Month: August 2013

The Gay Marriage / Bestiality Link that ISN’T

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2013-08-23 Byron Rushing with Elizabeth Warren

It’s fun to pass along every sensational tidbit that validates your world view, but it radicalizes debate, shuts down real communication, and erodes the credibility of whatever side you are attempting to support. In fact, the biggest difference between a partisan ideologue and someone with sincere principles may be the ability to scrutinize arguments that come from your own “side”.

That’s the spirit with which I decided to dig deeper into a series of Facebook posts I glimpsed today with headlines like “The First US State to Legalize Same Sex Marriage Now to legalize bestiality, adultery, repeal public morality, and stop teaching children about values and virtues.” Now, let’s be honest, if you have a rule “Never trust a headlines that verbose” you’re actually probably getting off to a great start. Following that up with a rule like “Never trust news sources with over-enthusiastic titles” (this story comes from “Wakeup Call News”) you’re going to end up filtering a lot of this stuff out without having to bother to scrutinize it. Practically speaking: that’s not a bad idea.

But I wanted to dig a little deeper and find out what is going on with a claim like this one. Here’s what I found. 

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The Gay Marriage Bait and Switch

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2013-08-23 Elaine Huguenin

In contrast to the laissez faire rhetoric of the gay rights  movement, one of the concerns raised has been that ultimately legalizing gay marriage (using the prevalent rationales) will infringe on the civil liberties of those who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.

With gay marriage proponents on the cusp of total victory, these fears may be starting to be realized. New Mexico recently ruled that a private photography business violated anti-discrimination law by refusing to take photos of a gay commitment ceremony.

I call this a “bait and switch” because it’s clearly not what the majority of Americans signed on for when they got beyond the libertarian rhetoric of the gay rights movement: “85 percent of Americans support the right of the photographer to say no.”

Which Famous Economist Are You Like?

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This survey uses an interesting definition of “famous” since I had never heard of the economists I was most similar to: Judith Chevalier, Pete Klenow, and Luigi Zingales. At least Zingales has his own Wikipedia page.

2013-08-23 Luigi Zingales

I liked what I read about him, but as I answered more questions about the EU (which I know very little about) I drifted away from him and towards Klenow / Chevalier, going back and forth several times before ending up nearest to Klenow.

2013-08-23 Survey Results

 

Who do you end up closest to?

Race Relations: Global Edition

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RealClearWorld has a recent post that should be instructive to Americans in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case and the racism claims that accompanied it. Though racism certainly exists in America (I’m willing to bet it will always exist everywhere to some extent), to obsessively focus of America’s past and present sins while ignoring the rest of the world is problematic. Here are a few points the RCW article makes:

  • A large number of Hungarian parents will not allow their children to be friends with Jews (46%), Africans (58%), or Roma/Gypsies (68%).
  • Italy’s first black government minister was openly compared to an orangutan by a senator and had bananas thrown at her by a citizen.
  • Dutch politicians exploit racial tensions to advance a particularly anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant agenda.
  • Mexican navy cadets were attacked by some 300 “soccer fans” on a Polish beach.
  • The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party caught 7% of the Greek popular vote in June.
  • The National Front caught nearly 18% of the French vote in the April 2012 first-round presidential elections.
  • The Freedom Party in the Netherlands caused the government to collapse in April 2012.
  • Extremist parties were part of government coalitions in Italy, Switzerland, Austria until recently.
  • Similar parties are gaining momentum in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland and were met with electoral success in the 2009 European Parliament elections in Hungary, the UK, etc.

As the article concludes, “Perhaps those who continue to obsess over American race relations should try reading global news every once in a while.”

New CDC Gun Study: Everyone Looks Foolish

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2013-08-21 Gun Control

If you Google “obama cdc gun study” you get interesting results: a bevy of mainstream pieces from January or February of this year when President Obama overrode Republican obstructionism to fund CDC research into gun violence and then a smattering of much more recent articles from conservative outlets crowing that the first such study proved they were right all along and that it “shreds” Obama’s position.

One of the first appears to be The New American which also links to a draft of the report. It’s mostly a glorified literature review an reinforces statistics gun advocates have long known about, such as the fact that lawful, defensive use of a firearm is more common (500,000 – 3,000,000 / year) than illegal use to commit a violent crime (300,000 / year). The study also found that many gun control laws are not reliably effective and, interestingly, it turns out that if you take California, Illinois, New Jersey, and Washington D.C. out of the national crime statistics, we go from a country that has 20 times the violent gun crime rate of the rest of the developed world to being basically average. These states have the most restrictive gun control laws in the country, and it doesn’t seem to be helping very much.

Good for the conservatives, but here’s the question: if they knew all along that this would be the result, why did they defund the CDC’s investigations to begin with? It’s a little rich to take credit for a report you would never have willingly permitted.

I’m glad more good evidence is out there, but both sides end up looking like fools to me.

Should Women Be Allowed to Go to College? Feminists Unsure

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2013-08-21 o-alma-mater

This headline is much more provocative than the blog post that inspired it (O, Alma Mater), so let me explain why I think it’s warranted. In the post, Anne-Marie Maginnis responds to the idea that women who earn Ivy League degrees and choose to be stay-at-home moms are wasting their degrees. She cites a recent article in The Guardian:

Any Harvard Law School degree obtained by a woman who then chooses not to use it in any sort of professional capacity throughout most of her life is a wasted opportunity. That degree could have gone to a woman who does want to spend her entire life using it to advance the cause of women—or others in need of advancement—not simply advancing the lives of her own family at home, which is a noble cause, but not one requiring an elite degree.

The quote is ostensibly about advanced degrees at elite schools (not “college”) and specifically about stay-at-home moms (not “women”), but the truly alarming thing about the argument–which Maginnis exposes immediately–is that it assumes that women aren’t worth educating for their own sake. If you take it seriously, this brand of feminism says that a woman’s value–her right to be educated–is dependent on her usefulness to the capitalist machine. So much for liberalism, in pretty much every sense of the word.

Groklaw Follows Lavabit, Shuts Down to Avoid Betraying Users to NSA

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2013-08-20 Groklaw

Gizmodo has a really ominous piece on the recent shutdown of Groklaw. It’s ominous because unlike Lavabit or Silent Cirlce which help users exchange secure emails, Groklaw is not primarily a platform for individual user communication. It is–or it was–“an award-winning website covering legal news of interest to the free and open source software community” (Wikipedia).

There’s no indication that the NSA was gunning for Groklaw in particular. Founder Pamela Jones simply explains that, in a world where emails are not private, there’s no way to carry on the collaborative communication necessary for the site to continue its 10-year tradition. She goes even farther, writing:

My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it’s possible. I’m just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can’t stay online personally without losing my humanness [because] it’s not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7.

An extreme reaction? Maybe. But Jones’s reaction underscores the simple reality that the Internet is first, foremost, and last about communication. The NSA’s snooping could never have been confined to only secure email providers even if that was their intent (not that it was). Shake the foundation, and the whole edifice trembles.

Little Boys Like Guns

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Don’t be afraid. It’s just a poptart. Also, your son is not a sociopath.

Time recently published a compelling article on how zero tolerance policies and teacher and parent aversion to action-packed boy play is hindering the social, verbal and academic (and possibly other) development of little boys.

At the same time that more and more research has shown that creative play is essential to childhood development, policies have been decreasing the amount of acceptable pretend play.  From redirecting superhero play (but not princess play for girls) to draconian policies that suspend or expel very young children for merely making a gun with their hands or other harmless object, we are robbing boys of essential growth.

If you’re one of those parents who doesn’t allow toy guns at home, maybe the next time you think “Oh no! Are my boys too violent?” because they want to play cops and robbers you should instead rethink “Oh yes! My boys are so creative.”

Ms. Molly Goes to Hollywood: Mormon Women Authors and Filmmakers Represent with “Austenland”

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My monthly post at the Association for Mormon Letters’ blog Dawning of a Brighter Day just went up. This month I explore the interesting possibilities that have opened up with the Mormon female helmed release of the film Austenland  in my post “Ms. Molly Goes to Hollywood: Mormon Women Authors and Filmmakers Represent with Austenland.” Check it out by clicking on the link!

Stephenie Meyer, Jerusha Hess, Shannon Hale

Court employee fired for helping innocent inmate access DNA testing.

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According to the Associated Press:

“A Kansas City man freed from prison three decades after being wrongfully convicted of rape considers Sharon Snyder his ‘angel’ for giving him a public document that showed him how to properly seek DNA tests. A Jackson County Circuit judge considers the 34-year court employee an insubordinate for offering legal advice and being too chatty about courthouse matters.”

The timeline of events is as follows:

  • 1984: Robert Nelson is convicted of rape, forcible sodomy, and first-degree robbery.
  • 2009: Nelson seeks DNA testing that wasn’t available during his original trial. Judge David Byrn denies the request.
  • August 2011: Nelson asks Byrn to reconsider; Byrn rejects Nelson’s motion because it falls short of statute requirements.
  • October 2011: Sharon Snyder give’s Nelson’s sister a copy of a successful (public) motion for DNA testing filed in a different case.
  • February 2012: Nelson uses this document as a basis for his new motion for DNA testing.
  • August 2012: Byrn sustains the motion allowing for DNA testing.
  • June 2013: The Kansas City crime lab concludes Nelson is not the source of the DNA evidence; Nelson is freed. Five days later Snyder is suspended without pay for her involvement in the case.
  • June 27, 2013: Byrn fires Snyder, saying Snyder “violated several court rules by providing assistance to Nelson and talking about aspects of the case, even while under seal, to attorneys not involved in the matter.”

Byrn, Nelson’s attorney, and other court officials declined to comment on the story. Snyder, however, explained, “I lent an ear to his sister, and maybe I did wrong, but if it was my brother, I would go to every resource I could possibly find.”

On the one hand, if court employees broke the rules every time they heard an emotionally compelling story, our system would not run smoothly at all. On the other hand, it seems like a failure of the system that an innocent prisoner did not otherwise have the resources (that is, did not have the knowledge or assistance) to make his case. What do you think? Should Snyder have done what she did?