Somone Is Wrong On The Internet: now a syndrome. Probably been so for a while. This syndrome explains a lot about this blog. There ought to be however an accompanying syndrome, something like: No One Cares About Your Criticism (NOCAYC)–only wittier and more elegant.
Perhaps the original (sorry don't feel like checking, summer time and all) can be found here.
More on a theme. Worth watching the whole thing. Via Leiter, News Apps.
Oh, and apologies for being down earlier today; technical difficulties.
Some puzzling words in favor of "traditional" marriage:
It was not for nothing that societies for millenniums recognized marriage for its civilizing properties and stepped in to regulate them secularly. That's because marriage, among other things, seeks to protect the lives and rights of women and children in a historically patriarchal society.
This from the mouth of the Chicago Tribune's get-off-my-lawn conservative guy, Dennis Byrne. This is in an argument against gay marriage–or rather, to use his words, in support of "traditional marriage." Of course, for Byrne, "traditional marriage" is one-man-one-woman leave-it-to-beaver marriage: not the real traditional marriage of the kind where the wife had very much unequal status. That particular argument from tradition would appeal to very few.
Anyway, so Byrne maintains that marriage civilizes. But it civilzes only when it's one-man and a series perhaps of individual women (or vice versa: one woman and a series of individual men). There seems to be no actual evidence for that claim, other than the fact that some form of contractual union has existed for a long time. In the absence of such evidence, one must naturally rely on the slope:
The formulated response to this point is that marriage can continue to go on protecting those lives and rights whether or not gays and lesbians are legally included in the marriage contract.
But that's too simplistic. Cultural institutions like marriage can be fragile structures, bending to the crosswinds of changing public attitudes. Tamper with them too much, and they become diluted and ineffective in their purpose.
I believe people have rights to legally designate in contract law who can visit them in hospitals, who can be named as insurance beneficiaries and the raft of other considerations sought for gay and lesbian couples. Call the arrangement civil unions if you wish.
But that's not the same as defining any union a marriage.
My fear — based on secular, more than religious precepts — is that watering down marriage could eventually rob society of the stabilizing and other beneficial effects of an institution now relentlessly under attack. Perhaps this argument is too ethereal to be grasped or accepted in an age of radical individualism. But it's an argument that is understood by plenty of Americans willing to state it, although it puts them in danger of being painted as haters.
This argument achieves new heights of terribleness. Byrne believes people have contractual rights except when they don't. Marriage, one might recall, as far as the law is concerned is a type of civil contract (that's why Sea Captains can perform marriages). People have a right to this with its responsibilities and benefits or they don't. If they don't, some aspect of contract is closed to them. Why don't they have those rights, according to Byrne? The slippery slope.
Recall that Byrne has already argued that marriage has stabilizing, er civilizing effects. Nowadays, more people want access to those effects (people who would not have accessed it before). So this means, somehow in Byrne's world, that marriage is under attack. And of coruse, the very fact that more people want to realize the benefits of civilization means the very end of civilization. I mean, you can't get a good drink around here anymore.
The weather is too nice around here. So please enjoy the following tweet:
The sweet spot is a mistake that allows the press to prosecute the error without sounding too political.
Sounds right to me. via Atrios.
Someone asked Mao Tse Tung (forgive me if I get this anecdote wrong) what he thought of the French Revolution. His reply: it's too early to tell. That's taking the long view. Now comes David Frum, former Bush Speechwriter guy, and transplanted Canadian conservative. He writes in favor of same sex marriage–good for him–but he does so in a way that makes you want to shake your head. You see, fourteen years ago he had predicted the decline of society in some kind of slippery slope type argument. He has waited around to see if that would happen, and lo, it didn't.
Washington (CNN) — I was a strong opponent of same-sex marriage. Fourteen years ago, Andrew Sullivan and I forcefully debated the issue at length online (at a time when online debate was a brand new thing).
Yet I find myself strangely untroubled by New York state's vote to authorize same-sex marriage — a vote that probably signals that most of "blue" states will follow within the next 10 years.
I don't think I'm alone in my reaction either. Most conservatives have reacted with calm — if not outright approval — to New York's dramatic decision.
Why?
The short answer is that the case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality. The case has not passed its test.
Since 1997, same-sex marriage has evolved from talk to fact.
If people like me had been right, we should have seen the American family become radically more unstable over the subsequent decade and a half.
Instead — while American family stability has continued to deteriorate — it has deteriorated much more slowly than it did in the 1970s and 1980s before same-sex marriage was ever seriously thought of.
By the numbers, in fact, the 2000s were the least bad decade for American family stability since the fabled 1950s. And when you take a closer look at the American family, the facts have become even tougher for the anti-gay marriage position.
Middle-class families have become somewhat more stable than they used to be. For example: College-educated women who got married in the 1990s were much less likely to get divorced than equally educated women who got married in the 1970s.
What's new and different in the past 20 years is the collapse of the Hispanic immigrant family. First-generation Latino immigrants maintain traditional families: conservative values, low divorce rates, high fertility and — despite low incomes — mothers surprisingly often at home with the children.
But the second-generation Latino family looks very different. In the new country, old norms collapse. Nearly half of all children born to Hispanic mothers are now born out of wedlock.
Whatever is driving this negative trend, it seems more than implausible to connect it to same-sex marriage. How would it even work that a 15-year-old girl in Van Nuys, California, becomes more likely to have a baby because two men in Des Moines, Iowa, can marry?
Maybe somebody can believe the connection, but I cannot.
You mean you cannot believe that anymore, dingis. Fourteen years it took him to realize that the crazy ass slippery slope arguments–gay marriage will lead to the death of Merica!–were crap. Fourteen years.
Besides, there remains the question of whether what contractual relationships two constenting adults engage in is any part of anyone's business but their own.
UPDATE. Maybe Frum ought to revise his view in light of Pat Robertson's recent claim.
Disgraced former Speaker of the House and current Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich on Gay Marriage:
"I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. I think that's what marriage ought to be and I would like to find ways to defend that view as legitimately and effectively as possible."
Getting hetero-married over and over (Gingrich is on his third wife) is not perhaps one of those ways.
In other news–every read this awesome post by Scott and Rob Talisse at 3 Quarks Daily.
Whatever else you might call it, abortion is a form of birth control. Not however, according to Americans United for Life President Charmain Yoest. Here she is (via Think Progress):
HOST: Is your organization in favor of helping women have more access to birth control and helping women have their birth control paid for by insurance?
YOEST: That’s actually not an issue that we address. We on life issues, on biotheics, on abortion, on end of life, on rights of conscience, but we do not address that issue because there are differences of opinion on that. […]
HOST: But I’m just curios, why not approach birth control as an issue if the goal is to reduce abortions, to make abortion unnecessary, birth control does that. Wouldn’t that be an interesting addition to your legal pallet?
YOEST: Well, as I said, there is an awful lot of issues that can be addressed and we stay really focused to this question of abortion itself. It’s really a red herring that the abortion lobby likes to bring up, conflating abortion and birth control and that’s why we try to stay very clear on differentiating between the two. Because frankly that would be carrying water on the other side.
It's hard to know how to respond to this, other than to say this person has little interest in reality and ought therefore to be laughed at. Abortion, for the people who support its availability, is, in the most objectionable cases (for Yoest), a form of birth control. There are other, less murderous (in her mind) forms of birth control, so it would seem that supporting them, rather than not supporting them, would not be unreasonable.
This would not be unreasonable, unless of course your real interest lies in objecting to all forms of birth control–which seems the only reasonable way to interpret her. At least that way she' s not inconsistent, or dumb. It's really after all a question of charity.
There is a new academic paper defending the idea that marriage of the "Leave it to Beaver" variety is a metaphysical fact (and no, I'm not kidding):
Marriage is the union of a man and a woman who make a permanent and exclusive commitment to each other of the type that is naturally (inherently) fulfilled by bearing and rearing children together. The spouses seal (consummate) and renew their union by conjugal acts—acts that constitute the behavioral part of the process of reproduction, thus uniting them as a reproductive unit. Marriage is valuable in itself, but its inherent orientation to the bearing and rearing of children contributes to its distinctive structure, including norms of monogamy and fidelity. This link to the welfare of children also helps explain why marriage is important to the common good and why the state should recognize and regulate it.
The paper is at the link. Here is one critique of the academic variety; here another, slightly less academic, but equally poignant. I'm not going to bother with the arguments, at this point, because I think that matter has been resolved–however much the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy might disagree. Well, ok, just one.
Our organs—our heart and stomach, for example—are parts of one body because they are coordinated, along with other parts, for a common biological purpose of the whole: our biological life. It follows that for two individuals to unite organically, and thus bodily, their bodies must be coordinated for some biological purpose of the whole.
That sort of union is impossible in relation to functions such as digestion and circulation, for which the human individual is by nature sufficient. But individual adults are naturally incomplete with respect to one biological function: sexual reproduction.
I suspect questions are massively begged on the idea of "biological purposes"–and I think "organic" uniting is probably different from anything you can get at your Whole Foods. Whatever their meaning may be, the hilarious part/whole purposes analogy cries out for inclusion in one's Introduction to Logic text. My liver has a function, ergo, ipso facto you must marry me.
Let's go ahead and suppose that lots of arguments can be dreamt up for Leave it to Beaver marriage. They're all going to suck, because they presume stuff that just can't be presumed, or they try to establish things as facts that can't be established as facts without the presumptions.
I wouldn't even consider this an academic argument at this point–one whose outcome matters not. The outcome of this argument matters a lot. It's just that we've already seen it. Does this mean, real question here, that we have duty not to entertain this kind of argumentative detritis?
via Leiter.
I've been thinking of the reverse straw man for a bit now. Following the suggestions of some friends and commenters at the Mid South, one variation of the too charitable straw man we might call the "iron man." This is when someone's weak argument–or some weak arguer–is made stronger by irrelevant and inappropriate charity. Too often this inappropriate charity comes from people who ought to know better. And trolls depend on troll enablers.
The Onion, of all places, seems to get this. Here's their take on Michelle Bachmann:
Michele Bachmann Announces Bid To Be Discussed More Than She Deserves In 2012
That pretty much sums it up. Bachmann makes Bush look like Aristotle. Not iron-manning every incoherent utterance. I heard this yesterday on NPR:
ELLIOTT: I think the reception that Minnesota Congresswoman, Michele Bachmann, got here. She was really the star of the day. The crowd even sort of mobbed the stage when she finished her speech. And she really gave this conservative crowd just what they were looking for: plenty of meat stoking the anti-President Obama fervor that was rumbling through the crowd.
She attacked the president's health care overhaul. She attacked his energy policy, as well as his handling of the economy.
Representative MICHELE BACHMANN (Republican, Minnesota): We know what works. It's cutting spending. It's growing the economy. It's doing what free markets do, and what economic superpowers do. And Mr. President, you're no economic superpower.
I think it's a stretch to call this an "attack" on the President's handling of the economy. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that she said words which on the most charitble interpretation were probably meant as criticism of Obama on the economy. Anything more would be iron-manning. The sample clip doesn't begin to make sense–it begs the question (it's growing the economy!), ignores basic economics (cutting spending!), and it equivocates on "economic superpower" (in the first it's a property of nations, then it's denied of Barack Obama).
Someone in Florida is arranging a kind of Tea Party summer camp, designed to inculcate such not at all vague and totally consistent core "principles" such as (1) God exists; (2) America is Awesome; and (3) No one (save presumably God and your tithe-requiring church) can make you share.
TAMPA — Here's another option now that the kids are out of school: a weeklong seminar about our nation's founding principles, courtesy of the Tampa 912 Project.
The organization, which falls under the tea party umbrella, hopes to introduce kids ages 8 to 12 to principles that include "America is good," "I believe in God," and "I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable."
Organized by conservative writer Jeff Lukens and staffed by volunteers from the 912 Project, Tampa Liberty School will meet every morning July 11-15 in borrowed space at the Paideia Christian school in Temple Terrace.
"We want to impart to our children what our nation is about, and what they may or may not be told," Lukens said.
He said he was not familiar with public school curriculum, but, "I do know they have a lot of political correctness. We are a faithful people, and when you talk about natural law, you have to talk about God. When you take that out of the discussion, you miss the whole thing."
Pointing and laughing is a reasonable option. But I don't know if it will do much good.