Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site.
Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children.
In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.
When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism. If these folks — if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation.
So I want to be very clear — some of the hype that we’ve been hearing over the last day or so — nobody is listening to the content of people’s phone calls. This program, by the way, is fully overseen not just by Congress, but by the FISA Court — a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them, and that it’s being carried out consistent with the Constitution and rule of law.
And so, not only does that court authorize the initial gathering of data, but — I want to repeat — if anybody in government wanted to go further than just that top-line data and want to, for example, listen to Jackie Calmes’ phone call, they would have to go back to a federal judge and indicate why, in fact, they were doing further probing.
You got that? They are only getting metadata. No big deal, right? If they really want the juicy goods, then they’ve got to go back to a federal judge. This argument rests on the premise that phone metadata is not, in and of itself, highly sensitive data. Which, when you think about it, is not really a hypothetical or philosophical question. It’s an empirical one. It’s something you could test. So… what kind of info can you glean from a person’s metadata?
The folks at Web Policy set out to answer the question. They used metadata gathered from a small number of volunteers over just a few months to see what they could learn about those volunteers looking only at metadta. Turns out, they could learn quite a lot.
The degree of sensitivity among contacts took us aback. Participants had calls with Alcoholics Anonymous, gun stores, NARAL Pro-Choice, labor unions, divorce lawyers, sexually transmitted disease clinics, a Canadian import pharmacy, strip clubs, and much more. This was not a hypothetical parade of horribles. These were simple inferences, about real phone users, that could trivially be made on a large scale.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of information your government can collect on you without a warrant or notification or really any restriction of any kind. But that’s not all.
Participant A communicated with multiple local neurology groups, a specialty pharmacy, a rare condition management service, and a hotline for a pharmaceutical used solely to treat relapsing multiple sclerosis.
Participant B spoke at length with cardiologists at a major medical center, talked briefly with a medical laboratory, received calls from a pharmacy, and placed short calls to a home reporting hotline for a medical device used to monitor cardiac arrhythmia.
Participant C made a number of calls to a firearm store that specializes in the AR semiautomatic rifle platform. They also spoke at length with customer service for a firearm manufacturer that produces an AR line.
In a span of three weeks, Participant D contacted a home improvement store, locksmiths, a hydroponics dealer, and a head shop.
Participant E had a long, early morning call with her sister. Two days later, she placed a series of calls to the local Planned Parenthood location. She placed brief additional calls two weeks later, and made a final call a month after.
Nothing to worry about, right? It’s just metadata, after all. It’s not like they’re listening to your calls, or something.
As any Browncoat knows, you can’t stop the signal. You can, however, try to hijack it. Before the end of the first episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., I realized that that was exactly what was going on. I’m definitely not the first person to notice the strong parallels between Agents and Firefly. This excellent piece at ScreenRant dives right into the similarities… and why they don’t work. I largely agree with everything Andrew Dyce says in it, but I want to hone in on just the characters themselves, rather than also talking about plot, setting, and theme.
The ensemble cast (9 stars!) was the heart and soul of Firefly, but it was also the show’s Achilles’ heel, because having a lot of characters makes it harder for the audience to invest in the characters. This is partially because each individual character gets less time-per-episode, but there’s more to it than that.
In a show like Firefly, the audience gets to know the characters through their interactions with each other. To really know the group, we have to know how every member of that group relates to every single other member. Which means that it’s not characters that we have to worry about, it’s relationships. And the number of relationships in a group grows much faster than the number of individuals in the group.
This is a basic finding from network theory, but we can skip the theory and go straight to the pictures. In this illustration, taken from Wikipedia, imagine that every dot is a character, and every line connecting two dots is a relationship.
Small groups have very few relationships. You have to get up to three people in a group before you have three relationships to keep track of. But from that point on, the number of relationships grows much faster than the number of people being added to the group. Agents has six characters, so there are 15 relationships to keep track of. Firefly, on the other hand, had nine characters, which means there are 36 relationships to keep track of. This means that the cast of Firefly is more than twice as hard to get to know than the cast of Agents.
This isn’t just some random mathematical excursion, either. Social dynamics are a fundamental part of what makes us human. Some evolutionary biologists believe that one of the defining characteristics of the human brain is the ability to keep track of larger social groups than other primates. This is called the social brain hypothesis, and it was first promoted by Robin Dunbar. He argued that humans can only track a finite number of total, real-life relationships (most modern estimates say about 150), and this number became known as Dunbar’s number. In the real world, Dunbar’s number meant that our ancestors could congregate in much larger groups than chimpanzees, which allowed them to specialize and survive and (according to the hypothesis) could have created a feedback loop of increasing intelligence that led to modern humanity. The point is that we’re social animals, and there’s no reason to think that this doesn’t also apply to art.
This means that narrative with a lot of characters has the potential to be particularly engaging for us, but that it’s also harder to pull off. The story has to be good enough to keep people engaged long enough to have a chance to learn the relationships, and it also has to actually depict all the important relationships.
This isn’t a comprehensive theory of narrative, or anything. There’s a lot more to the story. Harry Potter is an incredibly engrossing narrative, and it only has 3 core relationships (between Harry, Ron, and Hermione) but a lot of the depth there comes from how those relationships change over time. (It’s partially a coming-of-age story, after all.) Game of Thrones has literally dozens and dozens of important characters, and there’s no way the books (let alone show) could hope to describe how every single person relates to every single other person, but that’s fine. The characters in Game of Throne are divided into factions and separated by geography, so it makes sense to have a very incomplete graph: not all the dots are going to have lines between them. But Firefly is a show about 9 people who all live together, and in that context we’re going to want to know how everyone relates to everyone else. Similarly, Agents has 6 people all living together, and so we can do a sort of apples-to-apples comparison between those two shows, even if we can’t generalize the analysis to every other book, movie, or TV show in existence.
So the point is that Firefly had a lot of relationships, and if you watch the shows in order that’s awesome because the story is good enough to keep you hooked, and then the episodes flesh out all the relationships. Which is great, right up until Fox decides to show the episodes out of order and to not even bother airing the premier.
Now, the lesson we Browncoats took from this is simple: air the episodes in the order they were written! TV execs probably saw things differently, however. Rather than fuss with shows that are highly sensitive to viewing-order, you’d want to try and re-engineer the show to be less sensitive. With or without my fancy network diagrams, it’s not really rocket science to realize that the simplest way to do that is to have fewer characters.
Which brings us to Agents as FireflyLite: they basically took the exact same characters and downsized them from nine to just five[ref]Yes, just five. You’ll see.[/ref] Here’s how they did it:
Mal vs. Agent Coulson
This one is pretty obvious: older, white, father figure who was mysteriously and powerfully changed by some violent, traumatic event in his past. He loves his crew, but maintains a degree of emotional distance and detachment, attributes that serve him well as the unquestioned and unrivaled leader.
Zoe vs. The Cavalry
Next up we have the captain’s right-hand woman. She is staunchly loyal to the captain and they have a military history together, but there is absolutely no spark of romance whatsoever. Competent and resolute, she is the consummate professional fighter, but deep down she also bears the scars of loss and injury.
Kaylee vs. Fitz & Simmons
This is the most likeable and relatable character in the crew. We have a scientifically brilliant character who’s skills are without parallel and who has the technical know-how to save the crew on more than one occasion, but also a person who is in no way suited for combat and tends to wilt under threat of violence.
And yes, I am treating Fitz and Simmons as one character. This is because the thing that matters the most for this analysis is the relationship between characters, and the sibling relationship is so well-known that it doesn’t need to be explored or explained.
Jayne vs. Agent Ward
Here we have the muscle of the team. With nothing like the professional technique of the leader’s right-hand woman, the muscle is more an avatar of brute aggression and male assertiveness. Sexually avaricious, self-centered and emotionally stunted, the muscle can be relied on to rescue the team when needed, but usually grudgingly.
River & Simon vs. Skye
Here we have the most recent edition to the crew. This character is viewed with suspicion and a little resentment by everyone else because they arrived late, brought an unknown past, display a troubled personality, and still have murky ties to a mysterious organization that could threaten the whole crew. On the other hand, the character is vulnerable and needs their help and also possess a rare and highly specialized skill. Technical wizardry is great, but it sort of comes with the territory. Your very own top-tier trauma surgeon / hacker? That’s not something that comes standard for a group like this.
You’ll also note that, once again, I’m treating siblings like a single character because from the standpoint of intra-group relationships, the sibling relationship is more of a surplus to be tapped than a vacuum waiting to be filled.
MIA: Book, Inara, and Wash
So let’s talk about the crew of the Firefly that didn’t make the cut: Book, Inara, and Wash. Without doubt, these three characters were the most peripheral. After all, entire episodes took place with literally no input from Book and Inara, and when Serenity opens neither one of them is even onboard the ship anymore. Wash, for his part, ends up gutted on the end of a giant Reaver harpoon-type-thing, so none of them are actually present for the entire show.
They also, at times, fill overlapping roles. Book serves as the conscience of the crew sometimes, but Whedon often preferred to have the religious character ironically rudderless. In those cases, or when the Shepherd was off-camera, either Wash or Inara could also step up to fill that role.
And yet, they also each brought their own, irreplaceable element to the story. Book and Inara served to really flesh out Mal’s character, which is important because otherwise his relationship with the rest of the crew was a little formal and strained. Inara, as the love interest, and Book, as the mentor, showed a vulnerable and relatable side of Mal that made him much, much more compelling and relatable as a character. Wash, filled a similar role for Zoe, adding unexpected depth to her otherwise stoic façade. More than that, however, he served as the source of fun and humor for the crew. Not for the audience, mind you, but for the actual crew. It was Wash, more than anyone else, who could diffuse tension and act as a sort of mediator for some of the other relationships.
In a lot of ways, it was these supporting characters who really made the chemistry happen. They could drop off camera for a scene or even an episode, but they were anything but dispensable. These weren’t the only characters that Agents tried to get away without, however. There’s one more.
Serenity vs. The Bus
Outwardly there’s nothing subtle about this comparison. Serenity is a big, flying ship that is home to the entire crew. The Bus is a big, flying ship that is home to the entire crew. They perform pretty much exactly the same function, they look sort of similar, and they even both feature prominent engines that can rotate for vertical take-off and landing.
Other than function, however, they couldn’t be more different. The name Serenity comes from the Battle of Serenity Valley, which was the pivotal event in the war the defined the entire ‘Verse. It’s a deeply personal name for Mal, but it means something to every single person on the ship. The Bus, on the other hand, is about as impersonal as it gets. The Bus gets you from Point A to Point B. You don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what your relationship is to it. It’s just a means to an end. Agent Coulson named one of his cars with a personal name, but not the plane they all live. It isn’t really a home, and therefore they don’t have that family dynamic.
There’s nothing impersonal about Serenity. Every character on board had his or her own unique relationship to the ship, which is why it makes sense to talk about her as a character. She represents Mal’s stubborn refusal to let go of the past even as he struggles to confront the future, a symbol of the tattered shreds of his idealism and hope. She’s like a giant, beloved children’s toy or safety blanket for Wash, and she’s a confidant and companion to Kaylee. She’s a refuge for Inara, a rare example of a relationship that gives to the Companion without asking for anything in return. She’s like a forest for the Shepherd, providing both the shelter of shade and the confusion of shadow. She’s a bunk for Jayne, but also so much more. On Serenity, Jayne gets his own bunk, and so she represents his fragile self-esteem and acceptance in a that hates him (the feeling is mutual). Even Jayne loves Serenity because everyone loves their mom. Simon might have the most tenuous relationship to Serenity, but his sister River loves the ship so much she becomes incorporeal and merges her identity with it!
Although she doesn’t often make a big deal of if, however, it might be Zoe who has the most invested in Serenity, even if we don’t see it until after the loss of her husband at her helm.
Getting Agents off the Ground
Lots of folks have tried to call Agents something like Firefly 2.0, but it clearly doesn’t deserve that title. A 2.0 version is supposed to be a big step forward. It’s supposed to build on the lessons of the prior iteration and offer more and better. But Agents has struggled to find its own voice while living off of borrowed magic from Firefly, and it borrowed that magic poorly. It’s not a version 2.0. It’s much more like a lite version. It took the essential heart of Firefly–a band of misfits forged into a family—and then it tried to get away with a simplified, dumbed-down version. Fewer characters and simpler group dynamics might make the show easier to understand, but it also just means that there’s a lot less to love.
With the announcing of the semi-rebranding of Agents to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Uprising, the show clearly has aspirations of finally lumbering off the ground on its own right. Some folks are pretty excited about what this means. Others are more skeptical.
I certainly wish the show the best, and I hope it succeeds in finding its own identity. I sort of doubt it will, however. Trying to launch a stripped down version of an earlier success is the definition of playing it safe, and safety is hardly ever the path to greatness.
Capitalism and free markets are good. Cronyism is bad. Sometimes trying to explain the difference between the two to people can be hard. The one upside to the state of New Jersey effectively banning Tesla from opening any stores in their state is that at least it makes it easier for people to tell which is which. It’s also helpfully in complete and total violation of your usual expectations for a story about economic liberty:
This is a startling inversion of political stereotypes: Northern Californian capitalists quashed by East Coast Republicans defending the use of government regulations to keep competition out of the marketplace.
In a nutshell, politically powerful car dealers are trying to slam the door on Tesla before Tesla has a chance to show people that buying a car need not be a painful ordeal. Meanwhile car makers, who are often at odds with car dealers, are united to do anything they can to prevent Tesla from changing the whole landscape for car manufacturing in the US. So they are both doubling down on old, outdated laws that gave car dealers geographic monopolies back in the day when car makers had all the power.
And that, in a nutshell, is the curse of government intervention in markets. Even in those cases where it might have been valuable and necessary once upon a time, the laws will still be around decades after their original purpose has been forgotten, and there will be plenty of politically powerful elites ready to pay whatever it takes to keep those laws on the books and in force to protect their business interests. That’s not socialism, but it’s not capitalism either. It’s cronyism. Wired has the rest of the story, by the way, and it’s worth a quick read.
As a man with heavy stubble (based on these classifications), these results do not look too bad. Still, I wish I could grow mine out just a bit fuller…
What the chart shows is that if a man gets a lower grade (a B instead of an A) in Econ 101 his chance of majoring in econ is basically unaffected. But for women, there is a very strong and obvious correlation between their grade in Econ 101 and their willingness to major in economics. Just going from an A to an A- (still an A!) drops the likelihood of majoring in econ by about 7 points, from 42% to 35%.
This is a really important finding because it could answer the question of why so few women graduate in STEM courses, despite the fact that more women start them than men. STEM courses are much harsher than humanities, and so if you’re highly responsive to grades, you’re going to abandon STEM to get a degree in something less intimidating. But STEM courses also pay more, so women are sacrificing earnings to avoid lower grades. This could have important relevance for the gender gap, because it is pretty strong evidence that it’s not just preferences that are leading women to lower-paying jobs. As Rampell writes: “If women were changing their majors because they discovered new intellectual appetites, you’d expect to see greater flows into STEM fields, too.”
For me the big question is why women react more to grades than men do. Rampell has ideas (maybe men are overconfident? maybe they just care more about future salary than about grades?) but no solid answers. My initial reaction was to think that women might be more concerned with achievement overall, but my wife pointed out that men may be perfectionists too, but in other areas. Like sports and video games. That really made me think. After all, one major reason I never did sports much in high school was that I knew I didn’t have any amazing athletic ability, so why bother? And to this day I don’t like playing StarCraft 2 online because I know I won’t have the time to get really good at it. On the other hand, I do play a lot of Call of Duty, and I’m only mediocre at that game.
So I’m curious: what do you think makes women more sensitive to grades? And what impact do you think it is having on things like the gender gap and the lack of women in STEM careers?
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a frustrated counter-reaction to criticisms of Elder Callister’s article “What is the Lord’s Standard for Morality?” A lot of folks liked it. A lot of other folks did not. I found friends and family in both camps. That made me cautious as I wrote this followup. Not because I temper my words to try and please people, but because when folks I respect disagree with me I like to take the time to listen and reconsider. So I listened. And I reconsidered. This post is the result.
A Rock and a Hard Place
The idea that we should be careful in how we talk about sexual morality is valid. Last year, Elizabeth Smart provided a stark example. She described how an object lesson she’d heard in church that compared sex to chewing gum came to her mind after she was first raped by her kidnapper.
I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’ And that’s how easy it is to feel like you know longer have worth, you know longer have value. ‘Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.’
I’m sure that the person who gave this lesson meant well, but that object lesson (along with its cousins: the nail in the board, the licked cupcake, and the crumpled rose) is an example of purity culture, and purity culture is Satanic. Most of the time when we talk about sin, we use a mistake-paradigm. Sins are mistakes, and through the Atonement they can be fixed. Jesus says “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”[ref]Isaiah 1:18[/ref] It is true that the Atonement cannot erase the consequences of our sins, but it can and does make us whole. That’s the point, and for the most part, it’s what we teach.
Except when it comes to sexual sins. Then, suddenly, we switch from a mistakes-paradigm to a purity-paradigm. You can fix something that is broken, but rotten meat is bad forever. Even more pernicious, however, purity-culture makes it seem as though virginity and chastity are the same thing. This implies that even a victim of a rape should somehow bear the guilt of sexual transgression. That is an abominable and indefensible teaching. The mistakes-paradigm is compatible with Christianity. Purity culture, although it’s often preached by Christians, is not. It is antithetical to the Savior’s message of hope and redemption. It is what Satan, the accuser, wants us to believe.
As she recounts in her autobiography, Smart remembered that lesson when it could have done the most harm to her. She was rescued from despair, however, by the memory of love. She knew that her mother and father would accept her back with loving and open arms no matter what had been done to her. Throughout her awful ordeal, she remembered the love of her family and felt the love of her Heavenly Father. Love won out, and because of that Elizabeth found the resolve to endure and, in the end, to defeat her tormentors. But first she had to defeat a false teaching she had been subjected to in Sunday school.
There is more to the story. As I wrote at the time, headlines covering her comments ran along the lines of “Elizabeth Smart: Abstinence-only education can make rape survivors feel ‘dirty,’ ‘filthy’” and “Traditional Mormon Sexual Purity Lesson Contributed to Captivity, Elizabeth Smart Tells University Audience.” There was no shortage of those who were ready to use her words to score points for the world’s view of sexual freedom, whether she agreed or not.
The Church’s unwavering adherence to strict moral standards is unusual in our modern society, and it is under constant attack. This attack could have tragic consequences, precisely because the Church’s stark and plain teachings on chastity and morality have measurable, beneficial effects. A 4-year study conducted at the University of North Carolina found that, compared to other religious denominations, Mormon youths were more devout, more able to articulate their own faith, and more likely to adhere to the standards set by the Church. As Deseret News reported, the study found that fewer Mormon teens:
Engaged in sexual intercourse
Had ever smoked pot
Drank alcohol a few times a year
Watched x-rated or pornographic programs in the past year
There’s good reason to believe that clear teachings contribute to these measurably different outcomes for Mormons. Researcher Stephen Vaisey interviewed more than 20 Mormon youths for the project, and subsequently noted:
One of the groups that stood out … were the Mormons. In general they tended to be more articulate about their religion, what their religion actually taught and what kind of religious constraints it placed on them. [emphasis added]
Plain and unflinching talk from Church leaders is a shield between our children and the dangerous temptations of our modern world. These teachings are not a matter of sheltering youth, but rather of empowering them to see clearly the choices that lie before them.
We are trapped between the rock of purity culture and the hard place of the world’s dismissal of the seriousness of sexual sin.
Daggers Placed to Pierce Their Souls
The response to my original post that surprised me the most was the oft-repeated complaint that I had skipped over the worst line in the talk. That was:
In the end, most women get the type of man they dress for.
Some folks accused me of leaving it out because I didn’t know how to account for it, but the truth is that I left it out because it didn’t even register as problematic. I took it to be just a simple observation that dress, along with many other factors, is one way that like-minded individuals identify potential mates in a process known in economics, sociology and anthropology as assortative mating. If you would like to marry a man who values modesty in dress, then it makes sense to dress modestly. (The existence of assortative mating is itself so well known that some studies fault it for rising income inequality.)
Others, however, pointed out that the word “get” as opposed to “marry” was just too similar to the phrase “get what they deserve” and that, combined with a reference to a woman’s dress, it was just too close to victim-blaming. I do not dispute the validity of this reaction. One of the things I’ve learned, especially in private discussions, is that people can react to the same words in very, very different ways and that if you are willing to listen you will generally learn that people have good reasons for reacting the way that they do.
More than anything else, these discussions reminded me of Jacob’s haunting and cutting words when he spoke about chastity:
7 And also it grieveth me that I must use so much boldness of speech concerning you, before your wives and your children, many of whose feelings are exceedingly tender and chaste and delicate before God, which thing is pleasing unto God;
8 And it supposeth me that they have come up hither to hear the pleasing word of God, yea, the word which healeth the wounded soul.
9 Wherefore, it burdeneth my soul that I should be constrained, because of the strict commandment which I have received from God, to admonish you according to your crimes, to enlarge the wounds of those who are already wounded, instead of consoling and healing their wounds; and those who have not been wounded, instead of feasting upon the pleasing word of God have daggers placed to pierce their souls and wound their delicate minds.
10 But, notwithstanding the greatness of the task, I must do according to the strict commands of God, and tell you concerning your wickedness and abominations, in the presence of the pure in heart, and the broken heart, and under the glance of the piercing eye of the Almighty God.[ref]Jacob 2:7-10[/ref]
I always imagined, when I read these verses as a kid, that the women and children in the crowd must have just had very delicate Victorian sensibilities about the topic of sex. Now I realize how dubious that reading is, and I wonder how many of those in the audience had been traumatized by sexual assault, rape, and abuse. I don’t say this to give Elder Callister a get-out-of-jail-free card, because after all the big difference between Jacob’s words and the Ensign article is that Jacob gave this extended apology/warning (the earliest known trigger warning?) and Elder Callister did not.
My position is this: I think Elder Callister meant no ill will, and that it’s probably impossible to talk about these issues without causing pain to at least some people. As an audience, we should try to understand the principle behind the words. But I also would hope that our leaders can continue to learn how to be as careful as they may, without diluting the message, in picking their words, and I sincerely acknowledge the validity of those who were hurt by these words. Perhaps it is some comfort, in re-reading Jacob 2, to find yourself in good company.
What is Rape Culture, Anyway?
A post at Feminist Mormon Housewives called me out for misunderstanding what the term “rape culture” means. To be fair: that’s valid. I have my own definition of rape culture, but I shouldn’t have used a non-standard definition without more carefully explaining what it was and that it’s non-standard. I’m not going to get into that now, either (although the basics are in my original post). Instead, let’s just pause and consider a small irony.
One of the primary concerns with Elder Callister’s talk is that he used words and phrases that could be hurtful to his audience, even if the hurtful meaning wasn’t intended or even logically implied by his words. And that is valid. But wouldn’t the same concern apply to deploying a deliberately inflammatory term like “rape culture” to describe the talk? After all, there are quite a few people who aren’t familiar with the technical definition (that’s not in dispute, since the FMH post takes the trouble of providing the definition) so, by their own logic, perhaps critics ought to be more careful with their language? Just to be clear, my concern is not that Elder Callister’s feelings might be hurt, but rather that a very large number of faithful Mormons who do not keep current on feminist political terminology will be confused and hurt when some of their fellow Mormons start associating a general authority and advocacy of rape. So really, by the logic of the critics of the talk, we shouldn’t even be having a conversation using the term “rape culture” at all.
The substance of the rape culture accusation could be made without the incendiary terminology. Using the conventional definition, rape culture is the idea that common attitudes can lead indirectly to rape. Specific examples of rape culture include anything that condones or advocates (1) victim-blaming, (2) sexual objectification, or (3) trivializing rape. I don’t think anyone is seriously arguing that the talk trivializes rape. We’ve already talked about how the “get the type of man they dress for” line sounded like victim blaming. I have already conceded the validity of that painful association, but I am not willing to go from sounds like victim-blaming to engages in victim-blaming. (The observation that women’s dress can affect men doesn’t rise to the level of victim-blaming, either.)
So that leaves sexual objectifcation. Here the problem is not with any particular phrasing of any particular talk, but with the concept of modesty as it exists in Mormonism. Critics argue that emphasizing modest dress turns women into sexual objects, and that the only solution is to talk about modesty less. (They also argue that we should encourage women to dress modestly for themselves and not just for the sake of men, but I’m not going to go into that because I agree with it.) So, should the Church shut up about modesty, or at least talk about it a little bit less?
Will the Real Moderates Please Stand Up
As I mentioned, the number one criticism of my post was that I had skipped over the “get the type of man they dress for” line. Only slightly less prominent, however, was the argument that the critics of Elder Callister’s talk didn’t have anything against the Church’s standards or teachings on modesty. The theory was that the big kerfuffle wasn’t about what Elder Callister said. It was just about how he said it. I don’t for a moment doubt that the folks who told me that were sincere, but it’s worth pointing a couple of things out. First, even though some of them said (effectively) “I’m not going to criticize the content, just the delivery” they also disagreed with the content. Their position was “I think Elder Callister is wrong about sexual morality, but I’m choosing only to criticize his delivery. Not his message.” In other words, lots of the critics do, indeed have a beef with the Church’s positions. Secondly, plenty of the folks criticizing the talk did quite plainly criticize the Church’s teachings as well.
The original piece that set me off (Natasha Helfer Parker’s Morality? We can do much better than this) included an explicit rejection of the Church’s teaching that homosexuals ought to remain chaste and urged a shift to accepting monogamous gay sexual relations as moral. Several of the commenters on my piece insisted that, since there’s no direct scriptural evidence against masturbation, it ought not to be considered a sin (or at least, not a serious one). I was tempted to write this off as one of those weird, fringe issues that make the Internet such an interesting place until another piece at Feminist Mormon Housewives made the exact same case:
If you are going to say that the Lord condemns masturbation, please cite me chapter and verse on that. Masturbation is something that a vast, VAST majority of people on the earth and in the church have done. If it is sinful, it is a sin like lying, being inconsiderate, or any number of other mistakes that we all deal with.
And of course, in addition to teachings on homosexuality and masturbation, there are also those who would call for the Church to stop speaking so loudly and clearly about modesty. So, to my friends who tried to tell me that I was getting upset at nothing because no one actually challenged the Church’s teachings, I have to say: “look again.”
Keep in mind that in the first section of this post I argued (1) that the Church’s uniquely clear teachings on moral issues had led to uniquely positive results for our youth and (2) that the world outside is ready to abuse any possible opening to attack those teachings. In that context, the important thing isn’t that certain members of the Church feel comfortable publicly calling for the Church to retreat from traditional teachings. Instead, the important thing is why. What is the rationale behind this call for the Church to moderate moral teachings?
Sara Katherine Staheli Hanks’ (who wrote the FMH piece quoted above) argument boils down to the ever-classic: But everyone’s doing it! (Her exact words, just to re-quote, were that “Masturbation is something that a vast, VAST majority of people on the earth and in the church have done.” So, how bad can it be, right?) Parker, on the other hand, wrote that the standard on homosexual sex should be lowered because it “sets the Mormon LGBTQ population up for almost guaranteed failure,” and then broadened that logic at the end when she said: “The way that sexual standards are presented in this type of talk is unrealistic and sets people up for failure.”
It’s impossible to tell exactly which standards, other than those concerning homosexuality, Parker believes the Church should revise downwards, but the logic is basically limitless. If we accept the idea that whenever the Church’s standards get too high we need to lower them to more realistic levels, then they aren’t really standards at all. They are more like best practices or conventions. The principle of idealism cannot survive that assault. As I stated in my original piece: this logic is fundamentally anti-Christian. It’s the counterpart to purity culture. Purity culture says the Atonement cannot save you, and lowering standards until people can achieve them on their own says the Atonement is not needed to save you. These are just two different ways to repudiate the Gospel.
As much as moderate critics of Elder Callister’s talk may earnestly and sincerely believe in simply improving the way that we talk about sexual morality, it’s important to realize that we’re having that conversation in the midst of a greater battle. There are people both inside and outside the Church who are more than happy to use sincere complaints about how the Church teaches what it teaches to fuel their complaints about what the Church teaches. I don’t think that means that moderate critics ought to be silent or that their concerns are not legitimate. I just hope it explains the reaction of folks like me.
The Man-in-the-Middle Attack
This last section of my response is the most theoretical, but perhaps also the most important. It starts with a concept from cryptography. The man-in-the-middle attack is basically just what it sounds like: two people are trying to communicate to each other and a third party steps between them, intercepts the message, modifies it (possibly), and then sends it on. For example, if you’re logging on to your bank and a hacker is trying to intercept your communication to steal your password, then he’s trying to pull off the man-in-the-middle attack.
In this illustration, Mallory is performing a man-in-the-middle attack on Alice and Bob.
Let’s imagine someone trying to pull of a man-in-the-middle attack to sabotage communication between the general authorities (at one end) and the members of the Church (on the other end). A silly example would be to try and hack into the Church’s servers and modify the text of the Ensign so that what the GAs sent out and what the members received wasn’t the same. That’s a silly example because it would be so obvious (among other reasons). But what if, instead of hacking into the Church’s servers, an adversary were to metaphorically hack into the minds of members of the Church and change the way they perceived certain words and phrases? In that case, the words the General Authorities used would not mean the same thing to their audience that they meant to the General Authorities. More importantly, however, the sabotage would be a lot harder to detect because everyone would be so busy arguing about what the “right” meaning of the terms was. The argument over who to blame, the leaders or the members, would obscure the deeper reality: someone had driven a wedge between the watchmen on the walls and the people they are there to warn.
What might this look like in practice? The most obvious examples is the way that professional counselors (like Parker) took Elder Callister to task for using the word “abuse” (when he called masturbation “self-abuse”) in a non-technical sense. Not only did Parker do this, but Hanks followed suit: “Do not co-opt a clinical term used to describe things like ritualistic cutting or burning of the skin to describe masturbation.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way language works. Every specialized discipline in the world finds the need to invent new jargon and repurpose existing words from everyday language, but these technical terms are derived from the ordinary words and they are only valid within specific contexts. To argue that someone in a non-specialist outlet ought to be subject to specialized use of a term is not only irrational, it’s impossible. This is because quite often the same word will get repurposed again and again by different specialties. Off the top of my head, the phrase “tipping point” has a perfectly understandable meaning in plain English, but it also has a more technical meaning in economics and another, different, technical meaning in catastrophe theory. There’s a reason that Wikipedia had to invent disambiguation pages.
This example is too obvious to be a really powerful man-in-the-middle attack. The whole point of Parker’s critique is to assert the dominance of her expertise by calling Elder Callister wrong. Later on, when it starts to become a matter of course that we should bow to expert terminology, it may start to function as a man-in-the-middle attack, but for now we’re looking for a more subtle example. For example: Is it possible that the reaction to the “get the type of man they dress for” line is exacerbated because adherents of rape culture are actively looking for suspicious phrases? In other words, if you really believe in a political philosophy dedicated to unmasking sinister meanings behind otherwise ordinary terms, you’re probably going to find them whether they exist or not. This is the same danger behind accusation of dog whistle politics. When you’re accusing someone of something that is by definition hidden, how can they defend themselves? The reality is that anyone dedicated enough and clever enough is going to be able to find evidence of rape culture just about anywhere with only a little bit of effort and creativity.
This may seem like an academic quibble about linguistics, but the reality is that arguments about language are almost always really arguments about principles in the end. Without questioning the validity or sincerity of those who were hurt by Elder Callister’s word choice, I simply want to raise the possibility that in figuring out who is to blame, we may want to consider those who actively encourage us to look for evil intentions behind every ordinary turn of phrase. To the extent that secular politics (from any end of the spectrum) start to change the way we perceive the words we hear, there’s a risk that we’re starting to lose contact with the General Authorities. We should probably make it a matter of conscious effort to set aside our political filters somewhat when listening to what they have to say.
Pious fraud is the idea that sometimes it’s a good idea to lie to serve a higher good. In religion, it may mean lying about the origins of a sacred text or witnessing a miracle. In science, it may mean lying about a useless medical treatment to try and strengthen the placebo effect. In Disney movies, it means giving an ordinary feather to Dumbo and telling him that it will magically help him to fly. The ethics of pious fraud are therefore hotly contested.
The most recent entrant in the long and checkered history of pious fraud is the exaggerated claim that 97% of climate scientists all agree on climate change. The claim started out as a paper (not peer reviewed, btw) and then went on to get lots of airtime. Even President Obama tweeted it:
There are lots of problems with the original paper and with the way that the paper has been used by others. Before we dig in, however, it’s important to carefully define the terms. The issue that is really at stake is not just a science issue, but a policy issue as well. It has 5 core components. They are:
Climate change is really happening, and will continue to happen. (Implied: human forecasts are accurate.)
The principle cause of climate change is human behavior (e.g. carbon emissions).
The effects of climate change will, on balance, do much more harm than good.
Climate change is largely reversible (e.g. we can do something about it).
The costs of reversing climate change (e.g. with slower economic development for impoverished nations) are outweighed by the benefits.
As it turns out, however, the 97% paper successfully establishes near-universal scientific consensus on exactly none of these issues. Well, maybe on point #1, if you want to be generous. There are several articles out there castigating the authors of the paper for dishonesty and other shenanigans, but by far the strongest evidence of just how fraudulent the paper is comes from Popular Technology.
First, let’s explain how the 97% paper worked. Bjørn Lomborg (as reported in WattsUpWithThat) writes that:
The paper looks at 12,000 papers written in the last 25 years (see here, the paper doesn’t actually specify the numbers, http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/watch-the-pea/). It ditches about 8,000 papers because they don’t take a position.
They put people who agree into three different bins — 1.6% that explicitly endorse global warming with numbers, 23% that explicitly endorse global warming without numbers and then 74% that “implicitly endorse” because they’re looking at other issues with global warming that must mean they agree with human-caused global warming.
Voila, you got about 97% (actually here 98%, but because the authors haven’t released the numbers themselves, we have to rely on other quantitative assessments).
In other words, the 97% paper is based on interpreting the papers of various other climate scientists. So what Popular Technology did is actually quite simple, they asked the original authors if they agreed with how the 97% paper had characterized their articles. As it turns out: they did not. The 97% paper effectively drafted many of the most vocal and outspoken critics into the consensus regardless of their actual feelings. That would be bad enough. But, as the scientists described, the problems only get worse from there.
Let’s start with issue #2. Ostensibly, this should be the most reliable claim of the paper because it’s the whole point of the paper. Other folks, like President Obama, may have subsequently added on points 3-5 (which the paper itself didn’t claim), but surely the paper at least had some accuracy about the main issue it claimed to study? Not really. The problem is that the consensus being defended is what’s called the IPCC consensus (after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), but the IPCC defined anthropic global warming as global warming that is caused 90%-100% by humans. That’s a pretty high bar. The 97% paper, on the other hand, lowered that bar to just 50% and it did so without explaining what they were doing or why. Dr. Scaffeta, who has a PhD in physics and whose paper was used by the 97% paper as evidence of the consensus, explains:
Cook et al. (2013) [the 97% paper] is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.
What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun. [emphasis added]
Please note that it is very important to clarify that the AGW advocated by the IPCC has always claimed that 90-100% of the warming observed since 1900 is due to anthropogenic emissions. While critics like me have always claimed that the data would approximately indicate a 50-50 natural-anthropogenic contribution at most. [emphasis added]
What it is observed right now is utter dishonesty by the IPCC advocates. Instead of apologizing and honestly acknowledging that the AGW theory as advocated by the IPCC is wrong because based on climate models that poorly reconstruct the solar signature and do not reproduce the natural oscillations of the climate (AMO, PDO, NAO etc.) and honestly acknowledging that the truth, as it is emerging, is closer to what claimed by IPCC critics like me since 2005, these people are trying to get the credit.
They are gradually engaging into a metamorphosis process to save face.[emphasis added]
This is why I say that none of the 5 points above are actually substantiated by the 97% paper. Not only do Scaffeta (and many more) reject the characterization of their papers, but they in fact have dissenting views about the causes of global warming. This has profound implications. If (to use Scafetta’s high estimate), 70% of the global warming from 1990 – 2000 is caused by the sun, then this means that the models used by the IPCC consensus are wrong and we can’t trust their forecasts (so much for points 1 and 3). It also means that we have significant reason to doubt whether or not there’s much humans can do about climate change (points 4 and 5).
This is far from the only explosive comment to come from these scientists, however. Dr. Nir J. Shaviv (PhD in astrophysics) was also cited as being a part of the 97% consensus, and also completely rejected that categorization. He wrote:
Nope… it [that the paper was part of the 97% consensus] is not an accurate representation. The paper shows that if cosmic rays are included in empirical climate sensitivity analyses, then one finds that different time scales consistently give a low climate sensitiviity. i.e., it supports the idea that cosmic rays affect the climate and that climate sensitivity is low. This means that part of the 20th century should be attributed to the increased solar activity and that 21st century warming under a business as usual scenario should be low (about 1°C).
I couldn’t write these things more explicitly in the paper because of the refereeing, however, you don’t have to be a genius to reach these conclusions from the paper. [emphasis added]
So, not only does he also find that cosmic rays must factor into some of the warming (and therefore also criticize the forecasts), he also points out that he was unable to express his true opinion because of the peer review process, which was basically censoring (albeit not very well) his true belief. Just as a quick summary of the rest of the findings, here are some additional comments from the scientists who spoke with Popular Technology about how they felt the 97% paper characterized their own work:
“It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming.” (Dr. Craig D. Idso, Geography)
“I think your data are a load of crap. Why is that a lie? I really think so.” and “I think your sampling strategy is a load of nonsense. How is that a misrepresentation? Did I falsely describe your sample?” (Dr. S. J. Tol, Economics, in a series of tweets to one of the authors of the 97% paper.) [emphasis original to the Popular Technology article]
“The paper is strongly against AGW, and documents its absence in the sea level observational facts. Also, it invalidates the mode of sea level handling by the IPCC.” (Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, Quaternary Geography, describing how his own paper is actually against the consensus.)
“I am sure that this rating of no position on AGW by CO2 is nowhere accurate nor correct…. I hope my scientific views and conclusions are clear to anyone that will spend time reading our papers. Cook et al. (2013) is not the study to read if you want to find out about what we say and conclude in our own scientific works.” (Dr. Willie Soon, Rocket Science, describing why the categorization of his paper as having “no position” on anthropic global warming was false. He added: “No extra comment on Cook et al. (2013) is necessary as it is not a paper aiming to help anyone understand the science.” [emphasis added])
“If Cook et al’s paper classifies my paper, ‘A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change’ as “explicitly endorses AGW but does not quantify or minimize,” nothing could be further from either my intent or the contents of my paper… I would classify my paper in Cook et al’s category (7): Explicit rejection with quantification.” (Dr. Alan Carlin, Economics) [emphasis original to Popular Technology piece]
Where does that leave us? The most charitable possible interpretation is that the 97% paper deliberately or negligently inflated consensus on this issue. The reason for doing this is obvious: it’s a policy paper rather than a scientific paper. It is designed to get people to support policies intended to curb global warming without actually proving that these policies are the right decisions to make. It is a pious fraud. When the paper is used by others who tack on issues 3-5 (harm, reversibility, and net-benefit of opposing global warming) they are compounding the same fraud which the paper was deliberately designed to initiate.
This is a very, very bad idea. It is a bad idea because it poisons the entire debate. If scientists are willing to blatantly lie and fabricate to try and win a policy war, how can we (especially we who are non-experts) trust the scientific “consensus”? If the consensus were as low as 33% of scientists but it was transparent and honest and included all 5 points, that would be enough to make the issue quite serious. If it was as high as 67% (with the same conditions) that would be enough to make me seriously consider supporting drastic policies. But to try and trick people into believing there is consensus on all 5 points when there is, at best, exaggerated consensus on just 1 or 2 points throws the entire policy argument into question. Now I know that people are lying to me, and I also know that I have no realistic way of estimating the extent of the fabrications. I have to weigh the uncertain efficacy and uncertain benefits of climate change remedies against their certain costs.
This is not a good position for someone to be in if they are truly worried about climate change. And it’s not a reasonable position to be in if you’re actually confident of the facts. The fact that we are in this position at all is the reason that I, like many other open-minded skeptics, look for other possible explanations to explain the absolutist rhetoric of the climate change alarmists.
It never occurred to me for a moment that an armed force might consider using *non-violent* resistance, but apparently that’s what the Ukrainian forces in Crimea are doing. Based on alleged communication intercepts, Putin has no idea what to do about it. He sent in thousands of troops with the idea that they would trigger a fight-or-flight response in the Ukrainian army. He wants them to start shooting (and provide justification for a massacre) or surrender. Instead, every single unit so far has refused to do either, and their wives have also demonstrated stunning bravery, standing as human shields between Russian forces and their outnumbered, outgunned, and undersupplied husbands.
If I’m getting this story right, it’s an incredible strategy of courage, nobility, and also genius. But I don’t know how long it can continue.
Doublethink is a term from Orwell’s classic novel 1984. It is “the act of ordinary people simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts.” I’ve heard people try to come up with real-world examples of the term, but so far none have really lived up to the original meaning. But I think we’re really standing on the threshold now, and it’s the issue of gay rights that threatens to push us over the edge.
Up until recently, one of the key components of the push for gay rights has been that it would take a “live and let live” philosophy. If you don’t like gay marriage: don’t have one. But obviously gay marriage wouldn’t somehow force religious institutions to change their doctrine or allow their buildings to be used, nor would it require religious people to participate in or condone gay marriages. Right? Well, no. Not really.
This became obvious when Arizona tried to pass a bill that would have enacted the principle that “we should not punish people for practicing their religion unless we have a very good reason.” If that doesn’t sound like what the Arizona bill did, that’s no surprise. According to Professor Doug Laycock, who is one of the foremost experts on law and religion, “Arizona’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, was been egregiously misrepresented both before and after the veto.” You should really read his explanation of what the law really did, but the gist of it is simple: Rather than legalize anti-gay discrimination, the law would have simply clarified the context in which these types of cases would be viewed by the courts, who would still be open to determining who won or lost in any given case.
Instead, however, the country was fed the impression that Arizona wanted to legalize anti-gay discrimination. Which would be wrong, right? If a gay couple walks into your bakery and orders a wedding cake, you bake them the cake. Or else.
I think it’s just equality, dignity for everyone. I think everybody should be allowed the right to be together.
In other words, he had a sincere moral conviction and it would violate that moral conviction to force him to use his business, his talents, and literally his body to support someone who was opposed to that moral conviction. Sound familiar?
Ross Douthat pointed out that the no-holds-barred takedown of the Arizona bill was unprecedented, and he understands what that signifies:
What makes this response particularly instructive is that such bills have been seen, in the past, as a way for religious conservatives to negotiate surrender — to accept same-sex marriage’s inevitability while carving out protections for dissent. But now, apparently, the official line is that you bigots don’t get to negotiate anymore.
So this is where we stand today. Either the American people realize that treating religious objections to participation in gay marriage is a legitimate concern (perhaps with the help of examples like those above) and adopt a more nuanced pose. Or, on the other hand, they ignore the examples and press forward. In that brave new world, I fully expect that the right of gay people to refuse service to religious bigots will be enshrined legally, but the right of religious people to refuse to participate in gay weddings will be scorned and derided. And then, ladies and gentlemen, we will have arrived at a real-life example of doublethink in the wild.
Will Saletan, the national correspondent at Slate, is a smart and independent thinker on the abortion issue. He even wrote a controversial but highly regarded book called Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, said that the book “will make activists on both sides of the debate uncomfortable,” and that “there’s no smarter political commentator in Washington today.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, the editor of National Review Rich Lowry, called Saletan “one of America’s shrewdest political writers,” and added “If you care about the issue of abortion, you must read this book.”
The statistics on public opinion of abortion are pretty complex and very controversial. Saletan took an immediate dislike to a poll paid for by the National Right to Life Committee that provided unusually granular survey responses to a question about when abortion should be legal.
The poll (above) found that 53% of Americans fell within the broadly pro-life categories of opposing abortion at any time during a pregnancy with exceptions for the life of the mother as well as for rape and incest.
The NRLC also published the results of a poll from Gallup (a poll that they didn’t choose the questions for), and that poll confirmed the findings of the NRLC poll:
Based on these polls, one would conclude that most Americans are against most abortions, but Saletan thinks we should ignore these polls, and instead we should pay attention to a different collection of polls (also from reputable sources) that broke down abortion into the following cases: legal in all cases / legal in most cases / illegal in most cases / illegal in all cases.
As you can see, the NRLC and Gallup polls shows Americans opposed to most abortions. The polls provided by Saletan show the opposite. Who to believe?
Saletan argues that we should disregard the NRLC poll, but his reasoning is actually quite poor. According to him, the NRLC stacked the deck by picking 3 questions that are broadly pro-life and 3 that are broadly pro-choice, thus creating the false sense of equality between the two sides. Additionally, he suggests that with so many choice, folks will just opt for the middle.
This argument makes no sense, primary because both the polls Selatan disbelieves and the polls he likes are identical in terms of his alleged shenanigans. Three of the six NRLC options are more or less pro-life, but so are two of the four options in Saletan’s preferred polls. Additionally, it makes no sense to talk about driving people towards the middle when there are six choices. Six is an even number. If there was a strong central tendency for poll responses (Saletan provides no evidence of this assertion, and I couldn’t find any either), then wouldn’t the NRLC have picked five options instead of 6? (Or seven?) And, once again, the polls are identical in this since both have an even number of choices with half being pro-life and half being pro-choice. In short: Saletan has offered zero credible evidence to prefer one set of polls to the other.
The simplest explanation is the most reasonable, both polls are correct. In fact, Saletan implicitly argued for this in a follow-up piece (published the very next day) called The Political Peril of Second-Trimester Abortions. He wrote, “Poll numbers are usually meaningful, even when they don’t mean exactly what the sponsors claim.” In other words: respect that the answers people give to the actual poll questions are the best you’re gonna get, and be suspicious of what people extrapolate from there. That means we should prefer a theory that accommodates both sets of polls rather than one that forces us to try and explain away either set. (This is especially true because the NRLC’s poll is backed by a poll from Gallup and another one from CNN/ORC).
I took the trouble of looking through all of the polls that Saletan compiled to see if I could find a pattern. And I did. I found a very, very strong pattern that Saletan didn’t pick up on, and it is this: poll respondents react very strongly to the way the words “illegal” and “legal” are used. Here’s the Gallup poll that backed up the NRLC results:
Note that the third option doesn’t contain the word “illegal”. That is different from the four options that Saletan mentioned: legal in all cases / legal in most cases / illegal in most cases / illegal in all cases. To see what ones of those examples looks like, take a look at the AP/GfK poll:
Always legal
34%
Legal in most circumstances
19%
Ilegal in most circumstances
13%
Always illegal
29%
Now the third option includes the word “illegal”. That’s it, that’s pretty much the sole difference between both sets of polls. If the pro-life position is described without the word “illegal”, then Americans are pro-life. If the pro-life position is described using the word “illegal”, then Americans are pro-choice. Take a look at those polls again, when the third option uses the word “legal” it is the most popular response (in both polls). When the third option uses the word “illegal” it is the least popular response. The swing is truly enormous: support for the same option drops by about 67% when the word choice shifts from “legal” to “illegal”.
Unlike Saletan’s theory, the observation about the effect of word-choice is actually strongly supported by empirically verified theory and also consistent with all of the results. That’s good. Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually make the answer to the question much more clear. So if you want the simplest answer to the question, it is this: Americans do not know if they want most abortions to be illegal or not.
I’ll go a little farther, however, and make two observations.
First, I’m inclined to think that the NRLC poll is actually the best poll of the bunch because it doesn’t switch between “legal” and “illegal”. It uses only “legal” throughout. (What I’d really like, however, is a comparison to the NRLC poll that asked the exact same questions but rephrased them to use “illegal” throughout”.) My hunch (and I admit it is just an informed hunch), is that this probably takes some of the emphasis off of the emotional punch of the change from “illegal” to “legal” and gets closer to Americans policy preferences.
Second, I think that in some ways the most important finding is being obscured by all this discussion. We may not know exactly what Americans think about abortion, but we do know with certainty that the policy the American people want is a policy that is incompatible with Roe v. Wade. This becomes really clear in Saletan’s second piece (The Political Peril of Second-Trimester Abortions). In it, he used additional data from a poll funded by the Knight of Columbus and found significant erosion of support for abortion rights during the 2nd trimester even among the population that self-identified as strongly pro-choice. The decline in support was constant regardless of how the questions were asked. He concluded:
This doesn’t mean that most Americans think most abortions should be illegal. According to the most recent government data, 92 percent of abortions are performed in the first trimester. Beyond that point, abortions are much rarer and much harder to defend, both morally and politically. Without the protection of the courts, it’s difficult to see how they’d stay legal. [emphasis added]
In other words, the only thing standing between the will of the people and pro-life reform of abortion is the Roe v. Wade decision. This is one of the common themes of the entire abortion debate: Roe v. Wade was such an absolutist ruling that it gave the pro-choice side everything it could possibly have wanted. Despite a thin veneer of moderate rhetoric it is, when combined with the Doe v. Bolton decision handed down the same day, a truly extreme position. As a result of getting everything they could have wanted, the pro-choice side has had nothing to win and everything to lose since 1973.
In contrast to the Roe v. Wade ruling, the American people are anything but extreme and absolutist. It’s clear that any abortion after the first trimester is outside the mainstream of public opinion. Within the first trimester, it’s harder to say where Americans draw the line.
In a sense, though, it doesn’t matter where they draw the line today. Right now that’s an academic question because—until Roe is overturned or modified in some way—there’s no way to touch first-trimester abortions. Or second trimester abortions, for that matter. This makes pro-life strategy obvious: focus on using the unpopularity of 2nd trimester abortions to erode Roe v. Wade. Support for Roe is still deep and strong, but only because so few Americans understand what the ruling actually does. By name? Roe v. Wade is popular. By effect? It’s toxic. The key is to make defenders own the toxicity. (Related: It’s also important to help Americans realize how many of them already oppose abortion, because media bias causes us to significantly over-estimate the popularity of the pro-choice movement.)
And that’s really all you need to know about American opinion on abortion. When they see the facts, Americans still make the right choice. It’s true of Roe today, and I believe one day it will be true of elective abortions, regardless of trimester.
