Recently in Politics Category

I've seen several references to this story that imply or assert that Sarah Palin is a hypocrite for being a very vocal critic of the Canadian health care system, when it turns out she used to go with her family across the border to receive services from Canadian medical professionals instead of those in Alaska. (See here for an example.)

But then I read the article. It turns out there are two huge facts obscured by such an analysis, and they're both whoppers.

1. This wasn't something she did with her family as an adult. This is something her parents did with her until she was six. Yes, people are calling Sarah Palin a hypocrite because of what her parents chose to do, while bringing her along, when she was in kindergarten. I guess if you've run out of ways to attack her involving her own kids, you turn to attacking her for what happened to her when she was a kid herself. I suppose this is hypocrisy by proxy. Find something someone else did that seems to conflict with what Palin is saying, and then call her a hypocrite for someone else doing what she thinks is problematic.

2. They lived during that period in a very rural town near the Canadian border. The closest city was across that border. Most people in very rural towns drive to the nearest city for some of their health care concerns. It just happened that they had to go to another country in this case. If Sarah Palin had lived in that town and taken her own children to Canada, that's perfectly consistent with saying the Canadian health care system is inferior to the American health care system, because no one thinks the American health care system is equally available in every small rural town. The closest thing that's of good enough quality might be in the Canadian system that does things in a way that's less ideal. Being less ideal than the American system is compatible with being the best thing in the area. So there's no inconsistency here anyway.

I noticed an argument here that Juneau, AK is just as close to Skagway, AK where they lived as Whitehorse, YT, where they occasionally sent someone for medical aid in emergencies. So I checked Mapquest. It took 6 hours to get to Juneau and 3 hours to get to Whitehorse.

Then the comments there indicate that you would usually go to Juneau by ferry in those days, and that takes several hours also, where the train ride to Whitehorse is only two. So it does seem that Skagway's closest city is Whitehorse, YT. Juneau has a slightly larger population but not enough to make a huge distinction. They're both big enough cities to have the emergency care facilities that her small town didn't.

Also, the Associated Press interviewed Chuck Heath, Palin's father, about this:

Palin's father said Monday they had little choice, given their location in Skagway. "There was no road out of there at that time," said retired teacher Chuck Heath, reached by phone in Wasilla. "The ferry schedule was very erratic. We had no doctor in Skagway. The plane schedule was very erratic. The winds dictated whether the planes could come in or not."

So it's hard to make the argument that even her parents' choice had anything to do with preferring Canadian health care to American health care, never mind that she herself is somehow a hypocrite because of what her parents did when she was in kindergarten or younger.

A lot has been said about last week's flap over President Obama's scolding of the Supreme Court during the State of the Union. FDR was the last president who criticized a particular Supreme Court decision in a State of the Union speech. Justice Alito's mouthing the words "that's not true" in response have also been much-criticized, even by those who acknowledge that the justice was correct. I don't want to repeat everything that's been said, but I did notice something that I haven't seen anyone else picking up on.

Here is what President Obama said:

Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.

The most natural way to read that first sentence is that he's accusing the Supreme Court of doing this in order to give the special interests a chance to spend without limit. It's not just that it has that result but that such a result is the very reason they did it. He said they "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests". I don't know if he really meant to imply that the reasons they gave in the opinion are not their real reasons or if he was just uncareful in what he said, but what he said does seem to me to imply that they didn't really do it because they think the Constitution requires giving corporations and unions free speech rights that don't allow for these limits. Instead, it was because they wanted special interests in particular to have no limits.

That strikes me as a pretty uncharitable reading of their motives, especially given that this isn't all that surprising a decision for most of these justices. Justice Kennedy in particular is a free speech absolutist. He thinks hardly any limits on free speech are constitutionally allowable. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Scalia along with Chief Justice Roberts are more willing to allow exceptions for freedom of speech than Justice Kennedy is, but they've tended to oppose campaign finance restrictions on free speech grounds. The fact that some special interest groups will benefit from this is a mere effect. Accusing the Supreme Court of voting merely to get a political result can make sense if the argument they give in the opinion is extremely out of character for the kind of reasoning the justices in question usually give, but that's no so with this decision. It's extremely unlikely that this was motivated by some tie to special interests (as if special interests are only on one side of the aisle anyway; such a decision would go both ways, and given that Obama got more support from corporations than McCain it's also unlikely that this was motivated by a desire to get the Republican Party more money, as some conspiracy theorists have claimed).

But then this president, not very long ago, was a senator who made some pretty uncharitable comments to both Roberts and Alito when explaining his votes not to confirm them (and his vote to filibuster Alito). I'll quote one of my comments on a previous discussion:

I don't think what he said about Bush's Supreme Court nominees was all that respectful. He basically accused Roberts of having a callous heart toward the weak and being dismissive of attempts to eradicate discrimination. Then two paragraphs later he complained that Democrats were attacking Senator Leahy's motivations for supporting Roberts, as if it's bad to attack people's motives, something he'd just spent a couple paragraphs doing with Roberts.

He did something similar with Alito. He spoke about how civility is a good thing. He did say that Alito is a man of great character, which is at least better than how he treated Roberts. But then he went on to accuse him of siding with the strong, the state, and corporations in every case where he didn't have to follow Supreme Court precedent, as if it weren't about what he viewed the Constitution as requiring but were just about seeking to get certain results that favored the strong, the state, and corporations.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) has come under fire for some race-related comments he made a while back about President Obama's election that have recently come to light:

He [Reid] was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,'

I wouldn't say that there's no problem with Reid's words, but I'm wondering how it amounts to what a lot of critics have been saying. The comments from a number of politicians make fascinating reading. Republicans want to say that the remarks are racist or at least inappropriate, and they point to a double standard by Democrats, who find little problem with Reid but were calling for Trent Lott's resignation for speaking off-the-cuff at a birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) to say that if he'd been elected president we wouldn't have some of the problems we have. Of course, the same could be said for those who defended Lott but have now attacked Reid.

What Trent Lott said was totally unproblematic in its actual content. It's the context that made people think he meant something more. He was talking about someone who has long been hailed as a stalwart conservative, and if he'd been president we surely would have had more conservative policies than the ones we actually got with President Truman. So a conservative senator could indeed have said what he said and not meant anything even racially-related.

But he was also talking about someone with a history of supporting segregation, who was actually running with a segregationist party on the occasion Lott was referring to. He was speaking at an event in the South, and there were almost certainly people present who fully agreed with Thurmond's former views who would have heard such a statement as support for such views. I doubt Lott was even thinking of that. He was probably just trying to be nice to a very elderly colleague celebrating a birthday, and I find it unlikely that the racial issue was even on his mind. It doesn't amount to racism, but it amounts to racial insensitivity and ignorance, and it perpetuates patterns of such behavior that are worth calling attention to and seeking to undermine. So I do think it was good for people to call attention to it, even if it does seem a bit much to me to insist that he resign from a Senate leadership position over it.

On the other hand, Harry Reid's problem is not in the content of what he said but in his choice of actual words. What he said is actually either true or at least certainly arguably so. He made two claims: (1) that Obama couldn't have been elected as easily if he seemed "more black" to more people and (2) the reason he seems "less black" to some people is that he has lighter skin and doesn't naturally speak the way a lot of black people do.

The second claim is certainly true. Linguists study the language patterns of sub-communities with particular dialects, and one common dialect occurs among black people across the country, with similar traits no matter what part of the country they're in. This isn't another language. It's English. But it has some different grammatical rules and pronunciations from standard American English. It's usually associated with inner city or poor and very rural blacks. A lot of black Americans speak more standard English most of the time and occasionally take on an affect of what some linguists call Black English. The rest of the time their grammar and pronunciation are pretty standard. There is also a southern-like element to some word pronunciations for a lot of black Americans even if they don't ever use the dialectical elements unique to Black English, and this is true no matter what region of the country the person is from. That accent is sometimes detectable over the phone, and people often associate it with race, sometimes looking down on people for speaking that way. This is all just a matter of linguistic and sociological fact. Acknowledging it is neither racist nor succumbing to pressure to cater to racists. Knowing the facts about how race works in this country does not amount to liking those facts or wanting them to be that way. It seems to me to be simply true that President Obama does not speak the way a lot of people who have negative stereotypes about how black people speak would expect a black man to speak, except when he chooses to do so.

As for the first claim, I think it's at least arguable that Obama would have had a harder time getting elected if people with negative stereotypes about black people had seen him as "more black". With a white mother, lighter than average skin for a black man, and speech patterns that are more ambiguous, a lot of people who might hesitate to identify with him could more easily do so. A lot of people who might have a harder time respecting him might more easily do so. I don't want to minimize how far this country has come with race in being able to elect him. Nevertheless, interviews showed that people with racial animus or some resistance to voting for a black candidate were able to pull the lever for Obama. One possible explanation that's certainly not obviously false is that they saw him as "less black". Would someone who looks and talks like Chris Rock have as easy a time getting elected president? I don't think so. Could someone who looks and talks like Chris Rock do it? Maybe. I'm not as sure as Reid. But the claim he was making doesn't seem ridiculous. I've heard a number of black academics make exactly that claim in meetings at the American Philosophical Association where his becoming president has come up.

The only thing I see that's seriously wrong with Reid's statement is the expression "Negro dialect". I haven't encountered that exact expression before ever, but I suspect it's a relic of Reid's growing up with "Negro" as the preferred term for black people, and he's not so heavily involved with the black community or racial issues to have gotten the immediate sense of its inappropriateness the way anyone with any racial sensitivity nowadays would have. So, like Lott, it shows that he's racially out of touch. It's not about referencing a racist or racially-harmful ideology as good, which I think Lott did unintentionally and lots of people claimed he did intentionally. It's about overt language that's usually offensive nowadays but used to be fine. The result is the same, though. He showed some racial insensitivity, even if the Democrats defending him are right that he's voted the right way all along. Voting the right way is compatible with being extremely insensitive. Democrats generally take Ted Kennedy to have voted the right way with women's issues, but there's no arguing that his attitude toward women was always wonderful. The same goes for Bill Clinton.

So that makes me conclude the following two things. First, the nature of the offense is different in the two cases. One involves overt language without ill intent in one case and potential implicatures that probably weren't but could have been meant in the other. Second, the real problem this analysis reveals is that both senators showed serious insensitivity and ignorance about race issues. So I do wonder if calls for Lott to resign should consistently be made against Reid and if those who thought Lott's statement shouldn't require a resignation should apply the same reasoning to Reid. I don't think either requires a resignation, but both should lead us to consider how ignorant and insensitive those who lead us are about race issues, and the most important fact about racial ignorance is that it's an unknown unknown. You don't know you have it until someone points it out. We should use moments like this to raise understanding to a higher level, not for political points or to try to remove someone in an influential position from that position merely because the person's ignorance is now known (as if the ones who haven't happened to reveal it are just fine). I'm therefore much more inclined to direct my criticism to those who don't recognize the parity between these cases than I am to direct it toward the two senators in question.

Some on the right (e.g. Hot Air) are now attacking NPR for having opinion columnists who make fun of the tea parties (and the truly offensive video at issue was almost two months ago, so it's strange to be seeing this suddenly now). This sounds an awful lot like the idiotic claim of the Obama Administration that Fox News isn't news because they have some conservative opinion people who criticize the Obama Administration more than they criticized the Bush Administration.

Recently several seemingly-independent sources came up with a series of new recommendations for cancer screenings, saying that new research shows that we should no longer be screening for certain kinds of cancer at the ages we've been doing so, that it should be fine to wait until later on and save the expense that earlier screenings cost.

These recommendations have led to an interesting debate between those who think the cost of prevention is worth it even if more money gets paid than would otherwise happen and those who think cost-cutting is more important than the number of lives saved, because the number of lives saved isn't worth the cost.

A number of voices on one side in the debate, though, has repeatedly made what seems to me to be a terrible argument. They complain that those who object to the new recommendations are simply ignoring the new data. It's as if they stomp their foot and say that the numbers support their position, so the other side should back off. As I said, this is a terrible argument. If this were an empirical debate, that would settle it, but that's not what the dispute is over, so that argument is simply irrelevant. The very interesting debate that I've seen play itself out, as I pointed out above, is between the following two groups:

A. those who think that, even though it might cost more money in the long run, it's still worth screening earlier because it saves enough lives to be worth the extra cost even if it costs more than it would to catch the cancer later and not pay the cost for a lot of people who didn't need the screenings

B. those who think that the cost of screening all these people who didn't need it isn't going to be worth it in the long run, even if it means some people who would have found their cancer and been able to treat it will die because they didn't catch it soon enough

That's a moral debate, not an empirical one. View A places more value on people's lives (which they insist is still enough, even if smaller than we thought) than the financial cost (and that cost's effect on society). View B places more value on the financial cost (and its effects on society) than the number of lives that would be saved (which they say is too low to be a huge factor). Both views can agree on all the facts and still disagree on what we should do. So it doesn't help to keep insisting that the change in recommendations comes from new data from new studies with hard numbers to back it up. The disagreement still occurs even given the new data.

Pro-lifers are trying to pass an initiative defining human organisms as persons all the way back to conception. Opponents of the initiative apparently can't think of a better way to oppose this than to call it the "eggs-as-persons" initiative. I would have thought they'd be smart enough to know the biological difference between a conceptus and a mere egg. Or maybe they just think the voting public is stupid enough not to know the difference.

I also have to note that it amazes me completely that one of their arguments against this is that it now becomes child endangerment for a pregnant woman to drink too much or do something that seriously threatens the health of the fetus. Let me say that again. They think it shows how bad this proposal is that the proposal entails treating someone as engangering a child's health by drinking too much or engaging in wrestling matches while pregnant. Do they think the average voter approves of moms damaging their children by drinking heavily or by abusing their bodies in other ways while pregnant?

But then when you look at the articles from this paper (and the other papers affiliated with it) at any length, it doesn't take too long to realize that they don't have any sense at all of how to convince those who disagree, even though they seem to have a fondness for sending unsolicited email to people who disagree. This is entirely typical of the kind of story they send (several times a week at least) to my university email account. I guess you could call them independent, but it doesn't strike me as the kind of independence I expect when I think of the independent media who are supposed to raise a critical eye to those who hold the central reigns of political power.

President Obama is putting aside politics-as-usual to honor a black Republican former senator today. Edward Brooke was the first popularly-elected black Senator (Reconstruction doesn't count) and the only black Senator since Reconstruction from a state other than Illinois (the others have been Carol Mosely-Braun, Barack Obama, and Roland Burris). He was elected as a black Republican in an overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly Democratic state and was reelected to a second term, allowing him to serve in the Senate for over a decade. Today he's receiving the Congressional Gold Medal.

Redistricting in favor of majority-black districts has effectively created an environment that makes black senators much more rare than we would expect, since it tends to produce candidates who are focused on issues that energize black voters but who seem out of the mainstream enough to be much harder to win elections in statewide races. Democratic redistricting that relies on artificial lines to ensure majority black districts has ironically made it much more difficult for black politicians who are more electable statewide (and thus get into the Senate) from getting into the positions that very much help you to make such a statewide run. I've even seen conservative pundits (e.g. Abigail Thernstrom) claim that Republicans have gone along with this kind of gerrymandering because they knew it would ultimately favor their own party.

See Nate Silver's Why Are There No Black Senators? for a more substantial argument for the claim that gerrymandering of this sort is counterproductive to racial progress in the U.S. Senate. I think he's right.

One reason I read the LTI Blog is because I regularly come across important information there that I've never noticed in any of the abortion discussions in the philosophical literature or in any political blogs not focused on abortion. (This isn't the only reason. It's the only pro-life blog I've ever found focused mostly on abortion that is pretty well-informed philosophically. Several key contributors there are well-read in the philosophical literature and are pretty good at explaining the difference between good and bad arguments.)

In a post mostly about how to argue with those who disagree in a way that doesn't shut down discussion (which would be good for anyone to pay heed to), Jay Watts points to two documents I was unaware of. Both have to do with the common pro-choice argument that if abortion is made illegal again it will lead to lots of deaths from back-alley abortions.

The first document is an excerpt from material written by the Medical Director of Planned Parenthood in 1960, stating quite plainly that 90% of illegal abortions at the time were done by physicians in their offices in a way that was as safe for the mother as it would have been if it were legal. [The Wikipedia entry for "Unsafe Abortion" includes a key quote from this excerpt also, for those who don't want to trust the PDF. So this is out there for those who know what to look for, but I'd never been directed toward it before.]

The second is from NARAL founder Bernard Nathanson, admitting that the pro-choice arguments before Roe v. Wadeabout the numbers of deaths from illegal abortions were simply fabrications on the order of 10-20 times the amount that an accurate assessment could have produced.

I've always thought this argument was pretty ineffective anyway except for someone who is already pro-choice, for reasons Jay mentions at the end of the post. If you're open to the possibility that the fetus has significant moral status, then the fact that killing a fetus illegally might also produce a death of the mother is irrelevant. If you're going to legalize a particular kind of murder (or even something that, for all you know, might turn out to be murder but you're not sure) then legalizing it just because it produces a second death when illegal turns out to justify a lot of acts that are unquestionably murder by anyone's standards.

It's one thing to offer an argument that should only convince those who are already on your side but is a little deceptive because it makes an emotional appeal that isn't really all that rational on pro-life premises. It's quite another to use deliberate deception just the get the political result you want. A lot of misrepresentation happens in politics, and that includes misrepresentations of those who hold contrary views, abortion included. That's politics as usual. I try to resist it, and I hope I'm better than most at stopping it, but it's not the worst kind of dishonesty, since most of the people who do it simply assume the worst of their political opposition or of those who take contrary moral stands, and they at least think what they're saying is true, even if their standard of proof is pretty low in many cases. But simply making up numbers to argue for a policy change is much worse than politics as usual, and that's what these two leaders of the pro-choice movement admitted that the movement had done to get abortion legalized.

Like politics as usual, this happens on both sides of the aisle. But I think we have a much more significant duty to point it out and criticize it when it's this sort of deception, because this is a knowing twisting of the truth merely to get a certain result rather than simply assuming the worst of your opponent. We should avoid both, but it's worth distinguishing between the two and placing an even stronger emphasis on the avoiding the second. I will sometimes point out when I think one side misstates the other's position or ignores how an argument will fail given the assumptions of the other side. It's a lot less common when we can be sure that they're outright lying, though, and it's even more rare to find someone admitting it after the fact. It's kind of sad that this outright lie has become the basis of a fairly common pro-choice argument for retaining the status quo in abortion laws.

[cross-posted at Evangel]

The District of Columbia was ticketing people for parking in their own driveways, and apparently this was actually legal (at least there was a law that provided for this; I'm not sure whether the courts would find it constitutional). I don't know if this is still going on, but it sounded like a hoax when I first heard of it.

David Boies, Al Gore's lawyer in Bush v. Gore, and Ted Olsen, George Bush's lawyer from the same case (who was also Bush's first Solicitor General) are working together to try to get judicial declaration of same-sex marriage at the federal level. Olson, to be fair, is not advocating the kind of policy-preference right that more liberal lawyers and judges often see in the Constitution and that he has consistently argued against his entire career. His argument doesn't even assume that there is a right to marry. It just relies on the fact that our court system recognizes a right to marry and concludes that it ought to be applied to gay couples as well as straight couples if we're going to be in the business of applying such rights. (However, their argument does seem to assume that couples as couples and not just individuals have rights, or else it assumes what an Equal Rights Amendment would have provided but didn't when it never passed.)

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to reinstate the draft during the Bush Administration and then voted against the bill (almost no one actually voted for it, which was what he had expected). I thought it was strange when Republicans kept pushing a marriage amendment that they knew they didn't have enough votes to pass, but it's well beyond that to waste government time and money by pushing something you don't even want passing to begin with.

Jeff Bridges and Beau Bridges are brothers, and Lloyd Bridges was their father. Beau I can understand. But Jeff? I wouldn't have expected it.

All the miscreants who linked the phrase "miserable failure" to President Bush's biography had succeeded in making it the top website in Google for that expression. I was sure this was a joke when I first heard about it. It was pretty quick to verify, though. It had less skepticism when I heard that miscreants on the right had done the same with getting John Kerry's senate bio at the top of searches for "waffles".

Jeremiah Wright, whose heterodox, anti-white language makes him sound as if he doesn't think white people can be genuine Christians, actually has white members actively ministering in his congregation, sometimes even occupying leadership roles. (I don't think that excuses his rhetoric, which I think still counts as heterodox divisiveness, but he seems not to mean what he says.)

Philip Pullman wrote an entire scifi/fantasy series (His Dark Materials, whose first novel is The Golden Compass) out of an anti-religion and particularly anti-Christian agenda. When I first heard this, I thought it must be an exaggeration and that it probably just had some anti-religious elements throughout, but it turns out as the series develops that the agenda is far more central to the books than at first it appears. Pullman has even portrayed it as his remedy to the Narnia Chronicles, which he thinks call good evil and evil good. (I happen to think he failed in some crucial ways at what he was seeking to accomplish, but I wanted to post on that at some point separately, and I just haven't gotten around to it. Finishing up this post, which I started weeks ago but didn't have enough items to finish, has reminded me that I had wanted to do this, so maybe I'll get to it soon.)

Two days after his big announcement revoking President Bush's stem-cell policy, President Obama signed into law the big budget bill for the year, including a provision that prevented any funding from being used for embryonic stem cell research. I was especially skeptical about this, and it took me a long time and some hard Googling to find enough information to confirm it, but it does seem to have happened.

The Obama Administration's original discussion suggestions for his speech to school kids on September 8, 2009 really did ask kids to write about how they could help Obama, but they later changed it to ask about how they could be responsible. This was especially surprising given the actual content of the speech, which was mostly politically neutral. Why would they then ask how kids could help Obama when the thrust of the speech was just calling them to work harder in school and to be responsible? The original question therefore puzzles me a little unless he changed the speech too, which we have no evidence of (and the official explanation that the revision was what they had meant all along is completely implausible).

You can't help out your neighbor in Michigan by putting their kids on the bus for them every morning without a license to operate a daycare business.

The following two claims are clearly and obviously compatible:

(1) There are people who oppose President Obama and everything he does, in part because they can't stand the idea of a black president.
(2) The vast majority of opposition to President Obama's policies is because people simply oppose his policies.

I'm not entirely sure why so many people, including a former President of the United States and the current Speaker of the House, should think the first fact implies the denial of the second.

I've long argued that it's counter-productive for those who oppose racism to throw racism charges around when there's no good evidence of racism, especially when there's plenty of reason against it. If a particular racism charge is incorrect, it does no good to make it and causes much harm. People who regularly get accused of racism when they know full well that it's not remotely true are right to get upset and to think those who are making the charge have no good reasons to make it. They will tend to assume, then, that whenever there's a racism charge it must be manufactured. They'll be likely to think genuine charges of racism are similarly invented. They'll think we've moved beyond racism and that we no longer need to worry about racial problems.

This is in fact what many conservatives have wrongly concluded from the election of President Obama. If Democratic leaders insist on making obviously false charges of racism against a very large group of people (those who oppose the president's policies, when something like 46% of voters voted against him), it won't be surprising if it just feeds into the false picture many are trying to present that there's no more racism to fight against except the racism of the left accusing so many white people of being racists merely because they happen to be white but oppose someone who happens to be black. In other words, it feeds into the false narrative that the only racism that remains is anti-white racism.

People who voted for President Obama who have since decided that they did not get what they thought they were going to get (as is true of many of the protesters) are not the sort of racist who will oppose him for his being black, no matter what he does. Yet that's exactly what's being claimed by President Carter and Speaker Pelosi.

There are plenty of people who would oppose anyone who would expand the federal government at such massive levels and at a cost that will be impossible to pay for who then attempts to transform the health insurance industry in significant ways that will have unpredictable effects while denying that the effects reasonable people might worry about are at all possible. Yet President Carter and Speaker Pelosi are again insistent that there cannot be such people, because the only motivation anyone could possibly have for resisting such a reworking of the private enterprise of health insurance is because of racist opposition to the person proposing it, who happens to be black.

On March 11, President Obama held a press conference that got much attention, during which he announced his executive order that he claimed rescinded Bush's so-called ban on embryonic stem cell research. The discerning knew that there was quite a bit of dishonesty in that press conference, including how the media described it. I discussed several problems in his announcement at the time, so I won't repeat all that. It did seem to me to be excessively unfair and insulting to pro-lifers, and he engaged in several instances of historical revisionism at Bush's expense that struck me as underhanded and deceptive.

Yesterday I discovered an excellent summary of the timeline on the general issue of stem cell research. A couple facts stand out as too-often ignored. It was actually President Clinton in 1996, not President Bush in 2001, who began the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research (there was never a ban on the research, just federal funding of it). It's true that Clinton did announce at the end of his second term that he wanted to change that and was expecting soon-to-be-president Gore to change that policy, but there was never actually any funding during Clinton's presidency that Bush did away with, as the common myth usually has it. Bush didn't restrict funding that was already there. He actually loosened the restrictions by providing funding for the 21 lines of existing stem cells from already-destroyed embryos, funding that had not been available under Clinton. There was never any ban on embryonic stem cell research or on destroying embryos, but Clinton did ban federal funding on any such research, and Bush weakened that ban by allowing some funding for already-existing stem cell lines.

That was all just a fact-checking reminder, since none of it was really news to me. But there was one piece of information that completely surprised me. After this much-touted press conference that the White House and the media had presented as a return to the 21st century after eight years in the stone age, President Obama did indeed sign the executive order that opened up funding for new lines of embryonic stem cells. However, he signed a bill two days later that undid his own executive order, at least with respect to this year's funding from the main spending bill Congress passed.

When I first read this, I immediately wanted to find something to verify it. It was incredibly difficult to find an actual news story on it, since the mainstream media either suppressed it or never got the information on it. The one news story I could find was from a partisan organization, but it does give chapter and verse for where to find the language in the bill that does indeed do exactly what the story says it does. It's in Title V, section 509 of the Omnibus spending bill (page 128 of this PDF; it appears in full here). It repeats verbatim exactly the section that since 1996 has appeared in every such spending bill under President Clinton and President Bush. This bill therefore does seem to prohibit what Obama's executive order sought to do, and the president signed the bill into law a mere two days after issuing the executive order with such fanfare. Of course, since it appeared in spending bills during Bush's administration, I'm not sure how he got away with the stem-cell funding that he implemented. Wasn't that therefore illegal? Or was the money provided by a separate act of Congress?

I'm not going to speculate on whether President Obama knew what he was doing and if so why he did it. It may have been an instance of negligence in knowing what he was signing, or it may have been an instance of incredible deceit in making a big deal about a big change that he knew he was going to undermine almost immediately. The former seems much more likely to me given the president's officially-stated views and other actions related to this. But it does seem to be true that it happened, despite my initial skepticism upon reading this, and it does raise similar issues for Bush's executive order permitting more limited funding for embryonic stem cell research, although for all I know he never intended funding to come from the big spending bill each year and so signed it willingly. (I know that's not true of Obama, who did seem to expect this bill to provide funding for embryonic stem cell research. His statements that very week did give that impression.) This one's going in my upcoming post on truths that I at first thought must be myths.

Update: On second thought, this probably wasn't an issue for Bush, since it doesn't prohibit funding for stem cell research on already-existing lines of embryonic stem cells or on stem cells derived from other methods. I believe Obama has revoked the funding for both of those, so it's more of a problem for him, who only wanted to fund research that actually destroyed embryos in the process, and this bill prevents any of these funds from being used for such research.

President Obama and a lot of other fans of the legislation Congress has been working on for health-insurance reform have consistently insisted that there's no plan in the works to have abortions paid for by federal tax money. In his latest volley, the president called pro-lifers' claims to the contrary not true, even a fabrication intended to "discourage people from meeting ... a core ethical and moral obligation."

It's taken them too long, but Factcheck.org has finally chimed in on this issue to confirm almost everything the pro-life side has been saying. Just because it doesn't say the word 'abortion' in the bill doesn't mean it won't cover abortion as part of reproductive health. Given the history of what that term has been used to mean, it almost certainly would be used for that and certainly could be used for that. It doesn't technically mandate such coverage, at least in current forms, but it's hard for me to believe that the people who keep calling this charge a lie are telling the truth when their main argument is the absence of the word 'abortion'. It took the Hyde Amendment to prevent government funding for abortion in the current system. Why wouldn't it take something similar in a new plan that has no such ban?

Now those who think there is a moral obligation for a government health care program to cover abortions should have the freedom to pursue such a policy. But in our political system the way to do that is to propose it openly and not deceive people into thinking something they might support is something other than what it really is. I suspect those who see that as a moral obligation have realized that they can't get it passed if they're honest. So they think the obligation to do it outweighs the obligation to be honest with the voters about what they're doing.

Update: Serge observes something else that's important here. Unless we're going to be so anti-feminist as to define pregnancy as unhealth, the explicit motivation for this bill doesn't support including abortion and indeed undermines it. Starting from the premise that we have a moral obligation as a society to provide basic health care for everyone, then you might think it follows that we ought to treat all illnesses and have the top 10% of earners pay for most of it. But it doesn't follow that such a moral obligation could include something that isn't about health at all. Some do see such a moral obligation with abortion, but if so then it isn't about health care. You don't generally make a pregnant woman more healthy by aborting her pregnancy, even if you might want to argue that it has other benefits. So health insurance reform should not make it even possible that money earmarked for health care should go to something that isn't about providing for someone's health.

So I've listed ten myths that I at one point just believed when I first heard them, even if in some cases it was only when I was pretty young. I also wanted to put together a list of myths that never sounded plausible to me, even the ones I heard as a kid, but that somehow get passed around as if true (and in some cases even get trotted out as if any serious scholar must believe such a thing).

1. KFC changed its name from Kentucky Fried Chicken because they don't use chicken anymore. They use clones of chickens grown without heads, and the U.S. government won't allow them to call that chicken.

2. There's such a person as Santa Claus.

3. The Bush Administration orchestrated 9-11.

4. Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S.

5. The Pentateuch was compiled over several generations by people with different and conflicting ideologies, and we can reconstruct which ideology is behind which verses or even partial verses with pinpoint precision, according to such tell-tale signs as which name is used for God or whether it happens to involve a negative or positive assumption or conclusion about a certain tribe of Israel. It amazes me how confident scholars can be of this even though no sources have ever been found for such texts, no textual statements in the text we have indicate anything about any such sources, and no two scholars can even agree on which parts come from which sources.

6. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels, is a practitioner of Wicca who sought to convert Christians to Wicca by writing novels about magic.

7. Sarah Palin cut funding for teen mothers because of pro-life convictions.

8. George W. Bush attacked Iraq because he believed God told him to.

9. Sarah Palin thinks God directed the U.S. to attack Iraq.

10. Divine foreknowledge and predetermination are incompatible with human freedom and responsbility. Sorry, I suppose I should find something less controversial. How about the commonly-heard line about how Jesus' statement that it's easier for a camel to get through an eye of a needle than for the rich to enter God's kingdom once you know that there's a gate in Jerusalem called the eye of the needle, and camels can get through it, but it's hard. (I once heard someone repeat that false background to Jesus's statement and then say that knowing that changed her life. Somehow. She never explained any further and probably couldn't have done so even at gunpoint.)

I've been minimizing the discussion of race in my most recent posts about Judge Sotomayor's cases and statements about race, because I wanted to treat those issues together in one place, and it does involve both her speeches and her decisions, which would have required splitting up the discussion if I included it in those posts. So here are some thoughts on her speeches, judicial decisions, and recent statements about race and related issues.

As I've said before, I don't think there's any problem with thinking different people bring different things to interpretation of the law, and I don't think ethnic and racial differences are exempt from this. Someone who has been followed around in the store because of race understands discrimination and racism in different ways from how I do, since that hasn't happened to me that I'm aware of (and it hasn't happened to Sam when I've been around). But to assume that such a person will be a better judge goes too far, and that's exactly what the Sotomayor of the speeches claimed, even if she distanced herself from this in her testimony. What's odd about that is that she seems obviously right about some of the things she distanced herself from and yet wasn't willing to defend herself despite several senators attempting to do so.

There are ways she understands race and racism better than I do, because she's experienced it more from the perspective of someone being discriminated against or who has been followed around in a store. That might impact judging, because it allows someone to have a better understanding than someone who hasn't experienced such things. But what isn't often acknowledged by those making this point is that there are ways I understand racism and discrimination that someone who has more often been discriminated against might not understand. (I've made this kind of point before in a different context here.) For one thing, I've been around white people sometimes when no black people are around, and I know what white people talk about when only white people are around (it usually has nothing to do with race, but occasionally I have heard white people tell racist jokes and such things that they wouldn't say if they thought a black person might overhear). That's part of my experience, and it affects how I see racism and discrimination. Someone who is not white doesn't have that experience and has no first-hand knowledge of such facts.

I also have a third kind of experience from being in a mixed-race family, which includes experiences that most people of only one race don't have. For example, most same-race couples aren't going to have grocery store clerks assume they're not with each other. Most white people don't have family who aren't white, and thus they lack experiences of non-whites that I might have some understanding of. They don't have much experience attending black churches as family of one of the pastors, for instance. There are certain racial experiences that some white people can have that most white people don't have. That makes it hard to assume certain experiences just because of someone's race, which her statement does.

Which set of facts makes someone a better judge? The answer is neither. Both sets of facts could inform judges more about what our society is like, and a good, well-informed judge would welcome both sets of data. So I don't find her claim problematic when she says that a Latina judge's experience would provide experience relevant to judging and thus improve her judging in some ways from what it might otherwise be. I would also go as far as saying that, when a certain qualified judge comes from an underrepresented background, that background is likely to increase the quality of judging by adding the experiences of that underrepresented group to the data set the judges will consider. So having more Latina judges will make the judiciary better in one respect as compared with having one more white man on the judiciary, whose experiences may not (at least insofar as the person is a white man) add any further diversity to the pool of relevant experiences to inform interpretation of the facts that judges will hear.

But I don't think it follows that a Latina judge will be a better judge as an individual than a white man, merely because she is Latina, even holding all other things constant. That's what Sotomayor's statement actually says. I do find that inference troubling.

Since the Senate is going to be voting on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, I thought I might as well post my remaining thoughts on her. As I see it, there are three issues for senators to be considering in deciding how to vote in whether confirm her nomination. The first issue is to what extent they should consider ideology and to what extent they should defer to the president's choice. The second is the disconnect between some things she's said in the past and some things she's saying now and how we should think that will affect her decisions once she's on the Supreme Court. The one remaining kind of issue is simply what kinds of decisions she's made as a judge. [I should say that I left the race issue out of the last post, and I'm also not going to say much about it in this one, because I'm working on a separate post on that issue, covering both the speeches and decisions.]

One thing to keep in mind is what President Obama has repeatedly said in his discussions of judicial nominations. He estimates the percentage of cases where judges just apply the law to be 95% and then speaks of the other 5% as the ones to pay attention to. I think he's got his numbers way off about which cases are easy and would be unanimous, but he's right that it's the most difficult cases, particularly those involving constitutional issues, where we'll get a better idea of what's distinctive about a judge, and we need to look at those cases to get a good sense of how a judge will be on issues of tremendous importance. A lot of people have emphasized that the bulk of Judge Sotomayor's decisions are pretty moderate, but they don't acknowledge that the same was true of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito when they were appellate judges, and senators in the Democratic Party didn't let that stop them from pointing to the few decisions they could find that they considered problematic. It's those controversial decisions that give some sense of how a judge might decide the controversial Supreme Court decisions that most people are most likely to care about.

I think her record does include some bothersome decisions about constitutional rights. For example, there's a worrisome opinion about free speech (see also the 1st update here). She ruled that a public school can punish a student for a blog post written off school grounds and not during school hours.

Her record also includes a number of cases where she has refused to consider constitutional objections against a law or government practice when a large number of people in looking at it have thought such an argument is at least worth discussing and many would argue is decisive. These involve (at least) the Second, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments with regard to gun rights (discussed below), property rights (i.e. search and seizure, also discussed below), and equal protection (which I'll discuss in more detail in a subsequent post). It's a serious worry that she thinks these issues are not worth an argument, as if there's no real issue to discuss, when a large majority of her critics, including several people on the Supreme Court in each case, would think there is indeed an issue. Her dissent in the voting rights case about felons (see below) is similarly brief and dismissive, but that's not a constitutional issue. I've heard people say that she's especially thorough in most of her opinions, so this does tell you something about her view on these issues. She doesn't think there's much room for debate on such straightforward issues that lots of people don't think are so straightforward or think are straightforward in the other direction.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted almost along party lines yesterday to send Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the full Senate for a confirmation vote. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was the only Republican to vote in favor of her nomination. Two other senators, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), voted for the very first time in fairly lengthy Senate careers against a Supreme Court nominee. What's interesting about this is that this nominee's actual judicial record is probably more moderate than anyone else on President Obama's shortlist, and her decisions have been more moderate than several nominees Senators Hatch and Grassley have confirmed. So what's going on here?

I think there are two explanations. One has to do with our location in the history of the judicial confirmation process. The other has to do with the Two Sotomayors narrative that the Republican senators have been crafting. I've talked about the judicial confirmation process before (most recently here). I do think Republicans are getting frustrated that they've been letting Democratic judicial nominees sail through because of their commitment to give presidents deference, while Democrats have been blocking, filibustering, and voting against nominees who are as qualified and as ideologically-mainstream as the nominees Republicans have not opposed. Even some who are committed to showing presidents deference are going to moderate that commitment in such a setting if they think the judiciary is at stake because of the practical consequences of the two parties having different approaches to the amount of deference senators should give the president. This probably gives the second issue more weight than it might otherwise have, but I think it's at least a significant driving force in Republican resistance to Judge Sotomayor's nomination, even if they're not saying this in their explanations for their votes.

The explicit reason most of the Republican senators are giving depends on a running narrative from the Republican senators on the judiciary committee about the Sonia Sotomayor of her speeches and the Sonia Sotomayor of her decisions, and they want to know which one will appear on the Supreme Court if she's confirmed. Some of these differences are overstated, but some issues do raise a concern for many people. We might assume that a judge who has consistently ruled in an unbiased way in the majority of cases (which all sides agree is true of her) will continue to do so on the Supreme Court, even if she has expressed views in speeches that might seem at odds with that. It's been interesting to see some of the Democratic senators defending the speeches outright, while others have insisted on standing by her judicial record as a way of creating distance between her judicial decisions and her public statements.

Sotomayor herself has notably taken the second approach and backtracked from a number of things that she seems to have clearly endorsed in those speeches, emphasizing that her decisions have consistently applied the law and not interpreted it in light of the things the speeches seem to involve. She has articulated a view in her hearings on the relevance of foreign law to judging that sounds more like Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito in their resistance to use of foreign law for interpreting U.S. law and the U.S. Constitution. Consider her written response to Senator Sessions' questions:

In my view, American courts should not rely on decisions of foreign courts as binding or controlling precedent, except when American law requires a court to do so. In some limited circumstances, decisions of foreign courts can be a source of ideas, just as law review articles or treatises can be sources of ideas. The Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment cases establish how the Court considers constitutional challenges to the death penalty, and I accept those decisions.

On the other hand, her speeches on the subject sounded more like Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, who have on several occasions used foreign law as a reason to consider evolving standards of decency or a new national consensus of policy preferences as reasons to take the U.S. Constitution and U.S. laws to mean something very different from what they originally meant and have meant for the entire history of interpretation (e.g. on what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment or how to interpret due process in the 14th Amendment).

In these cases she's right to say that there were other issues, so the appeal to foreign law doesn't determine the outcome by itself, but a lot of readers have come away from the opinions with the impression that foreign law was driving it to begin with, and the justices had to find some way to justify their policy preference rather than simply deciding things according to precedent or what the text of the Constitution requires. So what she says here seems to me to be at odds with what it seems to me that these decisions she cites favorably actually do. Also, her speech on this question expressed concerns about how the United States would be viewed if we were significantly at odds with international law on important issues. A judge could be concerned about how our laws are viewed as a step toward arguing for changes in the laws via legislative process, but this statement wasn't in a speech advocating that. It was in a speech advocating the use of foreign law to get ideas for what judges in the U.S. can do.

Given a difference between her opinions as a judge and her speeches as a private citizen, the distinction between appellate judges and Supreme Court justices might make all the difference in which one of those would appear on the Supreme Court. If her views from her speeches really are worrisome, and the only thing keeping her from enacting them is that she's bound by Supreme Court precedent and Second Circuit precedent in her current role, with a Supreme Court review always possible for any decision she renders, then she will be freed from those constraints on the Supreme Court. That's why the narrative of the Two Sotomayors is still compelling for many people as an argument against her nomination. It's no defense, if this is right, to point out that most of her decisions have been in terms of legal rather than policy arguments or to point out that she hasn't based her decisions on empathy but on the law.

I totally missed this. According to Dale Carpenter, the Obama Administration has endorsed all the conservative arguments against same-sex marriage. I wonder if that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it does seem as if one important argument that's roundly derided by most of my philosopher friends is present in the DOJ brief, and it's an argument that I think is exactly right (even if very unpopular among those who favor same-sex marriage).

The DOJ argues that it doesn't violate equal protection on sexual orientation grounds to fail to recognize same-sex marriage, because gay and straight people aren't getting different marriage rights as each other. Gay men are free to marry anyone of the same group that straight men are free to marry -- women. It's true that gay men can't marry other gay men, but neither can straight men. So any discrimination that's taking place isn't according to sexual orientation. Men of both orientations (gay and straight) are being treated equally. You might argue that it's unfair because one is able to marry according to their preference and the other isn't, but they are strictly speaking given the same marriage rights, and it isn't discrimination along sexual-orientation lines. There's a much better explanation of what's going on, which I'll get to in a moment. But I wanted to say that I'm glad someone left-of-center is acknowledging this, because it seems obviously true to me and seems completely the wrong way to argue that this is discrimination. (The DOJ apparently doesn't intend to argue that right now about marriage, though. The Obama position is pretty clear that there shouldn't be a federal-level recognition of same-sex marriage but that there should be a federal-level recognition of civil unions with all the civil rights that marriage would convey.)

I've seen all manner of twists of logic to try to resist this conclusion, but I don't know how you could get around it. It's not sexual-orientation discrimination to treat all gay men and straight men equally any more than Prohibition was discrimination against drinkers of alcohol. It simply wasn't. Everyone was prohibited from alcohol, not just drinkers. It certainly affects those who drink in a way that it doesn't affect those who don't, but that doesn't mean that drinkers were being discriminated against, since that would involve being singled out with a law that doesn't apply to others. Being singled out with a law that others don't care about isn't the same thing as being singled out with a law that only would apply to some people. Requiring people to wear motorcycle helmets doesn't affect me because I don't ride a motorcycle, but I'd have to wear a helmet if I were to ride one, so it's not discrimination against motorcycle riders.

Nevertheless, there's a discrimination argument that the DOJ brief doesn't acknowledge. In fact, there are two. I think these arguments are both also very obvious once you consider them, so it surprises me that they don't deal with them at all. Most people on the right on this issue don't accept these arguments, and I think there are things they can say in order to justify such resistance, but the claim in both cases does seem at least initially plausible to me.

One kind of discrimination involved with not allowing same-sex marriage is discrimination against couples on the basis of their being same-sex. The above argument is only about individuals. I don't think this would be discrimination against a gay individual, but you could much more easily argue that a couple who is same-sex is being discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation. Technically speaking, that's not right either. Two straight men could, in principle, decide to go against their sexual orientation and seek civil marriage. The discrimination here isn't really according to sexual orientation, then, but according to same-sex pairings vs. opposite-sex pairings. Treating a same-sex couple and an opposite-sex couple differently is discriminating against the couple who is being denied a privilege or right that the other couple is given.

(This gets immensely complicated in terms of the logic of it once you accept intersexual, transgender, or transsexual members of pairings, so I'm ignoring that for the sake of this argument. I don't think it affects what I'm trying to argue in any significant way, so I think for simplicity's sake it's not problematic to do so.)

The other argument is still about individuals but is not about sexual orientation at all. Denying a man the right to marry another man is discrimination if women are allowed that right. The same is true of denying a woman the right to marry another woman when a man can do so. But this isn't sexual-orientation discrimination. It's sex-discrimination. Men are given certain rights or privileges not given to women, and women have rights or privileges men don't have. This argument seems to me that it should be utterly obvious once it's made clear.

A friend of mine on Facebook left a comment in response to a status update to the effect that there's an inconsistency in much of the rhetoric from the left when it comes to our attitude toward the next generation. I think this is a problem for both sides, actually. You can often find people who will issue very harsh criticisms of those on the other side for ignoring the devastating consequences of either inaction or a particular course of action on a certain issue, while the same people will ignore the devastating consequences of inaction or a certain course of action on a different issue.

You hear a lot about how we're failing in our responsibilities to the next generation if we allow climate change to continue at the rate it's going. Yet the same people who make these urgent calls to think about the next generation are happy to spend massive amounts of money that we couldn't hope to pay for in several generations, even if (as is likely) President Obama has to settle for significant departures from his campaign promises about taxes. (See note 1 below for more on this, which I decided was too intrusive to my argument to keep here.)

I would add that they're also happy to impose regulations that will almost certainly generate hardships for lower-earning wage-earners both in making it more difficult to buy new houses and cars with something like the cap-and-trade proposal currently at work or providing health insurance for people who don't have it, at the cost of making health care much worse on the whole for many people, including lower wage-earners whose employer currently does provide health insurance but who will be forced to move to worse health insurance as a result. (See note 2 for my own situation with respect to this, which I wanted to say something about but was also becoming too intrusive to my argument.)

But on the right, you can have similar inconsistencies. Some conservatives favor significant environmental regulation, but most want it limited. Some reject it entirely. Some of those who reject it are nevertheless environmentally conscious, taking it to be a problem we should do something about. For example, Dick Cheney, who is very generous with his money with regard to charitable donations, gives quite a lot of money every year to conservation-related charities, a good portion of of which (I believe) goes toward exploring technologies that will help deal with environmental problems more effectively than regulation could ever do. But there are conservatives who are simply not interested in environmental concerns, who nevertheless put a lot of effort into criticizing the Obama Administration and the current Democratic-led Congress for not caring about the future generations with their ridiculous levels of spending and regulation that will certainly have a negative impact on the next generation.

There's an ongoing debate about exactly what role senators should have in the process of confirming judicial nominees. The Constitution gives the President the role of appointing people to certain positions, including "Judges of the Supreme Court", but this role is qualified. It is to be done "by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate".

At this point there are two main views about what that advice and consent is supposed to be. Some senators have consistently maintained that ideology can play a role. If a senator disapproves of the ideology or perceived ideology of the nominee, it's perfectly fine to vote against the person's confirmation. Other senators have consistently maintained the view that senators should give significant deference to the president, voting to confirm any mainstream nominee who is qualified enough, even if the person tends significantly to the other side of the political spectrum or to a contrary judicial philosophy.

There are reasons for each view. Deference to the president makes some sense. When we vote for president, we do so while knowing what sort of judges the candidate is likely to appoint. Anyone who voted for Barack Obama while thinking he would appoint judicial conservatives to the bench is an idiot. Anyone who voted for George W. Bush while expecting him to appoint liberal justices to the Supreme Court wasn't paying attention to the kinds of justices he said he admired and would appoint. Mistakes can happen (as with Justice Souter with Bush's father), but you shouldn't expect your preferences to be fulfilled with judicial appointments if you vote for someone for president who has opposite preferences. Senators on the other side might say that elections have consequences and that presidents are owed some deference due to the political process. On the other hand, elections have consequences. Senators are elected. They represent the preferences of their constituents, and isn't the function of senators in judicial appointments part of what you should consider when you vote for someone for that office? So even on the democratic process argument, you might think it cuts both ways.

But other considerations have been offered against giving presidents a lot of deference on judicial nominations. One problem is that you still need to decide when to defer and when not to defer. How far outside the mainstream counts as sufficiently outside? Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito were both presented by Democratic senators as being outside the mainstream of conservative thought on evidence that's actually pretty similar to the evidence being used to argue that Judge Sotomayor is not outside the mainstream of judicial thought. It turns out, then, that this view isn't really a coherent, unified position. It's not about whether to give the president deference but about how much deference to give the president.

No one wants the Senate to rubber-stamp whoever the nominee is no matter what, so qualifications must matter, but it's not clear the ideological considerations are really separate from qualifications. Some would argue that an ideology that's very extreme actually disqualifies someone from being a good judge, because a good judge would interpret the law accurately and fairly, and extremist judges of certain sorts do not. But according to a judicial conservative, liberal jurisprudence then counts as a lack of qualifications. Any nominee who is ideologically liberal in terms of judicial philosophy is not a qualified nominee, and senators can vote against them on that basis and call it a matter of the nominee not being qualified.

So I'm no longer sure that the distinction between qualifications and ideology really explains much in terms of what senators should pay attention to, at least not in any way that will be agreed upon by a significant number of senators. Several other considerations also might favor looking to ideology. Some have argued that too much deference to the president leads to extremist judges on both sides, since presidents will get away with as much as they can if the Senate just defers.

We start off with Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) today. The senators are going through their second round, limited to 20 minutes each instead of 30 (and most aren't using the full time either).

I'm only going to comment if anything new occurs. A lot of these second-round questions are simply rehashing what they've talked about before.

Kyl challenges her on Ricci. She says she decided the case based on Second Circuit precedent. That applies in the original hearing of the case. She voted on the case the same way in the en banc review, when the whole Second Circuit heard it. He wants to know why she voted not to hear it en banc, given that precedent wouldn't bind her at that point. The district court decision doesn't bind her, and the Second Circuit precedent doesn't apply. So he wants to know what bound her to decide the same way then.

She says the three-judge panel opinion she issued was now precedent, making the district court opinion precedent. He says the Supreme Court said there was no precedent. She says that was on whether the circuit court decision used the right standard. Two provisions of Title VII need to be assured to be consistent with each other. That issue was raised with them but not with her panel. The outcome she came to wasn't based on that. He's trying to get her to admit that she wasn't bound by precedent when it came to voting to hear the Ricci case en banc but did so vote, and he wants her to explain why in terms other than precedent, because precedent doesn't bind her at that point. She won't admit that, but as far as I can tell it's true.

He reads from Judge Cabranes saying that cases are not typically dismissed with summary judgments when they are of this import. She doesn't seem to have anything to say about that either. He says the nine Supreme Court justices all said it shouldn't have been a summary judgment. He says there were three tests: the one the appellate court used, the one the Supreme Court went with, and the one the dissent went with. But all nine of them said it shouldn't have been a summary judgment. She says she doesn't read the opinion that way.

Kyl turns to a speech discussed by Senator Hatch yesterday about justice for an individual in a district court and justice for society in an appeals court. But in the appeals court, it's still supposed to be about justice for the individual. It might have the effect of building reliance on rule of law and creating precedent, but the decision is supposed to evaluate based on the law on this case. She agrees. The legislature's contribution to policy is making law. When judges follow the rule of law, they create precedent that then have a policy impact, but it's not in the sense of making law the way Congress does.

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) starts things off today. He's rehearsing the same worry about the different picture painted by her decisions as a judge and her public speeches, where the worry is that being less constrained on the Supreme Court would move her away from judging the way she has done on the Second Circuit and more like the picture she's presented in her speeches.

She says she stands by her words as she intended them but understands how people have taken them in a different way.

Cornyn moves on to the issue of the law being in flux. Why is the law indefinite? She says it's a matter of which legal cases apply. People bring cases because they believe precedents don't clearly answer the question at hand. They present facts that they say entitle them to relief under the law. Indefiniteness isn't about what the law is but how it's applied, and it leads people to believe it's unpredictable. Judges don't make law the way Congress does, but they apply law in new ways, as initiated by arguments of lawyers and not by judges themselves. Judges ensure the law applies to the facts, interpreted according to Congress's intent, being informed by precedents as applied to new facts.

A life experience as a prosecutor may help her understand things in a criminal case but not much in an anti-trust suit. Judges from a variety of backgrounds should increase public confidence because more issues will be addressed. It's not better addressed but it helps public confidence that all issues will be considered properly. She says in the particular paragraph she said we should ask the question as a possibility to think about. She wasn't answering it. She wasn't suggesting a difference in outcome, just a difference in process.

He keeps focusing on how physiological differences could do this. He's missing the point. She wasn't talking about physiological differences but different experiences. If he thinks men and women or whites and blacks have the same experiences, there's not much hope for her to convince him of this.

He asks if anyone asked her about views on abortion, and she says no one asked her anything about any specific issue. He asks why the White House would then assure abortion rights groups not to worry, and she says she knows no reason. She follows the law on all issues she addresses, and her record shows it.

He asks about the head partner of her firm saying she'd be clearly on the pro-choice side, and she says she never talked to him about that issue or any other social issue. She's upheld the law as it stands in every case she looked at. She upheld the Mexico City policy that prohibited federal funds for foreign abortions. She doesn't think he's read her 17-year judicial history, because he's a corporate litigator, and corporate litigators only read cases relevant to their current cases. He said she had liberal instincts, and she thinks he must be thinking equal opportunity is a liberal view, and she had pursued that as a board member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund.

He wants to know why the court's opinion in Ricci was unpublished, denying the firefighters' claims without discussing them. She says the briefs were available to the other judges when they considered whether to review it en banc, so Judge Cabranes had access to that. She can't speak for his reasons why he chose to reconsider the case. The issues of the case weren't hidden from the other judges, though. 75% of circuit court judgments are by summary order. (Right, but this is a much more major question than most.) She cites the district court's long opinion as a need not to repeat all that.

So I guess I'll liveblog at least part of this today.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT): Most of this seems to be about the best characteristics of judges and the role of the judge.

Sotomayor: As a judge, her role isn't to make law. Her role is to decide whether the law, as it exists, has principles that apply to new situations. That sounds pretty good to me, although people who say that might have a wide variety of how they carry it out, and some might see others as not doing that at all.

Leahy asks her about the Ricci case (the Connecticut firefighters who weren't promoted because not enough minorities did well enough on the test for promotion). He says it's "damned if you do, damned if you don't" case, but I didn't get the set of alternatives he presented. I suspect it's a false dilemma, but I need to look more closely at what he said to be sure.

She frames the issue as about the city certifying the test vs. finding a test that would measure effectiveness without the disparate impact. Was the decision of the city based on race or based on what its view of the law required it to do? Her panel concluded it was a lawful decision under established law and 2nd Circuit precedent. The Supreme Court applied a new standard and announced it as a new standard from a different law.

Now he asks about the "wise Latina" comment. She says she gave variants of the speech to several groups of young Latina lawyers to inspire them to believe their lives and experiences will enrich the legal system, because different backgrounds do. She wanted to inspire them to become anything they wanted, as she did. She thinks the words created a misunderstanding. She doesn't believe any ethnic, racial, or gender group has an advantage in sound judging. Every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge regardless of their background and life experiences. She says her words agree with the sentiment Justice O'Connor was trying to convey. Men and women are equally capable of being wise and fair judges. Judges disagree about legal outcomes in close cases. It can't be that one of them is unwise, despite the fact that some people think that. (Legal realism coming in?) She says her record shows that she first looks to what the law requires.

Leahy moves on to guns, making it clear that she recognizes the Supreme Court's Heller case establishing an individual right to bear arms when it comes to federal laws but not establishing anything about whether states can restrict gun ownership. (That is indeed what Justice Scalia's opinion says, and the circuit courts have split on that very issue, so it will face the Supreme Court soon enough.)

She says she has friends who hunt, and one godchild of hers is an NRA member. She recognizes the individual right under the 2nd Amendment as limiting the federal government rights to restrict firearm ownership. She does well explaining incorporation. The right doesn't apply to the states. Scalia didn't actually said that. He just said he's not commenting on that issue. She says she has an open mind on that issue. She'd follow Supreme Court precedent when it speaks directly on an issue, and she did in her Maloney decision where she took the view that [Second Circuit] precedent doesn't incorporate that right, but she'd hear the arguments open-mindedly if it came up on the Supreme Court [which doesn't have any precedent on the issue, but she didn't make that completely clear].

I've been listening to some of the senators' speeches at the confirmation hearings for Judge Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. I'm not going to live-blog these hearings, at least if that means updating every time I have anything to say, but I do want to record some thoughts on the senators' opening statements today, and I may comment on the questioning that begins tomorrow. I'm linking to senators' statements if they are online. Not all of them are (at least yet).

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) spends a good deal of time explaining the racist questions at Justice Thurgood Marshall's hearing, the anti-semitic questions at Justice Louis Brandeis' hearing, and the anti-Catholic assumptions of the unnamed first Catholic nominee (who I believe was Justice William Brennan). He then explains that we're in a different era, and we're beyond that now. Why then does he encourage the Republican senators not to cave to the pressure of special interest groups who are caricaturing Judge Sotomayor unless he thinks the conservative opposition to her is racially-based, and we're really not in a different era? I'm not sure which groups he means, but I haven't seen any of that from mainstream opponents of Sotomayor. There are those who have called her a racist, but it's not racist to call someone a racist if you think the view they hold is racist.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) seems to be setting the tone of possible criticisms well without being defaming. He's raising worries about things she's said and opinions she's joined or written. It's nice having a real judicial conservative running the Republican side of the committee again. He's a bit worried about certain decisions and statements from her, but he's not being strident or unfair about it at this point. He's doing a better job than most politicians do at setting forth a conservative judicial philosophy. It's good that he's the ranking member, thanks to Specter's defection (which he's now paying the price for, since he's the lowest-ranked member of this committee besides Senator Franken, who has only been a senator for about a week). I do think he's going too far, though, with some of her statements.

Senator Sessions thinks her record is clear that she defends the view that it's ok for judges to be biased, and I don't think her statements really amount to that, particularly with her view that experiences can and should inform how judges interpret the world and apply the law. How I see the meaning of the law is surely affected by my experiences in life, and there might well be ways that someone with experiences being discriminated against according to ethnicity will have a different view from me about what counts as wrongful discrimination. What's wrong with Sotomayor's view is that she assumes the person who has been discriminated against more often is going to have the right view, because she says a Latina judge will be a better judge than a white man. That's not necessarily true, but it's not the same thing as saying that a Latina judge should favor Latina people in particular cases. She's biased about what sort of people she expects to be better judges, but that's not a bias in how she will view people coming before her court, and Sessions is being a bit unfair in treating the two as the same thing.

Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) makes the case for considering her whole record and not just going by her decisions. He's making a lot of room for the Republicans to find places to criticize, but I think he's also trying to frame some ways she'll be able to respond to those criticisms. He and his fellow Wisconsinite Senator Feingold have always struck me as less partisan than the rest of the Democrats on this committee. That's true even though Senator Feingold is probably the most liberal member of the committee in his policy views (athough maybe that's changed with some new members).

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) reads off a number of then-Senator Obama's criteria when he filibustered the nomination of Judge Janice Roberts Brown to the D.C. Circuit. He arguesconvincingly that those criteria should have led to approval votes for Roberts and Alito. One signal that he's considering voting against Judge Sotomayor's confirmation, when he has never done so in the past, is that he seems to be getting fed up with the disjunct between what Democratic senators have said about Republican nominees and the official standards they present. Another sign is that he went out of his way to point out that judicial philosophy can be a qualification, and he said that presidents only get some deference for their qualified nominees. He's opening up the door for a "no" vote, and I get the sense that he's at least open to voting against her nomination, despite what many have assumed.

Perhaps future-Justice Sotomayor's judicial inclinations on abortion will be tested relatively soon once she assumes Justice Souter's now-vacated (as of today) seat on the Supreme Court (pending her all-but-assured confirmation by the heavily-Democratic Senate). The 4th Circuit decided a case last week that considers the constitutionality of a Virginia abortion ban that in almost every respect is just like the federal law that the Supreme Court narrowly upheld in an opinion written by abortion swing-voter Justice Anthony Kennedy.

The federal law and the Virginia law differ in one respect. The federal law bans deliberate partial-births (defined by delivery up to a certain biological point) in order to kill the fetus. That procedure is outlawed as a method of abortion. The Virgina law bans one further thing. If a doctor is carrying out an abortion by another method, and the fetus happens to get past that point of delivery defined by the law as a partial-birth, it is a crime to kill it via any method. In other words, once the fetus reaches the point defined by the federal law as a partial-birth (whereby it's a crime to deliver the fetus to that point in order to kill it), it counts in Virginia as a crime of a similar level if the doctor goes ahead and kills the fetus whether the intention was to abort it that way or another way earlier in the process.

In other words, the difference between these two laws is that one does not criminalize deliberate attempts to kill the fetus after it reaches the relevant partial-birth stage as long as the doctor had planned to kill the fetus earlier but failed to do so. The other does criminalize that. Which law is more consistent? Surely the Virgina one. It criminalizes any killing past that point, whether there was an intention of killing beforehand or not. Compare the laws against disposing of an infant born from a failed abortion. The U.S. Senate unanimously supported such a law. It doesn't matter if the doctor intended to abort the fetus. If it got to the point where it would normally be illegal to kill it, the fact that it was born as a result of a failed abortion doesn't make it legal to kill it. This just extends the same sort of reasoning to the partial-birth abortion ban the federal government passed that the Supreme Court has declared constitutional. So it seems as if it's actually the logical implication of the federal law, even if the federal law didn't go this far. It basically relies on the principle, found in Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous 1972 paper defending abortion, that a woman doesn't have a right to the death of the fetus just because she has a right to be rid of it from her body.

The 4th Circuit vote was narrowly-divided 6-5 along lines that happen to correspond with the party of the presidents who appointed them. Judges don't often follow a narrow ideology reflecting exactly that of the president who nominated them, but in this case it did work out that way. One judge was appointed by President Clinton as a recess appointment and renominated by President George W. Bush as a courtesy (as presidents do from time to time for previous presidents of another party), but he really counts as a Clinton appointment, since Clinton appointed him initially. Those appointed by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Bush signed the opinion that upheld the law. Those appointed by President Clinton signed the dissent (none remain from Carter and Obama's one nominee to that court hasn't been confirmed yet).

In effect, the Democratic appointees on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals have endorsed the view that a woman not only has a right to be rid of the fetus but also has a right to its death if being rid of it most of the way doesn't kill it. Otherwise they have nothing to complain about if they're really following Supreme Court precedent (which does bind them). The dissent here strikes me as a pretty obvious case of ideology trumping the law, even granting all Supreme Court precedent as the law. I really hope that if the Supreme Court hears this case it will affirm the 4th Circuit judgment by a 6-3 margin. It will likely not get more than that since three justices remain who will likely seek to continue their opposition to laws like this, but I suppose it's barely possible even if extremely unlikely that Justices Stevens or Breyer will defer to precedent they didn't original support. But no one has any clue about Judge Sotomayor's views on this sort of issue. She could be well to the left of anyone on the Supreme Court for all I know, but it's certainly possible that she's even to the right of Justice Kennedy for all that she's written about the issue (which is basically nothing besides issues relating to the free speech of abortion protesters).

I came across a pretty good discussion of several of the bad arguments for and against Judge Sotomayor's nomination by Jonathan Turley. I recommend the whole thing, but one statement by him got my attention.

He says something that led me to compare an interesting phenomenon that arises with both Justice Thomas and Judge Sotomayor involving race. There are those who are happy that Judge Sotomayor is a Latina and will support her nomination for that reason alone, ignoring anything else. Then there are those on the left like Turley who would have preferred someone with more intellectual heft. On the right, there are those like me who are happy enough that Obama has nominated someone who by most reports will do little to move the Court to the left from where it currently is (and on some issues may well move it somewhat to the right, although on some issues we don't have any clue, and she could be far left for all we know). Then there are those on the right who have also pointed out that she's gotten some negative reviews in terms of her intellect, claiming that she's an affirmative action pick who is being chosen not because she's qualified but because she's Latina, sometimes even with the suggestion that she's unqualified.

So on both sides of the political spectrum we get objections that she's not an intellectual heavyweight. Turley is right to point out that this is not the same as saying she's stupid, as some have claimed these critics to be saying. Maybe some of them are, but Turley thinks she's quite smart but just not an intellectual heavyweight whose depth of understanding of the law and the historical background of the legal questions would shift legal opinion in significant ways, e.g. as Justice Scalia has done on the right and as Justice Brennan did on the left in the latter half of the 20th century. Such a statement is consistent with recognizing her intelligence as pretty high.

Then there's a third category. There are those who claim the statements about her intelligence are due to racism. She's Latina, so they must be assuming she's dumb. You find this on the right too, particularly when people criticize Justice Thomas. Senator Harry Reid, for instance, despite admitting to never having read an opinion by Jusice Thomas, was happy to spout off the general wisdom of the left that his opinions aren't very well-written, and I regularly see and hear comments about how he's not all that smart and just looks to Justice Scalia for guidance about what to do. Anyone who has spent much time looking at his opinions and anyone who has heard him speak would never hesitate to consider him to be a pretty intelligent person.

So what about the racist charge? Is it racist to say that someone is dumb when the person happens to be non-white? Of course not. Your reasons for thinking someone is unintelligent may be despite great reluctance to say such a thing of a non-white person in the public eye. You might genuinely think the evidence supports it, or you may trust the opinion of someone else who reported to you that someone is unintelligent. I think it's pretty immoral to call someone a racist merely because they happen to think someone who is non-white isn't very bright. There are, after all, people who aren't white who aren't that bright. I've tutored for some of the athletic teams at my university. Some of the students on those teams are very good academically, and others should never have made it into college. Some of those who never should have been accepted happen not to be white. They struggle to understand pretty basic philosophical concepts that most freshmen pick up pretty readily. It's racist to assume someone is dumb just because the person is black or Hispanic, but it isn't racist to conclude that someone who happens to be black or Hispanic is of low intelligence after becoming aware of actual evidence that the person is of low intellifence.

Nevertheless, I think there's something that these critics have right. I think there's a very strong presumption in individual cases of not accusing someone of wrongdoing or evil motives when there isn't strong evidence that they are ill-intentioned or doing wrong. Therefore, I think it's wrong to throw around racism charges for everyone who, for all you know, might be operating based on racist assumptions. Racist assumptions would explain how someone might conclude that someone who managed to graduate top of her class at Princeton University might be stupid. Racist assumptions similarly would explain how someone might say the same about the justice who managed to convince Justice Scalia to become more judicially conservative than he already was because of some pretty innovative and out-of-favor reasons that it hadn't even occurred to Scalia to consider. But to assume that racism is at work in any particular case violates the principle of charity that we ought to take in cases where we don't really know if someone is being downright evil in the way we're inclined to accuse them of being.

Such a strong presumption is for individual cases when we're ignorant of the details, perhaps even relevant ones about a person's inner life. That's consistent with recognizing that a claim is too ludicrous to be perpetuated so easily and frequently by people who should know better when we rarely see such claims about men who are nominated or serving on the Supreme Court. That might lead us to wonder if there is some kind of racist stereotype being perpetuated. In this case, I don't think it would be that Judge Sotomayor is being assumed by anyone to be unintelligent because she's Latina, but I wonder if some people among those who say this are more likely to believe such a claim when made about a Latina than they would if it were made about a man, especially a white man.

I've been pretty busy teaching two intensive summer courses for the last few weeks, and I didn't have easy access to a computer for a good part of that time because Dell's next-day contract isn't exactly giving me next-day service due to some backlog problems (I still don't have full resolution from a problem that began something like 13 days ago.) But I did catch some people commenting that President Obama said that the U.S. would be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world if you just counted all the Muslims in the U.S., and I did see some people juxtaposing that comment with his claim during the election that the U.S. isn't a Christian country, claiming that he had contradicted himself.

There is a real tension between what he's doing with those two statements, but I don't think he contradicted himself. It turns out that one of his statements is hopelessly false. According to a Pew study, Muslims are about .6% of the U.S. population, which brings the total to less than 2 million. It seems France and Germany have more Muslims than the U.S. does, and most Muslim states are higher than that also. See Mollie Hemingway for some sources and some graphical presentations of the information. But the statements can be consistent even if one of them is false.

We need to ask first what it takes for a country to be Christian or Muslim. 1. Is a country a Christian country merely because its majority is Christian and its traditions are largely influenced by Christian traditions? 2. Or does there have to be an official declaration of Christianity as the nation's religion? 3. Or is that even enough, given that Christianity itself is a decidedly non-nationalizing religion, with strong resistance to seeing faith in the nationalized way that old-covenant religion in Israel was. The expansion to include all nations resists the very possibility of a Christian nation, according to Christian theology.

But what many people mean by using the adjective 'Christian' in this context is not any such thing but more that the government's structure, the legal tradition's views of human rights and assumptions of common law, and the nation's broader traditions are Christian-influenced in a strong enough way.

You have a very different situation with Islam. A nation can be Muslim in the weaker sense. It can also be Muslim in the second sense of being an officially-Muslim government, and in fact most nations that are Muslim in the first sense are also Muslim in the second. (I believe the only ones that haven't been have been controlled by a minority hierarchy of non-Muslims). But Islam explicitly affirms the third kind of being a Muslim nation, something Christianity never condones for itself. So that does change things, I think. It can much more easily be the case that a nation is unambiguously Muslim than it can be for a nation to be unambiguously Christian (in fact it's impossible for Christianity).

But will this help resolve the tension between the two Obama statements? I doubt his understanding of biblical theology is sufficient for him to come up with the view that it's impossible for a nation to be Christian in the third sense, but it's quite plausible that he meant the second sense when he said that the U.S. is not a Christian nation. It's pretty obviously not true if he meant it in the first sense, especially with his fairly broad sense of what it means to be a Christian. [And his view of Christianity is broader than mine, since he does consider himself a Christian, and I find it hard to include him given his denial of any afterlife, his conception of prayer as talking to himself, his reducing of the Holy Spirit to anyone's coming to see something that's true, and his conception of Jesus as merely bridging the God-human gap rather than having dealt with a serious problem of human sin interfering with any connection with God's holy nature. (See my Is Barack Obama an Evangelical? for further details on all that.) So with a broader conception of what counts as Christian, the numbers of Christians and the influence of Christianity in the U.S. will only appear to be stronger to someone like him than it would to someone like me with my more restrictive views of what is genuinely Christian.]

What about his statement about the U.S. being one of the largest Muslim countries if you only counted the Muslims. Even though the statement isn't even close to being true, I'm interested in what he meant to see if it's consistent with his statement about the U.S. not being a Christian nation. If he meant it in the second or third way, it's obviously false. I think he must have meant it in the first way. But saying something like that and meaning it in the first sense with Islam is perfectly consistent with resisting something along the same lines about Christianity and meaning it in the second sense. So I don't think his two statements are actually at odds, at least in terms of the consistency of the two things he meant with each statement.

Nevertheless, there might well be a tension between the pragmatic purpose of what he's trying to do in one case and the pragmatic purpose he's trying to achieve in the other. In the later case, he was looking toward a major speech trying to win over the Muslim world, so he wanted his audience in that speech to see that he was being positive about Muslim participation in American society. What was he doing in the first case? He was probably trying to satisfy the left's continued insistence that the religious right shouldn't control policies that people might disapprove of if they have other religious convictions or none at all. So the surface motivation is to be inclusive, a similar purpose to his later claim about Islam. Nevertheless, I do think the statement he made, in the context of why people do claim that this is a Christian nation, serves to send a message that Christian concerns are not to be included at the table when discussing certain kinds of policies. To the extent that that's true, I do think his statement serves an exclusionary purpose with socially-conservative religious voters, who were by and large turned off by his statement.

What he literally meant shouldn't have offended by it, but what he was trying to accomplish certainly does treat their concerns as unimportant. For that reason, I don't think those who are criticizing him for being inconsistent with these two statements are entirely wrong. There is something behind the first statement that is at odds with what he's trying to do with the second, at least if he wants to treat all religious expressions as legitimate and positive, which he at least says he wants to do.

Back during the nomination hearings for then-Judge Samuel Alito, Senator Barack Obama defended his vote to filibuster Alito, for reasons that included the following reasoning:

I believe firmly that the Constitution calls for the Senate to advise and consent. I believe that it calls for meaningful advice and consent that includes an examination of a judge's philosophy, ideology, and record. And when I examine the philosophy, ideology, and record of Samuel Alito, I'm deeply troubled.

I have no doubt that Judge Alito has the training and qualifications necessary to serve. He's an intelligent man and an accomplished jurist. And there's no indication he's not a man of great character.

But when you look at his record - when it comes to his understanding of the Constitution, I have found that in almost every case, he consistently sides on behalf of the powerful against the powerless; on behalf of a strong government or corporation against upholding American's individual rights.

If there is a case involving an employer and an employee and the Supreme Court has not given clear direction, he'll rule in favor of the employer. If there's a claim between prosecutors and defendants, if the Supreme Court has not provided a clear rule of decision, then he'll rule in favor of the state. He's rejected countless claims of employer discrimination, even refusing to give some plaintiffs a hearing for their case. He's refused to hold corporations accountable numerous times for dumping toxic chemicals into water supplies, even against the decisions of the EPA. He's overturned a jury verdict that found a company liable for being a monopoly when it had over 90% of the market share at the time.

It's not just his decisions in these individual cases that give me pause - it's that decisions like these are the rule for Samuel Alito, not the exception.

When it comes to how checks and balances in our system are supposed to operate - the balance of power between the Executive Branch, Congress, and the Judiciary, Judge Alito consistently sides with the notion that a President should not be constrained by either Congressional acts or the check of the Judiciary. He believes in the overarching power of the President to engage in whatever the President deems to be appropriate policy. As a consequence of this, I'm extraordinarily worried about how Judge Alito might approach issues like wiretapping, monitoring of emails, or other privacy concerns that we've seen surface over the last several months.

In sum, I've seen an extraordinarily consistent attitude on the part of Judge Alito that does not uphold the traditional role of the Supreme Court as a bastion of equality and justice for United States citizens.

By that standard, now-President Obama should find the current president's nominee disturbing for the same reasons he found the last Supreme Court nominee disturbing, at least if he's going to be consistent. In fact, he should promote a filibuster.

If you live in the District of Columbia, beware of parking your car in your own driveway. Unless your entire vehicle fits behind the front of your house (or technically the front of your front step), you'll be subject to a $20 ticket for parking in your own driveway. [Hat tip: Ilya Somin]

What are you supposed to do if your driveway doesn't go back far enough to fit your vehicles behind your front step? Maybe they don't make any driveways in D.C. that go back only as far as the front of the house, but I would highly doubt that. If this really is the law, they need to change it.

I have to agree with Ilya Solin about this. I've yet to put together my thoughts on the Sotomayor nomination fully, but this is an important point that I wanted to say something about separately. Regardless of your view of the correctness of Sotomayor's statement that a Latina just should be a better judge than a while male judge, such a view is not racism.

I tire of making this point on the left-leaning race blogs that I sometimes check in on. Racism, in its primary sense, is a negative attitude toward people of another race. Other things that might be called racist are so in a derivative way because those things are connected with racist attitudes. Thus certain acts are racist because they typically stem from such attitudes, and certain institutions are racist because they have a lot of such atittudes and acts woven into their very fabric. Jorge Garcia has an excellent philosophical defense of this approach in "The Heart of Racism".

When you call someone a racist, it doesn't mean they have innocent motives but participate in social practices that inadvertently cause racial harm. It doesn't mean they merely have false views about race or about races other than their own. It doesn't mean you can get away with ignoring race the many white people can much of the time. It doesn't mean you avoid some of the difficulties some others face because of race. The most immediatel thing converyed when someone is accused of being a racist is that the person has a deep-seated racial animosity or opposition to those of another race or that the person has views that those of another race are inferior, and these views have a negative emotional or attitudinal component. There are certainly things that can be called racism that don't fall into that category, but they're derivative of this fundamental meaning, and when you call someone a racist it sends entirely the wrong message if what you mean is something other than the primary meaning, because that's what people hear in such an accusation.

So it irks me when I hear conservatives making exactly the same blunder. It's not reverse racism to have the view that a Latina judge is likely to have experiences that influence her judging in positive ways, experiences that a white male judge wouldn't have. Calling someone a racist for thinking experiences common to the women of one ethnic group might make someone a better judge than people not in that category is as bad as calling someone a racist for opposing affirmative action or for claiming that the Democratic Senators at Clarence Thomas' nomination hearing were racists because they were willing to do anything, even smear his name with accusations that they had plenty of evidence against, if that's what it would take to prevent his confirmation. Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich have violated their own principles on this one. Limbaugh is a regular complainer about how the left issues racism charges in cases when such charges are not warranted. Yet that's exactly what he's doing here. I'm pretty sure Gingich shares that view, and yet he's also apparently called her a racist. Regardless of whether her view is true (and I encourage you to look at Tom Goldstein's analysis of her discrimination rulings, a post I'll try to comment on in more detail as soon as I can, before you come to a final judgment on her ability to be fair on such matters), it's certainly ridiculous to say that she's a racist for holding it.

1. I've been extremely busy. I'm teaching two summer classes and barely keeping up with them. Plus the kids have been sick, meaning some have been home and in need of more attention than normal. So I haven't had time to do much blogging. But I've got a few things I've been thinking about that I did manage to put in Facebook updates, which I might as well put here in lieu of anything that will take more time than I have.

2. Remember when Rosie O'Donnell outrageously called it a separation of church and state for President Bush to take the religious identification on the Supreme Court from three to give Catholics, making Catholic justices the majority? I just thought it was worth noticing that President Obama has nominated another self-identified Roman Catholic to replace another Protestant, and I've yet to hear any similar claims from Rosie O'Donnell (although I did hear that Christopher Hitchens is being consistent on this by finding it grave and troubling).

3. I heard a strange NPR story on the dangers of fracking. It took a little listening to discover that they meant this. It was hard to listen with a straight face. I don't know how the reporter got through it.

4. The Supreme Court could rule as early as Monday on a case Judge Sotomayor was involved in that could lead to some real fodder for criticism in her hearing. SCOTUSBlog has an excellent presentation of the issue and how it might go.

5. Once I get a breather I intend to look closely at some of the Sotomayor stuff that SCOTUSBlog has been posting since before her nomination even occurred. I haven't had time to comment on her nomination, but I'm not sure I would even know what to say just yet. Her actual opinions are kind of important, and most criticism so far has not focused on them but on some political speeches and interviews she's given.

Not really, but that's what Mother Jones wants you to believe. With "Supreme Court Upholds Pension Gender Gap" as a headline, they want to send the signal that the Supreme Court has considered the existence of a gender gap in who receives how much of a pension and deemed it just fine. That suggests the view that what the Supreme Court is about is results. We should evaluate them according to whether they decided cases that give us the right results. Several justices on the Supreme Court might be happy about such a description, but I'm sure that at least four of the seven justices in the majority in this decision would not, and I'd guess that most or all of the other justices would not approve of such a description (even if I happen to think it's true of some of them).

If you read the article, it actually undoes a lot of the damage from the headline. Authors of op-eds don't usually choose their own headlines, and I'm guessing that's what happened here, so I'm not blaming the author, whose article is largely accurate and doesn't really spin the facts too significantly. The issue before the court involved a 1978 law that makes it illegal to discriminate against women who take maternity leave when counting pension benefits, because standard practice at the time was not to count maternity leaves as time served when calculating how many years someone worked for the company. That law counted such a practice as discrimination, and it made it illegal to ignore the time a woman was not working if the reason was maternity leave.

The issue before the court was whether a maternity leave that occurred before that law was passed was similarly affected. The majority ruled 7-2 that the law was not retroactive, and thus when it was passed it did not suddenly pass on the features of future maternity leaves to past ones. In other words, it is not illegal now not to count the maternity leaves before this practice counted as discriminatory, but it is illegal now not to count the maternity leaves after the laws was passed.

So the majority ruled in this case that the law that makes this kind of discrimination illegal wasn't a retroactive law, i.e. it didn't make what people had done before the law was passed suddenly criminal when it had been legal before that. It also treated the discrimination the law prevents as occurring when the maternity leave was taken, not when the pension benefits are calculated. I haven't had time to research the law itself or the claims of either side in how to interpret it. I'm certainly open to Justice Ginsburg's dissenting argument that the majority interpreted the law wrongly. In fact, I'd probably lean that way just from what I've read in several accounts. I'd be a little surprised if the law was narrowly about how a company counts maternity leaves at the time they occur rather than about how a company should count previous ones when it calculates benefits much later. So if I had to guess my view on the legal question, I'd predict that I'd have strong inclinations to hear out Justice Ginsburg's argument, since it seems more likely to be correct from what I've seen.

This isn't to say that I agree with that as a policy matter. There are two kinds of fairness at odds here, fairness of outcome and fairness of granting someone credit only for what they contribute to the company. If you begin with a socialist conception of justice, you would consider any inequality of outcome to be unfair and immoral. On the other hand, a libertarian conception of justice would consider such a view to amount to stealing from those who actually contributed to the company for all the hours being counted in their favor. It may be unfair on one level that women can't help having to take time off from work for maternity leave, but it's also unfair on a differently level to count that time as work time when someone else actually put in more time working for the company and didn't get to have time off count. One might see that as discriminating in favor of women who take maternity leave against those who don't (including women and men). If all you care about is the just result, your views on such matters will enter in to the calculation of whether this outcome is just. One can take either view on that matter and still decide this case either way. (And I want to say that those views aren't mutually exclusive. You might think both kinds of justice are morally important. I in fact do, and I'm not sure how I'd sort that out in this kind of case. I would be open to being convinced by policy arguments either way if I were in Congress debating such a law.)

If the justices were using such considerations, I think a stronger case could be made that they simply upheld the gender gap. But the reasoning they actually gave was about legal matters. As I said, I might actually lean in the opposite direction on those legal matters (even if as a policy matter I think a case can be made either way in terms of whether we should have such a law to begin with). Nevertheless, it strikes me as strongly misleading to say this decision upholds the pension gender gap, for several reasons.

Jack Goldsmith has a very interesting piece in The New Republic comparing the Bush Administration and Obama Administration on carrying out the war on terrorism. Generally speaking, the Obama Administration has tweaked and modified a few things on a not-very-significant level. There have been a few major denouncements of things the Bush Administration hadn't done for a few years but was still defending as right. There have been a few minor adjustments. But on each separate item among the 11 policy planks Goldsmith has identified, the changes aren't much, and in some cases Obama has increased things Bush was criticized for. Here is his summary of the effects: obama_late_bush

Its changes to Bush practices thus far--cutting back on secret detentions, probable new restrictions on interrogation, and relatively small procedural changes to military commissions--will leave some suspected terrorists in a better place than they would have been under the Bush regime (although Obama's increase in targeted killings will likely result in more deaths and injuries, without due process, to terror suspects and innocent civilians). Even with these caveats, at the end of the day, Obama practices will be much closer to late Bush practices than almost anyone expected in January 2009.

I'm not sure I'd say no one would would have predicted it. I know of at least one person who voted for Obama in part because he thought McCain was going to go further than Bush did while Obama was presenting foreign policy views closer to Bush's. I remember reading several conservative bloggers saying that Obama was criticizing things that he'd eventually realize were good and right once he got into office (or less charitably that he knew full well that what he was criticizing was fine and was shooting himself in the foot for political gain). That kind of prediction does seem apt at least in terms of accurately predicting what Obama would do.

A caller on the Diane Rehm show on NPR yesterday gave an argument for why we need to go public with health care. Insurance companies that are motivated by profit will try to avoid giving people what they're obligated to give, so we need to prevent that by having insurance handled by those who have no such profit motive.

Some insurance companies do indeed function that way. Is that a reason to go public? We've had some pretty significant interaction with public health insurance for several years now, and they do the same thing. So it certainly isn't going to be any better on that score. Our Medicaid Services Coordinator for the boys' disability services says she's heard from people who have worked for Medicaid that they're told to try to find excuses to take so long with people's applications that they just give up. They tried to count my one intensive month of income during a summer course as if it was the rate of pay I get for the whole year, an error that I find very hard to attribute to carelessness during a time when the governor of New York has been trying to cut expenses of as many essential services as he can while ignoring all manner of worthless costs, and Medicaid and disability services were explicitly on the list of services getting cuts.

So the public health insurance does the same thing as some of the private companies who have a profit motive. Does that mean they're on par? I don't actually think so. The difference is that smart insurance companies know that such shadiness is actually not going to produce better profits in the long run, whereas government beaurocracy has no limits to its unfriendliness and unwillingness to help people, precisely because there's no profit motive to do so. I've been on the receiving end of that too many times to count, whereas insurance companies often bend over backwards to stay in your good graces so you won't find a competitor with better services.

So whatever arguments there may be for and against public health insurance, I don't see how this consideration should favor it.

 

Check out how the justices voted in this Supreme Court decision that was handed down a couple weeks ago. Arizona v. Gant reflects a division on search and seizure rights that doesn't fall on normal lines. Here is oneway of conceiving of the ideological differences on the Supreme Court:

The More Extreme Conservatives: Justices Scalia and Thomas
The More Moderate Conservatives: Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito
The Moderate: Justice Kennedy
The More Moderate Liberal: Justice Breyer
The More Extreme Liberals: Justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg

The lineup for this case:

Majority: Justices Stevens, Scalia, Souter, Thomas, and Ginsburg
Dissent: Chief Justice Roberts, Justices Kennedy, Breyer, Alito

That places the more extreme conservatives and more extreme liberals in the majority and those more moderate in the minority.

Note also that this is a 5-4 decision, so don't let it be said that all the 5-4 decisions are the four conservatives vs. the four liberals with Justice Kennedy as the deciding vote. This sort of division is much more common than you might have thought.

The CIA refused to interrogate an al Qaeda prisoner who was captured in recent weeks, because the Obama Administration's inconsistent position and likely untrustworthiness in their assurances to the CIA has led the CIA to be so scared of what might happen that they're just washing their hands of it.

This wasn't the emphasis of most of the resistance to releasing the memos, which focused on what our enemies would now know about what the U.S. would be willing to do if they were captured. This problem is on the side of our inability to do anything, apparently. So it seems even those opposing the memo release underestimated how seriously it would harm the effort in fighting against al Qaeda. The president's action didn't logically entail this response, but I think it's surely correct to say that it caused it. This has effectively crippled the CIA, and this particular prisoner may well have dated information that their fear at what Holder's Justice Department might do has led them not to try to get. It also makes me wonder how likely they think conventional interrogations would produce any worthwhile information, because surely they're not scared of doing that.

Update: I guess this argument has been prominently made, but I hadn't see it before. Gen. Michael Hayden, former CIA director and Michael Mukasey, former Attorney General, said in a WSJ op-ed:

Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.

The rest is well worth reading. Even if I became convinced that this interrogation program was illegal or immoral, I would still think the case against releasing these memos was extremely strong.

Maybe I haven't been following the calls for torture investigations closely enough, but it seems to me that there need to be two things that I'm not seeing for me to be convinced that the people issuing such calls are sincere about the issue and not just pursuing a politically-motivated witch hunt.

1. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and a number of other congressional Democrats were involved in discussions with President Bush and other administration officials when all this was actually going on, and they seem to have given their approval of whatever actually took place with official sanction. Or at least they voiced no objections. That's what I keep hearing. But I have heard very little about anyone seriously suggesting that they be investigated. The only reason I can think of for that is that they're Democrats. Someone with more information than I have should feel free to correct me on this if I've got the facts wrong, but it's very hard to see this as a movement to correct for mistaken policies and hold those responsible accountable unless all who were responsible are going to be investigated.

2. As far as I've been able to discern, the U.S. military has long used techniques like waterboarding in training their special forces to be able to withstand harsh interrogation techniques. My understanding is that they train them in techniques that are uncontroversially torture. Yet President Obama continues President Bush's claim that the U.S. doesn't torture. Those who accept it from Obama but didn't from Bush need to account for this, and if they think these procedures are immoral in principle then they ought to be consistent and issue a call to hold accountable those responsible for torturing our own troops, including any at high levels who knew about this and allowed it. (I suspect that would be all the presidents for at least as far back as Jimmy Carter, the earliest president still alive.) Again, it's possible that I don't have all the facts on this, and I'd be happy to receive corrections on this, particularly if you can back it up with sources I'd be likely to trust. But what I read of the very memos that everyone's getting all excited about now (even though they say almost nothing that we didn't already know) seems to confirm that this has been going on with our own troops.

I don't think this shows us one way or the other whether these policies are legal, morally justifiable, or worth pursuing an investigation about (and I see those as three somewhat independent issues). I actually think those issues are more complex and difficult to navigate than either side wants to acknowledge. See my 2004 post and then my 2007 pair on the moral and linguistic issues. (I can't say that I'd agree with everything in those posts now, though.)

But it doesn't seem to me that most of the people who are actually raising a big stink about this are doing so for consistent, principled reasons unless they're willing to apply it to the above two cases. (That doesn't mean they're all hypocrites, because they might not see the inconsistency and might be willing to adjust their behavior if they did see it, or perhaps they have arguments for differential treatment of the different cases, although I'm not sure what those would be.)

Yesterday I watched the Fox News coverage of some of the tea parties for a little bit. I know they have to compensate for the other networks barely touching on a major nationwide event. I know CNN gave it a little attention yesterday morning but only to dismiss a large-scale grass-roots internet-generated movement as if it had somehow instead been a GOP-initiated pretense. [Update: I just saw one clip of a reporter interviewing a protester but then challenging all of his arguments as if she were an opinion columnist before proceeding to walk away with a dismissal of everything he said because Fox News is somehow behind all this (not true), making everyone there anti-CNN justifying a claim that opposition to taxes is automatically right-wing extremism. CNN has apparently defended this reporter for simply doing her job.] But isn't it a bit excessive for Fox to spend almost their entire airtime on it for the whole day? They were treating it the way they cable news networks covered the Obama inauguration, which got record levels of coverage from the media.

I guess it's not a lot more excessive than what cable news channels tend to give to a lot of things, but there are other news stories that deserve some coverage, and sometimes I like to tune in to see some various headlines in a short period of time. For instance, Washington's legislature passed a same-sex civil union law yesterday, and I didn't find out about it until this morning, the Obama Administration is in the middle of deciding how much to reveal from CIA memos during the Bush Administration and how much to reveal about current interrogation practices, there's an ongoing investigation of the Justice Department into violations of the new laws on eavesdropping, and there's a furor rising over Obama's latest lobbyist nominee. [Update: And I notice that Fox News is just getting to the Susan Boyle story today. I've been getting Facebook updates about her since yesterday morning, and it took place five days ago.] I didn't hear about any of these stories when I had Fox News on. The only news not related to tea parties that I got any glimpse of had to do with pirates.

But I am glad at least someone covered these gatherings, so it won't be treated as a non-entity the way the red envelope campaign was. CNN has one link today way down their front page to a story on only one of the gatherings. MSNBC and the New York Times have single stories almost halfway down that at least cover the fact that many of these events took place. The Washington Post only has two links on their main page, and even though they're higher up (but it's a smaller front page), they're both opinion columns that are highly critical of the events. Even the National Review wasn't saying very much about the tea parties yesterday, just a few comments on their blog but no news stories or opinion columns, and today their only mention is a link to a Rush Limbaugh transcript from yesterday. The Wall Street Journal has no reference anywhere on their front page. (Presumably it's too populist for die-hard supply-siders for them to get as much behind it as Fox seems to have done.)

I saw a creative sign at one of these that just made the screen long enough for me to read it, so I may have gotten the last part only mostly right:

Pelosi
Obama
Reid
Killing Our Economy

But then there were the posters addressing Obama as if he's not a U.S. citizen, and one protester in Texas advocated secession from the union.

It was weird seeing one of these rallies (at the Alamo) led by right-leaning but populist entertainer and would-be commentator Glenn Beck, libertarian rock musician entertainer Ted Nugent (with guitar present and making continued bursts of noise), and conservative entertainer from the world of acting Janine Turner. Then they topped it all off by phoning in a video of entertainer Penn Jillette of the stage magician pair Penn and Teller. I was waiting to see how long it might take for them to involve someone who wasn't just an entertainer who might actually give intelligent commentary, but it was not to be, at least not in that location. (They did have some when they showed the Atlanta tea party when I tuned in a few hours later.)

The Syracuse gathering was right during my classes today, but I'm not sure I would really have enjoyed being at something like this. What I was seeing on TV was too reminiscent of when we went to Manhattan for New Years Eve shortly after we got married. There's nothing fun about standing outside in the middle of a large crowd when everyone else there thinks it's lots of fun to make a lot of noise screaming and clapping, but you can't actually see (and maybe can't even hear) anything that's going on that you're supposed to be watching. It's like going to a concert to listening to the music and finding that the crowd just wants to stand up and cheer and prevent you from paying attention to what you're there to see and hear.

Most tests I find to determine how closely one might align with which Supreme Court justices are fairly superficial and don't base their calculation on very many issues. They also usually focus on general issues that don't always line up well with the actual cases that we have justices' votes on. I've found one that's a lot better, although it does have a few problems still. This one is mainly focused on actual cases, although its reliance on mostly hot-button political issues, while providing some familiarity for those who aren't heavy court-watchers, probably skews the results, whereas one that included more mundane issues might lead some to side with justices whose views they disagree with on hot-button political issues.

I have a few comments on the test before I get to my results and question-by-question analysis and explanations. This quiz gets most of the issues right and in some places makes finer distinctions between views than most. As far as I can tell, almost all of the questions (with one exception I can detect) are based on actual votes of justices rather than expected views or general tendencies. I do see two problems, though, and they are substantial.

One is that it does still oversimplify in a few places. It seems to ask questions about the result, which fails to capture the various reasons justices might go for that result. Thus an originalist who supports originalist reasons for a certain result might be on the same side as a non-originalist who picks the same side for living constitutionalist reasons. Someone indicating that choice then gets both names associated with them, and that's unfortunate. I found a lot of these cases put me on the same side as justices whose reasoning I don't support. Most people aren't going to read the cases or even summaries of them, either, and thus they will be going fully on policy preferences. Some justices do that anyway unashamedly, and sometimes the ones who seek not to do that will smuggle policy preferences in without admitting it. But if I want to see if I'm like a certain justice, I should see if I agree with the justice's reasoning, not whether the outcome is the one I'd prefer if I were in a legislative body. Making this quiz result-based masks the real differences between the justices, treats policy outcomes as the only issue of dispute, and thus skews the results.

Some of the questions themselves are not framed correctly at all. For instance, on #10 it asks if suspected terrorists who aren't U.S. citizens have any constitutional rights, and everyone on the Supreme Court would say yes to that. But that issue has never been before the Court. So what's it doing here? What they probably meant to ask is whether they have some specified set of rights (e.g. habeas corpus and related rights to use U.S. courts to challenge their imprisonment, which the Supreme Court did disagree on). On several questions, I thought the question asked about a more minor matter of disagreement than what the main dispute in the case was about. In a few cases, I thought the opinions were so splintered that it wasn't really a good case to ask such a broad question about, as if your view on the issue of the question would tell you much about how much your reasoning or preferences are like those of any particular justices.

But, all that being said, this is still one of the better tests matching your answers to legal questions with justices who voted on those cases, so I thought it was worth spending some time seeing where I really come out, and I decided to look at some of these cases I was less familiar with in more detail to try to overcome some of the problems in how the questionnaire is conducted. Now on to my results and analysis.

It's getting to be a while since he posted this, but it's too hard to resist putting a link up to Rey's Insane Bailout Package. He tries to avoid sounding too serious about these, but in many ways they're a good bit better than much of what's in the bill we've actually gotten in terms of actually stimulating individual people to start spending some of their money more.

I've several times seen people refer to studies showing that abstinence-only sex ed programs don't work. What they mean by that is that people who go through the abstinence-only programs aren't any more likely than those who go through comprehensive programs to have had unprotected sex. If the goal is to prevent sexually-transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies by encouraging people not ready for parenthood not to engage in sex at all, it seems not to work. I didn't look closely at any of these studies, just accepting that they were correct, because I've never favored only telling people to abstain. There's nothing wrong with providing information about condoms and hormonal methods of contraception. In fact, without providing the full information, some might never realize the failure rates of various methods of contraception and those that do choose to use them might not do so properly, thus trusting increasing the unreliability of something they rely on. So it's counterproductive for those who want to reduce sexual activity even apart from pregnancy and STDs to resist presenting comprehensive information.

Someone (I don't remember who) recently directed me to this study. I haven't checked any other studies as closel, but I checked Wikipedia for any further long-term studies on this, and I didn't find anything but this study and a study on a different topic about how some abstinence-only programs didn't do it right (i.e. they had some false information in their educational package). If this data is correct then those who have been posturing about abstinence-only programs not working have been spinning the science with as much ideologically-motivated one-sidedness as such people regularly accused the Bush Administration of doing, not exactly the best behavior among those accusing others of being anti-science for doing the same thing.

A lot of criticism of abstinence-only sex ed has been that it's lack of information about contraception leaves kids with the wrong information, thus making it more likely that they won't use proper precautions if they do have sex. This turns out to be disconfirmed. The kids who went through the abstinence-only programs were as well-informed on such matters as the kids in the control group, and they didn't have any higher rate of unprotected sex than anyone else. It may well be that comprehensive sex ed would have led to their being more informed than average, but it's not as if abstinence-only sex ed made them less-informed, as many opponents of abstinence-only have been claiming. Given this study, it seems that it's just as much anti-science to call abstinence-only education dangerous and even a cause of unwanted pregnancy and the spread of STDs as it is to promote abstinence-only education as the best method of preventing STDs and unwanted pregnancy. Such behavior is irresponsible and pretty obviously motivated by ideology while at odds with the facts, the very thing the Bush Administration has repeatedly been accused of doing on this issue.

When you look at the fine print, you can also see that this is looking at the long-term effects of early abstinence-only programs that aren't continued in high school,and according to this story they did find an initial effect of delaying the first sexual encounter that dropped off in later years, the same later years that these kids weren't continuing to receive abstinence-only sex ed. Isn't that a bit suspicious if the conclusion is supposed to be that abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work? It's not clear that this study really shows what it's been taken to show, which is that abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work.

Keep in mind also that there is a study that shows that a number of abstinence-only programs had curriicula that included falsehoods and questionable elements. So if you examine just the actual abstinence-only programs, it doesn't necessarily tell you what would happen if it were done with more care to present the correct information. Even if some of the false information might have led some to be more likely to be abstinent, it may have gone the other way with some, especially those who know the information being presented is false, which could incline some to reject everything that's being said as a result, including the abstinence message and the correct rates of failure of condoms or other contraceptive or STD-preventative measures. Remember that we're talking about teenagers here. Also, some of these programs were determined to be teaching religious doctrine. I have no idea what that means, and I'm certainly aware that some things claimed by some to be religious doctrine simply aren't, e.g, that life begins at conception, while others are, e.g. that it's morally wrong to engage in sex outside marriage (although I think a secular argument exists for such a view). But the point is that some might turn off to the whole enterprise if their view is that this is religious education.

So what they study does seem to show is that earlier abstinence-only sex ed, as it's actually been taught (as opposed to how it should be taught), doesn't seem to affect later sexual behavior if that kind of sex ed doesn't continue into high school, but it doesn't tell us anything about what happens if it does continue, and the fact that some of these programs were presenting false information might skew the results in either direction. It may well be that comprehensive sex ed would do better on the measure that we're discussing, but this study doesn't help us know that, and I know of none that do. I do see some that show increased effectiveness among those receiving comprehensive sex ed over control groups, but until we have a long-term study that actually looks at those who receive abstinence-only sex ed in high school, the facts simply aren't fully available on that question, and it would ideally help if someone could conduct a study on the best abstinence-only programs compared to abstinence-only programs as they actually occur, to see if there's any difference.

In the following interview excerpt (source) from a few months ago, then-President George W. Bush misunderstood Charles Gibson in a way that I've just realized has implications for a hotly-debated but obscure-for-the-ordinary-person philosophical debate:

GIBSON: You've always said there's no do-overs as President. If you had one?
BUSH: I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.
GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?
BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.
GIBSON: No, if you had known he didn't.
BUSH: Oh, I see what you're saying. You know, that's an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can't do. It's hard for me to speculate.

Here are the two ways to read Gibson's question "If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?":

1. Holding the content of the intelligence the same as it is in the actual world, the rest of the world would have to have been different for the intelligence to have been right. If that situation were true, would the war have occurred? In other words, if what the intelligence reports actually said had turned out to be true, and Iraq's WMD programs were not just on hold because of sanctions, if there had been stockpiles of WMD in fact, would we have invaded Iraq?

2. Holding the rest of the world constant, for the intelligence reports to have been true, they would have had to say something different from what they actually said. If that situation were true, would the war have occurred? In other words, if the intelligence reports had said only that Saddam Hussein's WMD programs were not actively producing weapons but were merely on hold so that he could have such weapons within a year if the sanctions ended, would there have been a war?

It's hard to say which interpretation is more natural. I can see how Gibson's might be thought to be more natural, because there doesn't seem to be any reason to ask the question if he'd meant what Bush took it to mean. But for the hearer to come to that conclusion, it requires being aware of both interpretations and considering that the first wouldn't be worth asking in comparison with the second. Most hearers interpreting it in a way that seems most natural to them will probably hear it one way or the other, and thus (like President Bush) won't be going through that reasoning process to conclude that the second is the more likely intent.

On the other hand, I can see how someone might more naturally take it the way Bush did. I can think of a much clearer way to ask what Gibson wanted to know. He could have asked what would have happened if we'd had better intelligence or more accurate intelligence. By referring to it as "the intelligence", Bush took it to be referring to the actual intelligence. It's a lot harder to find an alternative way to say what Bush took it to mean. You'd need a much more roundabout expression like "if the information we based the war on from intelligence reports had turned out to be the accurate description of Saddam Hussein's WMD status".

I thought that was an interesting ambiguity, anyway.

[Sidebar to philosophers: At first I thought it had larger implications, because it seems very close to a debate in the semantics of counterfactual expressions. David Lewis takes counterfactual claims of the form "If A were true, then B" to mean that in the closest possible world (by which he means the possible world as much like ours in material composition) where A is true, B is also true. I've always found that view implausible, and I had at first thought this would be a good test case for people's intuitions on that matter. But then I realized that Lewis' theory is a theory for the truth conditions of counterfactual propositions. This is a case where it's ambiguous which proposition is even meant, not a case of how to evaluate whether a clear counterfactual proposition is true.]

President Obama announced today that he's lifting the ban on government funding for the destruction of living, complete human organisms in the embryonic stage. In his speech announcing this change, the President declared the choice between faith and science to be a false dichotomy, thus insinuating that the objections from the pro-life side (which are, in the popular mind, associated with faith rather than the philosophical backing that they tend to have among most pro-lifers) are anti-science. He speaks of pro-life objections as coming from thoughtful and decent people, which might suggest that he doesn't think such views are anti-intellectual, as many of my philosophical colleagues typically assume them to be. But in presenting his view as the middle road between the anti-science and pro-faith view on one side and the pro-science and anti-faith view on the other, it's hard to avoid the suggestion that pro-life objections are anti-science.

This becomes clearer later in his speech. He sees this order as part of a larger move to restore the promotion of good science. He sees it as a recovery from Bush Administration resistance to good science. Aside from the fact that those who make such claims have a pretty distorted view of what the Bush Administration actually did and what policies it actually supported in general, the claim is particularly ludicrous in this case. The pro-life objection to destroying human embryos has nothing to do with science or anti-science. It's based on a philosophical conclusion, that human life at any stage has the moral status that human life at any other stage has. The most science can show is that what empirical features are true of human life at any stage, not what moral status something with certain empirical features must have. That's a philosophical question, not a scientific question, and it's one the current President claimed to be beyond his pay grade, so he can't consistently now claim that science does give the answer in as clear a way as this speech insists.

The argument for full moral status does not deny the empirically-observable facts about human development. Consciousness, complexity of thought, fully-formed organs, and other features sometimes thought to be necessary for full moral status are simply irrelevant, according to the standard pro-life picture, and nothing science observes will tell us otherwise. It takes a philosophical presupposition to resist that conclusion, a presupposition not shared by the pro-lifer. So labeling the pro-life view anti-science is grossly unfair and unbecoming for the President of the United States, particularly when he's just called such people thoughtful and decent. Ironically, Obama's own position is also based on an ideological assumption that there's nothing wrong with killing an embryonic human being, and yet he says in this speech that "scientific decisions" should be "based on facts, not ideology". I won't call this hypocrisy, since he may simply not know what he's doing, but his words and actions are certainly inconsistent.

There's a further insult to pro-lifers hidden in this speech. He says, "with proper guidelines and strict oversight, the perils can be avoided". What perils does he mean? It sounds as if he's saying that the ethical objections can be handled by applying proper guidelines and oversight, but it's hard to see how that would be unless the proper guidelines and oversight would prevent the killing of any embryos for the purpose of deriving stem cells, and that's exactly the policy he's trying to remove with this executive order. So it's as if he wants people to get the impression that proper oversight and guidelines will avoid all the objections being raised against this research, when in reality the only way to have guidelines and oversight of that nature would have been to retain the Bush policy, which was already the ingenious middle way between the two extremes, one that recognized the value of the research while not allowing further human organisms to be destroyed. Now President Obama wants to claim that spot by abandoning Bush's middle-ground view and going for the more extreme view that refuses to recognize any of the moral objections of a sizable minority of the American populace (something like 41% according to one poll).

The Obama Administration has signaled that it will rescind the Bush Administration's executive order providing for freedom-of-conscience protection for health care workers who seek to refrain from activity they consider immoral. The motivation for this, according to the article, is that existing laws already provide some of the intended protection, and what the newer executive order does add might be unwelcome. The only examples given of what's unwelcome is that it would allow health care workers from refusing to take part in certain activities that might prevent abortion, such as providing information about contraceptives.

The question seems to be whether it's worse to do (1) something that has a negative consequence in making it more difficult in certain circumstances to find health care workers who won't abstain or (2) requiring people to do something they consider immoral. This should be a no-brainer for anyone who isn't a consequentialist. It's much worse to allow the unwelcome consequence than to perpetuate immorality yourself, and it's pretty downright evil to force people to do something they consider evil just because you would prefer a certain result that they might also prefer.

So this explanation won't fly. I'm curious to hear if they have anything else to offer, since I know President Obama has a track record of offering a multitude of contradictory explanations of his controversial acts, so I know he's creative with this kind of thing, but I'm having trouble seeing a motivation for this that a reasonable person could actually have.

The following statement is both ambiguous and so obviously ambiguous that it should hardly bear mentioning:

I want President Obama's agenda to fail.

This could be used in several kinds of circumstances, including ones where I might say any of the following:

1. President Obama has a certain agenda whose goals I disagree with, and I don't want him to achieve the goals that I want to avoid.
2. President Obama has a certain agenda whose methods I disagree with, and I don't want him to use those methods to achieve the goals he and I both agree to be good, even if I would want those goals to be achieved.
3. I don't want President Obama to have goals that would achieve good.
4. I don't want President Obama's goals to be achieved, no matter what those goals turn out to be, even the good ones, merely because they happen to be his goals.

So RNC chair Michael Steele comes along and says something that denies 3 and 4, and when pressed on the details he endorses 1 and 2. Popular conservative entertainer talk show host Rush Limbaugh around the same time says 1 and 2, and when pressed for details he denies 3 and 4. Aside from a small disagreement about how to say things and what constitutes the kind of cordiality that it's best to have toward the President of the Unites States, there isn't any real substantive disagreement here, and neither person involved thinks there is. So why do I keep hearing about this? There really is nothing to see here.

One or several of the following are now apparently racist:

1. Unwillingness to accept funding that is supposed to stimulate the economy but won't stimulate much of anything.
2. Unwillingness to accept funding that mandates further expenses to your state after the temporary federal funding providing for those expenses expires.
3. Unwillingness to accept funding that might have strings attached that will prevent campus religious groups from finding meeting space on campuses
4. Unwillingness to accept funding from a bill that was rushed overnight without giving any of the legislators who voted for it or the President who signed for it a chance even to read the thing, never mind decide whether it's morally responsible.
5. Unwillingness to accept funding that sets welfare back to what it was before the reforms instituted by President Clinton and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich that had wide bi-partisan support and a significant movement of welfare recipients back into the
6. Unwillingness to accept funding that will increase the budget deficit during a time when it's already too high and the President who initiated it is also complaining about the very thing he's contributing to at record levels.

I've heard all of the above motivations for governors resisting some of the funding coming from the stimulus package, and they all seem like pretty good arguments to me based on what I know (but I haven't read the bill; it takes most people a year to read the Bible, and that's not much longer). It may well be that some of the funding might help some people, and some of those people might be black. But the opposition from these governors is mostly to funding that isn't going to help people or would help them at too much cost, cost that might well mean in the long run that it isn't a help after all. So how is it an insult to black people in the states that are refusing this money? It could just as easily be argued that it's an insult to black people to support this disastrous bill that will almost certainly make life worse off in the long run for most Americans, black Americans included.

Does Rep. Clyburn honestly think a governor of a state is going to do something bad for the state purely out of spite for the black people in the state? I can't see how he can say what he does unless he thinks these governors are at least slighting blacks in some way. Otherwise he shouldn't count it as an insult. That assumes that these governors are ignoring the best interest of a major portion of their electorate. It's one thing to have a different view about what's in someonee's best interest and thus take a policy that the other side takes to be harmful or negligent. It's quite another to think this is being done with enough deliberateness or contempt that you could count it as an insult, which presumes that these governors understand that the stimulus bill really is in the best interest of their black population but somehow don't care. Isn't it much more likely that the governor in question really thinks it would be bad to do what Rep. Clyburn thinks would be good? But that doesn't justify being insulted, and his psychological dependence on being insulted is strong enough that he needs some way to justify it, even if it means slandering people who probably really do have the best of intentions.

There are a lot of black politicians who can say what they want with impunity, without having to face election in a district with a racial population spread closer to the mainstream of society. Such politicians will probably never move to higher levels of elected office than in a gerrymandered district in the House of Representatives, so they remain there and get committee chair spots whenever the Democrats are in control. Rep. Clyburn is in that category. Some hoped that electing Barack Obama to the presidency would put an end to the kind of unfair misrepresentation and ridiculous posturing that partisan gerrymandering along race lines has caused. It hasn't yet, and it's still early in Obama's term, but I don't think it will easily have that effect. The ironic result of race-based district gerrymandering is the election of cranks into the Unites States House of Representatives who wouldn't have a chance at statewide office given their extremist view and wllingness to spout them off whenever anyone does something they disagree with, even if it labels that person in a way that has little to do with the facts. I can't see how it helps black America to have people like this serving as their main elected representatives. I do hope having Obama in as visible a role as President will change this sort of thing. It doesn't seem like it's going to happen quickly, though.

I pointed out over a month ago that Bush's views on religion have often been misrepresented, usually out of ignorant assumptions about what he must hold given the ongoing narrative they've been using in opposition to him. The responses to a reference in President Obama's inaugural address [registration or BugMeNot required] to non-believers in apposition to members of various religions seems to me to be another instance of this same phenomenon, but this time it's heightened by messanic expectations about Obama. Here is the line in Obama's speech:

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.

This may well be the first reference from a U.S. President in an inaugural address that treats non-believers this way, but it's certainly not the first time a U.S. President has made such a comment. See the comments here for some typical examples of those who assume without much examination of any evidence that Obama must be the first who has. There are even some pretty bold claims that assume George W. Bush would never have done such a thing.

The first commenter calls it "a great step forward" and "a move -- albeit a small one -- in the right direction". Another says, "I think this may be the first time for Obama, let alone any other U.S. president." Another ends his comment, "To me, Obama's mention of us was both startling -- and wonderful." As the thread continues, we see a move to recognizing that this kind of comment is actually not new for Obama. Only two days into the discussion does someone point out that Bush did indeed make a comment like this (although it's called "a very surprising quote"), which is promptly followed by several other instances:

they can choose any religion they want. Or they can choose no religion. You see, you're just as big a patriot -- as good a patriot as the next fellow if you choose not to worship. It's your choice to make

We stand for freedom. We stand for people to worship freely. One of the great things about America is, you're equally American if you're a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian, an agnostic or an atheist

In our country, we recognize our fellow citizens are free to profess any faith they choose, or no faith at all. You're equally American if you're a Jew, or a Christian, or a Muslim. You're equally American if you choose not to have faith

I would find the back-pedaling that follows pretty humorous as commenters try to cover their embarrassment by excusing their ignorance with references to how surprising it is for Bush to say such a thing, except that it's only surprising if you're as ignorant about Bush's views on religion and civic life as these commenters seem to be. He's always been like this, despite the attempts of those who don't pay any attention the actual Bush. It's much more convenient to think of him according to a stereotype, because it's much harder to portray him as a fundamentalist and a theonomist if you have to do something like fit the actual man, who isn't all that close to either, to their preconceptions of him.

The comment that I think should be most embarrassing, though, is the second-to-last: "And as some have mentioned elsewhere in this vein, it's probable that the former president was merely anticipating the the current president." This is supposed to diminish the realization that Bush seems to have been the first to do this. So when it's finally clear that Obama can't be shown to be the first to include atheists and agnostics and that it's the hated George W. Bush who seems to have that honor, the only option left is that Bush can have said such things only in anticipation of Obama.

I'm pretty sure this is the first time Obama Messianism has come out in a way that makes Bush into Obama's John the Baptist. It's quite a strange notion, but I'm not sure how else to read that comment. Surely Bush in 2006 wasn't trying to anticipate the Obama presidency, and equally surely it's not that he only foreshadowed in a subtle way what Obama has now more explicitly done. If anything, Bush's words were more explicit, even to the point of using the word 'atheist'.

This is not the first instance I've seen of so-called change from Bush to Obama that has turned out to be pure invention, and I'm sure it won't be the last. There's going to be enough genuine change that there should be no need for this kind of thing, but there seem to be too many reality-challenged assumptions about Bush and his presidency that somehow have the ring of truthiness to those critical of him, and I think that's a sad reflection of the kind of ignorance about political matters that you can find even among supposedly well-informed intellectuals who follow politics and comment about it online.

A lot of people have been making a lot of the fact that Obama didn't say the exact oath required by the Constitution until last night. I've heard several constitutional scholars on NPR saying this was nonsense, because the Constitution is clear that the term of the new President starts at noon on January 20, and it doesn't matter if the oath is said at all. My understanding, given that, was that the oath was constitutionally required but not a condition of the presidency beginning. It was just something Obama needed to do, just as the VP is constitutionally obligated to break tie votes in the Senate, and even if he did it late he did it. But his term starts before the oath in any case.

[Update: See comments.] Then I went and actually read the relevant portions of the Constitution. I'm not sure it's all that clear who was president between noon on Tuesday and last night when he said the oath properly. I'm not saying that he wasn't president, but it's not clear if he was or in what sense he was if he was, and it's not clear if anyone was legally allowed carry out the duties of the President. Here are the relevant stipulations in the Constitution:

1. The previous president's term ends on Jan 20 at noon. There's no indication in that amendment about the next president's term beginning at that time, despite claims by several constitutional scholars I heard on NPR that it does say such a thing. So Bush was clearly no longer President, but that amendment says nothing about who, if anyone, was.

2. Article 2 does specify the oath to be said. It says the new President must say it "Before he enter on the Execution of his Office". It seems pretty clear that Obama couldn't enter on the execution of his office, whatever that means, until he said the oath or affirmation that follows (I believe to accommodate Quakers, it gives the option of swearing the oath or simply affirming it). So he was violating the Constitution if he was executing his office before Wednesday night if the oath he said isn't the same oath the Constitution requires.

3. Article 2 goes on to say: "In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected."

It's not entirely clear to me if the last clause "until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected" applies grammatically only to the bit about someone provided for by law (or in the actual case an amendment providing the line of succession declaring it to be the Speaker of the House) or if it also applies to the first part about the Vice President. I first thought the latter, since otherwise the election of a president doesn't remove the vice president from office when it would remove someone lower in the line of succession. That would be weird, and I can't see how the wording could have intentionally meant that. So that looks like any vacancy or inability of the president to perform duties (such as Obama being constitutionally prohibited from entering the execution of his office) would make the VP President or someone down the line of succession if there is no VP. But it could be the former, if there's a need to fill the gap with no elected officer to step in, and the former case is when an elected VP can take over, and there's no need for an election to fill the gap.

Biden had already been sworn in by noon on Tuesday, so presumably he was VP already at noon. I don't see any argument that he couldn't have been VP just because Obama hasn't sworn the oath, and this would be true even during the short intervening time between noon and an oath normally taken in the proper way just afterward. So on the assumption that an inability to enter into the execution of his office means he was not yet President, I think there's an argument that Biden was at least acting President, then, if Obama was not President. I don't think there's any reason to think Pelosi was, as some have claimed, and it's certainly not possible that it was Bush or Cheney. I think there's even an argument that Biden was acting President if Obama was President but couldn't carry out his duties as President because he hadn't entered the execution of his office. [But this may not be so if he hadn't said the Presidential oath, in which case no one could act as President. He had said the VP oath, but that probably isn't sufficient.]

4. But there's even one more puzzling factor. The article 2 paragraph I quoted does have that bit at the end "until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected." The Disability was clearly removed when they did the oath properly last night, so there's no question that Obama is now President in every important sense. But on the assumption that he wasn't President when he didn't get the oath right, there's still the election to account for if the last clause applies to the whole sentence and not just the case of a line of succession below VP. The condition says "or a President shall be elected". A President was elected by that point. What does that mean? Is it an argument that Obama really was President, even if Biden was Acting President?

There are several steps in this are unclear enough to me that I wouldn't be very sure about them, but there's a plausible case for that, unless Biden would have had to say the oath himself intending it to be for the acting presidency, in which case no one was acting as President in the intervening time. The line of succession specifies who takes on the Presidency in the event of a vacancy or inability to perform the duties. But it doesn't say they immediately become President. In fact, Pelosi would have to resign from the House to become Acting President, which she would never do for a temporary lapse because then she couldn't return to her House position as a Representative (although the House could re-elect her as Speaker even if she's not a member of the House, as far as I can tell; they've just never done that). The same would be true of Senator Bird, who is next in line, with his Senate seat, except that he could be reappointed to the Senate by his governor (although I believe he'd lose his seniority because of a gap in service and thus lose his status as President Pro Tempore). There's no condition of resigning from a cabinet position, though, and there's no specification that cabinet positions end at noon on Tuesday. In fact, some departments are now actingly-headed by Bush appointees who didn't resign, since a number Obama's appointees have not yet been confirmed. So presumably Condoleeza Rice, if she'd taken the oath to be Acting President, could have been Acting President given that Obama and Biden hadn't taken the Presidential oath and that Pelosi and Bird hadn't resigned from Congress. There's never any way such a thing would happen when none of the people higher in the line of succession were dead or incapacitated in any way but due to technical legalities, but I think that's the legal possibility.

It's funny how an argument that I thought was crazy after listening to some pretty confident constitutional scholars actually appears to have some merit, but I'm very hesitant to take it as far as many have and say that Obama wasn't President in any sense in that intervening time. I do hope he redoes anything he signed during that time if he wants to make sure they are legal (although some of them I'd probably be happier for them not to be law, so maybe I should be careful what I wish for).

Barack Obama resigned from the U.S. Senate on November 16. Roland Burris was sworn in as his replacement yesterday. In the intervening time, there were no black U.S. Senators.There have been relatively few black Senators at all. The first was Hiram Rhodes Revels, elected by the Reconstruction-era Mississippi legislature (state legislatures chose U.S. Senators at that time) in 1870. He resigned to become a college president before serving a full term, but not long afterward Blanche Bruce became the second black senator in Mississippi's other U.S. Senate seat.

After the Reconstruction period until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there were no blacks in Congress at all. The black population in the South was de facto disenfranchised because of literacy requirements, poll taxes, and other legal measures that in practice kept black voters from voting. Once the Voting Rights Act took effect, majority-black districts began electing black members to the U.S. House of Representatives, but until 1992 these were mostly from only nine cities. After the 1990 census, a lot more majority-black districts were gerrymandered to allow for majority-black populations, often from several disconnected communities, to elect black representatives in the House.

Four Senators since Reconstruction have been black. Edward Brooke, a Rockefeller Republican, was elected as the third black senator in U.S. history, this time from Massachusetts during the Civil Rights era. He served two terms, leaving office in 1979 when he was beaten by Paul Tsongas. Carol Mosely Braun served one term from Illinois from 199-1999. She was a moderate liberal on economic issues but very liberal on social issues. She was beaten by Peter Fitzgerald, a rare Republican win in that state. Barack Obama was elected, also from Illinois, in a bad year for Republicans given several GOP scandals in that state, when he had no serious contender as an opponent. Roland Burris was just appointed to replace him, with no electoral process at all. It's fair to say that even the few black Senators in the modern period have largely not gotten there with hard electoral victories and have had a hard time remaining there.

The vast majority of blacks in the House of Representatives have come from majority-black districts, which seems to reflect a general fact that black legislators can't seem to get elected easily from majority-white populations. There have also been few black governors. In 1972, P.B.S. Pinchback served as governor of Louisiana for 35 days at the end of a gubernatorial term that had been vacated due to corruption charges. In the modern period, Douglas Wilder was elected in the 1980s to only one term in Virginia as a moderate and libertarian-leaning Democrat who promised to implement policies contrary to union dogma. Deval Patrick is in his first term in Massachusetss. He ran as a business-friendly Democrat. David Paterson is filling out the remainder of Eliot Spitzer's term as governor of New York. He's governing as a fiscal conservative but is very socially liberal, and many political experts think he's going to have a hard time maintaining his governorship, probably losing in a primary contest to Andrew Cuomo if Cuomo doesn't take Hillary Clinton's Senate spot or possibly losing to someone Rudy Giuliani if he runs for governor. Those are the only four black governors. Only two of them managed to get elected, and both ran as moderates in typically liberal states.

What's the explanation for this, and why is it still true in an age when the nation can elect Barack Obama to the officer of President of the U.S. and Colin Powell can have such high bi-partisan popularity ratings among white voters, even after his association with the Bush Administration and the argument for a very unpopular war (even if he later has distanced himself from that process)? Does Obama's victory not show what so many people think it shows? Does it mean Obama is more the exception and that white people just don't want to elect black people to public office but will occasionally do so if they want to replace an unpopular party and don't want to do so by setting up a Democratic legacy for the Clintons? Is there something about Obama himself that explains why he's different, something that must be true in some sense for these other exceptions? Or is there a different explanation for why so few black politicians can manage to get elected by a mainstream voting public? I think the correct answer to all of the above questions is actually a qualified "yes", but the qualifications are pretty important.

Daddy, did you know that people can be musketeers too, besides animals that talk?
    -- Sophia, about a minute into the new Backyardigans episode "The Two Musketeers"

Update [3:18 pm]: That was yesterday. Then today she somehow transitions from a completely unrelated conversation with, "Just like in Bear-Bear's dream when he was trapped in tropical sunlight!" I asked her if she was in Bear-Bear's dream, and she said. "No. He was alone. In tropical sunlight." I'm not sure if he was trapped in the dream or trapped in the sunlight, but I suppose if stuffed bears are dreaming then either is possible.

Since President George W. Bush has, by some measures, had the most diverse cabinet in U.S. history, I thought it would be interesting to compare President-elect Obama's picks for the cabinet to see how they compare just on this one measure. I'm not talking ideological diversity here. I intend to reflect on that at some point. I'm simply talking about the standard kinds of diversity usually intended when people use the word, and the only ones I've ever heard people discuss with the cabinet are race/ethnicity and sex/gender. I'll go position by position. I'm only including full appointments with Senate confirmation, not acting secretaries. I'm also only counting cabinet secretaries, since the precise list of which other positions are in the cabinet varies with each president.

Madeleine Albright was the first woman to hold the position of Secretary of State, under President Clinton. Colin Powell replaced her and was the first black in the office. His replacement, Condoleeza Rice, was the first black woman. Obama chose not to go with a new first here, appointing Hillary Clinton, another woman.

As far as I can tell, there has never been anyone but a white man to hold the office of Secretary of the Treasury. That will not change under President Obama, at least not at the start of his term. Timothy Geithner certainly has a diversity of experience, but he's another white man. Diversity isn't the only consideration Obama should have factored in, but it's fair to say that he did miss an opportunity here to appoint the first person to this office who isn't a white man. If he appoints another person to this officer later, that might be a strong consideration.

The same goes for Secretary of Defense. The difference here is that Obama is just continuing the current occupant of that position in the interest of smoother transition in time of war.

Bill Clinton appointed Janet Reno as the first woman Attorney General. George W. Bush appointed Alberto Gonzales as the first Hispanic Attorney General. Obama has nominated Eric Holder to be the first black Attorney General. In his case, I have slightly more doubt that he'll be confirmed when compared with most of Obama's picks, because even if you ignore ideology there are excellent reasons not to confirm him given his leading role in Clinton's most unconscionable pardons (not just Marc Rich but a group of domestic terrorists who should never have been considered, never mind approved, for pardon) and his defense of pointing guns at small children by calling it respectful (in the Elian Gonzalez affair). Either is sufficient grounds to wonder if he's qualified to be the nation's chief law enforcement officer. But the Senate will probably roll over for Obama and confirm him anyway.

George W. Bush appointed the first woman Interior Secretary, Gale Norton. I'm not 100% sure of this, but I believe Obama's nomination of Ken Salazar would make him the first Hispanic Interior Secretary.

Mike Espy, Clinton's Secretary of Agriculture, was the first black person in that position. Ann Veneman, under George W. Bush, was the first woman to hold the office. Obama's nominee is a white man.

There's been some attention of late to a recent interview President Bush did with Cynthia McFadden of ABC news. Some of what he's had to say has surprised a lot of people. See links at Daniel Pulliam's GetReligion post for some of that. I have to say that most of what he had to say doesn't surprise me very much. You might be surprised and perhaps skeptical of what he says in this interview if you come with the assumption that Bush is an arrogant, self-absorbed fundamentalist with theologically conservative positions on every religious question, who thinks he can discern God's will obviously and with no hesitation, and who thinks everything he's done is God's will. You'd have to think he's lying about his views and his attitude toward his faith in this interview if you went into it with those assumptions about what he must think. But there was never much evidence to think anything of the sort about him, even though it's a pretty dominant meme on the left (and among some on the right).

Pulliam's post seems a little strange to me, because he talks about how this is true in Europe but doesn't seem to think it's quite as bad in the U.S. Maybe I'm underestimating how bad the coverage in Europe has been, but I'm pretty sure that the coverage in the U.S. has been pretty downright awful. The suggestion that Bush initiated the Iraq war because he heard God tell him to do it is pretty common, even though he never said anything remotely like that. I'm not sure I've seen it asserted in a news story, but opinion journalists trot it out as if it's verified fact, and the quickness of the mainstream media to jump to the idea that Sarah Palin thought such a thing from a sentence that didn't remotely mean that suggests that they were already thinking along such lines with Bush.

Bush all along has given moral reasons for the Iraq invasion and for his opposition to abortion and the killing of embryos for stem cells. He's given secularly-available reasons for his support of the teaching of intelligent design arguments alongside the teaching of standard evolutionary theory. He's given traditional conservative reasoning for the public expression of religious beliefs and public support for faith-based programs and hasn't based it in any claim to special revelation. His resistance to draconian measures to protect the environment and to ward off global warming has largely been because his moderately conservative economic principles oppose such draconian pressure from the government, not because he thinks the Bible says not to care about the environment due to an imminent return of Christ. Yet I've heard some pretty smart people attribute exactly those motivations to him. I do think they'd be surprised by this interview, but I'm not sure it's rational to be surprised by it given that there was never any evidence to attribute the views they attribute to him to begin with.

One genuinely new thing in this interview, as far as I know, is Bush's willingness to say that he doesn't take the Bible literally. As I've discussed before (and see the comments on Pulliam's post for others recognizing the same problem), this is a very unhelpful way to describe things, since there's no one who really takes the Bible entirely literally. When Jesus says he's a vine, he doesn't mean he's a plant rather than an animal. He's speaking metaphorically and thus not literally. When he tells a parable, on the other hand, he's not implying the existence of the characters and events in the parable just because the expressions in the parable are all used literally. I suspect most people who say they don't take the Bible literally are open to seeing some parts of it more like parables. They're not sure Adam and Eve refers to an actual couple when there were no other peopel but might see them as metaphorical for an entire generation of people who rejected God. Or they accept Adam and Eve as a real couple of the first humans, but they don't accept the six-day creation structure as referring to six 24-hour days but rather accomplishing some theological purpose to indicate that God structured creation in certain ways.

One justification for disallowing bans on same-sex marriage is that it's seen as discrimination to prevent same-sex couples from marrying. [In this post I'm not considering under what circumstances discrimination is wrong and when it's perfectly ok. The moral issue isn't my interest here. I'm just looking at whether it's discrimination, leaving aside the moral issue of whether such discrimination is ok. It's ok to discriminate against black people when casting a part in a play for a character that was written as a white racist. But it's still discrimination, just a perfectly legitimate kind. I'm interested in the legal implications here, not the moral ones.]

Whether a practice or act counts as discrimination depends on some assumptions. Two key issues are (a) who is being discriminated against and (b) on what basis.

Consider Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that overturned bans on interracial marriage. The Supreme Court ruled that the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment prevents states from treating individuals of different races differently when it comes to who they can marry. If a man is black, he couldn't marry a white woman in Virginia, but if he'd been white then he could have. That's discrimination against individuals along race lines.

Restricting marriage to same-sex couples isn't quite parallel. It doesn't discriminate against individuals according to sexual orientation. A gay man has the same rights as a straight man. He can marry an unmarried woman who is of age or who otherwise satisfies the requirements for marriage (parental consent or whatever). Both can marry women, and neither can marry men. Similarly, a lesbian has the same rights as a heterosexual woman. Both can marry men, and neither can marry women. That's not discrimination according to sexual orientation, since people of both sexual orientations (holding sex constant) have exactly the same restrictions. The law is equally applied to gays and straights.

But it is discrimination against couples. Same-sex couples are not allowed something that opposite-sex couples are allowed. Does a couple have the kind of legal status to serve as a party in this kind of legal question? My suspicion is that it would be a major innovation in our legal system to treat a couple as a legal entity. I'm not sure that's the best strategy for same-sex couples to try if they want to make headway on this issue, but it is the easiest way to end up with a discrimination claim on the basis of sexual orientation.

I've long thought that the most promising case that bans on same-sex marriage are discrimination is to ignore sexual orientation entirely and to focus on a different basis of discrimination. Men are being discriminated against on the basis of their sex by not being allowed to marry people women are allowed to marry, and women are being discriminated against on the basis of their sex by not being allowed to marry people men can marry. If you ignore sexual orientation, as many social conservatives want to do, then this complaint gets a footing. Of course you have to think any discrimination on the basis of sex is wrong or explain why this particular one is if others aren't, which puts you back to square one if you want to draw a negative moral conclusion, but I'm ignoring that in this post.

It's one thing to invent all manner of conspiracy theories about how you lost an election (see 2000 and 2004). Thankfully, the Republicans don't seem to be doing anything on the same order as that in 2008. Pretty much the only questions being raised by mainstream Republicans involve an organization that's actually under investigation by the FBI on the issue in question, and hardly anyone is claiming that the election was stolen or that McCain would have won easily if not for illegal vote-stealing of some sort.

I think part of that might have been that McCain was doing so well in the polls until the financial meltdown, and then Obama clearly had that crisis to thank for his win and for McCain's inability to get back in the game. If it had been closer, maybe things would be different, and there might be more charges that voter fraud actually affected the outcome. Nevertheless, I think it's noteworthy that Republicans largely aren't pushing it to that point, and I'm glad for that. I can't honestly say that I'm sure Democrats would do the same thing were the tables reversed, and we have history to support my doubts on that.

What amazes me, though, is all the sore winners in the 2008 election. It isn't enough just for a Democrat to take the popular vote for the first time since Jimmy Carter and to win the electoral college handily [clarification: I meant winning a majority, not simply a plurality; Clinton obviously won a plurality twice]. People have to complain about the states that did go for McCain, claiming that all the white Southerners who voted for McCain were doing so merely because of racism rather than because they think Obama's policies would be awful. See Sam's post on that. Today we heard some caller on NPR's Talk of the Nation talking about how she's glad she doesn't have to listen to Palin's voice anymore, and I thought it was perhaps some preference against the pitch of her voice, but it turned out she really meant her regional accent. She was talking as if someone is ignorant for dropping the 'g' in words ending in '-ing' and several other colloquialisms.

After hearing this woman's snotty bigotry against the kind of accent you can hear not just in Alaska but across the Midwest, Sam wondered out loud why people like that caller think it's a good idea to alienate such a large swathe of voters. People did it with Bush, but he'd won, and they needed some outlet to express their frustration. So they tried to feel better than him by pretending his accent was equivalent with being an ignorant dolt. I'm not sure what people think they're accomplishing by complaining about those on the losing side, though, with these exaggerations of racism in all anti-Obama voters and by making fun of a quite common accent in a large stretch of this country. It certainly does feel like sore winning. What's the motivation for that?

Update: I was originally planning to link to this in the post, but I reworked it enough times that I forgot to put it in the final version somewhere. I did want to give Senator McCain credit for what is absolutely and indisputably the best and most honorable concession speech I have ever heard from a political candidate. He knows how to lose gracefully and respectfully.

Barack Obama should not appoint Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to head the Environmental Protection Agency, as has been reported that he might do. This is for totally non-partisan reasons. I don't expect Obama to appoint a moderate on the environment. I would hope he doesn't choose someone who regularly presents inaccurate factual information and gives credence to discredited studies that feed panic.

He makes radical statements and then stands by them while under public criticism. For example, he claimed in 2002 that factory farming is more of a threat to American democracy than Osama bin Laden and refused to moderate his comment under pressure from those who called him on it. He has published criticisms of the Bush administration riddled with lies, distortions, and ad hominem attacks. He accepts conspiracy theories about Republicans stealing the 2004 election.

But the most important reason for me is alarmism about autism and vaccines, which is downright anti-scientific. The most that's been shown about autism and vaccines is that the symptoms of autism tend to be noticeable around an age when several vaccines tend to be scheduled. Correlation isn't causation, and in this case there's an obvious explanation for the correlation. The symptoms begin appearing at an age when, for completely independent reasons, certain vaccines are given. So Kennedy does nothing more than feed anti-scientific panic. Parents of autistic kids hear this stuff, accept it without looking into it, and end up treating their kids as having been stolen from them. Instead of accepting their kids for who they are, they spend all their time pretending they don't have any anymore and trying to make other parents feel guilty for causing their children's autism by taking steps to protect them and other kids from dangerous and life-threatening microbes. They seek to divert funds into wild goose chases instead of recognizing that autism has at least a significant genetic component (which is now very well established) and that the only thing that will likely be available to help their kids is to give them intensive help, something very hard to do if you spend all your time chasing windmills in the political blame game. Never mind the fact that they're risking their kids' lives by not vaccinating them, which has already led to a resurgence in diseases that had been nearly eradicated.

Anyone who has any sympathy for the many complaints, more from the left but also from the right, about the Bush Administration's attitude toward science should oppose Kennedy as an appointment for any important government position but especially to head the EPA. [And I note that some prominent anti-ID bloggers are avoiding hypocrisy on this issue by opposing Kennedy.] If he goes forward with this appointment, it's a huge political mistake. It will mean people can call him anti-science in more ways than just on abortion (see #3). But it's even worse as a policy mistake, given how much damage someone like Kennedy could do.

What would people have said if John McCain had won the election, given a wonderful speech about bringing the divided country back together in unity, and then as his first presidential act picked Karl Rove as his chief of staff? That's pretty much what Barack Obama's choice of Rahm Emmanuel amounts to. It isn't a good sign that he's picked one of the most divisive figures in national politics to help lead what he's saying is a new start to change the way people do politics and unify a bitterly divided country. I never saw Obama as really bi-partisan. It's not as if he has a record of getting together with Republicans and working together with them to put together moderate legislation. He just does what he's going to do anyway and convinces Republicans to vote for it. But Emmanuel isn't just "not really bi-partisan". He led the fight for the Democrats to retake Congress in 2006, and it was well-publicized at that time that he'd used some of the dirtiest tricks in the business to make that effort succeed. He's exactly the kind of figure Obama has spent lots of time saying he isn't and saying politicians need to stop being.

It's interesting to compare the early complaints about Bush in 2000 and 2001 for his choice of John Ashcroft, who almost didn't get approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee even to be voted on by the whole Senate. Ashcroft is a nice guy who happens to hold a position toward the extreme on the abortion issue, namely that pro-lifers shouldn't have an exception in rape cases, because the moral status of the fetus doesn't change if the cause of its existence is rape. It's an eminently reasonable position, actually. He holds prayer meetings that some of his co-workers would go to with him. That was pretty much the evidence against him, actually. His being a nice Christian who holds one view that's in the minority was reason enough that he couldn't possibly serve as an unbiased enforcer of the law. Ironically, Ashcroft was a check on those in the administration who really were extremist when it really came down to it with the wiretapping program. I don't remember any harsh words ever uttered by him against any person in the opposing party, even if he has strongly disagreed sometimes with their views. Still, no one has apologized for how the Senate Democrats treated him, and I'm sure no one will.

Rahm Emmanuel, by contrast, was the brains behind many partisan smear efforts during the 2006 election, misrepresenting Republicans left and right with the mere goal of getting a few more Democrats elected. Most politicians of any party will display some dishonesty in order to get elected, and they think their views are better enough that they think it's worth it. But it's usually slight exaggerations or focusing on aspects of a bill that someone pragmatically voted for based on other aspects of the bill or in Obama's case focusing on surface-level elements of your proposed policies while ignoring their more indirect impact. But Emmanuel is known for much more serious partisan politics, insisting that Democratic candidates should do everything possible to win their races (a view Obama has himself said isn't good for the Democratic party or for the country).

So Obama's first move after being elected is to break a significant campaign promise that he'd even reiterated in his acceptance speech the night of the election. He said he'd set a new tone. Selecting Rahm Emmanuel two days later is not setting a new tone. At least Nancy Pelosi waited a couple months before breaking her 2006 election-night promise to include House Republicans in planning congressional reform measures. Obama didn't even wait 48 hours. People are speculating that Obama was thinking he could make himself look like the good cop if he's got such a clear bad cop as his chief of staff, but that's not likely. Did Bush look like the good cop just because Rove, Cheney, and others in his administration were doing the bad copy duties? Complaints about Rove are very much a part of the anti-Bush vitriol from the left. This is only going to fuel partisanship, and Obama is now going to be associated with Emmanuel's style of politics, because when all things are said and done it's still Obama's chief of staff who is known for that kind of partisanship. He's shot his unity effort in the foot, and it's going to be very hard to get any momentum back in that attempt. He's basically going to have to convince some genuine conservatives (i.e. not Colin Powell) to work in his administration and to give them a significant place in setting policy for me to be reassured that he really does intend change of the sort he's said he favors.

A lot of people think it's irrational to vote if your vote isn't going to have an effect on the outcome. I live in an extremely blue district of a slightly red county in a very blue state. In local and statewide elections, my vote has so little an effect that it's not worth voting if the only point of voting is for my one vote to have an effect on the outcome. New York is overwhelmingly going to continue to support Senators Schumer and Clinton, and they tend to vote Democratic in governor elections except when there's a very moderate Republican like George Pataki on the ballot. County-wide races are closer, and so is the U.S. House district, which was almost a toss-up in 2006. Things were even more one-sided when I lived in Rhode Island.

But it simply isn't true that voting is only worth doing if you're going to be the deciding vote. There are other reasons people give for voting, some better than others. One that often occurs to me when it seems hopeless for my candidate is that if everyone voting for the other side thought it wasn't worth voting because the outcome is assured then my candidate might have a chance. Other reasons include that it helps you psychologically to feel like you're contributing and that it's simply your obligation to do what you can to influence things for the better even if what you can isn't by itself going to make the difference in who wins the election.

Any of those responses would be sufficient by itself, except perhaps the psychological benefit one (at least if that involves self-deception, and if it doesn't then it's not a distinct reason but depends on one of the others). I think there's an even better reason to vote, and I think it might actually be what motivates me most, but I hadn't actually thought about it in these terms until today. It takes a page from Calvinist responses to the objection that if the future is already determined then there's no point in praying.

Calvinists come in several varieties, but the most common sort of Calvinist (which isn't the same as being the most noticed kind on the internet) is compatibilist about human freedom and divine predetermination. If God has a plan that includes everything I'm going to do, everything every other person is going to do, and an outcome for every prayer I ever pray, then is it worth praying? My prayer isn't going to change anything, after all. Of course, my prayer would also be in this plan, and if I didn't pray then a different outcome may well have been in the works. Compatibilists about divine predetermination and human action are going to insist that God works through our choices and doesn't just force things outside our control. Our prayers are part of how God's plan works itself out as history unfolds.

One thing Calvinist sometimes say is that praying is not so much for the outcome but for us. God wants us to pray because of what God will do in us because we pray. I don't want to deny that, but it's certainly not the emphasis in scripture on reasons to pray. The emphasis seems to be on two things. One is that prayer does affect things. It doesn't change them, because the future can't be changed anymore than the past or present can. If the future is a certain way then it can't be changed. Even open theists don't think the future can be changed. Why should someone who thinks there's a definite future think it can be changed? But for the reasons in the previous paragraph, the future can be influenced. It can be caused by things in the present, and I can be part of that process of bringing it about. A compatibilist should have no trouble saying that sort of thing.

But there's another reason in scripture for why we should pray, even though God has worked out the end from the beginning, and this one (unlike the previous one) does have some relevance for voting. God wants us to communicate our dependence on him and to express our desires to him. He wants us to see him as the Father who cares for us and meets our needs and our wishes, provided that our wishes are righteous and as long as there isn't some other reason beyond our ken for why God wouldn't grant a particular wish (as there may well be). As Jesus points out, what father when presented with a request from a child for bread or fish will give a snake? God wants to bestow good things on his children and delights when we come to him with requests, for the same reasons a giving parent delights in such things. Given that, it's a privilege to call him Father, which is why it's a big deal that Jesus starts out the Lord's prayer with "our Father". Those who don't avail themselves of that title in addressing him are missing out on something great. Those who don't address him at all are missing out on even more.

The same dynamic plays out in a smaller way with voting. I'm privilege to live in a country that seeks my opinion on who should occupy certain offices. Even if my vote doesn't have an effect in putting someone in office, it's a privilege to be able to contribute my thoughts in the process of the communal decision that an election involves. I don't believe voting is a moral right. But I think I'd be wasting an opportunity to express my opinion if I didn't vote, and wasting a privilege is at least unfortunate (and I would even argue that it's immoral). This seems to me to be a much better reason to vote than any of the more common ones that I hear, even if most of them are good enough reasons.

It's a bit late to affect the election, but I note that Sarah Palin has been completely cleared of the ethics charges directed her way by an investigation led by a partisan political enemy who had stated the conclusion of the investigation in the news media before the investigation had even started. When I looked at the facts assembled by the self-fulfilling investigation, it was hard for me to see the conclusion following from those facts, so it's nice to know my suspicions were correct. It didn't. She didn't violate any ethics rules whatsoever.

Barack Obama seems to hold all of the following mutually inconsistent propositions about same-sex marriage:

1. We shouldn't deny rights to same-sex couples that opposite-sex marriages have.
2. We should not recognize same-sex relationships as marriage.
3. Attempts to prevent same-sex couples from getting married denies them rights that opposite-sex marriages have.

Unless you equivocate in the meaning of some terms in those statements (and I'm not thinking of a way that he could be), there's no way they can all be consistently held. Yet he does seem to hold all of them. He's said repeatedly that he doesn't support calling same-sex civil unions 'marriage'. Yet every time anyone tries to pass a law preventing a state from using such a term for a same-sex union, he opposes it and says it denies that couple rights that equal treatment requires. He opposes the federal legislation that protects states from having to observe other states' marriages. He opposes California voters' current attempt to overturn the judicial enforcement of same-sex marriage in that state. Is this position consistent?

It's one thing to hold Senator Robert Byrd's view, which is that the government shouldn't recognize same-sex marriage but that such a view shouldn't be encoded into the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps Obama would extend the same reasoning to state constitutions, and thus he could explain his opposition to Proposition 8 in California. But that's not what he said. He said he opposes it because it denies people a basic right, which amounts to #3 above.

Obama is even opposed to an ordinary law (as opposed to a constitutional amendment) preventing the recognition of same-sex marriage in a state that doesn't want to recognize it. Basically, the law means New York doesn't have to recognize Connecticut, California, and Massachusetts same-sex marriages, even though New York currently does. Obama's justification for opposing this law? It violates basic rights. It's #3 again.

Now there's a possible position that opposes not just constitutional amendments on this issue but even laws, while still disapproving of same-sex marriage. Someone could think it's wrong to encode same-sex marriage in the laws but that it's also wrong to encode opposition to it in the laws. That's clearly not Obama's view. His view just seems to be inherently contradictory. This also doesn't seem to be a genuine change in positions, where he's just rethought the issue and changed his mind. He's been opposing these laws and amendments for a long enough time that in the meantime he's also kept saying that he opposes legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

This isn't an issue that I care all that much about, mostly because I don't have much hope that this issue will ever be handled right. I'd prefer the government stay out of calling anything marriage, and that means I agree with very few politicians on either side on the debate. But it's an enormously significant issue of our time, and I'd expect someone running for president at least to have a view that's consistent (or to have a view and consistently follow it), even if it's not exactly the view I would advocate. Obama doesn't seem to be able to articulate a clear and consistent position on the matter and then consistently follow it, and this isn't the first issue I've noticed this about.

It makes me wonder how many other issues there are where I haven't followed the discussion as closely and don't know the wider debate as well as I do this one and abortion, where his ability or willingness to formulate a clear and consistent position is even more lacking. He certainly has similar problems with gun control. For a guy who by all accounts is very smart, it's unlikely that he's as confused as his statements make him sound, which makes me wonder if he's being honest about his views.

Legal scholar Steven Calabresi, in a generally accurate discussion of what Obama could do to change the federal courts, offers the following very strange argument:

This raises the question of whether Mr. Obama can in good faith take the presidential oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution" as he must do if he is to take office. Does Mr. Obama support the Constitution as it is written, or does he support amendments to guarantee welfare? Is his provision of a "tax cut" to millions of Americans who currently pay no taxes merely a foreshadowing of constitutional rights to welfare, health care, Social Security, vacation time and the redistribution of wealth? Perhaps the candidate ought to be asked to answer these questions before the election rather than after.

Aside from the issue of whether Obama meant to be saying the Constitution should be amended to change this (See this post and its comments for discussion of what Obama really meant), I find this argument extremely strange. The Constitution gives provisions for when it can be amended. If I swore an oath to uphold it, one of the things I would be upholding would be the legitimate amendment process that the Constitution specifies. A president could come along and advocate an amendment to the Constitution that changes it in extremely significant ways, but as long as due process for amending is followed it doesn't seem as if anything has been done to undermine the Constitution. What's been done is to undermine the moral principles behind why the Constitution is as if currently is, but it's not a violation of the oath to uphold the Constitution if you use the Constitution's own method of amending it to propose a change that's pretty drastic. It itself envisions that possibility.

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple weeks over whether Barack Obama is a socialist. I think the two main events that have spurred this on are the revelation of his past association with a social democratic party called the New Party, which is openly left of the Democratic mainstream, and redistributionist talk from him both at the last presidential debate and from a particularly explicit quote from 2001 about how the pretty leftward Warren Court didn't go far enough in overthrowing the founders' intent in the Constitution.

Here's what I think is going on here. Obama is an incrementalist. He hasn't always been. His change is actually chronicled in his first book. Alinsky-style community organizing is very close to an implementation of a socialist agenda to undermine the capitalist system. There's every indication that Obama was in the thick of Alinsky-style work, even if he never agreed with everything Alinsky followers thought. He identified with the kinds of things they were trying to do in community organizing. It was Alinsky followers who trained him and then recruited him to train others in the same techniques. But Obama's community organizing was a failure. He was disappointed at every turn, according to his book. He eventually gave up on that method of change and turned to politics, where he knew he could try to get at least something done, even if it was only a little bit of a change at a time. I'm not sure he's really moved from that attitude. The New Party is exactly what you'd expect of someone with such a view. He was willing to run as a Democrat with an additional New Party endorsement in order to indicate that he's to the left of mainstream Democrats while seeking their support anyway. It was an attempt to mainstream a left-of-Democrat candidate, and it was an effective strategy until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.

But this in itself shows that Obama is at least practically not a socialist. The distinction between socialism and European-style social democrats is that socialists seek to undermine and overthrow the system, and social democrats seek to work within the system to reform it gradually. The New Party was basically a bunch of former socialists who had become social democrats. Their goals had become more pragmatic. They were going to change what they could by moving the Democratic party to the left. The only way their candidates could win is if they also had the Democratic nomination, so they opted for double-billing to get their candidates more votes. (I'm not sure how New York still does it with parties like the Conservative Party, the Independence Party, and the Working Families Party. Does anyone know how those function differently from what the New Party was trying to do? What they do is obviously not the same, or it would have fallen under the same Supreme Court ruling.)

I'm convinced that Obama hasn't changed his ideals all that much. There's no way someone could say that the Warren Court didn't go far enough in overthrowing the founders' intent in the Constitution (alongside redistributionist language) unless there's a strong socialist steak still present, at least in terms of what he thinks the ideal government would look like. Even if that socialist streak has been toned down since, Obama said this after his conversion to being a social democrat. He does seem to be a redistributionist of sorts in the classic socialist mode, at least in his ideal government. How much he'd be willing to try to do depends, of course, on how much he expects to be able to get done. The scariest thing about an Obama victory for an economic conservative is that he'd almost certainly have at least two years of a Congress who would basically give him everything he wants, except on the few occasions when the Blue Dogs in the House might join with Republicans to prevent any particularly repugnant bills, but their influence seems to be about to diminish at least somewhat after this election. (It still amazes me that Democrats are running to replace minority Republicans in Congress by arguing for change. Giving the party in power more votes is change?)

So I don't think it's quite right to call Obama a socialist. He seems to be something closer to a European-style social democrat, at least in what he will try to do. But that just means he won't try to implement socialist ideals if he doesn't think he can. With a Congress entirely willing to grant their new Leader whatever he wants, I'm not sure that difference is as much as it might seem. Conservatives who keep calling him a socialist do seem to me to be on to something, even if I'd hesitate to apply that label straight out, and I think it's sufficient reason even for moderate Democrats to be very wary about casting a vote for him given that there won't be any divided government to reign in what he might try to do. I can understand why my friends who are themselves left of the Democratic party love him. I can understand why a lot of people are delighted to play a role in putting the first black president into office. I can even understand a mainstream Democrat who would have preferred Hillary Clinton but might still think Obama is closer to their views than McCain is. What I can't fathom is conservatives and moderates who think they're going to be getting a moderate Democrat who will vote for him just because they think McCain is too much like Bush, figuring Obama seems harmless enough because his proposals sound pretty centrist. That's what explains most independents' and moderates' support for Obama, and it strikes me as either ill-informed or irrational.

Update: Be sure to read the comments. The (first?) Nov 2 comment in particular has links to some much more detailed discussion that seems to me to confirm my general thesis that Obama holds that a socialist theory of justice would be good for the Supreme Court to endorse at some point but might be pragmatically worth getting to at most incrementally.

Latoya Peterson at Racialicious is, to my mind, one of the more insightful and fair-minded of commentators on race from a left-of-center perspective. I often find myself disagreeing with her on politics, and I don't think she always represents conservative views or Republican politicians as charitably as I'd like, but I usually find her discussions of race to be more nuanced than most left, center, or right commentators can achieve. I even recognize elements in her analysis that strike me as the sort of thing I'd expect out of moderate conservatives on race, which I regard as outstanding intellectual honesty on her part, because a lot of the people she associates with on such matters would be very resistant to such conclusions (and certainly would be if I were the one presenting them).

But sometimes I see something from her that I just can't accept, and I've just found one. She speaks favorably of Adriel Luis' diatribe on McCain's use of "that one" to refer to Obama as racist in what it "really means". I watcher the video of Luis, and I just don't see any argument there for why McCain must have meant it in a racist way, none at all. The "that one" comment reminded me more of John Kerry's continued use of "this president" when speaking directly at George W. Bush in their debates. It's insulting, but it's quite a reach to claim (without argument) that it's even racial, never mind racist. It may well be that McCain is a
racist. Some people have seen his use of 'gook' for his Vietnamese captors as a sign of racism, but see Katie Hong's better explanation of what's going on there (and her critique of why it's still bad to use the term in that way but isn't necessarily racist). But even if he's at least racially insensitive in some troubling ways, it's just crazy even to suggest that "that one" is racist without giving a shred of evidence that other interpretations are impossible or unlikely, including my own thought that it was just like Kerry's indirect way of referring to Bush as an intended slight without racial connotations.

Now I said Luis gave no argument for why McCain must have meant this in a racist way. I didn't say he gave no argument for making such a claim. He does give a very interesting argument for why it's perfectly ok to throw around charges of racism with no shred of evidence. He says that as long as we brush off each potentially racist claim as not being clearly racist then people won't see any racism as being there. I suppose that might be true if we did that with absolutely every case, even ones where there's evidence (and there are plenty, including some that can't be interpreted charitably, such as Michael Richards' big fiasco with the N-word). But remember that we're talking about particular cases that we don't really know about. There's a reason we don't (at least we're not supposed to) find someone guilty unless guilt can be established beyond a reasonable doubt. We could use the argument that such a policy would mean that we'd never catch killers and that people would deny the reality of murders, thinking deaths were all accidental. But it doesn't have that effect, and the policy of giving the people of the benefit of the doubt with accusations of racism need not have such an effect.

For the same reason that we don't assume guilt with crimes, we should also not assume guilt with moral accusations that aren't crimes. It's basic human decency, and I find it sorely lacking among people who throw racism charges around without strong evidence. Being hesitant in particular cases when you don't know for sure is not the same thing as denying that racism is real. No, it's just being unsure about particular cases when you don't know for sure. I can't count how many times I've been accused of justifying racism when I've pointed out that a racism charge is unwarranted. Only if you don't know the distinction between being true and being proved to be true can you make such a charge. You don't need to deny that racism is real or even that it's widespread and so deep-seated that it's hard to spot in order to point out that a particular case is not clearly racist and thus unfair to call racist, and this will be true no matter how many such particular cases you find.

I've given a moral argument for my policy of giving people the benefit of the doubt in cases of potential but unestablished racism. I don't think it should have to bring any negative racial effects as long as those who question racist accusations in particular cases are willing to acknowledge it when it's clear and insist that there are probably plenty of cases of real racism where we unfortunately can't be sure and thus be able to call them on it. My sense is that conservatives on race are sorely lacking in that sort of thing, and that's why every attempt to follow a policy like mine gets seen as an attempt to justify actual racism. But I don't see how that mistake on the part of people who follow a policy like mine can justify the accusation of trying to justify racism, as has been said about me many times in the comments at Racialicious whenever I've said that a charge of racism is going beyond what we can be sure of. But people prone to leap to racism charges without enough evidence are also prone to leap to racism-justifying charges without reason.

I maintain that we do need to give particular people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to racism charges. Leaping to accusations of racism fuels the sense that every charge of racism is just a political ploy to get more power for a black hegemony that has taken great joy in gaining power by making racism charges. There's no way conservatives on race are going to back down from that narrative as long as a significant number of people follow a policy like Luis'. His strategy is therefore counterproductive, because he's just adding fuel to the fire among those who think racism charges are all or mostly false. Consistently repeating such charges without evidence isn't going to undermine such a narrative. It will further it. A more widespread recognition of the fact that racism is more widespread and deeply-seated among everyday white experiences will only come if those who seek to find racism under every rock and tree are a little more willing to express skepticism in particular cases when racism isn't all that well established.

Conservatives need to understand the language of the left if they're going to criticize what people on the left say. William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn have a new book coming out. Here is the publisher's blurb about the book:

Race Course Against White Supremacy By: William C. Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn

White supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists. Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days--and that it is still very much with us--the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors' own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.

Tommy Oliver summarizes Ayers as saying, "we are a nation of white supremacists". He then quotes an LGF post that says Ayers claims, "the dominant political system in the United States is white supremacism". Both of these claims are gross misunderstandings of what that blurb says, and it takes only the little familiarity I have with Marxian-style racial critiques to see this.

White supremacy, according to the Marx-style critique, consists of two things. First, the social structure of race relations is such that white people do in fact dominate much of the time. Second, there are structures in place that serve to perpetuate that dominance. Such a view can range from the most radical end to a much more minimal version. The radical extreme claims that white people have set up such a system deliberately and intentionally perpetuate it to serve their own interests. A much more minimal version, in my view, is very close to the truth, and that claims only that there are factors in place that, often unintentionally or at least for motivations other than race, have the effect of continuing the influence that white people disproportionally still have most of the time.

White supremacism is an ideology. It holds that white people ought to be in power because white people are better than those of other races. It claims that any structures in place that might be called white supremacy are good and worth extending to make white control even stronger. It's not hard to see, then, that white supremacy is not the same thing as white supremacism. One is a set of social structures. The other is an ideology.

What the blurb for the Ayers/Dohrn book actually says is "that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days--and that it is still very much with us". That simply is not a claim that white supremacism is dominant in any respect, as the LGF post says. It is not a statement about the prevalence of white supremacism among Americans, as Tommy Oliver's post asserts. It is a statement that white supremacy, the fact of white predominance and structures that continue it, has been more influential in American history than any other political structure. I think it's a highly questionable claim, and I'm sure there's a great deal in this book that I'd disagree with, but it doesn't do to pretend the claim is something much crazier than it really is. There's enough to criticize about the book that there's no need to make it out to be making an accusation that's much more serious than what the blurb actually attributes to the book.

Whenever a commercial begins to play so often that it seems like it's airing every commercial break, I begin to lose patience with whatever it's advertising, even if it was something I tend to like or support. I'm curious how oversaturating the market with the same awful Obama ad every single break of Stargate Atlantis and Sanctuary is supposed to help Obama rather than just turning off any undecided voters who might be watching. People watch science fiction to get away from stuff like politics, not to have it show up every time the show takes a break. It would be different to do that on cable news, where most people watching are actually interested in what's going on in the world, or they wouldn't have that channel on. At least when I watch tonight's Heroes it will be on DVR.

It's bad enough that he's got his own channel now and intends to do a Ross Perot the week before the election, but the same tired commercial five times an hour is getting a bit annoying. I'm not at all sure it's an effective strategy in the longest election in American history, when most people are getting tired of the campaign and want it to be over, to get in everyone's face and encourage them to think of you as the late-night guest who just won't go home and let you go to bed in peace. That's not a way to make people happier to vote for you.

I'm not going to try to claim that Barack Obama hasn't ever changed his stance on Iraq, but this doesn't seem to be such a flip:

From last year:

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep US forces there," the AP reported on July 20, 2007...

From Tuesday night's debate:

In such cases, answered Obama, "we have moral issues at stake." Of course the United States must act to stop genocide, he said. "When genocide is happening, when ethnic cleansing is happening . . . and we stand idly by, that diminishes us."

Sorry, but I don't see any inconsistency here. He doesn't think preventing a potential genocide is a good enough reason for a military presence in another nation. He does think stopping one in progress gives a moral imperative to stop it. To make this work, he'll have to provide arguments for why the first case is merely potential and not a serious enough risk to worry about removing troops completely from the situation, or he'll have to argue that it's never ok to intervene until after the fact. I don't think either argument is easy to make. I'd need to see more than I've seen to convince me, anyway. I also don't know of any instance when he's tried to make that case. But it's not necessarily an inconsistency or a change in view.

It's perfectly fine to point out when politicians change their views in order to get them to explain the change (but don't assume a change is a sign of flipping for mere political reasons if there's a plausible explanation for that change in views, as there sometimes is). It's also fine to ask them to explain how two statements fit together if they don't think they've changed their views. I don't think Obama's statements on gun control fit together at all, despite his claim not to have changed his views. I also don't think his explanations of his past connections and votes are consistent with each other or with the past. But his critics need to be a little better at restricting themselves to genuine examples of conflicting statements, or even the legitimate questions about his honesty, revisionism, and political expediency are going to be seen as mere political plays without substance.

It's counter-productive to use flimsy reasoning against a candidate, because those inclined to give the benefit of the doubt (and undecided voters probably are) aren't going to be moved by the real criticisms if they constantly see bad ones. The mainstream media and lefty blogs have now ruined their chances at any legitimate criticisms of Sarah Palin move the conservative base, because they can't trust anything anyone says against her. The fact that a political opponent who has been vocally against her has led the investigation of the firinng of Mike Wooten is going to lead to immediate distrust of what little criticism of her their report contains (it's mostly critical of her husband). The base will of course have no problem playing this stuff up to no end, but that's not going to move undecided voters very much.

With all the claims (some probably true and some probably not) of sexism in people's responses to Sarah Palin, I've been thinking about a common sort-of-intuitive quick test for sexism that I've been seeing a lot lately.

One kind of evidence for a claim that sexism is taking place involves asking whether the same question or comment would be said if it were a man. The idea is that it's sexism if no one would say the same thing of a man in the same position, which means the treatment is purely based on her being a woman. There's one obvious problem with this kind of test. I would be very unlikely to say that my friend John is in the women's room when he goes into a public restroom, but I might easily say it of my wife. That's clearly not sexism, though. So the proper test needs to distinguish between things that would be appropriate to say of a woman that you wouldn't say of a man. The issue then becomes which ways are appropriate to treat women differently from how you treat men. That, of course, is a matter of disagreement between various people, and thus this test is hardly independent of moral views. So measuring sexism this way depends on what your larger moral picture is.

For example, there are those who thinks mothers and fathers generally bring different things to parenting, and thus (other things being equal) they would prefer that if one parent stays home with the kids that it be the mom. Some takes this to the more extreme view that the mom just ought to stay home without the "other things being equal" qualifier. Then there are those who think there's no moral reason to prefer either parent (and I've never met anyone claiming that we should prefer it be men, but that view is logically possible and might well be held by some feminists who seek to equalize men and women in every way).

These views would say very different things about a claim that a woman ought to do what she can to be the stay-home parent. Some will find it sexist, based on their background moral picture. Others will not. I think this is why some people have a hard time recognizing sexism that others see. It's very difficult to find a morally inappropriate expectation when your own moral view actually requires that expectation or at least sees it as worth trying for if other things are equal. (I should say, though, that it's hard to see a typical liberal using this response appropriately against typical conservatives, because typical liberals have a much larger set of things that they consider sexist than the typical conservative does, not the smaller set that this response assumes.)

I know this is one of my pet peeves, but it's a good pet peeve to have, since far too many people misrepresent the abortion debate as being about when life begins. When life begins is a scientific matter, and anyone who recognizes that should have a hard time seeing the plain meaning of Joe Biden's statement as follows as outright endorsement of relativism about science:

MR. BROKAW: If Senator Obama comes to you and says, "When does life begin? Help me out here, Joe," as a Roman Catholic, what would you say to him

SEN. BIDEN: I'd say, "Look, I know when it begins for me." It's a personal and private issue. For me, as a Roman Catholic, I'm prepared to accept the teachings of my church. But let me tell you. There are an awful lot of people of great confessional faiths--Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others--who have a different view. They believe in God as strongly as I do. They're intensely as religious as I am religious. They believe in their faith and they believe in human life, and they have differing views as to when life--I'm prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception. But that is my judgment. For me to impose that judgment on everyone else who is equally and maybe even more devout than I am seems to me is inappropriate in a pluralistic society. And I know you get the push back, "Well, what about fascism?" Everybody, you know, you going to say fascism's all right? Fascism isn't a matter of faith. No decent religious person thinks fascism is a good idea.

I'm very sure that Biden didn't mean what he said. He surely doesn't think scientific truth is all a matter of what you happen to believe any more than Nancy Pelosi thinks life doesn't really begin at conception when she quotes church fathers against the current Roman Catholic view (thus in effect quoting religion against science, ironic as that is from the highest-ranked (in one measure, anyway) Democrat in the United States. Both of them mean to be talking about moral status and perhaps personhood. But it's not at all clear what exactly he intended to say about it. He obviously couldn't have meant some kind of thoroughgoing moral relativism because of his last statement. What generates the relativist-sounding move is not that it's about moral views, where a moral relativism of some sort then kicks in once you enter moral territory. He both has some notion of what a decent religious person is (which sounds objective, even though it uses a value-laden term 'decent') and some notion that a view has to be held by a decent religious person to count as appropriate in a pluralistic society, which he takes to rule out Hitler's fascism.

What I'm least sure of is what he really thinks about all those religiously held beliefs. When he says he knows when it begins for him, does he want to say that any deeply-held religious belief is true for the person who holds it, in which case there's really no religious truth, just religious feelings? Or does "I know when it begins for me" function as an equivalent expression to "I know when I think it begins". It's a bit awkward to take it that way, but it would be something like "As for me, I know when it begins, but I'm not going to expect others to understand that because it involves faith, and I respect their conflicting religious traditions.

Is that overly charitable? Keep in mind that this is Joe Biden.

I don't know how many times I've heard from mainstream media reporters, bloggers, and even FactCheck.org that McCain's ad about Obama's support for sex ed for kindergarteners is an outright lie. According to the Obama campaign, the bill was intended to give information on how to avoid sexual predators and how to recognize inappropriate touching. The Obama line is that McCain is lying by making it out to be comprehensive sex ed. I sat and listened to a colleague Friday night launching into a diatribe about how evil McCain is for lying about this. I'd been hearing this, but I hadn't actually looked at it very carefully myself.

The bill is not mainly about sexual predators, which don't even come up until over halfway through the bill. It is about contraception and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. It mandates discussion of abstinence. How do you talk about contraception, methods of preventing STDs, and abstaining from sex without talking about sex in a way that's much more significant than simply coaching kids to recognize inappropriate touching?

Now the McCain ad does wrongly say that this is Obama's only legislative accomplishment. He wasn't a sponsor of this, and there are a couple bills that he does have his name on as a sponsor. The bill also does say, as Obama has been pointing out, that parents could opt their kids out and that it would be age-appropriate sex ed. However, it's clear from the bill that what's mandated will be a pretty comprehensive curriculum, and it's hard for me to see how that would be age-appropriate for kindergarteners by my standards of what's age-appropriate, which makes such a condition pretty inadequate. Simply specifying that it be age-appropriate accomplishes little more than allowing people who think the bill's mandate is age-appropriate to do what the bill mandates. It doesn't seem to me that it's at all inaccurate to call it comprehensive sex ed for kindergarteners, certainly not to the level of the outright lie that so many people, including the supposedly-neutral mainstream media and the supposedly non-partisan FactCheck.org, are talking about. What they keep saying is that the bill doesn't require the very thing that its language seems to me to plainly require.

Byron York has an excellent piece that summarizes a lot of this but also includes statements by the sponsors of the bill at the time and one statement by the only sponsor of the bill who would even talk with him. From what he can gather, it does seem that inappropriate touching, while one concern, was not one of the major reasons for the bill. It's possible that Obama was voting for the bill because he thought one tiny element of it was a good idea and that he disagreed with the rest of it. If you accept his story and his claim that he doesn't support what the bill turns out to mandate, then that would have to be what he was doing. So why would he vote for the bill, then, if it turns out to be mainly intended to do something he disagrees with? I was accepting the Obama line on this simply because so many people were repeating it, including FactCheck.org. But it turns out, on closer examination, that the major claim made in the ad is pretty much true, and it's Obama's story about it that seems to be false.

Cobb posted a pretty weird Sarah Palin cartoon last week. One of the characters assumes that if McCain were to die as president and Palin were to take his place, everyone below her in the line of succession would move up a spot. The character then suggests that perhaps it wouldn't be too bad for Nancy Pelosi to be VP.

It's interesting to think about what would happen if it really worked that way. If President Bush died now, Robert Byrd would have to be demoted to the House of Representatives, although I guess he'd at least be Speaker. But he'd be representing a district in California. Condi Rice would represent WV in the Senate, and the balance of power would flip back to Republican control. Henry Paulsen would be Secretary of State, and Robert Gates would be Secretary of the Treasury. Mukasey would become Defense. Perhaps even more ludicrously, Margaret Spellings would take over Energy, and Chertoff would be demoted to Veteran's Affairs. President Cheney would then be able to select a new Secretary of Homeland Security, I suppose, but if he could do that why couldn't he just fill the VP slot the way past presidents have done when they succeed to the presidency and avoid the whole shift?

David Bernstein asks a very interesting question:

But let's say a library stocked a children's book called "Adam and Eve." The book, which has sold 50,000 copies nationwide, explains that The Lord intended men and women to be couples, and that people who have same-sex relationships are violating the laws of God and nature, and are risking eternal damnation. The librarian had received several requests for this book, and finds it an age-appropriate way of explaining the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic position on sexuality to children.

A progressive parent complains that her child read this book in the library, and now is convinced that gay people are bad. She asks that the library remove the book from the shelf. Is she a "bookbanner?" If the librarian had refused to stock the book to begin with, despite its strong sales, the requests, and a finding of educational value and age-appropriateness, is he a "bookbanner"?

There's certainly a potential consistency problem here, although I'd refrain from charging anyone with that unless they show clearly that they apply inconsistent standards to the different cases. I'm suspicious that many of the criticisms of Sarah Palin involve something like that with at least a noticeable number of people who are making them, although some of the defenses have the same feature.

There are several questions with this that I don't have a firm view on. Is it ok for a mayor to gauge how a head librarian will respond to parental challenges to books in a library? Sure. Is it ok for a mayor to request that certain books be removed from the libary? I'm less sure of that, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to think Palin did any such thing. Is it ok for librarians to exclude books on ideological grounds? They certainly do, and they do it all the time. You're not going to find children's books advocating for slavery or sex between adults and children, and the only reason is ideology against such things, a view that happens to be pretty universal. It's on controversial issues where you see difficulties arising. How you respond to the above case and how you respond to the parallel case of Heather Has Two Mommies might reveal your ideology, or it might show a consistent position that you hold regardless of ideology (depending on your meta-ideology, someting the latter possibility then reveals about you).

One quibble I've had with a lot of the discussion of this issue is that it's strange to call this banning at all. Banning a book seems to me to be a much broader act than just not having it on the shelf of a local library. Book-banning prevents stores from selling it or doesn't allow anyone to possess copies of it. I even worry about calling it censorship, which is government prevention of private citizens saying something. If the FCC tells TV networks they can't show certain kinds of content, that's censorship of a limited sort. It's TV censorship. If it prevents book publishers from publishing certain kinds of content, that's censorship. If it doesn't allow certain books to be present on a library shelf, that's not stopping anyone from saying what's in the book. It's stopping that book from being in a certain location. Is that censorship? It's not as clearly so, at least.

Former Senator Mike Gravel (D, AK) seemed to me to be the worst of the Democratic candidates for the 2008 presidential nomination. It amazed me that anyone could make Dennis Kucinich look anywhere near mainstream, but Gravel did exactly that. He said the most extreme things in the most extreme ways against both Bush and all the Republican candidates (except perhaps Ron Paul), but he also said them about the leading Democratic contenders. It therefore surprises me that he doesn't extend that to his governor, Sarah Palin.

He doesn't agree with what he calls her theological views. He probably wouldn't ever vote for her. But he says McCain made a good choice. He says Troopergate's going to come out in her favor. The guy should have been fired. He says she's got more executive experience than Obama, McCain, and Biden combined. She doesn't satisfy his ideology, but Gravel notes that McCain's entitled to someone whose ideology doesn't reflect Gravel's ideology. He says she has the courage to stand up to Republican corruption, and he has the objective recognition of that at face value rather than running around talking about Troopergate or children's misconduct.

The interviewers couldn't handle this. They suggested his statements were because of an animus against Obama because Obama beat him for the nomination, as if Gravel ever thought he'd get the nomination. Once he starts talking about Democratic support for American imperialism, the interviewers decide to cut off the conversation. Perhaps their time had run out, but I wouldn't be surprised if they just didn't know what they were going to be in for. They do start the interview asking him to give them the dirt on Palin by talking about things we don't know about her, so it's not surprising that they were upset that he didn't deliver.

But think about his message. Gravel is almost libertarian in some ways. Palin has a libertarian streak that she doesn't apply consistently, because she's got other competing moral principles that sometimes win out. He's a contrarian who doesn't like what either party is up to. Palin took on her own party in several ways and won. He appreciates that. While he certainly doesn't agree with a lot of her views, many of which I share with her, I can see exactly what he appreciates about her and why he respects McCain's choice as more than just pragmatically useful for McCain and the GOP. He actually thinks McCain picked one of the best candidates among the choices he had within the GOP. When you keep in mind what really drives him, that shouldn't be as surprising as it at first sounds.

One of the smear memes about Sarah Palin has been that she claimed the invasion of Iraq was God's will. She did no such thing. She prayed that our leaders would do whatever God's will would be:

Pray for our military. He's [Palin's son Trask] going to be deployed in September to Iraq. Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do also what is right for this country - that our leaders, our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan.

Charles Gibson got this wrong in his interview with Palin:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words when he said -- first, he suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words.

But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side.

That's what that comment was all about, Charlie. And I do believe, though, that this war against extreme Islamic terrorists is the right thing. It's an unfortunate thing, because war is hell and I hate war, and, Charlie, today is the day that I send my first born, my son, my teenage son overseas with his Stryker brigade, 4,000 other wonderful American men and women, to fight for our country, for democracy, for our freedoms.

Charlie, those are freedoms that too many of us just take for granted. I hate war and I want to see war ended. We end war when we see victory, and we do see victory in sight in Iraq.

GIBSON: I take your point about Lincoln's words, but you went on and said, "There is a plan and it is God's plan."

PALIN: I believe that there is a plan for this world and that plan for this world is for good. I believe that there is great hope and great potential for every country to be able to live and be protected with inalienable rights that I believe are God-given, Charlie, and I believe that those are the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That, in my world view, is a grand -- the grand plan.

GIBSON: But then are you sending your son on a task that is from God?

PALIN: I don't know if the task is from God, Charlie. What I know is that my son has made a decision. I am so proud of his independent and strong decision he has made, what he decided to do and serving for the right reasons and serving something greater than himself and not choosing a real easy path where he could be more comfortable and certainly safer.

Molly Hemingway notes (at the end of the post) that ABC edited the clips down to his misrepresentation and her response, without any indication that he'd misquoted her, which makes it look as if she's changing her tune. Nice. Take awful journalism and cover it up by making it look as if the interviewer caught her in a gotcha moment of historical revisionism.

Steve Waldman of Beliefnet gets it right:

Palin asked members of the church to pray "that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan." That's very different. She's asking them to help insure that the war is part of God's plan, not declaring that it was.

Unfortunately, Waldman goes on to make exactly the same mistake immediately afterward, saying Gibson "should have asked her about her comment that it's "God's will" that Alaska have a great big natural gas pipeline."

The Associate Press published a piece today that it's hard for me to see as anything but a hit piece. It misrepresents Focus on the Family and ties them and Sarah Palin to views more extreme than they actually hold. This has become standard fare in the media over the last couple weeks, but I'm not going to accept it as perfectly ok just because they keep doing it.

Apparently Sarah Palin's church is promoting a conference called Love Won Out, sponsored by Focus on the Family. This is actually the first time I've heard of this, so everything I'm about to say is readily available on the web. The AP piece, written by Rachel D'Oro, describes the conference in their headline as promoting the conversion of gays. The first sentence reads, "Gov. Sarah Palin's church is promoting a conference that promises to convert gays into heterosexuals through the power of prayer."

Now I looked at Love Won Out's website, and here is what they say about converting gays into heterosexuals:

Are you here to "cure" gays? Absolutely not. The only time you'll ever hear the word "cure" used in relation to our event is by those who oppose Love Won Out. They also like to claim we want to "fix" or "convert" gays and lesbians and that we believe people can "pray away the gay." Such glib characterizations ignore the complex series of factors that can lead to same-sex attractions; they also mischaracterize our mission. We exist to help men and women dissatisfied with living homosexually understand that same-sex attractions can be overcome. It is not easy, but it is possible, as evidenced by the thousands of men and women who have walked this difficult road successfully.

But your goal is still to make gays straight, right?
That is a gross and narrow oversimplification. We aren't here to "make" anybody do or become anything; we are here to offer a biblical and experiential perspective on the issue of homosexuality that is, sadly, underreported in the mainstream media. Our goals include aiding parents who want to learn how to better love their sons or daughters without compromising their faith; helping people who want to better understand the many factors that can lead to someone adopting a homosexual identity; and assisting those who struggle with unwanted same-sex attractions and want to discover how they might also start upon the path ― a difficult path, as noted above ― to overcoming those desires.

Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?
We do not believe anyone chooses his or her same-sex attractions. We concur with the American Psychological Association's position that homosexuality is likely developmental in nature and caused by a "complex interaction of environmental, cognitive and biological factors" (www.apa.org). We would also agree with the American Psychiatric Association when it states "some people believe that sexual orientation is innate and fixed; however, sexual orientation develops across a person's lifetime." If you ever hear us use the word "choice," it is in relation to men and women who struggle with unwanted same-sex attractions choosing to steward their impulses in a way that aligns with their faith convictions.

So the organization insists that they do not seek to convert gays to straights. They seek to help gay Christians who believe a lifestyle of being gay is wrong. They seek to help them live in a way that resists their same-sex attraction and keep their desires in check, the same way that Christians seek to help single heterosexuals to live a celibate life. It's clear that their language about overcoming their desires is not conversion to heterosexuality, since it's held up in contrast to exactly that.

Yet D'Oro's AP piece defines the group most fundamentally as promising to do the very thing they insist they do not seek to do.

I think the only way to describe what's going on with Sarah Palin is that Bush Derangement Syndrome has now been transferred to Palin. There's no other way to explain how such blatant misrepresentation and distortion could so consistently and comprehensively turn so many of her views and actions into something completely different (even leaving aside the deeply insulting personal remarks, rumor-mongering, and sexist double-standards).

I'm glad someone has put together a numbered list of these myths, because so many of them have been perpetuated by major news organizations that I find myself repeating myself over and over. Directing someone to this site and a number in the list will be much easier. Here are a few highlights:

1. Yes, she is Governor of Alaska. No, she's not the Lieutenant Governor. No, she's not currently Mayor of Wasilla. Yes, she was Mayor of Wasilla, some years ago. [I add: Yes, that last link does go to a direct quote from Obama himself (and not just the campaign or supporters) belittling her experience by treating her as if she's still no more than the mayor of a small town.]

23. No, she's doesn't believe that the Iraq War was directed by God. Yes, she did pray that proceeding with the war was God's will: "they should pray 'that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God, that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan.'" (Ever hear the phrase "Not my will, but Thine, be done"?) Yes, this apparently freaks some people right out.

37. No, she didn't cut funding for unwed mothers; yes, she did increase it by "only" 354 percent instead of 454 percent, as part of a multi-year capital expenditures program. No, the Washington Post doesn't appear to have corrected their story. Even after this was pointed out in the comments on the story.

38. No, she didn't cut special needs student funding; yes, she did raise it by "only" 175 percent.

50. No, she doesn't believe in "abstinence only" education. Yes, she thinks abstinence is an effective way of preventing pregnancy. Duh. Yes, she believes kids should learn about condom use in schools.

66. No, she's not a "global warming denier", and when the crush dies down remind me to explain why the very phrasing "global warming denier" is anti-scientific, anti-intellectual, and a clear sign of a desire to impose your beliefs by coercion. But in the mean time, while I do believe that she has expressed some skepticism that warming is wholly human-caused, the existence of the Alaska Climate Change Sub-Cabinet and the Alaska Climate Change Strategy work demonstrate that she's considering the problem and has brought together people more expert than she to advise her.

But you've got to read it yourself to see some of the crazy rumors, especially 8 and 10. I'm not sure what 22 is doing on the list, but I had a similar response to 21.

Rep. Lynn Westmoreland represents a Georgia district in the U.S. House. He's recently come under fire for a very puzzling comment:

Just from what little I've seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity

As might be expected, he's been criticized for using the word 'uppity' when he was talking about a successful black couple. But then there's his defense:

I've never heard that term used in a racially derogatory sense. It is important to note that the dictionary definition of 'uppity' is 'affecting an air of inflated self-esteem -- snobbish.'

I've certainly heard it used in that sense, although it's never been from the mouth of someone who meant it. It's always been someone describing someone else's negative attitude toward "uppity Negroes". I'm not sure it's in common use anymore among genuine racists, but I wouldn't know, since I don't run in those circles. But I can imagine someone who doesn't travel in racist circles who also doesn't travel in very racially aware circles, where people might put it in the mouths of racists they're discussing. Such a person may have never heard the expression "uppity Negro". Sure, it's possible.

But there are two problems even if he really hasn't heard of that expression. The first is his claim that 'uppity' and 'elitist' are synonymous. I don't think that's true. To be uppity is to extend yourself above your place, which assumes there's a proper place you're supposed to remain in. To be elitist is to think oneself higher than others, which assumes you think you're better than others. The former is an attitude toward a place that someone else has judged fit for you. The latter is an attitude toward people you yourself have judged lower than you. So the elitist charge reflects badly on the views of the elitist. Saying someone is uppity reflects badly on the views of the person saying it. That's an important difference. Westmoreland may well not know that difference, but that would just show that he doesn't understand how the words are used.

If he's going to give this defense, he has to say not just that he was ignorant of a way of putting Negroes in their place that was very common in the place he represents in Congress, certainly during his own lifetime (he was born in 1950). He also has to admit to being pretty ignorant about the word's basic meaning even in a non-racial context.

But there's something even more puzzling about his statement. Read it carefully. He doesn't say that the Obamas are uppity, as a racist would. He says they think they're uppity. That means (if he understands the word, anyway) that he thinks they think they're rising above a place that they themselves would describe as their proper place, something they shouldn't rise above. Does he really think the Obamas think that's true of themelves? I doubt it. And that means there's yet another aspect of how the word 'uppity' is used that he doesn't understand. I'm beginning to think he just doesn't know much about the word at all. Perhaps he's heard it once or twice and somehow formed some false beliefs about how the word functions. I know I've found out real meanings of words that I had thought meant something else, usually inferred from a few occurrences in books I've read when I've used context clues to figure out the term but never bothered to look it up. It's possible that's what's happened here.

If that's right, he probably isn't lying when he says he's never heard it in a racial context. Someone familiar with that context isn't likely to misuse it in both of the ways that he does. But it's hard to say that it's not an ignorant statement. It's (at the very least) ignorant about what the word itself means and how it functions syntactically. I've only seen two news stories, a blog post, and a very long comment thread on this, but it's a little disturbing that I didn't see anyone making either of these points. Is the American public at large that ignorant of how this word is used? Maybe it's just left our national vocabulary except when referring to how racists talk, and that isn't enough to clue people in to how the word functions. Can that really be?

In the media feeding frenzy on Sarah Palin in the last six days, some completely inappropriate and ridiculous questions have dominated the coverage I've paid attention to (which has consisted mostly of NPR, as it happens). Many of the questions getting major play would never be asked of a man, and some are actually illegal to ask at job interviews. But there have been a few genuine issues in the mix. I want to look at one that almost everyone reporting on it has gotten wrong, both in the mainstream media and on blogs (and it's taken me a lot of work to keep inaccuracies and misrepresentations out of her Wikipedia article).

It stems from a brief answer in a political debate when she was running for governor, which she was able to follow up on in an interview the next day. I have found exactly one source that details her response, although it doesn't actually include the exact wording of the question, exact wording that might actually be very important. Here is the exchange during the gubernatorial debate:

The volatile issue of teaching creation science in public schools popped up in the Alaska governor's race this week when Republican Sarah Palin said she thinks creationism should be taught alongside evolution in the state's public classrooms. Palin was answering a question from the moderator near the conclusion of Wednesday night's televised debate on KAKM Channel 7 when she said, "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

I'd love to know what the question was, because I don't know what her answer means otherwise. Debate between both is a good thing. Both of what? The author of the article says creation science and evolution, but I don't trust a newspaper writer to be careful with important distinctions. Some people call intelligent design arguments creation science, despite there being a world of difference between the two categories. One is science done very badly. The other is a long-standing philosophical argument form that goes back to Plato and Xenophon whose current versions include a premise based on scientific fact but whose conclusion might be questioned, because it's an inference to the best explanation, and that sort of argument is by its very nature only probabilistic, and these particular arguments (depending on the version) can admit of alternative explanations that others will argue are the actual best explanation. So I'd like to know what they were discussing before I can interpret even her first sentence.

There's also an issue of what she means by teaching it. Does she mean (a) requiring it in the curriculum, (b) allowing teachers to include it in the curriculum, or (c) allowing teachers to discuss it if students happen to bring up the issue in class? The same article, which as I said is the only one a serious search could turn up from the time, goes on to describe her interview the next day, giving some much-needed clarification on the second issue. In short, she holds (c). (Unfortunately, it doesn't help very much on the first issue.)

In an interview Thursday, Palin said she meant only to say that discussion of alternative views should be allowed to arise in Alaska classrooms: "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum." She added that, if elected, she would not push the state Board of Education to add such creation-based alternatives to the state's required curriculum. Members of the state school board, which sets minimum requirements, are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Legislature. "I won't have religion as a litmus test, or anybody's personal opinion on evolution or creationism," Palin said. Palin has occasionally discussed her lifelong Christian faith during the governor's race but said teaching creationism is nothing she has campaigned about or even given much thought to.

Eugene Volokh uses scare quotes to refer to The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and The Jewish Conspiracy, both of which he then goes on to admit to being a member of (along with most of the contributors to his blog). Scare quotes usually indicate that you believe there's no such thing, and I'm sure that's actually his view. But then he says he's a member of both. This is an interesting set of views.

He must think these terms refer to the groups that Hillary Clinton and anti-semitists (respectively) call by those names, and those groups really exist (because a group is just a group of people), but the groups don't have the features believed to be true of them (among other things, being a conspiracy). If that's right, then he's taking the names as proper names (and not definite descriptions, which wouldn't refer to anything) and taking them refer to exactly the groups the people whose false beliefs generated the existence of those groups (or at least generated their social relevance if the group exists simply because the members exist).

It struck me that this is almost exactly what the majority view in philosophy of race says about races. Races are social kinds whose existence (or at least social relevance if the group exists merely because its members exist) was caused by false beliefs by those doing the classifying. But the difference is that everyone uses race-terms, even those who pretend there aren't any races. Most people, on the other hand, don't believe in either of these so-called conspiracies. That's why his speaking this way sounded funny to me in this case, almost as if it requires saying it tongue-in-cheek.

I've tried hard to make sense of Barack Obama's various statements, stumbles, votes, and explanations related to abortion. With many of them, I haven't succeeded. I've come to the conclusion that he simply hasn't thought hard about the issue and that he's grossly unaware of many of the important background facts, both about the legal background and the general philosophical conversation about this important issue. I wanted to put my conclusions together in one post, with links to some of the places where I've spent more time on the details for some of these things.

1. Obama misunderstands Supreme Court precedent so badly that he thinks it prohibits using the word 'person' for a prematurely-born infant. Supreme Court precedent does prohibit certain kinds of laws from restricting abortion, but it never does so by defining the moral status of a fetus (it simply ignores that issue as if it's unimportant) or by declaring anything about which human beings count as persons. I've discussed this issue at length here, with some followup discussion here, and those who were defending him in the comments didn't seem to me to have anything that really helped.

2. Obama misunderstands Supreme Court precedent so badly that he thinks he can require the kinds of exceptions to abortion that his voting record shows he insists on (and the Supreme Court has consistently required) while saying that mental health exceptions only mean diagnosed mental illnesses. This is not how pro-choice politicians opposing laws without mental health exceptions have based their opposition, and it's not how the Supreme Court has taken it. Any mental distress or psychological harm counts as a legitimate exception, according to Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and pretty much all abortion decisions the Supreme Court has rendered where it's come up. (The only exception is the one instance since the 80s when the conservatives have won the day, the second time the Supreme Court heard a case on a partial-birth abortion ban. The removal of the mental health exception there applies only to one method of late-term abortion and not to all late-term abortions.)

What's interesting about this is that it pulls Obama (1) to the left of the Supreme Court on the first issue, to the point of refusing to support a law that requires doctors to comfort and care for born infants who happen to be premature enough that it's unlikely but possible that they'll live and (2) to the right of the Supreme Court on the second issue, to the point of refusing to accept the limit on abortion restrictions that the Supreme Court has imposed, that any psychological trauma, even if not a diagnosed mental illness, can justify an abortion no matter what other circumstances occur (including bans against exactly that instance of abortion). So far there's no inconsistency.

But what Jan Crawford Greenburg points out is that Obama is on record opposing what he's been saying in #2. It's not just that he's on record saying it but has flipped to oppose it. He's currently supporting legislation that opposes his current position in #2, and he's promised that it will be a top priority upon assuming the office of president. The Freedom of Choice Act would basically remove all state and federal restrictions on abortion at any time and for any reason. Is Obama just talking out of both sides of his mouth? Or does he really not understand how badly he's mucked things up on this issue?

Matthew Franck notes that on one of Barack Obama's exam questions from when he was teaching law, he asks whether an equal protection challenge can be brought against a law requiring states to be color-blind. Franck says he knows of lots of people who think the equal protection clause requires states to be color-blind, but he hasn't encountered a serious argument anywhere that such laws violate the equal protection clause. I haven't either, but I don't read law reviews. Still, such an argument isn't hard to imagine, and I think it's actually a sound argument.

The equal protection clause entitles people of all races to equal protection of the laws. The laws therefore need to be able to rely on the distinction between members of one race and members of another if they are to ensure that each race is equally protected by them. Therefore, color-blind laws, which disallow the state from paying attention to race, violate the equal protection clause.

It sounds like a pretty good argument to me. As a policy issue, I don't mind restricting affirmative action in universities to class rather than race, or at least ensuring that the standards aren't lowered as much as they are. There's a significant argument that the way affirmative action is typically practiced in that setting (as opposed to in the workplace, which is a very different matter) seems to me to harm the people it's intended to help, given that admissions officers already go out of their way to promote diversity (so there's no discrimination to combat at that level), and it means accepting people who won't be able to do as well and then will appear less good when they graduate than they would at a lower institution with much higher grades and more time for extracurriculars. There are other negatives too, but that's the one that seems decisive to me. I think it's much better to work at the high school level and below to help kids do better in school, to care more about school, and to think of college as something worth doing.

But I can't see how it could be good to ban affirmative action by not allowing a state to recognize racial distinctions in any way. That sort of law is not just bad policy. It really is unconstitutional because it prevents enforcement of the equal protection clause.

Remember that Born-Alive bill that requires an additional doctor present at an abortion to keep any survivor of an abortion alive? Back in February, I wrote about Barack Obama's insistence on not passing such a law in Illinois, finding it at best puzzling given his party's wholehearted passing of the law in the U.S. Senate, with people like Barbara Boxer and organizations like NARAL endorsing the law.

As I said in my previous post, I don't think it's fair to call Obama a supporter of infanticide (as distinguished from abortion) because of this. At the same time, I don't see any consistent justification for opposing the law, and his own official reason didn't hold up. He said it was because the federal version had a neutrality clause that stated that the law takes no stance on the issue of the moral status of the fetus, while the Illinois law had no such clause.

At the time, it seems that Obama himself had held up a neutrality amendment in committee, so he was the one to blame for the laws not being similar in that way, and that's no reason not to pass the law if you do support the federal one. I concluded that either he didn't really support the federal law (and was thus lying about his views) or he was just inconsistent in the various things he's said without any sense of really believing anything clear on the matter.

Now it seems Obama actually did put the neutrality amendment before his committee. But then he and all the other Democrats on the committee voted against putting the amended law before the whole Illinois Senate. So, again, I'm not sure what to make of this. Is this another example among many of him simply lying about a past position that embarrasses him politically because it's far to the left of the mainstream, hoping no one would catch up with him on it? Or is there some way to put together what he's said with this revelation? I suppose he could have forgotten what his reasoning at the time was, but it's been an issue in the campaign long enough that he should be thinking it through and preparing a response that fits with the actual Senate records.

What possible motivation could he have had to pass this amendment and then still vote against the bill? It's not just inconsistent with what he's been saying happened. I'm not sure it's even internally consistent. What would be the point of voting for the amendment (an amendment that I'm pretty sure the Republicans had added) and then voting against the amended law? Was there some other amendment to the law that his party, who was in the majority on the committee, somehow couldn't get away from the law? That sounds unlikely. But if it was something in the law proper, then why would he say he would have been fine with the federal version?

According to Justin Taylor, Obama had also defended his past actions by saying "there was already a law in place in Illinois that said that you always have to supply life-saving treatment to any infant under any circumstances...." (See the 8/12 JT comment here.) He cites a David Freddoso book that says that's factually incorrect. Perhaps Obama misunderstood the law, so he may not have been lying, but if that's right then he at least hadn't done his homework, which as a legislator he ought to have been doing. This is second-hand information, so I'm open to correction on this, but I think if these things are right, then this piece of Obama's past that already reflected very badly on him is probably at least a little worse than it had seemed.

I just discovered that the Right Reason blog is no longer online at all. It was a politically conservative philosophers' blog hosted at the same server that hosts this blog, and I knew that it had stopped producing new posts, but I didn't expect all the archives to disappear. I managed to recover all the content from the guest-posting I did toward the end of that blog last year, including the whole comment thread on each post. I didn't know about archive.org, but it apparently saves the content of any web page at various intervals so you can go back and check what was once there. So I'm going to be posting that series here on days when I have less time to blog new stuff. Here's the introductory post. I'll put the comments below the fold since this initial post led to quite a lengthy discussion despite its brevity.

Introduction: Christianity and Politics (Guest Posting)

Posted by Jeremy Pierce on July 12, 2007 9:56 AM

Remember that ad used against Harold Ford that portrayed him as a philanderer in the 2006 Senate elections? Since Ford is black and the woman in the ad was white, a lot of people concluded that Tennessee voters were intended to draw the connection that this black boy was fooling around with their white womenfolk. I don't think there's any way to prove it in that case, but it sure was a lot more plausible as a possible play on racist sentiment than this current one.

So the McCain campaign comes along and compares Barack Obama to the substanceless Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Criticize the McCain all you want for its insinuation that Obama is like them, but please don't pretend that it's like the Harold Ford ad, as the New York Times editorial board does. The comparison is revealing, about those making it anyway, but it's logically invalid. I knew some people were touting it about, because someone on NPR mentioned it only to give a pretty decisive argument against it. Nevertheless, I'm a bit surprised to see it being endorsed by the NYT editors on their blog. That's pretty prominent for what I had thought was a position on the extremes.

There was no insinuation whatsoever in the ad that Obama is getting it on with these women. There was no suggestion at all that he's after white women. The ad compared Obama with these women, suggesting that he himself is like them, not that he's doing something with them. Even granting the premise that the anti-Ford ad is playing on racist fears of intermarriage, there simply is no argument that the McCain ad is remotely in the same ballpark. The ad criticizes Obama, but being black should not make remove someone from the possibility of criticism, even unfair criticism, especially in politics at this level. Criticism, even unfair criticism, is not the same thing as racism, and it's not the same thing as attempts to make use of others' racism. This is, in effect, the NYT editors' argument:

1. The anti-Ford ad had a black man and a hot white woman in it, and that was playing on racist fears of intermarriage.
2. The anti-Obama ad has a black man and hot white women in it.
3. Therefore, the anti-Obama ad is playing on racist fears of intermarriage.

It's not hard to see that the argument is logically invalid. There are any number of explanations for why an ad can have a black man and hot white women. The one offered in premise 1, even if it's true, is not the only one or even a remotely plausible one in this case. The ad portrays these white women as moronic celebrities, not as potential lovers for Obama. The point is absolutely clear to anyone with any political sense, and many pundits have criticized the ad in a way that recognizes its point without adding nonsense to it.

So why is the New York Times editorial board making it out to be racism? I have two theories. Either may be false, but I can't think of another, so I'm assuming one is true. Either (a) they're really, really stupid and can't see how fallacious this comparison is or (b) really, really immoral and want to make McCain look like a racist when they know there's no evidence in this ad that he or anyone in his campaign is. The first is uncharitable about their intelligence, and the second is uncharitable about their motivations, so the principle of charity can't help us out. There is no charitable explanation of their behavior.

If it's the latter explanation, then we have good reason to think this constitutes criminal defamation of character. If they know full well that they're lying to make him look like a racist, then it's legally prosecutable as libel. Perhaps they're not directly motivated by wanting him to look bad so much as to defend Obama's recent claims that the McCain campaign would use racist attacks by pointing out just such an attack, but I don't think that matters legally. They know they're lying about something that they know will defame his character. As I understand the law, that's sufficient for criminal defamation, and Wikipedia seems to confirm that judgment. On the other hand, they could believe the above argument is actually a good one, but then they'd be much dumber than you'd expect for people as highly educated as they are.

A friend sent my brother a link to Bush or Batman?. It's a pretty funny juxtaposition of quotes from President Bush and the Adam West version of Batman, and the people they find on the street can't seem to distinguish which are which. A moments reflection and a quick look here show that they've clearly picked quotes by each that sound like something the other might have said, but the fact that there are so many is pretty interesting. So does Bush talk about evil the way the superheroes he grew up watching on TV did?

(I should say that I'm not sure why some of the YouTube commenters think this entire video is an attack against Bush. There is one line about the Bush not believing the Batman quote about the Constitution, but I could see a Bush supporter even saying something like that, intending it ironically because so many people do think such a crazy thing about Bush. Anyway, I thought the comparison actually reflected well on him.)

I was originally going to connect this with yesterday's post on Obama and Evil because it relates to the way President Bush talks about evil, but I decided not to do too many things in one post. That does raise an extremely important issue. A lot of people complain about the way the current president talks, but they don't realize how grateful they ought to be. If he's modeling his speeches on Adam West's Batman, then we may have just narrowly missed having a president who talks like the Burt Ward version of Robin.

Last year, I expressed my consternation at those who think anyone who talks about fighting evil is relying on a conception of a force of evil, some even going as far as calling it dualist in the sense of good and evil being permanent, equal forces of reality that constantly war against each other. I gave several examples that show this is a normal way of talking that has pretty much no metaphysical assumption about what it means for something to be evil.

There's a tendency on the other side to assume that those who don't speak of evil must not understand it. See, for instance, the criticisms in the comments of Jim Lindgren's post about Barack Obama from about a month ago. Lindgren's argument is very interesting, and I think a lot of what he says is right. He read The Audacity of Hope and concluded that Obama really does think the United States is the best country in the world, rather than hating it as a number of people have pretended, but he thinks it's got some problems nonetheless and most of the time focuses on those problems rather than constantly praising all that's good about the U.S. Since it's my general personality tendency to do the same sort of thing, I have no criticism of that. It's good to point out problems, because otherwise you don't know they're there and thus can't do anything about them, and spending more time pointing out problems than recognizing what's good simply doesn't amount to not recognizing what's good.

On the other hand, Lindgren was looking for hints in the book that Obama has a deep grasp of the nature of evil rather than simply thinking everyone is basically good but misguided. Since I think no one is basically good, and everyone has downright awful motivations almost all of the time, short of the grace of God (which includes common grace and thus is not present just in Christians), I would have to disagree with such a stance. I realize that most people don't share this view. It's fairly extreme, in fact. I do contend that it is the Christian view, however, and if Obama does not think of default human motivational structure as deeply evil, then he does not accept the Christian view of human nature.

I'm not especially interesting in distinguishing between what I think is the biblical view and other, less extreme, views of deeply evil motivations. One might not think most human motivations (short of God's grace) ultimately stem from sin to think that there are deeply evil motivations. What I'm interested is whether Barack Obama admits to the reality of deep evil, not whether he holds the biblical view that takes this to be the default condition of all humanity (although if he's commented on that explicitly, I'd love to hear about it). There is one reason to question whether he does. Should we think someone who recognizes so many problems in the U.S. and points them out, despite having a positive view of the U.S., would also do the same with human beings if it comes to deeply evil motivations? Lindgren didn't recognize anything like that in Obama's book, and I can't remember ever hearing anything from Obama like that.

Has Obama has given any evidence that he believes in the depths of evil rather than just unfortunate structural problems in society and misguided motivations? A number of the commenters on Lindgren's post rightly pointed out that not using the word 'evil' doesn't amount to not believing in it. On the other hand, if Obama's autobiography presents him as a believer in mostly -misguided good at the heart of those who don't see the light as he does, then we probably should wonder if he admits to real evil in the hearts of human beings, short of strong evidence in his language for such a belief. I'm skeptical at this point. I'm curious if anyone can point me to anywhere that Obama does talk about evil in this way. It doesn't have to use the word 'evil' (and a Google search for "Obama evil" isn't going to turn up much that's helpful; I already tried it). My standards for this aren't as high as Lindgren's.

I don't understand what it is to play the race card, so I don't use that expression. Race is fine to bring in when it's relevant and not ok to bring in when it's not, but such an expression seems to me to assume that it's always inappropriate. But I did want to say something about the following remarks (taken from here):

Nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have [sic] a real answer for the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He's risky.

Notice that there's no explicit mention of race here. He also doesn't reference his middle name 'Hussein'. He just refers to it obliquely (or perhaps he's referring to his whole name, but it's his middle name that people have used against him). He also makes a veiled reference to his dark complexion with the comment about presidents on dollar bills. But he doesn't use any race terms. Further, when McCain called him out for playing the race card, his campaign denied that the dollar bill reference had anything to do with race. It was about his not being a Washington insider. (I sure hope he continues this line of defense, because if it becomes clear that he sees the founders of this country as evil Washington insiders whose government we need to do away with, then he's not going to be getting very far.) It seems as if he's dancing around the issues he wants to get across without saying anything about them. It makes it sound as if he's trying to engage in the politics of racial fear without losing his appearance of being a post-racial candidate of hope.

Compare his very similar speech from June 20:

The choice is clear. Most of all we can choose between hope and fear. It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they're going to run. They're going to try to make you afraid. They're going to try to make you afraid of me. 'He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?'

Then the previous day (from the same source):

They're going to try to make me into a scary guy. They're even trying to make Michelle into a scary person. Right? I don't know, before I wasn't black enough. 'Now he might be too black. We don't know whether he's going to socialize - well, who knows what.'

In our sermons, we just finished Matthew 1-7 followed by the Ten Commandments. Matthew 5-7 contains the Sermon on the Mount, and doing that right next to the Ten Commandments is pretty convicting. It's hard to imagine anyone who has carefully read and studied the Sermon on the Mount coming away from it thinking that it's easy to follow Jesus' teaching there. In the light of the full teaching of Jesus, anyone who does so is like the Pharisee who thanks God that he's not like those sinners, someone Jesus roundly condemns. The person is indeed a hypocrite of one of the worst kinds. In one of the last few sermons in the series, one of our elders pointed out exactly this response as one of the many ways people have responded to the Sermon on the Mount that miss the point, in this case violating several other major teachings of Jesus in the process.

I've been trying to find a good interpretation of Barack Obama's 2006 words that have recently gotten a lot of attention. (I first saw the complete quote in context here. although I won't endorse everything in that post, which also seems to me to be focused in the wrong direction.) I'm not having an easy time being charitable.

And even if we did have only Christians within our borders, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage so radical that it's doubtful that our Defense Department would survive its application?

There's a lot in there that worries me, quite deeply in fact. I've seen a lot of comment about these words, and a lot of it isn't entirely fair, which amazes me given how many things could be fairly criticized. I do think it reveals some lack of understanding about the New Testament's presentation of how Christians should see the Old Testament, but some very smart biblical scholars make those same mistakes, and in the theologically liberal churches whose well Obama drinks from, I'm sure he gets most of his understanding of the Bible from such people (probably very indirectly).

I've deliberately put off commenting on it, but I still haven't seen anyone point out the aspect of this statement that most disturbs me. (The closest is Collin Hansen's Christianity Today article, but that only gets to the beginning of my worry.) This isn't the only time I've seen Obama try to use the Sermon on the Mount as a method of sticking it to someone whose sins he doesn't happen to commit (or at least not in the way they do). It's very strange to use the Sermon on the Mount that way, though. The Sermon on the Mount sets some pretty tough standards, ones that no one really could meet.

I'm a firm believer in not assigning the term 'flip-flop' to someone unless they go back and forth on it more than once, with a clear sense that they're talking out of both sides of their mouth to different audiences. A change of mind is not a flip-flop, despite the popular tendency to use that term for a principled change of mind.

Nevertheless, there are reasons to criticize someone for changing their mind. One such reason is if they insist that they haven't changed their mind. Barack Obama seems to be in that category when it comes to gun control. He supported the DC gun ban back in February when the issue was before the Supreme Court. Now that the case is decided and the law deemed unconstitutional, he says he supports the decision. See Booker Rising for the video clips.

His only justification for supporting Justice Scalia's opinion overturning the ban now seems to be the same justification he gave for supporting the ban earlier, which is more than a little puzzling. He supports an individual right to gun ownership but thinks it's constitutional to restrict that right in certain contexts, and his support for the most restrictive ban on gun control in the country showed that he thinks these restrictions on the individual right can be pretty extensive without being unconstitutional. So the DC ban was ok. But now he responds to the opinion by saying that the same position he's held all along can support this opinion. He believes in an individual right but thinks restrictions of that right are constitutional. So the DC ban is not ok. Yet he's insisted that this isn't a change in his view. How is it not a change of view to think it's unconstitutional but then to agree with the Supreme Court's narrowly-divided opinion for the opposite view?

So I have a hard time distinguishing this from the mindset of flip-flopping, even though it's not a case of going back and forth. It's what you say on a divisive issue if you want everyone to think you agree with them, all the while planning your policy on something that a lot of them would not agree with at all. It's hard for me to see it as anything else but dishonesty of exactly the type that Senator Obama consistently says he's going to be a change away from. (He surely would be a change from the current administration in terms of policy, but that's not really the thrust of his change rhetoric.)

Update: Obama's response to Hillary Clinton's changing positions on Iraq is a good example of his condemnation of the very thing he does on this issue:

I have to say that she started this campaign saying that she wanted to make history and lately she has been spending a lot of time rewriting it. I know that in Washington it is acceptable to say or do anything it takes to get elected, but I really don't think that is the kind of politics that is good for our party, and I don't think it is good for our country, and I think that the American people will reject it in this election.

I sure hope the American people will reject it in this election, but it's becoming clear that rejecting it would mean rejecting Obama's candidacy. McCain's changed some of his views, but at least he's giving reasons for those changes and admitting that he's changed his mind. Obama is completely contradicting his previous statements while pretending he hasn't changed his views at all.

Senator John McCain opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment during President Bush's first term on the grounds that such decisions should be left to states (meaning state legislatures or voter initiatives, not state judiciaries). To be consistent with that position, he will probably now support a similar but not identical amendment to prevent state judiciaries or the federal judiciary from interfering with the process that he originally favored. So this position that I'm predicting will be entirely consistent with his original one, even though in one instance he opposed an amendment to the Constitution and in the other he would be favoring one. How much do you want to bet that this is going to be played very heavily as a flip-flop?

Update: I thought it might also be worth a reminder that people have previously taken McCain's consistent view on gay marriage to be a flip-flop simply because he decided to distinguish between two different things people might mean by 'gay marriage'.

This hadn't occurred to me until now, but Wickle makes a good point. People who like Bill Clinton and hate the current president tend to distrust Dick Morris but are now loving Scott McClellan and saying he's a hero for turning on Bush. People who support the president and hate the Clintons tend to love Dick Morris for speaking the truth about the Clinton Administration but think Scott McClellan is a liar and a traitor.

Isn't there some kind of inconsistency going on here? The situations seem reasonably parallel. The presumption should be to distrust both or to accept both (probably the former more than the latter, since it's generally a good idea to be more charitable to people being criticized than to those doing the criticizing). You need an argument, then, for why you should treat one as a hero for speaking the truth and the other as a liar and a traitor to all that's good. There may well be some considerations for doing that in either direction, but are there any that are so compelling to justify such a stark difference in treatment? I suspect not.

All administrations have their flaws, and all people have their negatives. There's probably something to what both men have said, and they've probably both exaggerated and taken events out of context. Perhaps there are outright lies involved. This isn't about the particulars of what they've said. It's about how people have treated them. I can't explain the disparity of treatment by either side unless it's based it on partisan assumptions that one political party is always on the side of righteousness while the other is always motivated only by the purest evil, and thus anyone who turns on one is a hero while anyone who turns on the other is the enemy.

John McCain has ditched the support of John Hagee. Hagee has some pretty wacky views. I'll be the first to say that. They don't compare in offensiveness with those of Jeremiah Wright, but they are weird. The fact that Hagee supported him also doesn't compare with Obama's 20-year commitment (with lots of money given), since McCain didn't invite anything from Hagee, never mind attend his church or announce him as his spiritual adviser (before pretending the media had invented that term when it came back to haunt him).

But one complaint did seem to get a foothold. Hagee has a reputation for being anti-Semitic, and McCain finally gave in when a particular statement (from about a decade ago) surfaced. This statement, which can be found here, basically amounts to saying that God had a purpose for allowing the Holocaust, and that purpose was to bring his people Israel back to the Holy Land. This statement was labeled anti-Semitic, and because of it McCain ended up withdrawing his acceptance of Hagee's support of it.

This completely baffles me. Hagee's statement is unfounded biblically. It's a stupid inference to draw given that we're not in a position to know much about what purposes God might have had for allowing Hitler to do what he did. Nevertheless, it's neither innovative nor anti-Jewish to think God had purposes for Jews through what happened in the Holocaust. It's parallel to many things said throughout the Hebrew Bible, including the way the Bible speaks of Jacob's ordeals with Laban, Joseph's trials with his brothers and in Egypt, all Israel's captivity in Egypt, and their much later captivity in Babylon.

Certainly anyone who accepts Christian teaching will find it hard to deny that the Holocaust is part of all things, since it did happen, and Christian teaching includes Paul's statements about all things working together for good. But you don't need the New Testament to see that the basic thesis that the Holocaust must have served some ultimate purpose in God's plans is perfectly representative of the theology of the Hebrew Bible, i.e. what contemporary Jews recognize as the Bible. There's plenty of criticism of Jews among their own prophets, though it's not criticism of Jews as Jews but of particular Jews or the majority of particular generations of Jews at a time. Hagee would surely agree with all that as part of the Christian Bible. But the main claim here is simply that it's anti-Semitic to think that God had a purpose for the Holocaust. That's completely and totally crazy.

Senator McCain should not have given in on this for the reason he seems to have given in on it. Hagee has weird views, and proposing the particular purpose he did goes way beyond anything a Christian should conclude from the theology the biblical authors assume. But the element that's being called anti-Semitic simply is not. The idea that a basic premise of Hebrew theology is anti-Semitic would be funny if large numbers of people didn't somehow get themselves to believe it and to smear public figures for believing it (or accepting support from those who believe it). McCain's description of this as deeply offensive should be seriously alienating to any Jews or Christians who hold to the traditional theology of both religions. This probably won't backfire for him politically, because most voters are as ignorant of the Bible as McCain apparently is, but evangelicals don't need another excuse to feel alienated by McCain.

We got this message on our voicemail from a number that was listed as RESTRICTED. It was an automated message that must have started before it began recording.

We just need to know what email address we can reach you at. The email address we have for you stopped working. So we wanted to ask you to take a quick second to update your address. You can do it over the phone right now. All you have to do is press 1 and fill out your email address. Just press 1. It just takes a second. That way we'll be able to keep you up to date on the great work that MoveOn's 3.2 million members are doing every day to win back the country from radical Republicans. So please just press 1, and thank you for your time and your continued support of MoveOn. And of course this message was paid for by MoveOn.org's political action and was not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

Then the voice changes, and there's a phone number for how to reach them (I assume for when the recording is left on an answering machine or voicemail, and you can't press 1 to get anywhere).

So is this a new tactic or something? Our phone number is associated with only two adults, both members of the Republican Party. No one else has been at this number since 1999. I don't think MoveOn.org even existed back then. (Update: I guess it has.) I'm pretty confident they would count us as radical Republicans. So is there something we actually did that they incompetently assumed would make us prime candidates for giving money to them? Or are they just trying to annoy conservatives by sending them spam phone calls?

I saw this several months ago but didn't get around to linking to it, and I've been spending all my online time looking at the bevy of activity on the Supreme Court blogs, so I wanted to post something that didn't take much time (and I had to drudge the dregs of my potential blogging list to find this). According to Justin Taylor in the above-linked post (there's no citation or link, so I'm taking his word for it), Hillary Clinton seemed to admit in January that she was allowing her supporters to die of exposure at one of her rallies. How so? Well, she said it was so cold that her supporters at the rally were literally freezing to death.

It's so funny that the word 'literally' is one of the most common words used to mean something other than its literal meaning. Here's another example that I love repeating. The great philosopher William Alston told our Christian philosophers' group about a decade ago that he had once heard a football announcer say, "and when he gets down into the red zone, he literally explodes!" I knew football was dangerous, but I didn't know how bad it really was!

What's going on here linguistically is that the word 'literally' is being used as an intensifier rather than to convey its literal meaning. This usage of the word is roughly synonymous to other intensifiers such as 'really', 'truly', and 'completely'. There's nothing linguistically inappropriate about it. Words don't always mean their literal meaning or their usual meaning. What's funny about it is how easy it is to intensify a metaphor by adding the word 'literal' without meaning it literally at all. In this case, it's particularly unfortunate, because if you did take her literally (and she did use the word that might in many cases indicate that you should) she would be admitting to what may well be gross negligence of the sort that could lead to many people's deaths.

I have to agree with Sean Oxendine on this:

But the absolute top of the list is how much the outcome of the race has depended on the ordering of the contests. Imagine, for example, where things would stand if Georgia, Alabama and a few caucus states hadn't moved their dates up to Super Tuesday, but Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas had, in fact, moved up. This race would likely have been over February 3, with calls for Obama to get out reaching the same crescendo that the calls against Hillary are reaching.

Of course, the whole way we got to this position was Obama's magical "ten in a row" during February. But Maryland, DC, Virginia, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Hawai'i, Maine, Washington and Nebraska were all races that he was supposed to win -- and by large margins at that -- with the arguable exception of Wisconsin. Imagine if those races had instead been Indiana, Kentucky, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and a couple of Super Tuesday states (say, MA and TN). The storyline would be completely different.

What a way to pick a President.

This is a criticism of the whole process, not just of how the Democratic primary does things. It's even clearer for the Republican primary. If Florida had been the first GOP state, followed by New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, Giuliani might have been the nominee. If Iowa had been followed by certain key Southern states without New Hampshire in between, Huckabee would have had a real chance. If South Carolina had been first, followed by Tennessee and perhaps Georgia, we might have actually seen Fred Thompson doing well in other states. If Michigan had been before Iowa, Romney would have had enough momentum that he could possibly have done a good deal better, and if more Western states were early on he might have had enough to get the momentum necessary to take states he lost by a large margin.

This process is highly sensitive to small changes in the order of states, and that seems to me to be a very bad thing.

What organization has a weekly death toll more than twice the five-year death toll for American troops in Iraq? Planned Parenthood [ht: Sam].

I don't think it's remotely morally decent to abandon Iraq the way most Americans seem to want to do (and most of the rest of the world wants us to do). Nevertheless, if I had to be a one-issue voter and did share that view, I would have little inclination to prefer the war issue to the abortion issue. Other issues being equal, anti-war pro-lifers will have a very hard case to make if they want to end up supporting the Democratic candidate over John McCain. Other issues aren't equal, of course, but there will have to be an awful lot of very serious issues, all favoring the Democratic side, to overcome this difference (and some people probably do think that). But I've seen people, even commenters on this blog, claiming that pro-life issues are outweighed by the anti-war issue, even claiming that it's more pro-life to support those who approve of the status quo on abortion in order to end the war. I don't know how that view can stand up under these numbers.

Michael Stickings of the Moderate Voice has a very puzzling post. Apparently Hillary Clinton has been participating in an evangelical Bible study group for Congress that encourages Christians to influence those around them for good, including sharing their faith with those who aren't believers. Stickings seems to think this is really disturbing for some reason, and the only sense I can get of why is that he must think this group is a front for a radical, theonomistic agenda. But I don't see any real evidence in anything he links to that it's even close to that. I posted the following comment several days ago:

I'm wondering what the fuss is supposed to be about. This looks like a typical evangelical group. They study the Bible and believe in influencing those around them (and therefore indirectly the world) through personal relationships infused with godliness and what they as Christians believe to be the truth. I realize that some conspiracy theorists associate any language about influencing the world with conspiracies about controlling people through theonomistic enforcement of Christian beliefs on those who reject such teachings, but anyone remotely familiar with evangelicalism should know that this is simply standard salt and light kind of stuff from the Sermon on the Mount. So what is it exactly that Hillary is supposed to explain? She is a Christian. Is it surprising that she wants to live her beliefs rather than pretending they don't influence her life?

As of this writing, there's been no response.

Kevin Drum had a very helpful discussion of the charges the Obama campaign and its surrogates have been leveling against Hillary Clinton. I'm not sure I agree with him in every case, but it's one of the best things I've seen on the subject. Any claim that it's Hillary who's really driving the racial overtones of the Democratic race is just ignoring a lot of what's out there. Some on her side have surely said things intended to be taken in a racially-negative way. But the examples he gives (and see the discussions he links to for arguments why the criticisms are indeed over-the-top) show that it's not simply an example of the Hillary side raising racial issues and the Obama side ignoring them and not making anything of race.

I had to take interest in the first two comments mentioning Geraldine Ferraro, who didn't come up in the post. What interested me most about their appearance is the assumption that that's a genuine case of racism that they must be taking to undermine his whole argument. First of all, if it's genuine racism that doesn't undermine his argument. His point is that many of the accusations of racism are going way too far. One case that is racism doesn't undermine that claim.

Second, I don't think it's fair to describe that as racist. If the same person who says Barack Obama's race has helped raise interest from the media and the Democratic higher-ups to jump-start his campaign also says of herself that the same is true from her being a woman, it strikes me as very unlikely that she's saying the former out of racism but is rather just acknowledging that the Democratic party is more likely to use affirmative action considerations for selecting presidential and vice-presidential candidates, something Democrats aren't generally opposed to and don't generally consider racist. (It's Republicans who are more likely to level that charge.) So why is it racist to point out that affirmative action techniques on that level might put someone in a position to get more attention than they could have gotten otherwise?

[I do realize that some people think Ferraro was saying more. According to them, she was claiming that no one would now support Obama if he weren't black. But I think that's a very unlikely interpretation. It's so radically at odds with the exit polls that I don't know how she could have thought she'd get away with saying something so empirically false.]

Update March 29: Is it racist for Obama to say the things of himself that Ferraro said of him?

In a recent case, the California Supreme Court affirmed a 1955 law that requires teachers to have proper credentials, even if they're homeschooling their own children. Some conservatives are up in arms. But it's important for conservatives to locate their criticism properly.

As far as I can tell, this was a judicially conservative decision. The law in California is that teaching requires certain qualifications. The only question was whether you can find a right in the Constitution to homeschooling, and they concluded not, which is actually a more judicially conservative position. See Eugene Volokh for more details.

Now I'm open to a judicially conservative argument that this case was wrongly decided, but I've been seeing people upset merely because of its being a bad policy decision. Well, don't complain to the court. Complain to the people who wrote the law to begin with (except they're probably dead), and seek to get the law changed. That's the normal process for this kind of thing, and it's not conservative to expect a court to find new rights in the Constitution that conservatives would prefer to have constitutionally guaranteed. This is a case of conservatives expecting judges to enact their policy preferences, which is the very thing conservatives usually complain about and call judicial activism when they see liberals doing the same thing.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Apparently Barack Obama has figured out (it took him a while, at least to say it) that Hillary Clinton's repeated claims that he's not ready to be president are slightly at odds with her suggestion that maybe he could be vice-president. Probably the most crucial role of the vice-president is to take over the responsibilities of the president if the president becomes unable to perform them.

But see her response. So he's not ready now, and therefore the Democrats should nominate her. But maybe he'll be ready by August, so she can float the idea of choosing him as a running mate? That see s to be how she's explaining both statements.

How isn't that an admission that her initial comments are wrongheaded? Well, here's the one path to consistency that I think she can trod. He isn't ready now, and there's no guarantee that he will be in January, so we shouldn't nominate him. Maybe some miracle will occur, and he'll be ready enough by August that he could run on the ticket as VP, so she won't say he's now ready even to be a running mate (not that she's in a position to offer it to him), but she'll float him as a possibility in case the miraculous occurs and he gets all this experience that he doesn't now have.

I suppose that's consistent. It's just a huge stretch.

A lot of people are discussing Barack Obama's recent off-the-cuff remarks about the Bible and same-sex civil unions. I want to delve a little bit into the contrast he draws between the Sermon on the Mount and Romans 1. The gist of his statement is (1) the Sermon on the Mount is more central to Christian faith than an "obscure" passage in Romans, and (2) the Sermon on the Mount should influence our attitudes toward civil unions in some positive way.

1. I don't think Romans 1 is all that obscure. I think he means that it's difficult to interpret, but there actually isn't all that much disagreement among serious biblical commentators who have bothered to connect their exegesis with a serious study of the whole book. Virtually everyone in that category acknowledges that Paul saw male-male and female-female sexual acts as bad and as the consequence of sin, and most recognize that he saw them as immoral. That doesn't count as obscure in my book, even if a few of the details in the passage might be debated. It's certainly no more obscure than the Sermon on the Mount, which has plenty of contested questions.

2. Romans 1 is not the only passage relevant to homosexuality. The Torah expressly forbids the same thing Romans 1 discusses, and it does so in pretty clear terms in two places in Leviticus and by implication in Genesis 19. I think the prophets may refer to it once or twice, too. In any case, just dismissing Romans 1 wouldn't be enough, but he treats it as sufficient.

3. Romans 1 isn't even the only New Testament passage relevant to this issue. Terms used for the passive and active partners in male-male sex appear in a vice list in I Corinthians (and one of those words appears in I Timothy). Jude 7 also assumes the Torah background.

4. What in the Sermon on the Mount does he mean? His argument seems to be that he's more willing to go with a passage he sees as more important over one that's "obscure" (and thus less important?). But what important passage in the Sermon on the Mount does he mean? It has to be a clear enough implication from what Jesus says that it's strong enough to outweigh all these other parts of scripture. Does any part of the Sermon on the Mount have such a clear implication for the issue of civil unions?

Some have suggested that he means the command not to judge, which of course is not a command not to call wrong things wrong, or else the biblical authors would all violate it repeatedly.

Others have put forth the many aspects of the Sermon on the Mount that have to do with loving your neighbor. I wonder if that would be question-begging. Some of the people he is taking issue with do not consider it loving to support same-sex unions, because they see such support as endorsing something immoral and in fact against the well-being of all involved.

The word is out that Senator Barack Obama's judicial advisory team (assuming this report is accurate) takes him to be interested in judicial nominees who come across like John Roberts in person but who would decide cases like Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan. [hat tip: Orin Kerr]

Obviously he doesn't mean they'd come across sounding like a moderate conservative, or it would be hard to get Democrats to support his nominees. He means someone who doesn't have much of a record in terms of ideology but who seems like a well-qualified judge. But he also doesn't mean someone who would be moderated in liberalism the way John Roberts is moderated in his conservatism. Otherwise he wouldn't name Justices Brennan and Marshall, two of the most liberal justices ever on the Supreme Court (by pretty much anyone's standards).

So he wants nominees who are actually extremely liberal but sound moderate. Moderation within judicial liberalism ends up with something like Justice Breyer, the one justice of the four liberals on the Supreme Court who is most likely to vote with the conservatives on constitutional issues of any moment. (Justices Ginsburg and Souter often vote with conservatives on statutory interpretation, but that's only when little of ideological importance is at stake.) Moderation in judicial liberalism does not lead to appointments of judges who will vote the way Justices Marshall and Brennan did.

For political reasons, this strategy does make sense. If you want to replace Justice Stevens, for example, with someone even further to the left, then you better find someone who isn't obviously further to the left, or it would be much harder to confirm them. I'm not going to dispute such a strategy. Both sides in the current environment need nominees who come across the way Roberts did if they want to get anything like a strong confirmation vote. I think McCain would need to be even more conscious of this than a Democratic president would, given the Democratic control of the Senate, but the Senate is still divided enough that the Republicans could present problems for a Democratic nominee if they really want to (and partly because the Gang of 16 was successful, which McCain would then have himself to thank for).

But even if this strategy makes political sense, I think it shows something about Senator Obama. He doesn't say he'd appoint real moderates in order to get them confirmed. He wants real liberals but knows there isn't enough popular support for them to get them through the current Senate. The conservatives I've been reading who are arguing for appointing someone like Roberts in order to get a chance at confirmation are arguing for someone just like Roberts, not someone who sounds like Roberts but actually would vote like Judge Robert Bork. I do worry about whether this counts as deception. But whatever you think about that issues,. this is yet another clear sign that Barack Obama is no moderate, despite the popular view of him. It continues to amaze me how far left of center he is, and yet so many people see him as the sort of person who would be able to break down the gridlock in Congress and get genuine conservatives to work with him on proposals that are anathema to them. I just don't get it.

I had to laugh at the last line of the Emily Bazelon Slate piece I linked to above. The judicial strategy of sounding moderate but turning out to be quite a bit to the left of moderate wouldn't exactly be a new tactic for Senator Obama.

Barack Obama's opposition as an Illinois State Senator to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act has been making the rounds, with a lot of people overstating their case on both sides. Some conservatives are taking this as a sign that Obama thinks infanticide is morally ok, and some liberals are acting as if his approach is what any supporter of keeping abortion legal before viability should say. I'm not sure either is true, but I'm also not sure this reflects well on Obama.

Here is the law. It says that if a baby is born alive, whether by intended delivery or by failed abortion, it is legally a person, a human being, a child, and an individual. It counts as born alive only if it is completely removed from the mother (ignoring an umbilical cord connection, which does not count as a sufficient connection according to this law). Partial-birth abortion is thus not ruled out, because a partial birth is not a complete removal of the fetus. As long as the birth has not fully taken place, this law threatens no actual abortion rights.

Obama's reason for not supporting this ban is not because he thinks it's ok to kill a born fetus. As far as he's said, he does not actually support infanticide (and he didn't vote against the law; he just voted present, although that in itself was part of a strategy devised by Planned Parenthood of Illinois to protect pro-choice politicians from voters seeing how pro-choice they are). For his actual words, see comment 9 here. What he says is that he worries about the logic. Here is what seems to me to be his argument:

1. The Supreme Court has declared laws banning abortion before viability to be unconstitutional.
2. There is no difference between the moral status of a fetus inside its mother before viability and the moral status of a born baby at the same developmental stage.
3. Therefore, banning the killing of a born baby at this stage is morally tantamount to banning abortion at a pre-viability stage. (from 2)
4. Therefore, the law is unconstitutional. (from 1 and 3)

This argument does not amount to supporting infanticide morally. It is merely an argument based on the constitutional issue. According to Supreme Court precedent, this law is unconstitutional, and thus it's pointless to pass it. He gives no moral argument against the ban, just a pragmatic one. So from this speech alone it's impossible to get any clear support for infanticide.

Nevertheless, I think this is a terrible argument. The first premise is clearly true. I would argue that the second is also true. I see no difference in the intrinsic moral status of the fetus merely because it is contained within someone or is separate. However, I don't think 1 and 3 guarantee 4. There's no legal reason why morally inconsistent laws can't occur. You can ban something that's morally equivalent to something else that's unconstitutional to ban, as long as the first thing isn't unconstitutional to ban. But the real problem I have with the argument is his inference from 2 to 3.

The standard pro-choice argument is not that a mother has a right to kill a fetus growing within her. Only the most extreme abortion-choice proponents hold such a view. The standard view is that a woman's right to control her body is morally more important than whatever rights a fetus might have. That argument allows for a fetus to have some sort of moral status such that killing it would be prima facie wrong, even if the bodily rights of the mother outweigh that. What this means is that the standard pro-choice argument does not accord a mother the right to the death of the fetus. If it survives removal, her rights have been satisfied. That means the moral status of the fetus is what kicks in to determine what you should do in such a case, and this law settles that question. It does not threaten the woman's bodily rights, at least not according to the standard justification of abortion rights.

Several people have asked me where I got the information that John McCain has changed his view on stem cell research. His position used to be the same as that of former Senator Bill Frist, who opposes the creation of new stem cell lines except in cases where the embryo is already going to be destroyed. I have defended this position as consistent with pro-life principles about the full moral status of the fetus (and again here in a slightly different context), but many people who are pro-life do not agree. A lot of people think the issue should largely be defused now, however, since the discovery that embryonic-like stem cells can be developed without destroying embryos at all. I was under the impression that McCain was one of them.

I'm pretty sure one of the political blogs I read that usually has very reliable, up-to-date information about candidates had a mention in the last week or so of this change in McCain's view, but I can't remember where. What it said is that McCain had changed his mind in light of this new research and no longer supports research even on embryos that will already be destroyed, citing the new research as evidence that we probably will no longer need to do that to get enough embryos for the research that he still considers necessary. Since I couldn't find where I saw this, I spent some time looking around for recent statements by McCain on the issue. Here's what I came up with.

Gerald Bradley wrote in the National Review on January 18:

McCain has said -- it is true -- that he approved embryo-destructive research in the limited case of so-called "spares"-- those embryos "left-over" after couples have exhausted their interest in IVF. I disagree with him.In face-to-face conversation with McCain I said not only that such research was wrong, but that it would never be limited to "spares." I said that big biotech needed a far larger supply of research subjects than "spares" could provide. McCain asked to continue that conversation, to hear more. Now he realizes that there is no need to exploit "spare" embryos, in light of recent successes with adult cells. And so he has been telling South Carolinians over the last few days.

According to the Catholic News Agency, this was where he stood about a week later:

When he was asked how he reconciled his otherwise solid pro-life voting record with his support for experimentation on "surplus" embryos, Sen. McCain called his decision to back the research "a very agonizing and tough decision".

He continued, saying, "All I can say to you is that I went back and forth, back and forth on it and I came in on one of the toughest decisions I've ever had, in favor of that research. And one reason being very frankly is those embryos will be either discarded or kept in permanent frozen status." The senator, while standing firm on his decision added, "I understand how divisive this is among the pro-life community."

Referring to the recent break through in stem cell research which allows scientists to use skin cells to create stem cells, McCain said that, "I believe that skin stem cell research has every potential very soon of making that discussion academic.... Sam Brownback and others are very encouraged at this latest advance...."

Now I don't see that as necessarily conflicting with Bradley's first-hand report. All it does is give McCain's justification at the time and then his indication that he thinks it was the right decision. It doesn't say if he still holds it, just that he stands firm in his view that it was the right one and that in the future it will be a non-issue. It says nothing about what he thinks we ought to be doing right now. So I don't see how this is inconsistent with what Bradley reports hearing from McCain in person.

But then there's this:

When a woman asked whether promising new methods of stem cell research
would end McCain's support for embryonic stem cell research, he replied
firmly: "I have not changed my position yet."

So now I'm not sure what to think. He very clearly does not think his initial view was wrong at the time he made it, and he pretty obviously thinks that soon it will not be an issue and that we will not end up needing to use "spares" for this research. Bradley's impression was that he now no longer wants to fund use of "spares". He seems not to have fully made that decision at this point, though, unless he's being misquoted or taken out of context (which I wouldn't put past Dana Milbank but certainly wouldn't assume is true).

Whichever is the case, I don't have a problem with McCain's initial view, although I think it would be good if he backed off in the face of this new research. He does seem to be moving in that direction at the very least under the influence of his close friend Senator Sam Brownback. My suspicion is that he's in a transition at the moment. His website account of his view on stem cell research notably does not treat this particular issue at all:

Stem cell research offers tremendous hope for those suffering from a variety of deadly diseases - hope for both cures and life-extending treatments. However, the compassion to relieve suffering and to cure deadly disease cannot erode moral and ethical principles.

For this reason, John McCain opposes the intentional creation of human embryos for research purposes. To that end, Senator McCain voted to ban the practice of "fetal farming," making it a federal crime for researchers to use cells or fetal tissue from an embryo created for research purposes. Furthermore, he voted to ban attempts to use or obtain human cells gestated in animals. Finally, John McCain strongly opposes human cloning and voted to ban the practice, and any related experimentation, under federal law.

As president, John McCain will strongly support funding for promising research programs, including amniotic fluid and adult stem cell research and other types of scientific study that do not involve the use of human embryos.

Where federal funds are used for stem cell research, Senator McCain believes clear lines should be drawn that reflect a refusal to sacrifice moral values and ethical principles for the sake of scientific progress, and that any such research should be subject to strict federal guidelines.

I don't see anything there about using stem cells from embryos about to be destroyed. He says he hasn't changed his view yet, but I think he's probably at least suspended his view until further notice, even if he has not yet adopted Brownback's (while giving every indication that he probably will at some point).

James Dobson continues his crusade against the pro-life cause [hat tip: Justin Taylor]. Now that he can't use Rudy Giuliani's actual pro-choice views to prefer a hardcore pro-choicer to a moderate pro-choicer, he's stuck using John McCain's lukewarm but consistently pro-life views as an excuse to prefer a pro-choice president to a pro-life one. It's a strange way to try to pursue the pro-life agenda if you do everything you can to put into office those who will do everything they can to frustrate that agenda.

What's worse is how badly he misrepresents McCain's views. Here is what he gives as his reasons for preferring a radically pro-choice president to John McCain:

McCain "did not support a Constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage".

Well, sure. He doesn't think that's what the Constitution is for. Is it better on pro-life principles to prefer Roe v. Wade staying on as the law of the land for decades or to vote for someone whose opposition to gay marriage isn't going to occur at the constitutional amendment level but rather at the level of mere law? This disagreement isn't about McCain not opposing gay marriage. It's about his not opposing it at the level of a constitutional amendment that never had any chance of passing to begin with. If Dobson thinks that's any reason to vote against him, he's gone off the deep end.

McCain "voted for embryonic stem cell research to kill nascent human beings".

That's a lie. What McCain did is vote for embryonic stem cell research that would use the stem cells from embryos that were already going to be killed one way or the other. There are pro-life people who wrongly think such research would violate pro-life principles. I've tried to argue against that claim. But Dobson could at least present his criticism accurately rather than slandering his fellow pro-lifer who happens to think the moral implications of the pro-life assumption go in a different direction on this one issue.

What's even worse is that McCain no longer even holds this position, something Dobson fails to mention. Isn't that a little bit relevant? A vote for McCain wouldn't support a president who advocates the view Dobson disagrees with, since McCain doesn't support that view. He's become convinced that there are now alternative ways of providing enough stem cells for the research he wants funded without relying on embryos, even ones who are already going to be killed. By not mentioning this extremely important fact, Dobson is misleading those who will reasonably be expected to conclude that McCain still holds this view, and deliberate deception is as bad morally as outright lying, even if the statement is literally true (not that it is; see the immediately previous paragraph).

Update: I've treated McCain's current views on this issue more fully here.

McCain "opposed tax cuts that ended the marriage penalty".

First of all, it's important to recognize that many legislative packages are exactly that: packages. Legislators often vote against a package because of something in it, but it doesn't follow that they voted against it because of whatever particular item in it you happen to pick out as important to you. They may actually approve of that item but not of something else in it. So the fact that McCain voted against a packaged that included ending the marriage penalty doesn't mean he opposes ending the marriage penalty. In fact, his initial vote was in favor of this package, so something else must have been added to change his vote before the final version went through. The removal of the marriage penalty was part of the package he voted for. In fact, he supports exactly the sort of thing Dobson is implicating that he opposes. This is an excellent example of a literally true statement that has a clear implicature of something false, which is tantamount to a lie even if it's not technically false.

McCain "has little regard for freedom of speech".

I assume this has to do with campaign finance. To say that McCain has little regard for free speech is pretty low. He certainly opposes a certain use of money in electoral campaigns, and many conservatives see his views as limiting free speech. It's a little misleading to put it this way, though. What he's saying is that McCain has little regard for one particular use of money that should count as free speech. That would be accurate and precise. Since Dobson counts it as free speech, he could say that McCain has little regard for one particular kind of free speech. That would certainly be accurate on Dobson's view (and I agree with him). But the way he said it makes it sound as if it's free speech in general that McCain has little regard for, and that's at best misleading.

McCain "organized the Gang of 14 to preserve filibusters in judicial hearings".

Was the single purpose of the Gang of 14 to preserve filibusters in judicial hearings? Look again at what both sides of the 14 wanted in their compromise. It's true that the Democrats in the Gang of 14 were in it to preserve the chance to filibuster the nominees they saw as extreme, but the point of the compromise from the GOP side was to get a lot of the nominees the rest of the Democrats saw as extreme confirmed. McCain saw a chance to avoid a filibuster of a number of conservative nominees as long as he could keep some Republicans from removing the filibuster for a much smaller group of nominees that the seven Democrats in the Gang of 14 still wanted to oppose.

As is often the case in a narrowly divided legislative body, McCain was willing to compromise on a few more conservative nominees for the sake of a much larger group of pretty conservative nominees. He thought such a compromise would be better than losing the rights of the minority party to filibuster, something the Republicans in the Senate will probably be glad they will be able to use against the next Democratic president that Dobson is doing his best to have elected this year. I can see how someone might prefer to sacrifice that ability if they think it's wrong to use it to begin with (McCain doesn't) or if they shortsightedly think they'll retain the majority forever (which is pretty dumb), but please don't act as if someone who makes the wrong choice on that is a traitor to conservatism for wanting to get more conservative judges appointed than seemed likely. Keep in mind McCain's motivation. Dobson refuses to do so.

McCain "has a legendary temper and often uses foul and obscene language".

True enough. Is that going to count as a serious criterion from a hardcore pro-life, nearly single-issue voter (as evidenced by his refusal to support Giuliani if he had won the nomination)? I can't see how this should count at all when the serious issues Dobson has against Clinton and Obama are at stake. If abortion is morally equivalent to murder, and the top priority of pro-life voters is to stop the tragic allowance of such evil, how relevant is it that the candidate most likely to be able to do anything about it uses foul language and gets angry pretty easily? If Dobson thinks opposing a foul-mouthed, angry presidential candidate is so all-important that it's worth refusing to do what he can (which is a fair amount given his influence) to prevent a president who will blithely dismiss all concerns for preventing the equivalent of the murder of millions of people, then his moral priorities are seriously screwed up. If abortion is indeed equivalent to murder, then a candidate's language shouldn't make the list of important considerations.

I've been taken to task in the past for criticizing Dobson on this (see the comments here). I'll let those comments stand as my justification for my willingness to do this despite recognizing all that he's done that I appreciate. I will note, though, that this instance seems even worse than the one I was criticizing before, because at least Giuliani really is pro-choice. Dobson is well-meaning, but I can't see how his comments serve the pro-life cause. They seem to me rather to be a betrayal of the very goals he wants to achieve, even more so on this occasion than the last time I took him to task over this.

Since I'll be voting in the Super Tuesday primaries today, I thought I'd look at the two leading GOP candidates on the issues, because I think they've both been misrepresented by the pundits. Judging by the SelectSmart information, here is how they compare on the issues. I'll include some comments on Huckabee as I go to indicate why he's not getting as strong consideration. (Anyone who's been reading this blog for more than a week should know why Ron Paul gets zero consideration.)

On Iraq and general war on terrorism issues, I see no difference of substance. They both support the continued efforts in Iraq and have criticized the Bush Administration in pretty much the same ways as each other. (Huckabee's criticism has been stronger, but his forward policies are similar as far as I can tell.) They may well be different on budget/spending/deficit issues, but there's no easy way to measure that, and their rhetoric is pretty similar (whereas Huckabee seems to be at least a little to the left of both of them, but there is a disconnect between his rhetoric and his record, and it's hard to tell how much has to do with Arkansas-specific issues or things he's changed his mind on and how much has to do with general approach).

It's hard to see a difference between them on issues like marijuana legalization and medical marijuana (Huckabee does clearly oppose decriminalize medical marijuana, but the other two are at least toying with decriminalization). Both have at times favored minimum wage increases, but both have opposed them at times too (and Huckabee seems to be a pragmatist on the issue). Both support vouchers in education (and Huckabee does not).

It's also hard to tell how to compare them on environmental issues. McCain is more environment-friendly than most Republicans, but Romney may well be also. He's certainly more open to the reality of global warming than some Republicans have been (although most who resist making huge changes aren't resisting the premise, just insisting that the reality of global warming isn't the issue).

I see no difference in their current views on stem cells. (McCain at one point supported the use of stem cells from embryos who were already going to be killed, a view I don't think pro-lifers should have a problem with but many wrongly do. But given the strong possibilities with other kinds of stem cell research without killing any embryos, McCain has decided that there's no need to such an approach anymore, and he's now insisting on not supporting any funding for stem cell research that involves developing new lines from embryos that haven't yet been killed. So his position is now the same as Romney's. [Update: See here for more details that I've been able to dig up since writing this post. It's not quite as clear as I'd thought, but what I said here is in the direction of the truth.]

On other pro-life issues, Romney and McCain are pretty much in the same spot. Romney used to be pro-choice on the legal question (but never on the moral question), but he's now fully pro-life. McCain has always been pro-life, but I get the impression it's not an issue he
spends a lot of time getting worked up about. McCain does have a misleading statistic because some pro-life groups consider his campaign finance views to be against their desired methods of promoting their cause. But they're being pretty deceptive by pretending his campaign finance votes are pro-choice votes. On actual pro-life/pro-choice issues, he's consistently voted pro-life. So I see no real difference between these two here on the actual issues.

I never agreed with the argument made by James Dobson, Joe Carter, and others that Hillary Clinton would be preferable to Rudy Giuliani on pro-life grounds. The idea wasn't that she would do things as president that pro-lifers would be happy with. That's clearly false. As pro-choice as Giuliani is, she is much more committed to that cause, and he is at best lukewarm about it while retaining a much more conservative view on judicial matters, which would certainly have some impact on the future of Roe v. Wade.

No, the argument was that having a pro-choice president means (1) the party is pro-choice and (2) that there must be a pro-life party for the pro-life movement to succeed. (1) is shown false because no one thinks the Republican party is the party of guest worker programs and Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court just because President Bush wanted both. It's clear that (2) is also problematic given there was no civil rights party in the mid-1960s; significant numbers of members of both parties opposed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964-1965. Also, significant numbers of members of both parties opposed the Bush plan on immigration (albeit for different reasons). Party support doesn't necessarily go to a president on every issue, and often movements span parties while facing serious opposition from many influential members of both parties. I could easily see something like that happening with a pro-choice Republican president (or a pro-life Democrat if that were to happen).

So the argument at least recognized that Giuliani might be better for pro-life concerns in the short term. The claim was that the movement would be killed long-term by not having a pro-life party. I don't think this kind of argument succeeds, but it's at least honest about the relative positions of the candidates. Compare, now, Ann Coulter's completely ridiculous argument against John McCain. She's not focused completely or even mostly on abortion. This is about general conservatism. Otherwise it sounds on the surface to be a similar argument. Her premises are analogous. John McCain would make the Republican party too liberal, and having a too-liberal GOP would mean GOP goals are sacrificed long-term. But there's a key difference. Even aside from the problems with each premise along the lines of the original Giuliani argument, Coulter makes one claim that's just completely ridiculous about the factual basis of this to begin with. She claims that Hillary Clinton is more conservative than John McCain.

How could anyone possibly think such a thing? If we judge foreign policy by the standard view within each party, McCain is to the left of the GOP on a few issues but mostly with them, and Clinton is to the right of the GOP on a few issues but mostly with them. He favors staying in Iraq and trying to stabilize the situation a lot more, citing the success of the so-called surge as evidence that progress can be made. She's insisting that troop withdrawal needs to begin as soon as she takes the presidency. He thinks we need more troops in Iraq. He's an absolutist against torture (and insistent on calling certain techniques torture that other Republicans are hesitant to describe as torture). But certainly that position isn't a liberal-conservative one. An argument can even be made that it's liberal to soften our resistance to such techniques. It's moral conservatism to oppose them, one might argue. He's also consistently voted to renew Patriot Act and similar provisions, and she's sometimes done so and sometimes not.

On social issues, there's no comparison. She's not at this point endorsing gay marriage, but she didn't want it banned on the federal level. She and McCain both want something like civil unions. He's not to the left of her there. There's no question when it comes to abortion. If she were to become a single-issue candidate, abortion would be it. Her view is as extreme as it gets. She's never been willing to allow any restriction on abortion for any reason. He gets almost full support from right-to-life groups except when the issue is campaign finance. On actual abortion issues, he scores almost perfect on his voting record. His one weakness has been stem cell issues, and his view there was the Bill Frist view that using stem cells from embryos that were already going to be killed would be ok, a view I have defended on pro-life grounds. But McCain doesn't even hold this view anymore. He's since been convinced that there are now alternative methods to pursuing stem cell research with non-embryonic cells so that there's no need even to use the cells from destroyed embryos. In other words, his view is basically the standard GOP view on the issue. [Update: This isn't as clear as I'd thought, but he seems to be moving in that direction. See here for more detail.] Hillary Clinton's is the standard view of her party that we ought to manufacture human embryos in order to destroy them.

On immigration, he's certainly to the left of his party but no moreso than the current president, and no one's arguing that he's to the left of Hillary Clinton. The fact is that her view on the matter is no more conservative than his. I'm not convinced that their views are the same. I suspect she's more to the left on the issue than he is. But I don't see any indication that he's left of her. The same is true of any economic issue I'm aware of. He supports vouchers, and she opposes them. He's left of his party in getting 50% ratings by environmentalist groups, but she gets close to 90%. He supported Medicare prescription drug expansion, but so did she. She doesn't support universal health care anymore, but her plan is no more conservative than what he supports. The Chamber of Commerce gives him a 72% rating and her a 35% rating. He's a free-trader, which is usally seen as a conservative issue. She got 50% support from a free trade group one year and 17% the previous year. She opposes any privatizing of social security. He favors partial privatization. She gets 58% on balanced budget issues. He gets 95%.

On other issues, she generally supports the ACLU (ranging from 60% to 80% over three years), and he generally opposes them. She gets a 100% rating from the Brady Campaign and an F from the NRA. He gets 14% from Brady and a C+ from the NRA.You can look at the comparison yourself here. I think it's pretty clear that he's more conservative than she is on most issues, often considerably so, and even when he's not he's no more liberal than she is. This goes not just for all three major areas (economic, social, and foreign policy) but for all the sub-questions within each area. There's no question that Ann Coulter is either completely unwilling to look at the facts or flat-out lying. McCain has certainly not been my favorite candidate throughout this primary, but I can't see how anyone would think he's to the left of Hillary Clinton even on one issue, never mind as a whole. So those who hate McCain can go ahead and try to present the argument against him in the form of the argument above against Giuliani. I'd still dispute it on the same grounds I gave against the Giuliani version. But it's neither hopelessly ignorant nor insidiously malicious, and Coulter's argument is at least one of those.

Now it's a separate question whether conservatives should vote for McCain in their primaries. I hope to treat that question in a future post (and I especially hope to do so before my own primary next Tuesday). I don't ultimately think conservatives should oppose McCain in the general election even with the more substantial argument analogous to the anti-Giuliani argument, but it seems completely silly to me to oppose him in the general election on the ground that he's more liberal than Hillary Clinton. That claim is utterly ridiculous, and if Ann Coulter had not already lost all my respect this would have finished her off.

For an interesting take on all this talk of Senator Barack Obama transcending race, see this post by Too Sense. One Drop argues that those speaking of Senator Obama transcending race are actually exhibiting a kind of racism. The way some people speak of transcending race, you get the idea that Obama is making headway with white voters because he's somehow risen above the fact that he's black.

I very much appreciate One Drop's affirmation that black people who have "made it", such as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, are still as black as they ever were and as black as anyone else who is black. Colin Powell, who occupied high positions both in the military and the civilian government, is black. He didn't transcend his race. It's insulting to them and to all black people to speak as if these people did.

I must note that it isn't just white people who think this way. Black people can operate from the same assumption. They don't usually say Colin Powell transcends race, though, as white people operating under this assumption will. They say he's not really black and that he's sold out to the white power structure by his willingness to hold a position in it. It's a pretty negative attitude toward the person, whereas this idea of transcending race is at least on the surface positive. But both come from the same false assumption, that blackness is incompatible with success in a world dominated by white people (and most often white men).

On the other hand, as I commented at One Drop's post, there's something very different that someone might mean by the expression "transcending race". Rather than seeing Obama as somehow beyond his race, as if his race doesn't matter at all, some people (I am convinced) are seeing him as standing for more than the issues that are particularly associated with being black. They see most blacks who have run for president in the past, most notably Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley-Braun, Jesse Jackson, and Shirley Chisholm (but most definitely not Alan Keyes) as being too focused on concerns that are black, in a way that white people who haven't adopted those concerns would be less attracted to their candidacy. In other words, Obama has a wider attraction because he deals with wider issues, and he presents the issues that are specifically related to black people in a way that white people can see that they support them too.

Now there's a different danger with this kind of "transcending race". If it assumes (or gives the impression) that so-called black issues aren't important for non-blacks to be concerned about or that what's bad for blacks isn't bad for everyone, then I think that's bad. It displays a real insensitivity to race issues. But I don't think it's quite as bad as the kind of "transcending race" talk One Drop points to. I'd say that it's a pretty unfortunate feature of the Obama campaign but one that he can do little about at this point (and I suspect wasn't responsible for in the first place). But those who participate in it are perpetuating something racially harmful.

There's actually a third group of people talking about Obama as transcending race who do neither of the above. They see him as transcending race but see that as negative. They're well aware of the fact that, for many, transcending race can be one or both of the above two things. Then they accuse Obama of inappropriately trying to transcend race (or perhaps being used by others to do so) in order to appeal to white people. Those who make this complaint will thus see him as a sort of race traitor. I don't think it's fair to go that far with it, but I do think a lot of the reason why he's got the support he's got from white people is that they see Obama as a safe black. Talking about someone as transcending race in that sense can be perfectly legitimate when it informs us about a real racial dynamic, one that can be dangerous. So it's not clear to me that all talk of transcending race is bad, even if the first kind is very bad and the second is at least unfortunate.

I've been reading through the second edition of D.A. Carson's How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil. Last night I came across a passage that I had to read a little differently now than when he first wrote it in his first edition of 1990. Carson was responding to the view that predestination-language in the Bible is basically referring to God knowing ahead of time what people outside his control will do, which takes its start from Romans 8:29's "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son". Consider his criticism:

This way of wording things, of course, makes the human being the pivotal "decider"; God's decision is not predestination in any meaningful sense, but a kind of ratification-in-advance. Moreover, too little attention is paid to the fact that this text does not speak of foreknowing that such and such will take place, but that God foreknows the person. Many have shown that in Semitic thought "to know" a person can have overtones of intimacy: if a husband "knows" his wife, for instance, he has sexual intercourse with her. For God to "foreknow" certain people, especially in the context of Romans 8:28-30, means (as most serious commentators point out) that God has a personal relationship with the individual in advance. Those whom God foreknows in this sense, he predestines "to be conformed to the likeness of his Son". Besides, it is a strange method that takes a doubtful definition of one occurrence of "foreknowledge" and pits it against the many references in which it is clearly stated that God has chosen his people (e.g., Deut. 4:37-39; 7:6-9; Ps. 4:3; Matt 24:22, 31; Luke 18:7; John 15:16; Acts 13:48; Gal. 4:27, 31; Eph. 1:4-6; 2 Tim. 2:10; 1 Pet. 1:2).

This is part of Carson's longer argument that theological discussions of free will shouldn't first assume a particular meaning of a controversial term (in philosophy, there is no consensus on what counts as freedom) and then read the biblical text in terms of such an account of freedom, particularly if the text itself assumes a different concept of freedom. Three things came to mind as I read this paragraph.

1. Given that this use of "foreknow" is based on the Semitic concept Carson explains (which I think is highly likely if not almost certain), there is an alternative interpretation of this passage as merely corporate. God choose a people and then lets individuals decide if they want to be in it. A lot of Wesleyans and Arminians hold such a view about other passages involving predestination. I find it thoroughly implausible for other reasons, but given its availability and commonness, it's a little strange that this individualist interpretation at odds with the Semitic language persists.

2. This view makes the predestination-language pretty dumb. Why should Paul bother to add it in? If all God is doing is seeing that someone will do something and then agreeing that they will indeed do the thing that he sees them doing in the future, what's the point of saying that he predestines people? If predestining is simply foreknowing, then it's redundant, in fact tautologous. It basically means, "For whom he foreknew that they would do it, he agreed that they would do it." That's not very informative unless you're inclined to think God engages in self-deception. I'm not too fond of interpretations of Paul that make him out to be an idiot.

3. The first sentence struck me as extremely funny given a certain political moment of a couple years ago. Carson doesn't use the exact term "the decider", but by implication he's saying that God is the ultimate decider, and the view he's responding to makes humans the decider. This is pretty much the exact sense of the term the president was using when people made fun of him for calling himself the decider. So a very intelligent professor from Canada with a Ph.D. from a top U.K. institution, one who I note is very particular about his language, can write in a way that pretty much got universally made fun of as dumb Southerner hick language when the president of the United States used it. (Carson does acknowledge something funny about using the term this way by putting it in scare quotes, but the president was speaking extemporaneously, and Carson was not only writing in a prepared way, but it passed through the editorial review process and then did so again when he revised the book five or six years later.)

Ron Paul is indisputably the presidential candidate who most attracts the support of white supremacists, and he