The absolute contempt that gay marriage advocates have for the democratic process is jawdropping.
“The core purpose of a constitution is to protect minority rights,” said Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “It’s the law of California that same-sex couples have the fundamental right to marry.”
That is such crap. Complete, absolute, total crap, and I could almost guarantee that 9 out of 10 constitutional law professors would agree with it. That’s why lawyers believe it.
The core purpose of a constitution is to define how a free people is to govern themselves: how bills become laws, who can hold offices, what powers each office has. Protecting rights is incidental to that.
A document that laid out the rules for how the government worked but didn’t specifically protect any rights would still be a constitution, but a document that just “protected” rights without laying out how the government worked would not be. When you start viewing a constitution as nothing more than a method of vindicating supposed rights, all you get are lawsuits and rule by lawyers.
It is the law of California that its people have the fundamental right to govern themselves, subject only to the restraints of their good sense and the Constitution of the United States. Things get wild and woolly when you give a people the ability to amend the constitution with a majority vote, but democracy is, everywhere and always, wild and woolly.
But that doesn’t change the fact that living in a democratic republic compels a respect for the majority and a respect for all citizens to select rules of government that reflect their values and traditions.
The damned thing passed on Tuesday, and on Wednesday there are already lawsuits - attempts to substitute the rule of lawyers for the rule of law. When you so fundamentally disrespect the majority’s right to self-government, you have no legitimate claim that the majority is disrespecting your right to use a specific word to describe your personal relationships.
[Note: this post started as a comment on Tom’s excellent post below about bleeding heart conservativism. The ideas seemed to merit a full blog post rather than a blog post comment.]
A useful, if by no means perfect, way to think about government intervention is to do a thought experiment: will this program exacerbate a problem because people, who tend to take the path of least resistance, will behave badly so as to continue to take advantage of it? Always remember that a government program is a subsidy, and whenever something is subsidized, we get more of it.
One program that passes this test would be the G.I. Bill. This program is the sort of thing that some anti-war and anti-government libertarians would like to repeal, but since it encourages military service and college, it subsidizes good behavior.
One program that flunks this test would be the Great Society’s welfare program. It had wonderful intentions: alleviate the poverty of single mothers. But in doing so, government made fathers and work irrelevant; we got an explosion of single motherhood from this subsidy of bad behavior.
Hubbard posted this at 8:07 AM EDT on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 as Conservatism, Philosophy
It takes an optimist like George Will to point out what’s good these days:
Really grim news always contains good news. Remember Orwell’s rule that the quickest way to end a war is to lose it? One way to reduce the price of oil is to have an economic slowdown. The price plummeted from a July 3 peak of $145.29 to $62.65 last Friday. Is everybody happy?
Not exactly. Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin and Iran’s ruling mullahs, whose geopolitical ambitions are lubricated by high oil prices, are dismayed, which augments America’s stock of happiness. Some Americans, who discern a lead lining in any silver cloud, fret that falling oil prices will lure less virtuous Americans out of the market for electric cars, if there ever is such a market. The plummeting profits of oil companies please people who think profits represent economic success but moral failure. Such people are not among the millions of individual investors who own 23 percent of the companies and who do not worry that their pension funds are among those that own 27 percent of the oil companies, or that their IRAs, mutual funds, etc., are among those that own 43.5 percent of the companies. Anyway, as Congress contemplates yet another “stimulus,” the plunge in oil prices has delivered the equivalent of a huge cut in income taxes.
Thank you, Mr. Will. By the way, where are we going and why am are we in a handbasket again?
Hubbard posted this at 12:28 PM EDT on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 as Philosophy, Politics
Global warming, credit crises, nuclear war with Russia, Iran, or North Korea…these are all things we are right to worry about to one degree or another. However, in times of perceived chaos and impending doom, it’s worthwhile to keep a larger perspective on the scope of our problems. Whatever’s going on here on Earth, the truly poop-your-pants scary things are happening elsewhere. You want something to worry about?
The solar wind “inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system,” which protects the inner planets against the radiation from other stars, said Dave McComas, Ulysses’ solar wind principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
“With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere will diminish in size and strength,” said Ed Smith, NASA’s Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system,” added Smith.
Scientists say the weakening of solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun’s magnetic field, but the causes of these changes are unknown.
Yikes. Nothing will come of this - life’s been around on Earth for quite some time, and that wouldn’t be the case if destructive cosmic rays reached us on a routine basis. Or maybe not. Maybe this is a once in a billion years cycle and all life on Earth is to die before the election, and then we’ll never know who won. It’s worth pondering how little we know of space, and how uncontrollable it is. No one gives the sun a second’s thought, but we are completely and totally at its mercy.
Apollo posted this at 1:47 AM EDT on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 as Philosophy
2) From the beginning, the internal controversy (such as it is) over Sarah Palin has been a controversy not about Palin herself, but about John McCain. What kind of a decision-maker is he? How much information and consideration does he bring to bear?
If John McCain gambled on Palin without adequate research and preparation, the fact that he won his gamble does not reassure me very much. Gamblers sometimes do win. But the longer they play, the more they lose.
When I think of gambling, I think of two people, a family member and my friend, whom we’ll call Bill. The family member used to go to casinos occaisionally and play slot machines. She did this to amuse herself, and, win or lose, it generally worked. Almost certainly the long-term trend was losing, but that wasn’t really the point.
My friend Bill, on the other hand, is an actor and a math savant who played poker at casinos for spending money throughout college. When he’d get close to broke, he’d use the last of his money to buy a train ticket to a casino and a few chips to start himself off. And the next morning he’d leave with $500 in his pocket. True, even great poker players have bad nights. Luck is still a factor, but it’s not a very big one, and the definite long-term trend is winning
So when people off-handedly say that something is “a gamble,” I always ask myself what sort of gamble it is. The later sort, the types of gambles Bill took, are more correctly thought of as calculated risks. I think that accurately describes the Palin pick. She’s the governor of a frickin’ state, so there’s a lot of easily accessible information out there on her; idiots insisting that McCain didn’t know much about her are simply stupid. But she’s never been tested on a national stage, and this is certainly higher pressure than Alaska politics. So there’s a chance she’d fall apart.
Any pick, though, would have been a calculated risk. Picking the “safe” Romney would be betting on his inherent weirdness and stiffness not turning off voters; picking the “safe” Pawlenty would be betting that people would have actually paid attention to him; picking Liebermarn would have been betting that Republicans wouldn’t care that they disagreed with him on almost every issue. I think the Palin pick has both lower risks than all of these, and higher possible rewards. It was a smart risk, with significantly higher upsides than all other possibilities.
Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won reelection.
This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages — and loses — both necessary and unnecessary wars.
McCain has so little respect for the presidency of the United States that he is willing to put the girl next door (soon, too, to be a grandma) into office beside him. He has so little respect for the average American voter that he thinks this reckless and cynical ploy will work.
There’s a difference between elitism, which is a love of excellence, and snobbery, which is this bit of vitriol from Harris. To fully understand why Harris has blundered thus, we need to understand the difference between ordinary and average.
Average is a statistical category. It’s what people stumble into by default. Almost by definition, average is passive and conforming.
Ordinary is an earned category. It’s something people have to strive for, since common decency isn’t natural to humanity. Oddly enough, one must strive to be ordinary.
In this light, we can see that Palin is both far from average and profoundly ordinary—indeed, extra-ordinary. Average people might become mayors, but they rarely resign from boards in protest over other people’s ethics violations. Neither do average people challenge incumbent governors in primaries; it takes someone with ordinary decency to do that. If the statistics are true that most babies with Downs syndrome are aborted, than an average woman would have never given birth to Trig Palin—but Palin was an ordinary mother. Over the past several days, The Anchoress and Ann Althouse have done a series of posts defending the sheer ordinariness of Palin; they have done remarkable work.
But someone writing over a hundred years ago anticipated Sam Harris, who seems to yearn for his politicians to be Nietzschean supermen. He was G.K. Chesterton, and in his book Heretics, he had this defense of democracy and the ordinary:
Democracy is not philanthropy; it is not even altruism or social reform. Democracy is not founded on pity for the common man; democracy is founded on reverence for the common man, or, if you will, even on fear of him. It does not champion man because man is so miserable, but because man is so sublime. It does not object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king, for its dream is always the dream of the first Roman republic, a nation of kings.
Next to a genuine republic, the most democratic thing in the world is a hereditary despotism. I mean a despotism in which there is absolutely no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness for the post. Rational despotism—that is, selective despotism—is always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all. But irrational despotism is always democratic, because it is the ordinary man enthroned. The worst form of slavery is that which is called Caesarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man as despot because he is suitable. For that means that men choose a representative, not because he represents them, but because he does not. Men trust an ordinary man like George III or William IV because they are themselves ordinary men and understand him. Men trust an ordinary man because they trust themselves. But men trust a great man because they do not trust themselves. And hence the worship of great men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of great men until the time when all other men are small.
In this light, McCain’s selection of an ordinary woman shows a profound respect to citizens. He could have picked the hyperachieving Mitt Romney or the blandly average Tim Pawlenty; he instead went with the ordinary Sarah Palin. And the excitement from the grassroots shows that they don’t view themselves as weak, that they trust themselves. Sam Harris, however, views the people as weak and does not trust them. Like his intellectual forebear George Bernard Shaw, Harris cares little for ordinary people and, if he believed in God, would think that He made far too many of them. Like Chesterton, Palin is an ordinary person who believes that ordinary people are blessings.
The issue over Palin has come down, as so many conflicts do these days, to another duel between Bernard Shaw and Chesterton. What’s wrong with the world, as noted here before, is that this is Bernard Shaw’s world. But every now and then, when you least expect it, Chesterton scores a victory, as unexpected as a carpenter’s son changing the world.
In the discussion thread on my post about PZ Myers and Bill Donahue’s equally shameful behavior last week, commenter Blake wrote:
PZ and Co. aren’t in the business of changing minds because dogmatic beliefs don’t usually change. PZ is in the business of showing the next, undecided generation that religion is worthless at best.
Were Myers and Dawkins merely atheist apologists, I’d simply leave them to it and not bother. But their open contempt for all forms of religion compromises their professional efforts to combat scientific illiteracy, counter pseudo-science like Intelligent Design, and fight anti-science like Creationism. As someone who cares deeply about science education, it breaks my heart to see two such talented science writers waste their talent like this.
Rightly or wrongly, most Americans are deeply religious and find real-life, personal benefits in their religion: it answers theological and philosophical questions, provides them with meaning, and informs their interactions with others.
As my co-blogger Apollo has noted, however, most people are not inclined to care that much about evolution in and of itself. Unless you work in the sciences, you are unlikely to derive any obvious benefit from the truth or falsity of evolution (the key word in that sentence being ‘obvious’). A religious person might find many daily applications for his religion – solace through prayer, strength in the face of adversity, guidance in ethical behavior, etc.* – but few will find so many practical, daily uses for evolution.
When they do think of evolution (and I’m still borrowing from Apollo here), they tend to be resistant to it. Most people, quite understandably, find more fulfillment in thinking of themselves as ensouled creations of a divine intelligence than as imperfect, mortal organisms shaped by the unguided hand of Natural Selection.
It should come as no surprise then, that when asked to choose between an uncomfortable theory with no (obvious) practical application and deeply-held beliefs with clear benefits, most people chose the latter. They are all the more likely to do so when the purveyors of the Uncomfortable Truth delight in disparaging their deepest convictions, however true the former and ridiculous the latter may be.
Myers and Dawkins have absolutely every right to work as atheist spokesmen and as popularizers of science. I have no interest in silencing them, or in telling them to keep their non-sciencey thoughts to themselves. I am not suggesting that great and wonderful things will happen if they ‘make nice’ with their opponents, nor do I believe that Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA theory can draw a clearly defined line between the empirical and the religious worlds.
I do, however, question the wisdom of working to increase scientific literacy while needlessly disparaging religion, especially in the manner Myers has been doing lately; it has no other effect than to give well-meaning religious people a perfectly justifiable reason to ignore his superb scholarship and writing. For good or for bad, scientific literacy and atheist apologetics are not complimentary goals in America today; Myers and Dawkins do themselves, their profession, and our civilization great harm by their failure to acknowledge this.
* My point is not that religion is the only source of solace, meaning, and ethics; rather, that most people derive these things from religion. It should go without saying that people can also find justification for bigotry, arrogance, and hatred in religion as well.