behalf of Terry Jones:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan has weighed in on the Terry Jones saga, filing a brief supporting the controversial pastor’s right to protest this afternoon in front of a mosque.  In the eight-page brief to the 19th District Court, the ACLU argued that efforts to make Jones pay a peace bond to protest outside the Islamic Center of America constitute prior restraint of his rights to free speech and assembly.  “The ACLU vehemently disagrees with the content of Pastor Jones’ speech, but we feel equally strongly that if the First Amendment is tohave any meaning, it must mean that the government cannot suppress free speech because it, or anyone else, disagrees with that speech,” ACLU Staff Attorney Jessie Rossman told The Detroit News today. “While we are not representing Pastor Jones, we filed this friend of court brief to help provide additional analysis with respect to the critical constitutional issues at stake here.” . . .   The ACLU’s brief argued that the government cannot suppress speech by making Jones pay a bond based on the cost of police services necessary for anticipated actions of others, calling it an “unconstitutional prior restraint of free speech.” The group also cites a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that said it’s unconstitutional to have a group bear the cost of police protection due to the content of their message.

Radley Balko comments “Count on this to be forgotten next time a conservative uses the they-never-help-out-Christians version of the tired ‘Where’s the ACLU?‘ mantra.”

In Colorado Springs yesterday, an elderly man called police to report his own suicide:

At about 8:15 a.m. the 74-year-old man called 911 to report “he had a suicide,” according to the police report.  When a dispatcher asked for more information, he replied, “Hold your ears,” then the dispatcher heard a gun discharge, according to the report.  Police rushed to the home and found the man dead with a .38-caliber pistol in his hand, “along with several notes indicating funeral arrangements and desired disposition of his property,” according to the report.

There isn’t any information in the brief article about his mental history, but it does note that he had been treated for “several medical conditions.” Whether those conditions were the ultimate reason for his suicide, we just don’t know.

Dr. X recently posted about witnessing the reaction after someone had committed suicide by train– perhaps purposefully holding up a final metaphorical middle finger to strangers by opting to step in front of the train during Friday rush hour on a commuter track, thus traumatizing a lot of people, particularly the train’s unfortunate engineer. As I remarked there, I think it’s pretty easy to acknowledge that in a society where suicide and assisted suicide are illegal, there will inevitably be some inconvenience (at the very least) caused to others by a person who decides to go ahead and do it anyway. But people who do make that choice seem to exist on a continuum of concern. This man in Colorado Springs clearly put a good deal of thought into the decision to end his life, not just about whether or not to do it but how to do it…well, considerately. As much as that is possible, anyway.

Cream soda, cherry, apple? Maybe.

The New York Times thinks it knows:

Naked Cheetos would not seem to have much commercial future. Nor might some brands of pickles. The pickling process turns them an unappetizing gray. Dye is responsible for their robust green. Gummi worms without artificial coloring would look, like, well, muddily translucent worms. Jell-O would emerge out of the refrigerator a watery tan.  No doubt the world would be a considerably duller place without artificial food coloring. But might it also be a safer place? The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, asked the government last week to ban artificial coloring because the dyes that are used in some foods might worsen hyperactivity in some children.  “These dyes have no purpose whatsoever other than to sell junk food,” Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University.

Well, not just junk food…also fruit, soda, cheese, taco shells, bread, cereals, and who knows what else. Probably any and all processed food, actually, which are the vast majority of foods you’ll see at the grocery store, depending on what grocery store you frequent.

“Color is such a crucial part of the eating experience that banning dyes would take much of the pleasure out of life,” said Kantha Shelke, a food chemist and spokeswoman for the Institute of Food Technologists. “Would we really want to ban everything when only a small percentage of us are sensitive?” Indeed, color often defines flavor in taste tests. When tasteless yellow coloring is added to vanilla pudding, consumers say it tastes like banana or lemon pudding. And when mango or lemon flavoring is added to white pudding, most consumers say that it tastes like vanilla pudding. Color creates a psychological expectation for a certain flavor that is often impossible to dislodge, Dr. Shelke said. “Color can actually override the other parts of the eating experience,” she said in an interview. Even so, some food companies have expanded their processed-product offerings to include foods without artificial colorings. You can now buy Kool-Aid Invisible, for instance, and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Organic White Cheddar. Some grocery chains, including Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe’s, refuse to sell foods with artificial coloring.

I wouldn’t support a wholesale ban on artificial coloring precisely because of this psychological factor, and because the health risk isn’t actually that great at all, but…it would certainly be interesting to see all food products in the country go without artificial coloring for a month. Just so we can all see what we’re eating.  And then when the colors come back, we can decide whether we still want to eat it.

Terry Jones issues a statement on ChristianNewsWire concerning the riots, claiming that “we should hold Islam accountable.” He comments under the name “Dr. Terry Jones.” Doctor of what? I have no idea. The Wikipedia entry on the Dover World Outreach Center says that “Jones received no academic degree in theology but was given an honorary degree from the unaccredited California Graduate School of Theology in 1983, which now seeks to disassociate itself from him.”

Lindsey Graham gives an interview with the National Review Online basically saying that he’s not actually that fond of this whole “freedom of speech” thing, and he regrets that it doesn’t allow us to hold people accountable for what they say.

Gretchen starts to wonder if Jones and Graham get their notions of accountability from the same place, and if so how to keep hers away from it.

ETA: Also, Glenn Greenwald socks Graham and Reid but good, noting that

there is an extreme irony in Harry Reid and Lindsey Graham, of all people, suddenly worrying about actions that trigger anger and violence in the Muslim world. These two Senators, after all, have supported virtually every one of America’s actions which have triggered vastly more anti-American anger, vengeance and violence in the Muslim world than anything Pastor Jones could dream of spawning — from the attack on Iraq to the decade-long occupation of Afghanistan to blind support for Israel to the ongoing camp at Guantanamo. To support his demand for Congressional action against Pastor Jones, Graham has the audacity to cite Gen. Petraeus, who condemned the Koran burning on the ground that it would endanger American troops: “General Petreaus understand better than anybody else in America what happens when something like this is done in our country and he was right to condemn it.” But here’s something else Gen. Petraeus said about what triggers violence against Americans and helps the Enemy:

Closing the military prison at Guantanamo Bay would purge the U.S. of a symbol used by enemies to divide the nation, the head of the U.S. Central Command said Friday. Army Gen. David Petraeus said the U.S. military is “beat around the head and shoulders” with images of detainees held in Guantanamo.

On a previous occasion, Gen. Petraeus said: “Gitmo has caused us problems, there’s no question about it. I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us.” By publicly demanding that Guantanamo detainees not be tried in the U.S., Reid played a major role in preventing closure of that camp, while Graham has been a leading advocate of the indefenite detention regime that made the camp so controversial and which itself spawns substantial anti-American violence in Afghanistan. Reid and Graham both voted for the attack on Iraq. Reid and Graham continue to be outspoken supporters of the war in Afghanistan. Both Senators are blind supporters of Israel, including its most heinous acts. If they’re looking for targets to punish whose ideas have triggered violence and anti-American rage in the Muslim world, they should look in the mirror.

Cross-posted from State of Formation.

Remember Terry Jones? Not the guy from Monty Python, but the Florida pastor who threatened to burn copies of the Qur’an last August in response to the building of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center a few blocks away from where the World Trade Center used to stand? And the president actually got on television to ask him not to do it? And Jones responded that he wouldn’t, not ever?

He finally got around to burning a Qur’an about a week ago. Well, another pastor actually did it but Jones “supervised,” during a mock trial of the text in which it was apparently found guilty. And nobody much cared…until some angry mullahs in Afghanistan encouraged a crowd of 20,000 Muslims to “avenge” the burning. Which they did on Friday, by attacking a United Nations compound in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, killing at least twelve people, none of whom were American. Seven of them were United Nations workers from European countries, and five were Afghani. The crowd had attacked the United Nations building because they had been unable to find any Americans on which to vent their anger.

Mr. Jones, the Florida pastor, caused an international uproar by threatening to burn the Koran last year on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Among others, the overall commander of forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, had warned at that time that such an action could provoke violence in Afghanistan and could endanger American troops. Mr. Jones subsequently promised not to burn a Koran, but he nonetheless presided over a mock trial and then the burning of the Koran at his small church in Gainesville, Fla., on March 20, with only 30 worshipers attending.

The act drew little response worldwide, but provoked angry condemnation in this region, where it was reported in the local media and where anti-American sentiment already runs high. Last week, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan condemned the burning in an address before Parliament, and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan on Thursday called on the United States to bring those responsible for the Koran burning to justice.

A prominent Afghan cleric, Mullah Qyamudin Kashaf, the acting head of the influential Ulema Council of Afghanistan and a Karzai appointee, also called for American authorities to arrest and try Mr. Jones in the Koran burning.

The Ulema Council recently met to discuss the Koran burning, Mullah Kashaf said in a telephone interview. “We expressed our deep concerns about this act, and we were expecting the violence that we are witnessing now,” he said. “Unless they try him and give him the highest possible punishment, we will witness violence and protests not only in Afghanistan but in the entire world.

Mr. Jones was unrepentant. “We must hold these countries and people accountable for what they have done as well as for any excuses they may use to promote their terrorist activities,” he said in a statement. “Islam is not a religion of peace. It is time that we call these people to accountability.”

Do I need to list off all of the absurd elements in this situation? Maybe I do:

1. Both sides were blaming enormous groups for the actions of individuals. In Jones’ case it was the entirety of Islam for the acts of some terrorists; in the mob’s case it was the entirety of America for the acts of a small congregation of loony Americans. And in the mob’s case they not only decided to punish the group as a whole, but couldn’t even be bothered to make sure that the people they attacked were even members of it or that the property they destroyed was owned by members of it.
2. Had the three mullahs in Mazari-i-Sharif not encouraged people to take to the streets and commit murder, they almost certainly would not have done so. Just as with the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad, none of this destruction would have happened had it not been for mullahs stirring up the anger of Muslims.
3. And yet, Mullah Kashaf holds Jones responsible. He, along with President Karzai, want the United States to bring Jones to justice for doing something that is perfectly legal here. Jones burnt a book in another country; the mullahs actively incited violence in the angry mob standing before them. Obviously, Jones is the guilty party.

Let’s be clear on one thing– in no sense do I have to condone Jones’ ideology, his hatred of Muslims, or his decision to burn a copy of their sacred text in order to hold the Afghani mullahs and rioters 100% responsible for what they did.

They reacted violently in response to desecration of a symbol, a reaction to which Americans are not immune (as can be seen in the effort every couple of years to ban burning of the flag) but which for the most part we have rightly condemned as a fundamentally unacceptable response. Burning a sacred text is not shouting “Fire” falsely in a crowded theater; it is not incitement to violence; it is not a violation of anyone’s property rights provided the copy you burn is your own. It is Constitutionally protected free speech in America, something that Afghanistan might want to try.

There just might be fewer violent outbursts if their own government decided that the destruction of sacred symbols is not desirable but also doesn’t justify attacking anyone or anything.

Afghanistan, I’m sorry you are a country in which is considered okay to react to blasphemy in this way.  But that’s not Jones’s fault– it is, ironically, part of what he was complaining about. He went wrong by blaming Islam as a whole, but it is the fault of specific Muslims that this happened. Just as with the Danish cartoons, reacting by wishing death on an entire country and taking to the streets to kill people and burn down buildings kind of puts the lie to that “religion of peace” thing.

I’ve written before about the heckler’s veto— the attempt to convince someone not to do something by threatening that you will throw a fit about it. In the interests of preventing violence, otherwise decent people react to these threats by encouraging the speaker to not say whatever he or she was going to say. It’s a means of transferring blame for violent behavior away from the actual violent person, and nobody should condone it. I was happy to see that Obama’s comment on the U.N. attacks did not mention Terry Jones or his church at all:

In Washington, President Obama issued a statement strongly condemning the violence against United Nations workers. “Their work is essential to building a stronger Afghanistan for the benefit of all its citizens,” he said. “We stress the importance of calm and urge all parties to reject violence.” The statement made no reference to the Florida church or the Koran burning.

It would have been better, of course, for the president to flatly reject any and all suggestions that Jones should be punished by his government for anything, and to affirm that desecration of religious symbols should be legal everywhere and reacted to with displeased words at most. But I probably would’ve fainted dead away if he’d said that.

Addendum: The rioting continues today, with a current estimated toll of 20 dead and more than 80 injured.  The top U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, said “I don’t think we should be blaming any Afghan. We should blame the person who produced the news– the one who burned the Quran.” Being strongly opposed to the initial invasion as well as our current occupation of Afghanistan, I’m certainly not overlooking the possibility that this rioting is simply a sign of the camel’s back having been broken and general anti-American sentiment having come to a head. That very well might be the case. Nevertheless, it’s still horrifying that the Qur’an burning has been taken as endorsed by the entirety of the U.S. and that it is viewed as legitimizing this kind of reaction. Not only does Terry Jones’s church not speak for anyone but themselves, but they certainly aren’t occupying Afghanistan.

 

From a day long past:

“It was at the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement…What I owe, even intellectually, to her, is in its detail, almost infinite…I have often received praise, which in my own right I only partially deserve, for the greater practicality which is supposed to be found in my writings, compared with those of most thinkers who have been equally addicted to large generalizations. The writings in which this quality has been observed, were not the work of one mind, but of the fusion of two.” -Philosopher John Stuart Mill on his “most valuable friend,” wife Harriet Parker

Hat tip to The Art of Manliness