The NonSequitur

How often is it that the following three analogies are used in discussions of legalizing gay marriage? 

#1: Laws against gay marriage are analogous to anti-miscegenation laws. Therefore, they are unjust.

#2: Laws against gay marriage are analogous to prohibitions against polygamy.  Therefore, they are just.

#3: Laws against gay marriage are analogous to outlawing bestiality (or marrying one's dog).  Therefore, they are just.

The answer to my rhetorical question is that the use of these analogies is innumerable.  Most of the talking heads debating on TV race each other to the punch — whoever gets one of these analogies out first is the one who's framed the debate properly and thereby has the rhetorical upper hand.  Now, I'm all for rhetorical competitions, but c'mon — you'd think that once the analogies are out there, somebody might… you know… address how apt these analogies are.

Enter Steve Chapman, writing for conservative opinion page, Townhall.com.  Importantly, Chapman supports gay marriage, but doesn't want the courts to impose it on the citizenry.  (One of the first questions that comes to my mind when I hear this sort of talk is what's better (again assuming he supports gay marriage): having a just conclusion imposed on a citizenry that does not want it, or an unjust law imposed on a smaller section of that citizenry… that does not want it either!  If you don't see the point of this question, you don't see the point of judicial review.)  Regardless, Chapman runs the gamut of the analogies, and makes it all worse.  Especially when addressing #2:

Gays argue, correctly, that they can't be expected to change their inborn sexual orientation to get married.  But polygamists can assert that monogamy is impossible for them – and, judging from the prevalence of sexual infidelity, for most people.  Nor does the polygamy ban solve any problems.  Men can already have sex with multiple females, produce offspring with them and furnish them with financial support.  Former NFL running back Travis Henry has nine children by nine different women.  Prohibiting polygamy does nothing to prevent such conduct.  It just keeps people who want to do it responsibly from operating within an established legal framework.  That's why I would legalize polygamy as well as same sex marriage.

Seriously, that is the dumbest defense of gay marriage against the analogy with polygamy I have ever seen.  I could not have even made up a more dunderheaded version.  In no way should the argument be that: well, lots of people are going to have multiple partners, and prohibiting polygamy doesn't prevent that, so we should legalize polygamy so they can do it responsibly.  By analogy, Chapman's reasoning would be: gay marriage bans don't reduce homosexual sex and cohabitation.  But that's not what those bans are out to prevent.  Anti-sodomy laws were supposed to do that, and see how they fared constitutionally?  The same fate would befall anti-multiple-baby-daddy laws.

The best way to defend gay marriage is to break the analogies between gay marriage and polygamy and gay sex and bestiality.  The first is a simple moral difference: there is no established frame of injustice associated with gay marriages.  They are, like modern heterosexual marriages, a relationship between equals.  Polygamous marriages have structural inequalities, and the traditional forms of them have them in spades: younger wives are to play the role of child-rearer, clothes-washer, and concubine.  Once they've borne children, they move up the ladder…  Legalizing institutions that have these legacies is akin to legalizing a form of household slavery.  My good friend Thom Brooks has an excellent survey of polygamy and its problems here.

The disanalogy between gay sex and besitality is simply with consent.  Adult humans can give consent, dogs (or what have you) can't.  End of discussion.

So why are people still wrestling with these analogies?  Part of the answer is because columnists like Steve Chapman, despite being on the right side of the issue, can't put together a non-crazy response to them.

I once read an entire book on giving, or givenness, or something, by Jacques Derrida.  The point was, so I seem to remember, that you can't ever really give anything, even anonymously, because it all gets rolled into an economy.  Now of course "giving" in that text means a lot more than just giving stuff.  But nonetheless, the point is clear.  It seems a local op-ed columnist has had a similar idea.  She writes of his encounter with some girls who have a lemonade stand:

The three young girls — under the watchful eye of a nanny, sitting on the grass with them — explained that they had regular lemonade, raspberry lemonade, and small chocolate candy bars.

Then my brother asked how much each item cost.

"Oh, no," they replied in unison, "they're all free!"

I sat in the back seat in shock. Free? My brother questioned them again: "But you have to charge something? What should I pay for a lemonade? I'm really thirsty!"

His fiancee smiled and commented, "Isn't that cute. They have the spirit of giving."

That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.

"No!" I exclaimed from the back seat. "That's not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They're giving away their parents' things — the lemonade, cups, candy. It's not theirs to give."

I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.

"You must charge something for the lemonade," I explained. "That's the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs — how much the lemonade costs, and the cups — and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money."

I was confident I had explained it clearly. Until my brother, breaking the tension, ordered a raspberry lemonade. As they handed it to him, he again asked: "So how much is it?"

And the girls once again replied: "It's free!" And the nanny looked on contentedly.

No wonder America is getting it all wrong when it comes to government, and taxes, and policy. We all act as if the "lemonade" or benefits we're "giving away" is free.

And so the voters demand more — more subsidies for mortgages, more bailouts, more loan modification and longer periods of unemployment benefits.

Other than the obvious fact that this person is a massive tool for lecturing three girls in this way (she says it's a true story), the analogy makes no sense.  Presumably the parents have given the girls permission to give away free lemonade.  In a similar fashion, people who support public benefits, etc., give their permission to distribute their goods (tax money). 

And I don't remember voters clamoring for more bailouts and other versions of corporate welfare (which oddly don't seem to bother the author here).

**Update.  the "he" above is a she.  And I just saw her on MSNBC, which called her a "financial expert"–liberal media.  And speaking of liberal media.  No Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) on that channel!

There has been a lot of coverage of veganism in the major media recently–Jonathen Safran Foer–bears much of the credit for this: And so, it was probably just a matter of time before we saw desperate and silly self-justification start to be printed. I was unprepared for seeing one of the silliest arguments that I have seen in the New York Times op-ed pages.

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way.

The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

I take it that her point is that there is a moral fault in eating plants. This is because plants are sophisticated and have responses to the world around them. Of course, these are not the reasons that anyone thinks that animals are morally significant and our use of them for food is a moral fault in the circumstances in which most people (in the West at least) consume animals.

Perhaps, I wouldn't have a problem with a form of this argument–there are many interesting biocentric ethical positions, which hold that non-sentient living things have interests in a morally significant sense. But, when this argument is deployed to create a moral equivalence between harvesting grain and the slaughter of sentient animals for non-necessary purposes, we end up with this twaddle bent, it seems, on scoring cheaply a clearer moral conscience.

Eugene Robinson's attempted takedown of Sarah Palin was so bad that Sarah Palin (or her assistant) was able to demolish it in a letter to the Post.   Was she right about climate change?  Probably not.  No matter.  The Post published her anyway.  Why?  Via the Howler, Editor and Publisher gives us a little insight:

NEW YORK It took editors at The Washington Post less than a day to greenlight Sarah Palin's climate change Op-Ed piece, according to Op-Ed Editor Autumn Brewington.

She said the newspaper received an e-mail from Palin Tuesday asking to write about the issue and it decided it should run Wednesday, before President Barack Obama was to head to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

"If we were going to use it, we had to use it immediately," Brewington said. "It was a quicker turnaround than is often the case. But we made the decision based on news."

The Palin piece questioned the ongoing climate change view of global warming, stating: "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes." It brought a string of criticism in other publications and Web sites, ranging from The Atlantic to Scienceblogs.com.

Brewington did not regret giving Palin space, noting, "She is someone who stirs discussion and we are in the business of putting out opinion. She reached out to us."

She said the e-mail actually arrived Monday night, but editors did not see it until Tuesday. Brewington said no other Op-Eds had to be bumped for the piece to appear Wednesday, adding that columnist Ruth Marcus is off this week, freeing up more space.

Palin's piece drew interest for its criticism of climate change proponents, citing a scandal in Britain in which some "climate experts" were accused of falsifying data.

Brewington said the piece drew more reaction than most Op-Eds, adding that it ranked among the 10 most-read articles on the Post Web site Wednesday. "We are getting a lot of feedback. I have heard from a few more people today than I normally would have," she said. "Some people I think were glad that Palin had a voice in the Post, some were critical of her writing about climate change."

Among the critics was a university professor who has offered to write a rebuttal column, Brewington said, declining to name the person. "It is always interesting to see who reaches out to us," she said.

So Palin, someone without any knowledge or expertise or even credible opinion on the subject of climate change has her opinion rushed into print in one day because she "stirs discussion" and generates hits on the web page.  Some university professor's rebuttal–one can only imagine how many offered–not so much.  This is our discourse. 

There is no question that Palin has an opinion (though I am never sure what it is).  The question is whether her opinion is one that belongs in this debate.  My opinion of the Detroit Lions does not belong in a debate about this year's playoffs–they're not going.  But by the Post's reasoning, publishing a piece about how they should be going or how they are going would "stir discussion."

A variation on Godwin's law has it that a discussion thread is finished and a debater has lost when he turns to inappropriate Nazi comparisons.  Enter Michael Gerson.  Today he writes an entire meditation on the following argument:

1.  The Nazis exploited advanced communication technologies (bullhorns, leaflets, radio, etc.) for their own evil purposes;

2.  The internet is an advanced communication technology;

3.  Ergo, the internet is a tool of Nazism.

Or something like that (they also used books, newspapers, and other media as well folks).  Here's a sample:

But it was radio that proved the most powerful tool. The Nazis worked with radio manufacturers to provide Germans with free or low-cost "people's receivers." This new technology was disorienting, taking the public sphere, for the first time, into private places — homes, schools and factories. "If you tuned in," says Steve Luckert, curator of the exhibit, "you heard strangers' voices all the time. The style had a heavy emphasis on emotion, tapping into a mass psychology. You were bombarded by information that you were unable to verify or critically evaluate. It was the Internet of its time." 

I think it's funny that he mentions the radio while blaming the internet for factually-challenged, hyperbolic, demagogic rhetoric, when, we have in fact the radio–and of course television, to blame for that.

Anyway.  Here is the justification for the comparison:

This comparison to the Internet is apt. The Nazis would have found much to admire in the adaptation of their message on neo-Nazi, white supremacist and Holocaust-denial Web sites. 

The comparison is apt because there are actual neo-Nazis using the internet!  This justification misses the point of the original comparison.  The point is that the internet is Nazi-like (but not necessarily Nazi in content).  The Nazi content cited by Gerson as evidence of Nazi-likeness of the medium doesn't establish, however, that the internet itself is Nazi-like.  The Nazis printed books as well.  At most this establishes the bland theory that the internet is a communication medium, which can be used and accessed by many people.  That fact, I think, is not very surprising.

Kathleen Parker concern trolls on behalf of homophobic Christian ministers:

When whites lynched blacks with the tacit approval of the state, the entire African American community was terrorized. No one can pretend otherwise. It is this immeasurable horror that hate-crimes laws attempt to address by adding another layer of punishment to the primary crime.

What fair-minded person could object? On the other hand, how do we read the minds of our worst actors? Is it possible to say conclusively that these killers were motivated by hate to the exclusion of other potentially confounding factors?

These are legitimate questions that deserve rational debate without the dueling rants of hyperbole and outrage. Ultimately, that debate leads to free-speech issues — especially religious speech — and the real crux of the opposition.

Some conservative groups worry that hate-crimes laws might lead to restrictions on churches or other religious organizations' freedom to quote Scripture that might be deemed hateful toward gays. Might a passionate preacher's invocation of, say, Leviticus 20:13, which condemns homosexual behavior, be interpreted as conspiracy to commit a hate crime?

In fact, the legislation applies when a physical assault or attempted murder takes place. And, so far, the First Amendment still protects the rights of even the Rev. Fred Phelps to take his "God Hates Fags" show on the road.

But in a country where eating Twinkies can be a defense for murder — and a Miss USA contestant can be publicly denounced as a "dumb bitch" for saying that marriage should be between a man and a woman — stranger things are sure to happen.

As an operating principle, meanwhile, it seems wiser to hear and see the haters rather than criminalize their thoughts and banish them to the underground where their demons can fester and where no law can breach their purpose

There's a neat collection of straightforward fallacies here.  In the first place, there is the oft-repeated objection that bias crimes involve an impossible form of "mind reading."  That is just dumb.  "Intentional murder" involves mind reading.  

Second, that the existence of hate crimes laws will ultimately (that's the word that indicates the bottom of the slippery slope–here a fallacious one) inhibit religious speech is just crazy.  Hate crimes laws, as the very name makes clear, involve crimes.  Click here for the FBI page on hate crimes.

That–the alleged slope–completes the red herring–the bait and switch.  For the initial point of the piece regarded including crimes against homosexuals (and others) in hate crimes laws.  Including them seems perfectly reasonable.  It has nothing to do, as Parker even seems to admit without realizing it, with people's "thoughts" (taken by themselves).  Non-existent restrictions on free speech, in other words, are not the issue at all.  On account of that obvious fact, we don't need to worry about "criminalizing" anyone's thoughts.  

Finally, it's ludicrous (and just plain baffling) to group the (not actually real) "Twinkie defense" (supposedly used to justify the murder of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco) and the completely reasonable negative public reaction to a beauty contest's lame and ignorant defense of opposite marriage.  She made a contentious point about what rights certain people should have–many have objected to her reasoning.  She's a public figure and ought to expect that.  

One more thing, however, about the murderer of Harvey Milk.  The jury, reading the defendents mind, found him unable to have engaged in premeditated murder on account of diminished mental capacity. 

We certainly pick on George Will a lot.  This is because he is a recidivist.  Now despite his having been roundly and decisively refuted in his ridiculous global warming denialism, he has returned to the scene of the crime, to repeat his errors and once again to tout the virtues of his skepticism.  His skepticism has little by way of virtue, because it has no factual basis, and he has no business writing anything about a subject in which he has worse than no competence. 

Others have already amply demonstrated the factual errors again in his column.  I would just like to make two points.  Will's most basic problem lies with the inferences he draws.  He insists in his column that dire warnings about global cooling 30 years ago in the popular press have some kind of significance for whether or not one should believe the community of competent and qualified climate scientists when they assert that the globe is warming.  He writes:

Few phenomena generate as much heat as disputes about current orthodoxies concerning global warming. This column recently reported and commented on some developments pertinent to the debate about whether global warming is occurring and what can and should be done. That column, which expressed skepticism about some emphatic proclamations by the alarmed, took a stroll down memory lane, through the debris of 1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous global cooling.

Concerning those predictions, the New York Times was — as it is today in a contrary crusade — a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that "a major cooling of the climate" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950." Now the Times, a trumpet that never sounds retreat in today's war against warming, has afforded this column an opportunity to revisit another facet of this subject — meretricious journalism in the service of dubious certitudes.

Yes, the New York Times' being wrong about global cooling is evidence against a Times' reporter's claims (problematic though they were for being too kind to Will) that scientists have questioned Will's facts.  Sheesh.  You cannot get any dumber than that by way of rejoinder.  Maybe: I know what you are, so what am I?  But this really is a version of that.  

Here's the second point.  Science, as far as I know, thrives on skepticism–qualified skepticism.  Arguing that maybe the Bible is correct and Jesus created the world (okay, it doesn't say that) does not amount to meaningful skepticism.  Neither does George Will's incompetent, ignorant, and self-important bumbling through the facts.  He writes:

The scientists at the Illinois center offer their statistics with responsible caveats germane to margins of error in measurements and precise seasonal comparisons of year-on-year estimates of global sea ice. Nowadays, however, scientists often find themselves enveloped in furies triggered by any expression of skepticism about the global warming consensus (which will prevail until a diametrically different consensus comes along; see the 1970s) in the media-environmental complex.

Nah.  Will has been fairly and roundly criticized for having been wrong in his facts and wrong in his judgments.  This does not amount to evidence of a media-environmental complex, it does, however, suggest that the Post has no interest in reality.  They say as much:

If you want to start telling me that columnists can’t make inferences which you disagree with—and, you know, they want to run a campaign online to pressure newspapers into suppressing minority views on this subject—I think that’s really inappropriate. It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject — so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him.

That is not the point.  And it's a deliberate misconstruing of the criticism.  In the first place, Will's facts were wrong.  In the second place, his inferences are preposterous (see, for instance, above).  He has no business making them in a public forum such as this and the Post has no business publishing them.  

In the category of sloppy pseudo-balance-driven reporting today, we have the following comparison between George Will's making stuff up and Al Gore's exaggerating a consequence of a well-established phenomenon.  The New York Times' Andrew Revkin writes:

In the effort to shape the public’s views on global climate change, hyperbole is an ever-present temptation on all sides of the debate.

Earlier this month, former Vice President Al Gore and the Washington Post columnist George Will made strong public statements about global warning — from starkly divergent viewpoints.

Mr. Gore, addressing a hall filled with scientists in Chicago, showed a slide that illustrated a sharp spike in fires, floods and other calamities around the world and warned the audience that global warming “is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented.”

Mr. Will, in a column attacking what he said were exaggerated claims about global warming’s risks, chided climate scientists for predicting an ice age three decades ago and asserted that a pause in warming in recent years and the recent expansion of polar sea ice undermined visions of calamity ahead.

Both men, experts said afterward, were guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements.

In the first place, George Will is on record for denying that global warming is taking place–he's not just denying its risks.  

Gore, on the other hand, engaged in hyperbole about the risks of global warming, a phenomenon qualified scientists justifiably believe to be taking place.

The difference, seems to me, is fairly obvious.  Is what Gore says wrong?  Probably.  But obviously not in the same Will is wrong.

Here's some prescience by Revkin:

In a paper being published in the March-April edition of the journal Environment, Matthew C. Nisbet, a professor of communications at American University, said Mr. Gore’s approach, focusing on language of crisis and catastrophe, could actually be serving the other side in the fight.

“There is little evidence to suggest that it is effective at building broad-based support for policy action,” Dr. Nisbet said. “Perhaps worse, his message is very easily countered by people such as Will as global-warming alarmism, shifting the focus back to their preferred emphasis on scientific uncertainty and dueling expert views.”

But Dr. Nisbet said that for Mr. Will, there was little downside in stretching the bounds of science to sow doubt.

Criticism of Mr. Will’s columns, Dr. Nisbet said, “only serves to draw attention to his claims while reinforcing a larger false narrative that liberals and the mainstream press are seeking to censor rival scientific evidence and views.”

Indeed, perhaps Nisbet could add that a primary cause of doubt in the public's mind is reporting of this variety.  Perhaps it is Revkin's job to help us see the difference between Al Gore's occasional and not wholly unsupported exaggeration and George Will's dishonest rejection of well-established science.  George Wil, in other words, is to blame for making stuff up.  This is not somehow Al Gore's fault.

In the spirit of the season, let's reflect on the words of the Reverend Warren, a man noted for the fact that he, perhaps alone among right wing evangelicals, does not always blame the poor and the sick for their condition.  But that doesn't stop him from being a rather sorry thinker when it comes to homosexuality.  In an interview with Beliefnet.com, he says:

The issue to me, I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to redefinition of a 5,000 year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister being together and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

[Question] Do you think those are equivalent to gays getting married?

Oh , I do. For 5,000 years, marriage has been defined by every single culture and every single religion – this is not a Christian issue. Buddhist, Muslims, Jews – historically, marriage is a man and a woman. And the reason I supported Proposition 8, is really a free speech issue. Because first the court overrode the will of the people, but second there were all kinds of threats that if that did not pass then any pastor could be considered doing hate speech if he shared his views that he didn’t think homosexuality was the most natural way for relationships, and that would be hate speech. We should have freedom of speech, ok? And you should be able to have freedom of speech to make your position and I should be able to have freedom of speech to make my position, and can’t we do this in a civil way.

In the interest of Christian charity, someone should point out that marriage has not been defined in every single culture as that between one man and one woman.  Sometimes, it turns out, that the Kings of Israel had to have many many many wives and then concubines beyond that (Lucky them, some might add).  Some cultures, get this, define marriage as that between one woman and many men–it's called polyandry–or marriage to many dudes.

Aside from picking and choosing which passages of the Bible to endorse and which cultural practices to remember, the Reverend Warren is confused about the nature of definitions and free speech.  In the first place, he can define marriage however he wants in his church.  No one would force him to recognize the marriage of a brother and a sister (which he considers by the way equivalent to gay marriage).  Recognizing the legal right of two unrelated adults to contract however they want does not entail any alteration in the fabric of the universe of definitions–in the world of Platonic forms, or the divine mind, or wherever these things exist.  Besides, as Warren points out, this particular definition of marriage, on his view, extends back only 5,000 years.  That number of years, even in the relatively short span of human history, is but a drop in the bucket (sidenote: why does Warren repeat "5,000 years"?  Is he a young earther?).

As for freedom of speech, the court "overriding" the will of the people does not ipso facto constitute a violation of freedom of speech.  Sometimes that's the court's job.  And Warren can continue to preach that Gayness can or shoudl be cured in his church.  He has, after all, a right to be wrong.  No one will take that away from him.   

I saw this absurd piece by Deborah Howell, the Washington Post ombudsperson, on Saturday, but I had other things to do so no time to write anything.  Having established by quantitative means that the Post had a crush on Obama the previous week, she now attempts to make a more substantive case with a recommendation for how to avoid it.  Here's more substance:

Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said, "The perception of liberal bias is a problem by itself for the news media. It's not okay to dismiss it. Conservatives who think the press is deliberately trying to help Democrats are wrong. But conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It's inconceivable that that is irrelevant."

Journalism, like academia, seems full of crazed liberals such as myself.  A neighbor of mine, a journalist for a major newspaper, has confirmed this (so it must be true).  The liberal dominance of journalism–the fact that many reporters are liberals in other words–ought to raise at least two more questions: (1) why's that? and (2) does it affect their readers (not their reporting–you can't tell that, after all, because only academic liberals would be able to study whether it has)?  I can't answer (1) with anything but the speculative–because liberals live in a reality-based world, reporters who report on the world, come to share those views.  Or perhaps one could say reporters are cynical nihilists, like many godless liberals, so therefore, etc.  Anyway, the answer to (2) seems more important.  Since Howell discounts liberal bias going out in the form of reporting, there out to be evidence of a "liberal tilt" in the reading of that reporting.  I don't really know what that would be, short of something like this: "I have an unjustified feeling of good will toward Obama and Nancy Pelosi."

Anyway, here's the funny part.  Howell suggests that this perception of bias on the part of people who don't believe the stories anyway–that is, people already immune to bias–is for newsrooms to hire more conservative journalists:

Are there ways to tackle this? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two. The first is not easy: Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy. But newspapers have hired more minorities and women, so it can be done.

Rosenstiel said, "There should be more intellectual diversity among journalists. More conservatives in newsrooms will bring about better journalism. We need to be more vigilant and conscious in looking for bias. Our aims are pure, but our execution sometimes is not. Staff members should feel in their bones that unfairness will never be tolerated."

Perhaps the new affirmative action hires of conservative journalists could write for the irony page, where they can report on the failure of affirmative action programs and the like.

Update.  Just saw this on Political Animal–it's a better post on the same topic with some good links.