Recently in Sex, Marriage, and Sexuality Category

I previously posted my worries about the glossary entry for the word 'gay' in Elizabeth Meyer's Gender, Bullying, and Harassment. I'm worried about the following entry also, for several reasons:

Heterosexism: A bias toward heterosexuality that denigrates and devalues GLB people. Also, the presumption that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality or prejudice, bias, or discrimination based on these things.

The first thing to notice is that this is a disjunctive definition. It lists three different things, any of which it will count as heterosexism. This isn't problematic in itself. There are plenty of words that can apply to a number of different things. Some of them are due to plain old ambiguity, e.g. the word 'bank' can mean a financial institution or the sandy shoreline alongside a river. More often a term can refer to several phenomena that all fit under the same category.

I'm reading through the glossary in Elizabeth Meyer's Gender, Bullying, and Harassment, which I've been reading for an invited book review, and I noticed something that seemed odd to me in the definition for 'gay':

The preferred term for a person who engages in same-sex relationships and identifies as a member of this community. It is preferred to the term homosexual, which has scientific meanings that apply specifically to same-sex behaviors and does not consider a person's identities and relationships. Gay can refer to both men and women, although many women prefer the term lesbian.

Now I can think of three different things that could be distinguished here:

You know, I'd have thought that philosophers would be the ones pointing out contradictions in what other people are doing, not contradicting themselves. But the American Philosophical Association has just passed a new policy regarding discrimination that seems to me to be flat-out inconsistent. It very clearly commits something that it itself condemns as unethical.

According to Alastair Norcross (via Brian Leiter), the policy will be worded as follows:

The American Philosophical Association rejects as unethical all forms of discrimination based on race, color, religion, political convictions, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, gender identification or age, whether in graduate admissions, appointments, retention, promotion and tenure, manuscript evaluation, salary determination, or other professional activities in which APA members characteristically participate. This includes both discrimination on the basis of status and discrimination on the basis of conduct integrally connected to that status, where "integrally connected" means (a) the conduct is a normal and predictable expression of the status (e.g., sexual conduct expressive of a sexual orientation), or (b) the conduct is something that only a person with that status could engage in (e.g., pregnancy), or (c) the proscription of that conduct is historically and routinely connected with invidious discrimination against the status (e.g., interracial marriage). At the same time, the APA recognizes the special commitments and roles of institutions with a religious affiliation; and it is not inconsistent with the APA's position against discrimination to adopt religious affiliation as a criterion in graduate admissions or employment policies when this is directly related to the school's religious affiliation or purpose, so long as these policies are made known to members of the philosophical community and so long as the criteria for such religious affiliation do not discriminate against persons according to the other attributes listed in this statement. Advertisers in Jobs for Philosophers are expected to comply with this fundamental commitment of the APA, which is not to be taken to preclude explicitly stated affirmative action initiatives.

For those who don't know the background behind this, the change is mainly due to a petition to change the APA policy, because it's been widely believed to have been inconsistent before the change. The problem case has been (mainly) Christian institutions that have statements of faith or conduct that faculty have to subscribe to, that include statements that homosexual conduct is immoral and that faculty will not engage in it. Members of the APA petitioned to declare such institutions discriminatory according to the APA's own anti-discrimination policy, which at the time did prohibit discrimination against someone for sexual orientation but did not indicate whether it would count it discrimination to refuse to hire someone who is actively gay while being willing to hire someone who is gay but celibate (e.g. the Roman Catholic Church has exactly this distinction with priests, and a lot of evangelical institutes of higher learning have exactly this practice, as I understand it; it was definitely the policy of the requirements for leadership of several Christian ministry groups I know of on campuses, two of which I know to have had either (a) celibate gay or (b) heterosexually-married but homosexually-abstinent gay or bisexual leaders).

So due to this petition, the APA has indeed indicated that it would include such policies as discriminatory, but it didn't go all the way to banning schools with such policies from participating in APA activities such as the main publication for advertising jobs in the profession. They'll just report which schools don't indicate compliance with the new policy and investigate any schools with actual complaints, indicating also which schools have been investigated and found non-compliant. I don't think the APA has actually achieved the result of consistency now that the petitioners have gotten what they wanted (which some insisted they were supporting only for the reason of getting the APA to act consistently with their own policy). In fact, I think now they've simply instituted a new inconsistency and worked it into their explicit statement.

Consider a college that expects its faculty to refrain from male-male and female-female sexual acts. According to the policy, such a school is discriminating against sexual orientation by discriminating against the "normal and predictable expression" of homosexuality. Such a school would be flagged as discriminatory. But that means the APA is now differentially treating that school and schools that don't make such distinctions. In other words, they are discriminating on the basis of the behavior of requiring faculty to conform to a moral code that includes abstaining from gay sex. Such discrimination is not a problem as long as it's not along the lines of anything in the list or anything that's the "normal and predictable expression" of anything in that list (or one of the other two requirements, but those aren't relevant here). But conservative evangelicals, for example, do consider such conduct immoral, and they do want their faculty to uphold a moral standard on such things. It is in fact the "normal and predictable expression" of conservative evangelicalism to insist that your institution's faculty not engage in gay sex. That means the action of flagging such schools as discriminatory is itself discrimination against religion, based on the "normal and predictable expression" of that religion, i.e. by the policy's own standards.

You could run a similar argument based on political convictions, which is also in the list. Someone, for political reasons, might oppose the normalization of homosexual sexual behavior and thus want their politically-conservative college to reflect that in the moral conduct required of faculty. That means the APA policy is also discriminatory against the "normal and predictable expression" of such political convictions. For that matter, you could say exactly the same thing about a school that doesn't cater to a certain group but that refuses to hire KKK members, which certainly is a "normal and predictable expression" of the KKk's political convictions. The new APA policy begins to look ridiculous once you examine its implications. I don't think it's possible to treat all the categories on their list as equally protected without contradiction, at least if different treatment according to the "normal and predictable expression" of being a member of the category can count as equivalent to different treatment because of merely belonging to the category.

Last night I was catching up on PEA Soup, and this excellent post by Jussi Suikkanen caught my attention. It's about the harm of rape (in particular of men raping women), not just to the woman being raped or even to all women but even to all men, including the rapist himself. One thing I appreciate about the post is a pretty clear listing of ways that rape causes harm in a much broader way in society than it might seem if you just focus on the act of rape itself.

One key element is missing, though. The most significant way that a man harms himself by raping a woman is the harm caused to himself merely by doing such an immoral thing. By committing such a terrible act, he diminishes his well-being in unmeasurable ways. A crucial element of experiencing the good of this life is being a good person. Without good moral character expressed through good actions, no one can live the best life available to us in this life. It would be much better to lack all the kinds of goods that Suikkanen focuses on if having them meant being an evil person.

On a different note, I want to affirm Suikkanen's overall point and expand it a bit. I appreciate Suikkanen's resistance to the common treatment among some feminists of rape as a zero-sum game that sets up social structures to benefit men at women's expense. I have similar resistance to the parallel reasoning that treats anti-black racism as benefiting white people at the expense of black people. There certainly are social structures that harm black people in ways that few white people experience. If you want to call this white privilege, I have no objection to that, as long as it's clear that the racist structure isn't giving whites a boost. Even if there's some boost from it in one respect, the harm to everyone from the existence of such racist structures has become so obvious to me that I can't see privilege of this sort as a real privilege.

If I have an easier time getting a certain kind of job compared with black applicants because of unconscious anti-black bias on the part of the hiring committee (e.g. they have lower expectations for black applicants without having an explicit view that black people are less intelligent or less capable), then I guess there's some sense in which I can benefit from white privilege. But the existence of that sort of privilege is itself a negative, not just for the black people who have a harder time getting a job because of it. It's a harm to me too (and not just because my wife is white and my kids mixed race). It's a harm because it diminishes my interaction with those who might resent me because of my race. It's a harm because the kinds of cooperation and mutual trust among members of the same society is weakened. It's a harm because it makes it takes more work and more thought to be a good person with respect to those of other races. It's a harm because "keeping blacks down" in any sense and to any degree will weaken the good contributions of black people to society as a whole, of which I'm a part. Much will slip through (e.g. much of what some call "white culture" has been so strongly influenced by black culture over more than a century of mass media that has included black entertainers that there's really no such thing as white culture). But the fact that it's still seen as "white culture" and therefore "other" by many black Americans is not just unfortunate for people who have that attitude but for the enrichment of all Americans. I could go on and on.

This is at least one reason for resisting the narrative that paints white privilege as almost a conscious cause of all structural and institutional racism in society. It's common, especially among this influenced by Marxian analyses, to think of power structures in society that perpetuate themselves. I have no problem with this. It seems obvious to me on reflection that there are such self-perpetuating structures. The key objection I have is that many who hold such a view attribute a rational character to these structures, as if white privilege is perpetuated by deliberate choices by those in power (which in this case might not just be heads of corporations or politicians but in some cases might be every white person who benefits), with the goal simply of maintaining that power.

This was true enough with Jim Crow, and it makes the best sense of some really crazy historical moments (like the Supreme Court definition of Mexicans as white that allowed systematic exlusion of Mexican-Americans from juries even though it was already accepted as unconstitutional to exclude blacks from juries systematically). But does it explain why generational welfare inheritance is more common among blacks than whites? Did the white liberals who concocted welfare intend it to be a way to keep black people dependent on the government in order to preserve white privilege? Even my most cynical moments don't go that far. (They only go as far as suspecting that politicians knowingly put band-aids on problems that they know will not solve them in order to appear to be doing something, but the goal there isn't to keep black people down and preserve white privilege but rather a very different selfish motive -- an individual motive to maintain one's political position, completely independently of race.)

Most of the time I'm not so jaded about people's motivations, though. Welfare was never really seen as a political move to try to gain points while doing nothing. Most supporters of particular welfare policies have genuinely seen it to be a good thing, something to help those who are less fortunate and could use a leg up. It wasn't until the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform that we had a distinction between (1) those who rely on welfare because they can't work or are temporarily needing assistance while they seek a job or seek education for a job and (2) those who seek assistance merely to avoid working. That welfare reform brough some problems with it, but it fixed something the original creation of welfare created that was probably unintentional but was an unfortunate consequence. When welfare was massively expanded in the 1960s in a way that got self-sufficient black Americans to become generationally dependent on welfare, which in turn caused many of the more serious inner city problems in many predominantly-black neighborhoods, I don't think many if any of its original supporters had any clue what kind of serious consequences the program would lead to. They just rightly saw that some people in need would be helped (and probably wrongly saw that some who didn't need help should be ushered into that help as well).

There's no need to impugn the motives of such people. But I think it's that kind of inference that the usual narrative of white privilege often involves. It doesn't follow from the facts about how these self-perpetuating social structures work, even apart from its dependence on false judgments about harm and benefit.

Every once in a while I run into someone criticizing the Bible because it contains some depiction of someone doing something immoral, usually when the text never endorses that act or even if it's clear from the general context that the narrator considers the act downright evil. For example, Richard Dawkins objects to the story of Jephthah's rash vow, that if God gives him victory he'd sacrifice the first thing coming through his gates to greet him as he returns home, only to be greeted by his daughter, so he sacrifices her. His reason for objecting? Well, Jephthah did something obviously wrong. So the Bible must not be a good guide to immorality.

As has been said many a time, Dawkins would fail an introductory philosophy or religion course if he submitted materials from his book or similar quality work for such classes. This idea that the mere inclusion of an immoral act in a narrative somehow makes that narrative immoral is downright crazy. No one really believes that. Murder mysteries would suddenly because evil, for instance, because a murder does take place in them. You couldn't have crime-fighting stories of any sort, because those would contain evil acts to be fought against.

Nevertheless, despite this idea being absolutely ridiculous, it apparently comes up in contexts that have nothing to do with the Bible. There's been a campaign against the forthcoming Stargate Universe, the third (and I think what may well be the best) series in the Stargate franchise. Darren Sumner of Gateworld has an excellent discussion of what these objections are and why they fail completely.

Aside from the fact that it's pretty dumb to criticize a show you haven't even bothered to wait to see when you have at best partial information, the argument itself seems silly. It's been rumored that there will be some temporary body-switching, with the consciousness of one person controlling the body of someone else in a different galaxy (which the Stargate franchise has done several times before), only this time the controlling parties will have sexual encounters using other people's bodies. That raises obvious moral questions, in particular if the owner of the body in question didn't consent to have their body used this way. But merely depicting them something doesn't imply endorsement, and it's almost certainly true (given what I know from the Stargate writers) that they will want us to question whether this is ok, again assuming no consent (and we haven't been told if there will be consent to use each other's bodies this way by mutual agreement, which for all I know will be part of the arrangement).

The claim (see the comments) is that it's rape, and they shouldn't be depicting it. Well, we don't know if they'll be depicting it. But they do depict rape on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, or at least they sometimes come close enough. They did depict rape on Battlestar Galactica. There were people who objected to the latter, but I never understood why the mere depiction of rape, especially when it's absolutely clear that the people doing it are being downright evil, is somehow wrong. It was, in that case, an easy way to show the morally degenerate state of the Pegasus crew under Admiral Cain's command. The Galactica crew were certainly not perfect, but the Pegasus crew had gone well over the edge to true evil. That scene made that abundantly clear, and it was good storytelling.

The difference here, as some commenters in that thread point out, is that main characters carry this out. But main characters can be morally flawed in a good story. They can even be pretty evil. Why is it immoral for a storyteller to have a main character do something as bad as raping someone? I see no argument for this claim anywhere in any of these discussions.

But comparing these two kinds of fallacious criticisms at least helps me understand that such shoddy thinking isn't present just among those seeking to have any argument, no matter how bad, against the Bible. Those who want to have any argument, no matter how bad, against a forthcoming TV show will resort to the same tactics. So maybe this isn't a problem just among those who want to attack Christianity, the Bible, or religion. It occurs much more generally than that.

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.

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.

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.

There's a movement right now in the American Philosophical Association to prevent schools that have a code of conduct restricting sexual behavior to within heterosexual marriage from advertising in the main job market publication of the field, which is run by the APA.

Before I look to what I think is the key moral issue here, I want to make a few things clear. One is that the current APA policy allows de facto discrimination on the part of participating institutions. The proposed change would mean the APA is actually engaging in discrimination, because they would be excluding schools with a statement of faith or moral code of a certain sort. If you have a choice between allowing someone else to engage in de facto discrimination and engaging in discrimination yourself, then other things being equal you ought to do the former. Aside from pure consequentialists, most philosophers should be willing to count that in favor of retaining the current practice, other things being equal.

The second is that the discrimination in question is merely de facto, not facial. I've seen people calling it facial discrimination, and it's plainly not. This distinction is found in legal discussions, including court decisions going all the way up to the Supreme Court. Facial discrimination is basically discrimination that wears its discrimination on the surface or on its face. Facial discrimination on the basis of race is discrimination for the obvious reason of the person's race. De facto discrimination, on the other hand, is simply an effect of diminishing the likelihood of inclusion by someone of the group in question. A policy of giving priority to people you know when you hire a new employee has the effect of giving white employers more likelihood of white employees, and since white employers are more often interviewing for top jobs you will see a racial effect given that people's friends more often than not are disproportionally one's own race compared to the percentages in the general population. Courts have consistently refused to tolerate de facto discrimination claims as legally problematic for obvious reasons. There has to be intent to discriminate on the basis of race for a race discrimination claim, and it pretty much has to wear it on its face.

In this case the kind of discrimination we're dealing with is not sexual orientation discrimination on its face. The discriminating element is a choice to hire people who share one's views and/or practices. These schools are hiring only those who will sign a statement of faith or conduct that includes either the view that same-sex sexual relations are immoral or a commitment not to engage in such practices. This will indeed certainly have a disproportionate effect of eliminating gay people more than straight people, but it's not discrimination according to sexual orientation. It's discrimination according to moral viewpoint or behavior.

Third, some people in this discussion are simply insisting on consistency with the APA's existing policy on discrimination. They want the APA to change their discrimination statement if they're going to allow these institutions to participate. If these people are being honest, then they wouldn't mind one way or the other if the APA (a) stops allowing these schools to participate or (b) removes their language against discrimination from their official stances. I tend to doubt that this is a very large group who care only about consistency. I suspect most of the people signing this thing are advocating just (a) and would disapprove of (b). But I think those making the consistency argument should not use it alone to favor (a) over (b).

But I don't think any of those concerns gets to the heart of the central moral issue here. The main difficulty I see is that the APA has to decide between (1) allowing schools that de facto discriminate and (2) enacting their own discriminatory practice. They need a clear argument why their own discrimination would be much less bad than merely tolerating someone else's. I think we in fact face the opposite situation, but that's what's going to take some argument. The rest of the post is my reasoning for that claim.

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.

A commenter here directed me toward a series by Michael Craven on the moral issues regarding homosexuality and same-sex marriage, asking what I thought of it. This post gives a pretty detailed answer to that request. I think Craven is better than most conservatives on this issue. He doesn't seem to have the screed that I often find in many of those who bother to spend much time on this issue. I don't think all his arguments are as effective as they could be, though, and a few seem to me to be real mistakes. Overall, I don't think he's actually achieved his goal, which is to provide an argument based on secular premises that establishes the traditional view of marriage in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Craven's first part starts in the right place, by noticing the difference between what the Bible calls marriage and what most Americans call marriage. That's the most fundamental observation you need to make if you're going to have an intelligent conversation about this issue. I'm a bit disappointed in how he handles comments. Instead of pointing out that his commenters are tackling issues he hasn't gotten to, he asserts conclusions he hasn't argued for yet, and it makes it sound as if he's just making assertions that he can't back up.

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Craven's design argument in the second part seems to me to rely on a mistake. He seems to think that evolutionary theory allows for a purpose in nature that affects morality. It's as if there's a purpose to procreate, and homosexuality prevents that. It's not as if homosexuality does prevent the continuance of one's genes. For one thing, gay people could become sperm or egg donors. For another, they could have a hand in raising their nephews and nieces, who may then go on to pass on genes that overlap with their own in a full enough way. So homosexuality isn't contrary to this supposed purpose of evolution anymore than singleness is. Even worse, it's a mistake to think evolution has purposes to begin with, at least if you restrict yourself to arguments that are secularly available without relying on theism.

I think it's kind of ironic that naturalistic evolutionary theorists can't resist talking in design terms, as if subconsciously they can't avoid attributing a designer behind the scenes, but they can't mean it literally and remain consistent. When Gould talks about selfish genes, he doesn't literally mean that genes have interests and that they consciously seek to promote them. So why should we think evolution has the purpose of procreation simply because it leads to a higher chance of procreation among those who survive to be able to pass on their genes? That could only be true if there's a designer (and it doesn't follow even if there is).

So he's trying to offer an argument that doesn't rely on controversial theistic premises, but I think this particular point fails in that regard, at least given that he doesn't spend the time motivating the thesis in a different way, such as arguing for a designer first on secular premises and then arguing that a designer who designed the world via evolution as contemporary biology holds must have intended procreation as a moral goal that requires some commitment to heterosexuality. That's at least not an easy task, and Craven hasn't really tried to fill out his argument in that way anyway. I happen to think the first step (a design argument) can be done. I don't think a natural law argument can succeed without that. But I'm also not sure a convincing natural law argument will work on this issue even given theism. The only versions I've seen lead to too much being immoral (e.g. voluntary celibacy or choosing to remain married to an infertile spouse) or involve a step to avoid such a result that seems hard to motivate independently (e.g. choosing to avoid a human purpose is wrong if you use the body parts associated with that purpose for non-natural goals but ok if you don't).

There's another gap in his argument in part 2 as well. If homosexuality is an unnatural perversion of something that has a designed purpose, it doesn't follow that it's morally wrong unless you again assume theism and our moral obligation to follow the intent of the designer as our purpose. The idea that we have natural purposes that we should follow goes back to Aristotle, so the argument finds good company in many who do not rely on theological premises. But I'm not sure they have a right to such attribution of purposes and to conclude moral properties as a result, not without divine intent as the basis of such a connection.

I recently found this interview with Richard Rodriguez, which raises some interesting suppositions about why social conservatives oppose same-sex marriage, tying it to a desire to maintain a traditional view of the family. On one level, this seems right. Much of the actual rhetoric from socially conservative groups, e.g. the Family Research Council, links same-sex marriage to the breakdown of the family, a claim that on the face of it seems absurd. How does the ability of two gay men to call their union a marriage somehow make my heterosexual marriage more likely to break down? One common argument for same-sex marriage is that it will actually strength the institution of marriage by promoting long-term relationships among a demographic that has a much higher tendency to avoid them.

In some ways the level of vitriol and forcefulness of resistance to same-sex marriage does seem to me to reflect a misplaced set of priorities when there are much more immediate problems within the very communities that oppose same-sex marriage. Evangelicals (as traditionally defined by the media, anyway) have as much of a problem with divorce as the country at large (although if you look at the stricter criteria of George Barna to define evangelicalism, the gap widens considerably). Roman Catholicism still hasn't responded in a way that has satisfied enough people to the priest sex abuse scandal. Mormons still endorse polygamy as in principle perfectly fine and the right way to do things during certain periods. Given their opposition to same-sex marriage on grounds of supporting the traditional family, black Americans have a  disturbingly high rate of single parenthood and, for that matter, abortion with respect to the general population. While we certainly shouldn't assume individual cases are all a result of hypocrisy, Rodriguez is at least prima facie right to raise that spectre as a worry.

Nevertheless, when it comes down to the details, some of Rodriguez's claims seem to me to be so off-base that I find it amazing that someone could put them forward seriously. Is the resistance to same-sex marriage based fundamentally in a desire to prevent women from becoming too dominant in society? After recognizing that society is now at a place where we hardly even wonder where someone's father is when only his mother shows up at the Olympics to see him win medal after medal, he goes on to offer a sweeping generalization to explain the opposition to same-sex marriage:

The possibility that a whole new generation of American males is being raised by women without men is very challenging for the churches. I think they want to reassert some sort of male authority over the order of things. I think the pro-Proposition 8 movement was really galvanized by an insecurity that churches are feeling now with the rise of women.

It's certainly true that some churches want to reassert the view that authority should be primarily in the hands of men. Some extend this to society as a whole, but far more limit it (as the Bible does) to leadership in the family and authoritative teaching and leading in the church. But is that the explanation for opposition to same-sex marriage? It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that a lot of people think same-sex sexual relationships are morally wrong? Rodriguez just seems to me to be confusing two separate issues that don't actually have much in common theoretically. It's true that one argument against homosexuality has to do with how the Bible treats a marriage relationship as reflective of role relations within the Trinity. But if you listen to Rodriguez, you get the sense that all the outrage against gay couples wanting to call their relationships marriages stems from some visceral desire to prevent women from becoming too uppity, which just sounds crazy. I know several people (although it's actually a pretty small percentage of people I know who think same-sex sexual relationships are wrong) who seem to base their opposition on a visceral disgust at the idea of two men having sex with each other. That has nothing to do with women and authority. The more common reason comes from simple observation of biblical texts as traditionally interpreted, and the basis of those interpretations doesn't lie in one's attitude toward women.

Along the way, he gives a similar argument with respect to abortion:
 

Monotheistic religions feel threatened by the rise of feminism and the insistence, in many communities, that women take a bigger role in the church. At the same time that women are claiming more responsibility for their religious life, they are also moving out of traditional roles as wife and mother. This is why abortion is so threatening to many religious people -- it represents some rejection of the traditional role of mother.

It's completely crazy to try to explain opposition to abortion entirely in terms of preventing women from being in control. It's certainly true that arguments within pro-choice feminism see the abortion issue that way, but there's no way that's the important issue for pro-lifers. If Rodriguez doesn't understand that the main reason so many people oppose abortion is because they think it's despicable to take an innocent life for reasons that usually amount to lesser importance than the life issue, then he's living in a bubble. Since Rodriguez is Catholic, he should know better.

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.

In the wake of same-sex marriage court decisions and legislation, many seek to define 'marriage' in terms that require a marriage to be between one man and one woman. Now I'm not on the bandwagon that says that, just because the term has always meant that, it must still mean that. A lot of people apparently think that's a good argument, but words change their meaning. It's never safe to base your ethical argument on what a term has meant in the past. Nevertheless, some of the responses to this sort of view are also pretty lame. One argument I've seen a handful of times showed up recently in a comment at Pharyngula:

Sure is funny how "God ordered each and all marriages [sic] to be between one man and one woman". Gosh, I guess Solomon missed that one. And others - I'm no bible student, help me out here.

Right, you're no Bible student. A Bible student would know that Solomon was criticized for his marriages within the very same book that sees his marriages as a sign of the prosperity God had blessed him with. So the biblical narrator's attitude toward Solomon's marriages is at least complex.

But you're apparently also no logic student. Think about polygamous marriages. Did Warren Jeffs have a group marriage? Were the women he was married to also married to each other? Or was it just a bunch of marriages, each one consisting of Jeffs and a woman? Did Solomon have all these wives who were married to each other as much as they were married to him? Or was he married to each one of them in a separate marriage? Maybe group marriages have occurred. I have no idea. But that's not polygamy. Polygamy is one man marrying separate women in multiple marriages, with each marriage involving one man-woman pair. Polygamy is no exception to the claim that marriage has always consisted of one man and one woman. It's just an exception to the claim that no one has more than one marriage at once.

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.

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.)

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.

This is the 45th post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. The last post finished up the compatibilist account of freedom, and this post moves on to a perplexing problem related to freedom and moral responsibility, one that philosophers have called moral luck.

Immanuel Kant thought it obvious that we're not responsible for things not under our control. Why hold people responsible for the workings of fate? Shouldn't we be responsible just for what we intend to do, or at least what we can reasonably, foreseeably expect given what we intend? It's irrational to evaluate each other based on things not under our control. Yet Thomas Nagel points out that we do it, and we will continue to do it, since it's part of our way of thinking about morality. It seems fine to us until we think more deeply about it. Nagel argues that we can be morally responsible in circumstances we have no control over. His cases involve moral evaluations that depend on things outside our control. He calls this phenomenon moral luck (I think it was actually Sir Bernard Williams who came up with the term). These are cases in which something outside my control affects our moral judgment of my actions, usually by affecting the action or its consequences.

Some of Nagel's cases might fit into different of these categories, depending on how you think of it, so keep in mind that these are loose categories. Also, Nagel has four categories, but I think the difference between two of them is not worth the time it takes to distinguish them, at least for the purpose of these notes, which come from my lecture notes for an introductory philosophy class.

1. constitutive luck: my inclinations, capacities, and temperament aren't fully in my control. Significant aspects of who I am are from genetics, experiences, etc. Yet I often act in certain ways because of these. I may have a genetic tendency to be more violent, or maybe I'm good largely because of a good upbringing. This doesn't stop moral evaluation. We still blame the violent person or praise the good person, and it seems right to do so. (Note: determinists admit this. What's important is that libertarians have to admit a large amount of constitutive luck, which on their view means freedom is a lot more limited than you might have wished.

Woe to the one who says to his father, "What will you engender?" or to a woman, "What will you writhe over in labor?" [Isaiah 45:10]

John Oswalt (Isaiah 40-66: New International Commentary on the Old Testament) comments on the last part of the above verse as follows:

Commentators have questioned why woman is used in the second bicolon instead of the expected parallel, "mother." The solutions offered have generally been inconclusive, but this may be another example of the Bible's careful refusal to give even the appearance of labeling God as Mother. Once that equation is permitted to stand it becomes all but impossible to maintain the doctrine of transcendence on which all biblical revelation stands or falls. This is so for two reasons: (1) because there is a physical continuity between mother and child, and (2) because of the total association of mother goddesses in the ancient Near East with fertility and reproduction.

I think Oswalt is right that the biblical authors are reluctant to make explicit statements about God as mother. This is worth contrasting with using clear feminine imagery about God, which they certainly do, albeit not as often as they use masculine imagery. But they don't speak of God as mother.

I'm curious what it means if Oswalt is right about the reasons for avoiding such a conclusion. Oswalt's reasoning seems to me to be friendly to some feminist views, in at least one respect. The reason for not using explicit mother language is at least in part culturally-conditioned, since his second explanation involves something true only of the immediately surrounding cultures.

But it does also involve something universal, even if it is contingent. The close physical continuity between mother and child is not culturally-relative. Only in science fiction scenarios with artificial wombs can you minimize that continuity, and even then it doesn't remove it entirely, since an egg has a little more connection with a mother than a sperm cell does with a father, and the fertilized egg has more connection with the egg than the sperm cell that fertilized it.

Yet both explanations do not rely on any sense of God being male, and thus the usual view that God is neither male nor female but has chosen male language to be more revealing of his nature seems to make sense on Oswalt's account.

Eugene Volokh points out a problem in the way some people are arguing for brute parental control rather than looking at serious studies to determine whether abstinence-only sex education has the effects it's supposed to have. He's right about that.

I do have a quibble, though, and I wonder if it shows a deep disagreement between many of the people on the two sides of this issue. The way he frames his criticism seems to me to assume something that many on the abstinence-only side will not grant. He says:

But if you're going to talk about what's actually "best for ... children" -- which is to say what's actually effective in preventing harmful behavior -- then don't claim that parents have some sort of innate insight into a process that they've never systematically studied, and as to which they have at best a couple of observations (and far from perfect ones, since they may not know that much about their children's sex lives). It's not that parents are less inherently "elite" than public health Ph.D.s. It's just that, on the question of what sorts of educational programs work in this area, only people who have indeed studied the subject in a systematic way are likely to have a trustworthy opinion on what will actually work.

That's probably right if we can all agree on what counts as what's best for children and then figure out how to measure that. But he's given a very explicit account of what's best for children, and it's not one that I think many people on the abstinence-only side would accept. He equates what's best for them (i.e. well-being) with preventing harmful behavior. Doesn't that assume that the only thing that can make their lives worse is their own and others' harmful behavior rather than simply not living up to high standards?

I wonder if this reveals a key difference in assumptions lying behind disputes about this issue. People who favor more comprehensive sex education are simply trying to prevent teen pregnancy and the spread of STDs. People who favor abstinence-only education are trying to promote a much broader kind of excellence than merely not running into those two very narrow problems compared to all the other ways people can fall short of the ideal sexually. (They have other differences too, including differences in what counts as the sexual ideal, but I think this issue is an important part of the puzzle.)

Now some people do agree with the Volokh view of self-interest, thinking of well-being just as lack of harm. But some people have a higher notion of excellence, and I wonder if that assumption leads many people to avoid the studies he wants them to pay attention to. If the studies assume something about what's best for kids, and it's not the most important thing about what's best for them in the minds of these parents, then it's no surprise that they don't care what the study shows. The study relies on assumptions they disagree with. It's thus irrelevant to them. Most of the people I'm talking about probably don't think explicitly in these terms, but I think it's part of what's going on. If I'm right, then they're not being quite as anti-intellectual as Volokh thinks.

I've heard it said that the Levitical requirement for priests to marry virgins is a sign of an assumption that virgins are more pure, which implies that sex is in itself impure. Here is the relevant passage:

And he shall take a wife in her virginity. A widow, or a divorced woman, or a woman who has been defiled, or a prostitute, these he shall not marry. But he shall take as his wife a virgin of his own people, that he may not profane his offspring among his people, for I am the Lord who sanctifies him." (Leviticus 21:13-15, ESV)

There are several things wrong with this argument. One is that the priest is supposed to be pure after marriage too, and if sex is impure then how is he going to remain pure if he has sex with his wife? Another is that there's a reason give, one that doesn't have to do with the purity of the bride but with the offspring. I suppose it's possible to take that as assuming the offspring will be polluted because the mother is polluted, but I don't think that's what's going on here. One of the priestly requirements during Ezekiel's vision of a renewed temple in the last chapters of his prophecy sheds some light on this issue:

They shall not marry a widow or a divorced woman, but only virgins of the offspring of the house of Israel, or a widow who is the widow of a priest. (Ezekiel 44:22, ESV)

If the issue were some animus against people who had had sex, then why would a widow of a priest be ok? Presumably if pollution from sex itself transferred pollution to any offspring, then wouldn't the widow of a priest be just as problematic as the widow of anyone else? This suggests some other reason why priests needed to marry virgins in Leviticus, a reason that must be consistent with marrying widows of priests in Ezekiel. It's unlikely that there's different reasoning involved in the two cases, even if you don't accept divine inspiration behind the two passages.

A much more likely explanation is that the issue with offspring is that virgins raise no problem for offspring having been fathered by someone else prior to the marriage. If a priest marries a virgin, any child she gives birth to will be of the priestly line. If he marries someone who is not a virgin, there is always the possibility that any offspring might have been fathered by someone who is not a priest. At least that's true if her previous sexual activity was with someone who was not a priest. If she was married to a priest, her offspring would still be assumed to be of priestly descent. So this interpretation makes sense of the second allowable condition in Ezekiel, in keeping with the spirit of the Leviticus passage.

Those who begin with the assumption that the Bible is anti-sex like to come up with these implausible claims, and someone who doesn't think carefully about the biblical passages in context can easily come away with the conclusion that these charges have some foundation. Biblical passages certainly do assume a sexual morality that differs from popular views today, but it doesn't follow that the assumptions behind that sexual ethic are anti-sex. Even ignoring the celebration of sex in the Song of Songs and Paul's insistence in I Corinthians 7 that sex should be a normal and regular part of marriage, you still can't easily get the conclusion that sex itself is impure unless you ignore much of the ancient context and often even the literary context of biblical statements.

This is over a month old now, but I'm way behind on a number of things, and it won't get better until the semester is over in a couple weeks. Hugo Schwyzer wrote a while back about a bad policy at what seems to be an emergent-type church involving having married couples promise to have sex every day for a month in an effort to build sexual intimacy. He's probably right in a lot of his criticisms, and I can think of some he doesn't mention. But I disagree with one of his points, and I think it's one he's particularly emphatic about.

He thinks the bad guy here is duty, as if a duty to have sex with one's spouse is bad. His argument is that good things lose their goodness when they become a mere duty. In one sense of what someone might mean by a duty, I think he's right. However, in a pretty common sense of the term, I think he's very wrong, and I think his view is strongly at odds with the moral perspective Paul expresses in I Corinthians 7 and Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount implies.

It's worth distinguishing between (1) duty in the sense of merely following rules without any further reason and (2) duty in the sense of going the extra mile for another person or doing what you'd want them to do for you if you were the one who strongly desired sexual connection. The first kind of duty is worthy of the Schwyzer's criticism. The second is not.

Suppose one member of a married couple has a strong desire for sexual intimacy, while the other doesn't. I'm not talking about cases of serious illness or complete exhaustion. I simply mean one wants to and the other doesn't. The one who doesn't is completely capable of engaging in sexual activity and enjoying it but simply isn't interested. Now it may be the loving thing to do for the interested party to back down. I don't want to suggest that forcing sex even in marriage is remotely excusable. Nevertheless, the question I'm interested in here is not the moral obligation of the interested party. What Schwyzer was addressing is whether there can be a duty to have sex, not whether there can be a duty to refrain. I'm sure he'd agree with me that there are plenty of instances of that.

The Pauline view is clear on this. In I Corinthians 7, Paul commands husbands and wives to seek to be available to each other sexually except in times of special devotion to intense prayer. That suggests a duty to have sex. It doesn't mean a duty to have sex every night, as the proposal in question suggested. But it does imply a duty to have sex. This Pauline view can be easily motivated by Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, particularly by the Golden Rule (do to others what you'd want them to do for you) and the extra mile (if someone asks you to carry something a mile, do it for two miles, and if someone asks for your coat offer up your shirt too). Jesus speaks as if this sort of thing is a typical characteristic of his followers, and those who don't do this are failing to be like citizens of the kingdom of God out to be. I can see how someone would apply such statements to the case at hand by arguing for a duty to have sex even when one isn't interested for the sake of the sex.

But this is not duty for the mere sake of duty. It's duty for the sake of the other person. If a person motivated by love for another person has a duty to do what's loving for the other person, there may well be times when that involves having sex when one otherwise wouldn't have been interested, and Jesus' teaching does seem to include cases like that. I'm not sure why cases of voluntarily being willing to have sex when one isn't interested should be exceptions to the kinds of loving acts he commands in those passages. This doesn't mean setting an arbitrary rule to ensure that couples have sex more often, but it does suggest that the motivation Jesus commands in the Sermon on the Mount involves a duty to show the kind of love that might include things like this. So I would defend Paul against Schwyzer's argument by pointing out that a duty to sex in the Pauline sense seems to follow fairly easily from the kinds of teachings in the Sermon on the Mount that I'm sure Schwyzer has no problem with.

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.

There's an ongoing debate between two false views. Some Christians think love is a command (after all the two great commandments are to love God and to love others) and therefore doesn't involve feelings. The other view is that love is obviously a feeling and thus isn't really something we can be responsible for. We can't be commanded to love if it's something that happens to us, as feelings do. On the latter view, those who fall in love are just lucky, and there's no room for choosing to love someone. On the former view, as long as you do the right actions you're loving, and it doesn't matter if you feel the right feelings.

I've resisted both views before. See the comments on my Christian Hedonism post from a few years ago and Wink's Love is not a Choice post from a couple months later. (By the way, I'm not saying Wink commits one of the two errors, His denial of love as a choice isn't to remove ourselves from being responsible for our feelings. Rather, the reverse -- he sees love as involving feelings that we're obligated to feel.)

I've been reading a commentary on Proverbs, and I came to Proverbs 5 last week. It struck me as a particularly nice example of what I said in those comment sections. In this passage, it's even stronger in one sense. It isn't just love that's commanded here. It's utter delight and intoxication, the height of positive emotional responses. It's so clearly a feeling that I don't know how anyone could try to claim otherwise. Yet it's also so obviously a command in context that it would take extracting the passage from its literary surroundings and reading the grammar extremely woodenly to deny that..

Drink water from your own cistern,
flowing water from your own well.
Should your springs be scattered abroad,
streams of water in the streets?
Let them be for yourself alone,
and not for strangers with you.
Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;
be intoxicated always in her love.
Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman
and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? [Proverbs 5:15-20, ESV]

It is technically true that some of the verbs are not grammatically commands but are actually blessing formulas (often translated in other translations as "may you be..."), but in context the entire section is contrasted with getting tangled up in adultery, which the father commands the son to avoid. Part of the remedy for the son's temptation toward adultery is to take delight in his wife. It has the force of a command even when it technically invokes a divine blessing to provide this for the son. In other words, it's a lot like many passages throughout the Bible that assume full human participation and moral responsibility in living the righteous life despite the need for God to provide grace to enable the righteous to be righteous.

Some Christians have argued that the ancient Hebrews took marriage to be nothing more or less than a relationship instituted by consummation, i.e. by sexual relations. My understanding of Gordon Hugenberger's view in Marriage as a Covenant is that he takes the sexual act to be the initiation of the marriage, with the ceremony leading up to it counting as only a formality. The vows serve an important foundation of the comittment in marriage, but those vows are contingent on actually consummating the marriage. So a couple legally married who never consummate their marriage are not biblically married on his view. This is why Christians have often had no problem with divorce in such cases, and some even insist on calling it annulment, which means the marriage is treated as if it never really occurred. On Hugenberger's view, it never really did.

I've been inclined toward thinking that this was the view the ancient Hebrews assumed. After all, the marriage ceremony lasted something like a week, and during it the bride and groom are not married until the groom took the bride to his tent for their first sexual intercourse. However, if you assume this view and then read the Christmas narrative in Matthew, something doesn't seem right about Joseph's interaction with Mary. The text seems to indicate that he married her but didn't have sex with her until after Jesus was born. So what did their marriage consist of? What event initiated it? Not sex. On Hugenberger's view, sex is what makes it marriage. It's hard to see how that's consistent with this text.

Now this is surely an extraordinary event, since it involves a pregnancy that is itself an extraordinary event. Maybe that's enough to allow this to be an exception to what's generally true. But it still doesn't sit right with me, because it means marriage can't be defined the way Hugenberger defines it. In at least one instance a marriage is not initiated in the way his view requires. This is consistent with his view that any sexual interaction involves an implicit lifelong commitment. It's also consistent with the view that a marriage without consummation can be annulled. But it does seem to show that marriage can't be defined as a relationship initiated by sex.

Consider the following words from Rudy Giuliani (hat tip: DaveG):

Giuliani, who appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said in response to a question that he did not believe homosexuality was aberrant.

“The way somebody leads their life isn’t sinful. It’s the acts,” said Giuliani, who supports gay rights and lived with an openly gay couple after separating from his second wife while mayor. “It’s the various acts that people perform that are sinful, not the orientation that they have.”

What could that possibly mean? Here are the three main views on this issue:

View A: There's nothing wrong remotely in the area of homosexuality.
View B: Homosexuality (as a sexual orientation) is involuntary (or largely involuntary), but homosexual acts are immoral.
View C: It's morally wrong to be gay, even if you're celibate.

Now I think Giuliani has ruled out all three views. There are acts that he thinks are wrong that are remotely related to homosexuality. So it's not A. It's clearly not C, since he says a homosexual orientation isn't a sin. B might seem the most plausible, and it does seem to follow from his denial of the other two, but he does say that "the way somebody leads their life isn't sinful". Unless he means that in a way that isn't its most natural meaning, I think he's just contradicted his statement that various acts are wrong.

I have two overly charitable interpretations that might make sense of this.

1. View B is his view, and when he refers to the way somebody leads their life he's not talking about acts but orientation. In favor of this is the parallel between his contrast between how you lead your life and your acts and his second contrast between orientation and your acts. But it's extremely strange to talk about orientation as equivalent with how you lead your life. How you lead your life seems more akin to acts than it does to orientation.

2. DaveG's interpretation is correct, and View A is what Giuliani meant to say, which means the acts he refers to have nothing to do with homosexuality. He's making a general claim that sins are acts, and homosexuality isn't an act, so it can't be a sin. The problem with this is that there are acts associated with homosexuality, and his point doesn't say anything against View B, which is an extremely common view. Also, his contrast between acts and orientation does seem to be parallel to the contrast between the way you lead your life and your acts, which would suggest some connection between the acts and the orientation.

I also have a somewhat uncharitable interpretation that might make some sense of it:

3. View A is his view, and the acts he has in mind are ones that don't actually have to do with homosexuality but are commonly associated with it anyway, e.g. male-male incest, paedophilia/pederasty, male-male rape, etc. Homosexuality entails none of those, but they are male-male, and thus they are technically homosexual. What's somewhat uncharitable about interpreting him this way is that it makes him out to connect homosexuality with such acts even when he's trying to defend it. It wouldn't be my first choice to attribute such a view to someone just to try to make sense of what seems to be a contradiction. But I'm not happy with any of the above options, either.

A recent update from the Family Research Council takes an interesting tactic from the point of view of bad rhetorical moves. What do you do if you want to convince people that you're on the side of families? Probably not word things in such a way that you sound as if parents of adopted children aren't parents. Not a good idea. Yet this is exactly what the FRC has done (and I must say it's not the first time I've seen this from mainstream opposition to gay marriage).

It is outrageous that courts in some states have become complicit in this denial of biological reality by allowing homosexual couples to have custody of newborns and birth certificates that mislead about the true parentage of the child. 

So what counts as true parentage? I accept that birth certificates of adopted kids ideally ought to list the biological parents, for a lot of reasons. But I would never in my right mind suggest that this is the same thing as saying birth certificates ought to list the true parents, as if adoptive parents aren't the true parents of the child. So here's a hint to the FRC. If you're going to argue against adoption by gay people, it's not going to endear people toward thinking of you as a legitimate family advocate if you also in effect include adoption by straight married couples as part of your target by speaking of them as if they're not real parents.

It turns out divorce is bad for the environment. So is breaking up any cohabitation. I guess marriage and cohabitation are good for the environment, then. It's interesting that they worded the headline to emphasize the negative rather than the positive, though. [hat tip: Jonathan Adler]

In case you haven't heard, J.K. Rowling was asked last week if Albus Dumbledore ever experienced romantic love, and Rowling revealed something that never appeared in the books: she'd always thought of Dumbldore as gay. This revelation makes sense of something in the last book that was a little puzzling otherwise, but I won't get into it in case anyone hasn't read the book and wants to get into it spoiler-free. I wish I had the time to write up my thoughts on this, but I'm glad someone has saved me the trouble. Travis at Sword of Gryffindor has already written up most of what I'd want to say:

See also the two comments linked to at the top of his post, in the update. If you haven't read the final book of the series, beware of spoilers in any of this.

A colleague who shares an office with me presented the following argument today (I can't remember where he said he got it from, but I'll try to ask him when I see him next Tuesday so I can give credit to the source):

1. If a complete stranger tells a woman to have sex with him or she'll never see her children again, she should have sex with him (and there's very good reason to believe he's telling the truth), because her children should be more important to her than her preferences about who she has sex with.
2. The issues involved with her decision are parallel to the issues involved in cases of rape and cases of a divorced parent preventing the other parent from seeing their children.
3. Therefore, preventing a parent from seeing their children is worse than raping someone.

Now some people might not accept premise 1. But assume premise 1 is true. I don't think you should have to deny premise 1 to get out of this argument. But the trick is identifying precisely where the argument goes wrong. Its conclusion is certain to be very unpopular. Rape is commonly viewed as one of the most despicable things anyone could do, and we never say anything remotely as bad about a woman who gains custody after divorcing her husband and preventing him from ever seeing his kids. But according to this argument, rape is not as bad as preventing him from seeing his kids. So where does the argument go wrong? Or is it actually true that, as bad as rape is, it's actually worse to rob a parent of access to their kids?

Update 10-23-07 1:17pm: The argument came from someone named David Thomas (not the founder of Wendy's, from a book called Not Guilty: The Case in Defense of Men). Second, I think I was overstating the conclusion a bit. It's not a comparison of the moral badness of the two actions. He was just trying to argue that we should care as much about men being kept from their children as we do about rape, and the fact is that we don't. Third, the cases he has in mind are not custody cases where men aren't granted visitation rights. He's thinking of the many cases when men are given visitation rights legally, but the police and courts won't enforce them, and the men never see their kids.

Numbers 30 deals with Israelite vows to God, i.e. declaring something to be dedicated to God. This would usually involve vowing something to God that one would give to the tabernacle or temple system much later, e.g. a certain percentage of the harvest that hasn't arrive yet or something of that nature. Some of the Pharisees in Jesus' time abused this system by vowing things to God that were necessary for caring for their parents, and thus they used these laws to get out of more important ones like honoring father and mother.

Jephthah in Judges 11 vowed whatever first came through his door, and it turned out to be his daughter. In that case, he tragically honored his vow when he shouldn't have done so, although if he had broken it he would have needed to make atonement. But other vows could be rash and should never have been made that nonetheless have to be honored. Typically if a man made a vow, he would have to honor it even if it was rashly made and burdensome to honor.

The regulations in Numbers 30 relate to girls and women making vows when under the authority of someone else. Normally a man would be responsible for his own vows. A girl under her father's authority would also normally be responsible for her own vows, provided that her father, when hearing about it, said nothing. But he did have the authority to cancel her vow. The same is true of a husband of a married woman. The father or husband would have to cancel the vow immediately when hearing about it, but the authority to cancel the vow came with being the father of a minor girl or the husband of a wife.

What interested me in reading this chapter recently was how it treats widows and divorced women. There were cases of widows and divorced women going back to live with their father, but there were also cases of widows retaining the property their husbands had inherited and serving as a head of household. These cases would have to have involved children, since otherwise the property might leave the clan, and property ties to tribes and clans was a very big deal in ancient Israel. But what's notably absent in this chapter is any statement about such women being under the authority of their father in terms of vows. As far as this chapter is concerned, a widow or divorced woman was simply responsible for her vows, and no one had the authority to cancel them.

A megachurch in Arlingon, Texas canceled a funeral service for someone when they found out he was gay, on the ground that they didn't want to be seen as endorsing that lifestyle. Since when does agreeing to host a funeral service for someone mean you endorse everything that person did? Should a congregation refuse to use their building to provide a funeral for the dead brother of one of their members simply because they guy lived with his girlfriend without getting married? What if the dead brother was a convicted thief or a greedy drunkard who slandered people fairly regularly? What if it was the rebellious son of members of the congregation or an arrogant and boastful member of the congregation?

Two of the most prominent passages that deal with homosexual sex in the New Testament list these other sins alongside same-sex sexual acts. No passage in the entire Bible elevates anything to do with homosexuality on a level that disallows showing love to the family of the sort that would be involved in having a funeral. Somehow homosexuality has become so evil to many evangelicals that we could refuse to do something for the family of a gay person that we'd probably do for the family of a murderer.

It's nice to see that this doesn't affect Dale Carpenter's attitude toward Christianity, but I think that's because he has direct contact with sincere, loving Christians who treat him as a real person with a lifestyle they simply disagree with. He understands that true Christianity is not like this. But when high-profile congregations do this kind of thing, it is all the majority of secular people will ever see. Most people who aren't Christians don't have a lot of significant contact with believing Christians who live out the Christian norm of love for neighbor in a way that demonstrates that gay people are part of that love. This isn't because Christians aren't doing that but because most secular people have little contact with evangelicals to begin with. So high-profile Christian leaders and congregations like this one have a much higher responsibility because of their visibility. Unfortunately, this congregation has utterly failed in that responsibility in this instance.

Mark Goodacre points to the attention Deirdre Good's new book Jesus' Family Values is getting. Her argument is basically that Jesus had no family values, on the following ground:

1. Jesus challenged some of the societal expectations people in his cultural context had about families.
2. Jesus doesn't spend a lot of time on some of the moral perspectives assumed by all first-century Jews because of the background of the Hebrew scriptures, i.e. he focuses on where the people of his time were misinterpreting or violating the spirit of the Hebrew scriptures.
3. Jesus predicts that families will divide over him, without ever saying that those who reject his followers in this way and put them to death are right to cause such division.
4. We see no sign of Jesus calling his foster father Joseph by the name he reserved for his heavenly Father.

She also says (falsely) that the word 'family' never appears in the New Testament. Now the English word never appears in the Greek, but a simple online search would have shown her that many English translations use the word regularly (see the ESV, NIV, HCSB, TNIV, NLT). Maybe she got some not quite true information about the KJV not having the word in the NT (it does have it once), but that has nothing to do with the content of the Greek NT itself but more to do with the English language at the time the KJV was translated (or rather the English language of a couple centuries earlier, which is what the KJV translators were translating the Bible into). [Update: see the comments for a more careful presentation of her view, why it's a little better than this, and why I still disagree with it.]

Now maybe the bulk of her argumentation is good, and maybe her conclusions aren't as radical as this presentation makes it look, but the impression of what I'm getting is that she's trying to send a message that pretty much everything those who speak of "family values" consider to fall under that would have been foreign to Jesus, and he'd in fact take the opposite views on many of those issues. The implicature is that those who say they derive their moral and political views from the Bible on these issues are in fact making them up whole cloth.

As I said in the comments on Mark's post, this is a very strange argument. For one thing, Jesus did speak about family values. He lambasted the Pharisees for taking the money they should have been using to care for their parents and dedicating it to God with a vow so they could use it now and not have to support their parents. He gives his mother to John to take care of her. He treats the love of the father for the prodigal son as an image of perfect, divine love, which affirms such love for wayward children.

What would you describe as the typical Disney family model? Jae Ran Kim points out how frequently the main character of Disney movies has either an absent or dead parent (or two absent or dead parents), among other unusual anomalies that should be surprising for a line of children's entertainment. I think the only one in her pretty long list to have both parents raise her ends up a cross-dresser.

This isn't necessarily a criticism. This particular story device often simply makes for a good story. But doesn't it seem excessive for Disney to be so overwhelmingly like this? Or is this more common in children's stories in general than we notice? Since we generally don't notice it with Disney, maybe that's so. But why don't we notice it, if we don't?

John Piper recently preached a sermon on the high calling of singleness. Someone wrote to him afterward, asking why anyone should get married if singleness is such a high calling. His response is balanced, careful, and full of wisdom. [hat tip: Justin Taylor]

J.K. Rowling regularly speaks against this sort of thing. It's one thing to photshop women as a matter of course to increase their bust size and thin their waist. Not that it's not immoral with adult women, but it seems to me to be a completely different matter to do it with someone who is underage (just turned 17, probably 16 when she took the picture) who is portraying someone even more underage (15 at the beginning of the movie, 16 at the end).

Several of the commenters have already made this point, but I'll make it again here. If whoever was responsible for this perverse act doesn't think Emma Watson is attractive enough to teenagagers as she is, then our culture's standards of beauty have become even more warped than I had thought (and I've long thought them to be pretty twisted). We already tell girls in too many ways that they're not good enough unless they look like Emma Watson. Now it turns out even Emma Watson isn't even good enough as she is.

Update: More here. I've also now linked above to Rowling's own rant against this sort of thing.

Update 2: Warner Brothers claims that they didn't authorize this. They've asked IMAX to remove it from their site. 

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy has some interesting observations about interracial dating. It turns out that there's more resistance to interracial dating even when it comes to online dating, which means it doesn't just have to do with who you associate with in daily life within your local community (although that's got to be a factor, because groups who tend to live in areas where they are the majority are less likely to take part in interracial dating than groups that typically find themselves in the majority wherever they live).

One factor that he includes that I hadn't connected with this is that people with higher or more specific standards in non-racial ways might be more open to interracial dating simply because their pool is already much smaller than other people's. He includes religious standards such as refusal to date someone of another religion. This may well be one explanation why, in my own observation, evangelical Christians (at least in the circles I run in) are far more open to interracial dating than most any other group I can think of. It may well be partly because evangelicals have a smaller pool to pick from because many evangelicals will date only other evangelicals, and being open to interracial dating helps widen the pool from what it would be if they looked only at people within their own racial group.

Nonetheless, I don't think such an explanation undermines what I've long thought to be the explanation for evangelicals' greater openness to interracial dating. I've generally taken it to be because evangelicals have a heightened sense of the oneness of all genuine followers of Jesus, who evangelicals typically see as including mainly those who have put their allegiance to Christ above all other allegiances. Identity in Christ is primary, and other sources of identity are at best secondary. Thus when I think about who I'm most closely aligned with, I'm going to think of black evangelicals as much closer to the heart of my identity than I will white non-believers.

This isn't just not in conflict with Somin's point, as if they are two compatible explanations. It's actually the same fact under two different descriptions. On the one hand, evangelicals who have this restriction do indeed have a smaller pool to pick from, and they are thus more likely to be willing to include others in the pool than just those of their own race. But the philosophical justification for restricting the pool to like-minded believers is the same justification for expanding it to include like-minded believers regardless of race. After all, it's the sense of closer identity with fellow believers that leads both to the restriction to only believers and to openness to believers of other races.

One more voice enters the fray to support the minority report that Don Imus' primary offense is against women, with his offense against blacks only secondary. Roland Martin (who it is worth recognizing is black) argues that, while the nappy-haired qualifier restricted Imus' comment to black women, it's very clear that calling them hos made it an attack on women.

I wouldn't say some of what he says, and I'd word some more of it very differently than he does. I think you could be critical of Hillary Clinton as an opportunist without basing it on her violation of gender stereotypes that we'd prefer her to conform to. But I do think enough of the criticism she receives comes from what he's getting at. The same is true of Condi Rice. People can criticize her views or even slander her character without necessarily being sexist. After all, they do the same to other members of the Bush Administration, most of whom are not women. But sometimes it takes on a particular flavor with her in ways that you couldn't see if the attack were against a man. The same is true of Janet Reno. Just consider the SNL parodies of all three of these women, especially Will Ferrell's Reno.

Compare someone who refers to some black people (sex unspecified) as nappy-headed and someone who refers to some women (race unspecified) as hos. The former makes fun of someone's physical characteristics, deriding a distinctive characteristic of the appearance of black people. The latter invokes a double standard (men who are promiscuous have no similar negative term) and usually involves a moral judgment about sexual behavior based on evidence that often isn't closely (or isn't at all) tied to sexual behavior. It is a particular insult against women to take part in that game, regardless of whether the insult in a particular case is restricted to a particular sub-group of women, even if the context also insults that sub-group.

Both are immoral, but the second seems much worse to me. So when both are done together, why is it that people focus just on the former? Is it that we're just incapable of seeing an insult against black women as being an insult against women? Or is it that we've got a heightened sensibility toward seeing slights against black people that we don't have toward seeing slights against women? Or is it some combination of the two?

Al Mohler thinks Christians are going to have a harder time with the homosexuality issue than most other problems that future generations look back on and wonder what all the fuss was about. His reason is that there is no middle ground on homosexuality. [ht: Mark Olson] He quotes Theo Hobson:

Firstly, this is an issue that shuns compromise. It has a stark "either/or" quality. Either homosexuality is a fully valid alternative to heterosexuality or it is not. There is no room for compromise, no third way: poor Rowan Williams is trying to make himself a perch on a barbed-wire fence. You don't find such absoluteness in other moral debates, such a complete absence of shared assumptions and aims. This is not a normal moral debate but a pure clash of visceral responses.

Mohler adds his own agreement:

It is refreshing to see Hobson point to the "either/or" character of this controversy. He is precisely right -- there is no middle ground -- no third way. Homosexuality will be seen as either normal or sinful. Everything hinges on that assessment. If it is accepted as normal, those who consider it sinful will be seen as repressive, hateful, and dangerous to the good of society. This, he argues, is where the church now stands.

I disagree, very strongly. I've argued several times throughout the history of this blog that there is indeed a third position. Homosexuality need not be seen as either normal or sinful. It might be seen, as the apostle Paul saw it, as a consequence of the fall. Homosexuality is a condition whose social construction doesn't exactly fit the categories of NT Christians, and so Paul shouldn't be expected to have anything to say about what we call homosexuality. He did state very clearly that gay sex is sinful, but that's an action. I think, by extension, he'd agree that it's bad to deliberately and willingly accept the category of being gay as part of one's identity. But I don't think either gay sex or such identification with homosexuality is the same thing as homosexuality itself. Homosexuality is merely a condition people find themselves in. That can no more be sinful than a married heterosexual finding themselves attracted to people of the opposite sex besides their spouse.

Now I don't expect Mohler to agree with my position. But surely it is a third position of the sort he has ruled out without argument. (The way Hobson stated his binary, it's possible he'd see the third view as agreeing that homosexuality is not a fully valid alternative to heterosexuality, and thus his binary might remain. But Mohler clearly rules out a view like this one.) Since John Piper holds exactly the view I have just outlined, it's not as if no prominent evangelical has put it forward. There are places where a biblical view is going to come up against the view that nothing is bad at all about homosexuality. But I don't think it's a good idea to state it the way Mohler did, which rules out the view that homosexuality is an unfortunate condition tied up with an inclination toward certain sins but that the condition itself isn't sinful.

Jollyblogger and Tim Challies are discussing an argument from David Powlison against social explanations for homosexuality. In particular, they pick on a Christian counselor who explains why someone is a lesbian by pointing to events in her past.

I think there are several reasons to disagree with the basic thrust of this argument, but one pretty ironic one is that many Christians are spending so much effort to deny biological explanations for homosexuality that they're left explaining it in terms of social factors exactly like the case Powlison is rejecting here. Powlison now wants to remove social explanations as well. Why? It seems that Powlison thinks (and David Wayne and Tim Challies agree with him) that giving an account of why something is true is inconsistent with saying that anything could be sinful about the thing you're explaining.

I can't disagree more. This argument seems to me to rely on two fallacies, a category mistake and a false dichtomy, and I think it leads to some very disturbing consequences if we consistently refused to explain sin in this way. I hereby call them to reconsider for the following reasons.

This is part three of what I was expecting to be a four-part review of Mary Kassian's The Feminist Mistake. I have decided to post what I've written of part three and then not continue, primarily because I have not been reading any more of this book for quite some time, and I need to limit my reading list down to something much more manageable given that I would like to finish my dissertation by the end of next summer. So I've decided not to finish this book in the foreseeable future. Here, then, is the last part of my series of reviews on this book, covering a few chapters into the third section.

Andreas Kostenberger has a thoughtful post on singleness in the Bible. I especially found one observation noteworthy. He finds a trajectory across salvation history with regard to singleness and marriage. Marriage is part of the creation order, part of God's original intent before the fall. It isn't until Jesus comes along to initiate the new covenant that you get any sense at all that there's anything but marriage as the norm, with singleness as an extraordinary exception (e.g. widows, serious illness). But Jesus indicates that some will be single by choice, and Paul even argues that the kingdom is more greatly served (in certain kinds of situations?) by those who are single, and therefore what was once the exception becomes something especially useful.

But Jesus also indicates that there will be no marriage in the resurrection. That means the intermediate phase between the initiation of the new covenant and its ultimate fulfillment in the resurrection is in tension between the marriage norm of the old covenant and the singleness norm of the resurrection. Seeing this according to a trajectory makes so much sense of how Paul can have such a high view of marriage and yet also view singleness as something for some to strive for. This doesn't (as some have argued) imply a lower view of marriage but simply reflects the tension between these two norms, one eventually to be replaced by the other but both having value in the in-between time. But Kostenberger does take marriage as a sort of norm even in this age, citing Matthew 19 as evidence. It's just not a norm in the fuller sense of when most everyone would be expected to get married.

Laurence Thomas defends Dr. Laura on marital sex, particularly her encouragement to married women to be more willing to be coaxed into sex by their husbands. Laurence argues that seeking to satisfy their husbands' desires is not merely giving in to selfishness. It's actually acting in a way that serves the interests of him while also being in her own self-interest at the same time. He suggests that the gift of sex is a power that women have that men do not, a theme consistent with a number of his recent posts. The good life involves the best use of that power, and fostering gratitude is one good use of any moral power. In the process, he argues that Dr. Laura's view comes from feminist motivations that her critics have simply failed to see, out of their assumption that seeking a man's happiness must always mean ignoring a woman's own concerns. It does not, and it particularly might not even when a woman thinks it means ignoring her own concerns.

I think the key issue in the whole post is the difference between choosing to see someone else's desire as an imposition on oneself vs. choosing to see it as an opportunity for kindness, one that will in the end reap the rewards of the other's gratitude. This point generalizes to many other circumstances, of course, but it does seem apt here. I think the problem Dr. Laura's critics have had is that they see her as arguing that women should consent to sex as a conjugal duty, when that is not at all what she's saying. She's saying that the kind of character trait that builds a good marriage includes seeking to please one's spouse, especially if the means of pleasing involves pleasure to oneself. I guess some of her critics can't see the difference between that and a mere fulfillment of a duty that one hates, but it's a fundamental distinction in terms of both motive and result. It's telling that in the one place this comes up in the writings of the apostle Paul in I Corinthians ch. 7, he tells married couples not to deprive each other (except by mutual consent for a limited time and only then for the sake of more focused prayer). The motive is concern for each other. The result is a good for each other that otherwise would count as deprivation. This is mutual. If abstaining is depriving each other, then sex is a good (a good for both parties) to be encouraged and engaged in, in part for the sake of the other. As far as I can tell, that's all Dr. Laura is saying to women. (What men might need to hear is a very different thing, but that's an issue for another time.)

Eugene Volokh discusses some problematic sexual assault policies at Gettysburg College and Antioch College regarding what counts as consensual sex. The most striking element to me comes toward the end of the post. It looks to me as if Antioch College's sexual assault policy leads to a fascinating infinite regress. Apparently you need explicit verbal agreement to count as consent. Yet they also prohibit non-consensual sexual communication. That means you can't even ask someone verbally if they want to have sex unless they first consent to your question. So you need to ask them if you can ask them a question about sex, but before that you need to ask them if you can ask them if you can ask them a question about sex, and before that you need to ask them if you can ask them if you can ask them if you can ask them a question about sex. That means you could never even get going with asking the question, which means consensual sex is impossible, and thus sex is in effect outlawed. Antioch College is the new Bob Jones University.

In a post about the consistency of maintaining equal rights for men and women while calling women to live decently , Laurence Thomas raises some further issues about a moral power of women that men don't have. He says that, because of the difference between a man raping a woman and a woman raping a man, women have a moral power that men don't have. This is a curious statement, and I can see what he might be getting at, but I'd need to see a little more to be sure. Since he didn't enable comments on that one post, I'll raise my questions here.

I agree with the claim that rape of a man by a woman and rape of a woman by a man are not equivalent. There's clearly a kind of rape that a woman cannot do to a man that a man can do to a woman, and that is to have sex when the other party is not aroused at all. There are purely biological reasons for this. There can be sexual assault of some sort, but it won't be outright rape of a man by a woman unless he is aroused enough that the act can even take place. That's a real disanalogy, and I think it has severe consequences for how we think about rape of a man by a woman as opposed to rape of a woman by a man. Men can rape women in ways that women can't rape men.

I'm not entirely sure that Laurence's next step is correct. He points out that a sexual act can be rape even if the woman being raped enjoys it or desires it at some level. This is the very heart of what sometimes happens in date rape cases. She does not consent to sex. He presses and succeeds. This can happen even if on some level she does desire the sexual interaction, as long as she doesn't rationally consent. This is especially the case when she's unable to give rational consent due to what's commonly called the date rape drug or even just a high blood alcohol level. Her desire is perfectly compatible with lack of consent, and it is indeed rape in such cases. But Laurence doesn't apply the same reasoning to men, and I'm not fully clear on why.

Last week, I picked up a copy of the Syracuse University Daily Orange, and it had an interesting article [registration may be required] about some students who wanted to start a chapter of N.O.W. on campus but decided against it because N.O.W. is a top-down organization that wouldn't let them promote the issues as they wanted to promote them, and there was also some hesitation related to the perception that N.O.W. consists largely of rich, white women. That was an interesting enough issue, but I have little to say about it. I do have something to say about one thing in the article, however. They include a quote from Marcia Pappas, president of the New York State division of N.O.W. Pappas says, "If you can't control your own reproductive system, you can't control anything."

Really? I'd like to see some evidence that societies that illegalize abortion are forced to prevent women from having jobs or to decide what kind of car they'd like to have. Show me even just a strong correlation between restricting contraception and removal of things like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and other freedoms that someone who can't control anything wouldn't possess. I'd be interested in any sign that those whose reproductive choices are restricted will somehow lose control of all their limbs and be unable to control what words come out of their mouths. That's what her statement implies. She probably just meant that those without good control over their reproductive options have far fewer options on matters of great importance, but her way of saying it makes it sound as if she can't distinguish between having fewer options on matters of great importance and not being able to control anything in your life. Probably even worse is that she's insulted anyone who struggles with fertility issues. Her statement implies that their lives are completely out of their control simply because they can't control their reproductive system.

Whatever you think of the views N.O.W. puts forth, this sort of ridiculous overstatement does not in any way serve their purposes, because it just makes her sound really stupid. People are then going to associate stupidity with the agenda of N.O.W. On one level I have welcome this sort of rhetorical blunder, because I think the N.O.W. agenda is ultimately evil, even if most of the people promoting it have good intentions. Still, I regret that anyone would say such foolish things and thus bring the entire public debate over abortion down to this kind of idiocy. It's bad enough that both sides ignore some important philosophical issues that aren't always obvious. It's much worse if we support our views with statements that are this obviously false while also insulting to a significant enough portion of the population.

The Syracuse University Daily Orange has an interesting article about the LGBT group making a list of bathrooms that would be more favorable for transgendered people [registration probably required], particularly so that they know which bathrooms are single-occupant and which have offensive graffiti. I don't want to get into the general issue of why this is or isn't a good idea or what we should think about the transgender phenomenon as a whole. I've commented on some aspects of those things previously. (It's not clear in the article, but I don't think anyone here is advocating making all bathrooms co-ed, since that would surely make many more people uncomfortable going to the bathroom than the current situation.)

What struck me as very strange, though, was a quote from a student:

The directory is a good idea because people should not feel nervous about going to the bathroom," said Sarabeth Schoeneck, an undeclared sophomore in the College of Human Services and Health Professions. "SU claims to be "no place for hate, and people being discriminated against in the restrooms is a form of hate," she said.

This seems to me to be a huge mistake. I think I have a pretty clear idea of what hate is, and I think I could give plenty of examples of when discrimination stems from hate, but the mere fact of discrimination is simply not hate. Sometimes discrimination occurs unintentionally. Sometimes it's from something like residual racism, where someone might have an immediate response of fear or discomfort because of someone else's race even if they rationally cannot stand the fact that they have such a response and really try to overcome it. Yet it might unconsciously affect some of their decisions and actions. Anyone who thinks that sort of discrimination is hate is morally insensitive.

What's even worse is confusing institutional discrimination with hate. Many authority positions are occupied disproportionally by white males, and white males tend to have disproportionally white male friends, both for largely innocent reasons with respect to their own choices. Given these realities, the practice of favoring people you know in hiring has a disproportionate effect on racial and gender lines. Those who aren't white males will tend to be less likely to be hired. That's a simple statistical fact, and this one practice will offer resistance to overcoming discrimination. So an institution or an overwhelming tendency in society can promote discrimination without any intentional discrimination. That seems to me to be exactly the sort of discrimination you might call this. How, then, is it hate? I think we're just so unaccustomed to seeing real hate in these matters that we have to invent it to have something to talk about. What's ironic is that most people making claims like this wouldn't know real hate if it bit them on the leg, and yet it's pretty common in academia. But hatred of those whom it's politically correct to hate doesn't count as hatred, while mindless processes and attitudes people are desperately trying to overcome do.

This one really shocked me. This is from Doug Wilson, of all people. Gay marriage is a judgment on our culture, and as God's people Christians should allow that judgment to play out. Now this shouldn't be too shocking from someone who thinks we need to make a strong distinction between the heavenly reality of the church (what Augustine called the City of God) and earthly governments. Wink and I disagree on how much the government has a moral responsibility to represent moral truth as taught by Christianity, which we both believe to get moral teaching correct, but we agree on the strong distinction between the two cities of Augustine. For those who don't know who Wilson is, he's a theonomist, maybe the most influential one in the world. That means he sees no such distinction. For him to say something like this sounds really strange, at least if you think of theonomy the way pundits complaining about conservative evangelicals' politics think of it. However, those complainers don't understand what the more sane versions of theonomy really amount to, and Wilson's stance on this issue demonstrates that. [Hat tip: World, whose weird code for links I can never get to work either in Internet Explorer or Firefox, which is why I'm not giving any links to Wilson himself.]

On the more general point about Theocracy Paranoia, Gene Veith said something a few weeks back that I thought was incredibly insightful. The primary things people are worried about are the unsuccessful attempts by conservatives, many of whom are Christians, to limit abortion and to prevent marriage from being gender-neutral. Consider the failed attempt to limit what can best be described as the most barbaric abortion procedure ever invented That description of it is almost a direct quote from a Norwegian atheist philosopher friend of mine who is thoroughly opposed to the pro-life position. He says he doesn't know how American politicians like my senators can defend such an barbaric procedure. Even after Congress passed it and the president signed it, judges wouldn't allow the ban, claiming that it might sometimes be healthier for a woman to kill her child during birth than to go ahead and finish delivery. If the so-called theocrats can't even accomplish that small and relatively reasonable restriction on a dreadful procedure, I don't know why there's such paranoia about the looming theocracy that we all need to beware of. Anyway, in the light of that point, Veith asks the following question. "A few decades ago, when abortion was against the law and homosexuality was assumed by all sides to be immoral, was that a theocracy?"

Update: I hadn't thought to run my mouse over the World link and then type in the URL. I've done that. Apparently it's a piece by Doug Jones and Doug Wilson together. My thoughts on the actual piece follow below the fold.

Digitus, Finger & Co. has a nice post explaining why abstinence-only sex education (or lack thereof!) is a very bad idea, even if excluding the abstinence-only message is also a bad idea. I knew there were extremists out there who think it's morally wrong to teach facts about birth control or how the human reproductive system works, but I thought abstinence education was simply showing why abstinence is the only way to be sure to avoid pregnancy and STDs (barring rape). I didn't realize that there are whole programs developed just make that claim and don't bother to teach the rest of the relevant issues. That's at least as bad as failing to mention that abstinence is the only 100% safe method and failing to talk about the magical thinking of the inverse lottery fallacy (instead of "I know how irrational it is to play the lottery, but I might win, and isn't that enough" it's "I know it's possible I might lose at the sex lottery, but that won't happen"). How can you support your claim that abstinence is the best method when you don't teach the facts about the others to back it up?

Yes, you heard right. People are no longer just marrying people of the opposite sex, people of the same sex, and people who are dead. Now they're marrying themselves. All sorts of interesting questions now get raised. Is it bigamy for her to marry someone else? Does this make her a lesbian? Should she double her name and hyphenate it to become Jennifer Hoes-Hoes, so as not to give undue influence from the groom's name? I can't agree with all the conclusions of the author, but some of the questions are quite funny.

Here are some more that may not have occurred to the author. Is this incest? Will death be enough to do her part? Does masturbation count as consummating the marriage, joining her with herself in some spiritual way that wasn't true before? Are her siblings now her sibilings-in-law and her parents her parents-in-law? Should she count herself as two people on official documents and as both parents of any children she adopts or acquires in some other way?

Link kudos to Ockhamism in a Real World.

What is supposed to be so harmful about gay marriage? What turns out to be the main reason Christians should want to safeguard the term 'marriage' has to do with the biblical concept of marriage, and it's something almost no one I've been reading on the topic mentions. It's no wonder that Andrew Sullivan can't find any argument for why Christians are so opposed to gay marriage. The main biblical reason never shows up on his radar.