By Richard D. Erlich

There is currently a debate going on in The Miami Student (Oxford, Ohio) over Miami's becoming more fully a research university, and various professors have argued well both pro and con. I'd like to extend the argument with a discussion of the advantages of what I'll call "the Big U Model for higher education."

I draw here on the work of Murray Sperber in Beer and Circus (2000), Michael Moffatt in Coming of Age in New Jersey (1989), and my own informal research at Miami at Oxford, Ohio, in the mid-1980s.

Briefly, the Big U -- the large, public research university -- works.

You should now ask, "Works for whom, and to what ends?" The system works for employers, the university as an institution, established faculty, and for most students.

It does not work particularly well to educate on an advanced level large numbers of Americans; but, as an old joke has it, "Most jobs require only a decent high-school education, which is why employers require college degrees." For employers, any system works that certifies potential employees who are able to work their ways through complex bureaucracies. A college degree does that, certifying graduates have "satisfied in full the requirements for the degree of" whatever, and are therefore people who can show up fairly regularly, follow orders, and get a job finished more or less on time.

For the university as an institution, in part a business operation, there is this from a former Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs: "The purpose of Miami University is to process the maximum number of students in the most cost-efficient manner." For cost-effectiveness, that VP and economist insisted on "maintaining the value of the Miami degree as a piece of social currency": i.e., our degrees had to certify enough competence to make them exchangeable for a chance at a good job.

Since the 1980s, add to necessities for the university as business "The Three Rs" of Recruitment, Retention, and Renewal: Bring them to your school, keep them there, send them out happy and ready to contribute money ("renewal"). Which brings us to students and faculty.

Students are and should be attracted by the status of universities, and that status rests to a large extent on an impressive faculty in terms of impressive published research. If that research takes time and emphasis away from undergraduate education, well, research still serves the interests of many faculty members, whose personal status is increased by well-received research more than by teaching. And less faculty attention to teaching and to undergraduate students may not be altogether negative for students in terms of the desires of students.

Murray Sperber suggests revising somewhat and recycling an old "taxonomy," yielding for students the subcultures Collegiate, Academic, Vocational, and Rebel (3-11). We can discount "Rebel" for most schools, and note that high percentages of undergrads desire most what has been politely called "The full collegiate experience" and less politely called--in titles from two of my students--"College: Half-Way House to Adulthood" and "College: The Four-Year Vacation."

Some Miami students are very serious about school; I found about one-third of our students work hard. Far more students want College! ("The Four-Year Vacation") plus the "paper": a degree with a decent transcript as "social currency."

Michael Moffatt handles such issues in his comments on the 1968 sociological work, Making the Grade: The Academic Side of College Life: "Three sociologists have written an excellent ethnography of the grading process at the University of Kansas based on research in the late 1950s that proves that the pragmatics of 'making the grade' came first for almost all the students and that substantial intellectual understandings of the material they were learning came a distant, optional second." Moffatt's more recent study of Rutgers undergrads showed the same result, and he wonders, given the institutional system, "why three otherwise intelligent sociologists should have expected" anything else (287).

Most students are Collegiate and/or Vocational and in college for College! and for the "paper"; for those whose primary goal is academic, there are Honors and other small programs, such as Miami's Western College Program.

High-quality, published research improves the reputation of a university, hence improves the value of its "paper"; and the Big U Model serves "Collegiate" goals.

Emphasis upon research requires freeing faculty time for that research, which in turn means--money always being short--many classes taught in a cost-efficient manner: large lectures with machine-graded exams.

"When thinking about formal learning," Moffatt notes at Rutgers, "the students clearly disliked the herd approach to higher education. In other ways, however, this aspect of academia contributed to the students' freedom and autonomy in college." Moffatt sums up, "You could, in other words, take it very easy indeed in the Rutgers classroom in the 1980s if you so desired. Or you could pace yourself exactly as you liked. And so the students did" (292-93), in many cases freeing up time for Collegiate social life.

Unlike training, about all education is good for is helping people become well-informed critical thinkers, capable of citizenship in a Republic. So one can attack the Big U for not earning its keep as a support of the Republic and the life of the mind. But to do so is to speak a language foreign to important constituencies for which the Big U works just fine.

Richard D. Erlich has taught at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) since 1971.

Sources

Erlich, Richard D. "It's Time to Rethink How Colleges Are Financed." The Chronicle of Higher Education 4 Dec. 1985. Rpt. in Points of View on American Higher Education. Ed. Stephen H. Barnes. Vol. 2. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1990. 56-60.

---. "Rethink College Financing." The Plain Dealer 10 Apr. 1985: 2B.

Moffatt, Michael. Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1989.

Sperber, Murray. Beer and Circus (How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education). New York: Holt, 2000.

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It's called El Día de la Raza in Latin American countries, Discovery Day in the Bahamas, Hispanic Day in Spain, and El Día de la Resistencia Indígena in Venezuela. Here in the United States, we call it Columbus Day. In the United States, it's celebrated on the second Monday in October, supposedly the date that Columbus landed in the Bahamas and "discovered" the New World. Of course, there are plenty of European explorers who visited the Americas before Columbus, and we have credible evidence of their voyages. And it's hard to say that Columbus or any Europeans "discovered" anything, since there was a thriving population of people living in the Americas already. Nevertheless, in elementary school social studies textbooks, Columbus discovered America. Then, in high school history textbooks, a lot of other people discovered America. Oh, and they gave the native populations smallpox. (Joke's on the Europeans, though; the natives gave them syphillis!)

But the controversy surrounding Columbus Day is more complex than who gave smallpox-laden blankets to who, and who gave venereal diseases to who. The first issue is, why is Columbus so much more important than Leif Ericsson, Eric the Red, or Amerigo Vespucci, all of whom explored the Americas before Columbus? Columbus was a man with a plan: find a faster route to India. European trade with India was hot stuff, since that area of the world contained a lot of exotic items not to be found in Europe -- yes, including spices that could only be found in that part of the world. But the only route to India was overland, and it was looong. And that meant it was expensive.

Contrary to popular belief, practically every learned person of the time knew that the Earth was round. Columbus was one of these people, and he did not travel to the New World to prove that the Earth wasn't flat. His problem, though, was that he -- and every other European since the map-maker Ptolemy -- thought the Earth was smaller than it really was. Maps created since the 4th century B.C. reflected only the existence of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Columbus theorized that, instead of traveling east overland, he could just travel west, and he would bump into India. And his idea was pretty sound -- except that he didn't know the Americas were in the way. Thus, when he ran aground on the shore of an uncharted desert isle (the Bahamas), he thought he was in the Indies. Hence "Indians" and "East Indies." Turns out he didn't land in India.

Nevertheless, Columbus became popularized as the person who discovered America. According to Wikipedia -- which is not authoritative but is good enough for a two-bit blog -- the first Columbus Day was celebrated Oct. 12, 1872 by New York's Tammany Society, also called the Colombian Order. It was celebrated by Italians in San Francisco in 1869, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the day a U.S. holiday in 1937.

But for some crazy reason, people of Native American descent don't like Columbus. Probably something about enslaving Native Americans and all that jazz. Around the country, while many cities are having Columbus Day festivities, Native Americans-rights groups are having counter-festivities in which they vilify Columbus as a mass murderer. University of Colorado Professor of Crazy Ward Churchill -- who is not a Cherokee[1] -- has said before that Columbus Day is a celebration of genocide. Which, to some degree, it is.

But that still doesn't explain why Columbus gets all the credit for killing Native Americans. As much credit can be given to President Andrew Jackson or General "Mad Anthony" Wayne. What about Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés, the man who brought down the Aztec empire? Or Francisco Pizzaro, who supposedly ransomed the Incan leader Altahualpa for two roomfuls of silver and one roomful of gold? Why do we set aside a day just for Christopher Columbus, a guy who didn't discover America and a guy who didn't kill as many Indians as people say he did? It's like creating an "Albert Einstein Day" to celebrate Albert Einstein as the first president of the United States. Maybe it has something to do with Italian-American influence in the early part of the century. Columbus was Italian and could, I guess, be considered a hero to Italian-Americans.

Nevertheless, many places will be closed today. I drove through the snow to the bank, only to find that the bank was closed. It's not a federal holiday, but it's a holiday for a lot of people. Why? To celebrate genocide? To celebrate lies? Come on, people. We can come up with better holidays than this.

Footnotes

1. Ward Churchill is a Cherokee in the same way that Bill Clinton is a Cherokee. Churchill is an "associate member" of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees. The program that allows non-Native Americans to become honorary Cherokees has been since discontinued.

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From The News-Herald, of course, comes the most ignorant thing I've ever read in my life. It's a letter to the editor published yesterday:

Evolution and Creationism have existed for years and years. To this date, I have seen no factual evidence that evolution is in fact a fact. After all, it is the Theory of Evolution by Charles Darwin -- not the Fact of Evolution.

There is still the Missing Link. There is no one person more widely known throughout the world than Jesus Christ. More people know of Him than anyone else in history.

I totally believe that we were created. The Big Bang Theory (evolution) just doesn't cut it. An accident? Come on. It has been said that theory is no more reliable than a tornado going through a junkyard and putting together a jet airplane. Think about it.

My question to all those that believe in the Theory of Evolution is: Why are you so afraid of Creationism? If you are so sure that evolution is the reason we are all here, what could it hurt to teach Creationism, or are you not so sure?

We have the Bible and many, many other books of history and religion. You have Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Is it unjust to teach both and let each decide for themselves? It has been said that even Darwin turned to God in the end.

Absurd? I think not. I think the teaching of Creationism is just as important (and more so) as evolution. After all, we are talking about eternal salvation.

Eternity is a long, long time. I am a Christian and very confident in my beliefs, an I am willing to give each a chance and let the students decide what they believe. Are you?

Marlene Robinson
Burton

Oh boy. I will put the word "fisk," which I learned from Doug Ross, to good use.

First, may I remind readers that evolution and natural selection are not synonymous. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that evolution is the method by which biology works. Even Pope John Paul II acknowledged the reality of evolution. In a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, JP2 reminded everyone that "Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation." He also provided a Catholic definition of a theory:

A theory is a metascientific elaboration, distinct from the results of observation but consistent with them. By means of it a series of independent data and facts can be related and interpreted in a unified explanation. A theory's validity depends on whether or not it can be verified, it is constantly tested against the facts; wherever it can no longer explain the latter, it shows its limitations and unsuitability. It must then be rethought.

He goes on to say that theories of evolution which eliminate God from the equation are not sanctioned by the Church, since "[i]t is by virtue of his spiritual soul that the whole person possesses such a dignity even in his body." He again invokes Pius XII, who "stressed this essential point: if the human body takes its origin from pre-existent living matter the spiritual soul is immediately created by God." Thus, evolution is consistent with Scripture only if we can say that God creates a soul for a human being. Evolution doesn't address whether or not humans have souls, and as long as it doesn't do so, evolution and Scripture can be reconciled.

So let's talk about this letter to the editor. First, "Theory of Evolution" as used in the letter is capitalized. This should not be so. The theory behind evolution is not so grand and so infalliable as to be capitalized. It is merely a theory, like any other theory. In fact, evolution is as much a theory as gravity is, and I find it appropriate to analogize them. We know that evolution exists. Contrary to what Marlene Richardson says, we have observed evolution. Now all that remains is to explain how it works, and this is where competing theories -- natural selection ("the Theory of Evolution by Charles Darwin"), genetic drift, and non-Darwinian mutations -- try to explain how the process works. Likewise with gravity. We know that it works. We can observe it. But we don't understand how it works.

Charles Darwin did not invent the "Theory of Evolution." His theory, natural selection, was an attempt to explain the many different species of finches on the Galapagos islands. Darwin's theory of natural selection suggests that variations between different individuals of the same species exist already, and these variations contribute to an organism's survival. These variations are then passed on to an organism's offspring if the variations allow the organism to live long enough to pass those traits on. Over time, these variations create specialized groups of organisms that become distinct species. The environment determines the survival value of variations.

I take issue with the ethnocentric assumption that "[t]here is no one person more widely known throughout the world than Jesus Christ. More people know of Him than anyone else in history." The statement is ignorant and offensive on its face.

The Big Bang is not evolution. The Big Bang is a theory explaining the origin of the universe, not the origin of life on Earth. They may be analagous in the abstract sense that they both deal with order from chaos, but they are not equatable. Planets do not "evolve." Stars do not "evolve." They congeal from clouds of gas and dust.

As for this "tornado going through a junkyard and putting together a jet airplane," it's a clever metaphor that appeals to public ignorance of how natural selection works. It is not a random process. Mutations are random, but adaptability to the environment is not.

And moving on to the issue of being "afraid of Creationism," I don't think scientists are "afraid" of Creationism as such. They know that their theory stands on its own evidence. What they are afraid of is Creationists attempting to appeal to children and parents with the promise of better arguments and a less offensive explanation for how we got here. Which is better for your self-esteem: you were consciously created with a purpose, or you were a series of random mutations? As they say, sometimes the truth hurts. The existentialists have been dealing with this problem for years: man has no creator and no purpose, and the human condition is a search for purpose. But we'll leave that aside.

Creationism is very good at exploiting ignorance of evolution and common rhetorical tricks. Intelligent design is creationism wearing a different hat. It is not a theory in the sense that any of its assertions are testable, and it does not forward a testable hypothesis of its own. It merely says that evolution is wrong.

"We have the Bible and many, many other books of history and relgion," says Marlene Richardson. Actually, you don't. As a Christian, you have the Bible. As a Catholic, you have lots of Church doctrine along with the Bible. Again, the assumption that Christianity is correct is ethnocentric. The Christian creation myth is different from other creation myths from different parts of the world. Marlene Richardson's assumption is also that creationism is as valid a scientific theory as evolution. But remember what the Pope said: "A theory's validity depends on whether or not it can be verified, it is constantly tested against the facts [...]" Creationism cannot be verified, nor can it be refuted. The only empirical data that support creationism come from the Bible, a single source. Creationism cannot be replicated by someone else under the same conditions. It is not a scientific theory and as such should not be taught in a science classroom. Bring me an actual, scientific theory counter to evolution and I'll teach it all day long. But equating creationism and intelligent design is disingenuous and preys upon a misunderstanding of evolution.

Sorry, Marlene Richardson, but if you make statements like these, you're going to be injured. You should have spent the time you wasted writing that letter on reading a book about how "the Theory of Evolution by Charles Darwin" (available in paperback this summer!) actually works.

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From The New York Times via Metafilter, reader response theorist Stanley Fish explains why kids no write so good:

Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.

While I never took freshman composition, I'm assured that the activities were tedious and stupid. At Miami University, some instructors were graduate students who were forced into teaching freshman composition. Some of the instructors were honest-to-God tenured full professors, since Miami requires that real professors teach a section of freshman composition every now and then. But in high school, we were taught "journaling," the action of just writing and writing and writing. We were never critiqued on the content of these journals, just whether or not we had done them. Fish believes -- and I agree -- that this is a pointless exercise.

Fish's solution of having freshmen create their own language is a bit extreme, but it emphasizes the point that incoming college students don't know how their own language works! "Grammar" as a subject is missing, replaced in elementary school by the nebulous "language arts" (another theorist or professor lamented the popularity of "social studies" in the same way), which encompass literature and composition, but never any grammar. Students learn how to read, but they don't learn how to write.

Trust me. I've read papers written by senior college students, and the kind of crap they turn out is frightening. No one ever taught these students what good sentences sound like, and no one sure as hell ever taught them not to use the passive voice all the time. This is a catastrophe that will not be put up with by me! Students have learned that they shouldn't make their arguments too assertive (where, I'm not sure), so they water down their statements by having things acted upon by nebulous outside forces. While the passive voice has its place -- sometimes, sources aren't clear, so things must "be said," or sometimes, the passive voice breaks up a monotonous string of active statements -- the passive voice sounds wishy-washy and weak.

Students these days also can't construct coherent thoughts. Since seventh grade, students have been using the same cliched idioms to spice up their writing. I have read entire papers that appeared to be nothing more than strings of cliches about "similarities," "differences," and "contrasts." This, however, can be traced to laziness: some students write papers the night before and their quality is horrible. In my dealings with students, they can recognize when things sound bad, so it's not that they don't know when a string of cliches is being used, it's just that they don't want to take the time to write good papers.

Stringing cliches together fooled the teachers in high school, but it doesn't fly in college. Students who enter college are grossly under-prepared and haven't been taught how to write well. They haven't written enough long papers (a brief survey of my friends revealed that most of them hadn't written papers longer than five pages in high school. At the end of my senior year in high school, I had to write a 15-page literary analysis), which means they aren't prepared for college writing, where five pages is a night's homework and final exams can typically be fifteen pages for a single class.

College professors assume that kids know how to write, but it turns out that they don't, which means they have to spend time during freshman year teaching kids the ins and outs of good writing: eliminating cliches, making an arguable thesis, defending the thesis (which includes refuting counterpoints), and writing in the active voice.

I was fortunate enough to be in a school system that really really emphasized writing. I wrote until I was blue in the face, but I was all the better for it at college. And in the real world, by the way, people don't know how to write, either. Businesses are constantly on the lookout for people who can write well. Teams usually have a good writer on them, because the engineer may be brilliant, but he certainly can't communicate that brilliance in a brilliant way. So hire a brilliant writer to make those brilliant ideas sound as brilliant as they really are!

Oh, and don't overuse words.

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A post at Boing Boing today made me almost wet myself. The post links to an anti-communist comic book from the 1960s which is ridiculous in its blatant oversimplification of communism and its scare tactics: it could happen to you!

The first part of the comic book is actually dystopian; it spins a story of your life, Billy and Betty, might be like if the godless communists took over the country. The communists are your enemy! Their beliefs are antithetical to your own! They want to replace everything that you consider good with every that you consider bad! The best part is that children can buy into this stuff (and judging from the kinds of adults that are out there today, they did buy into this stuff). Here's some snippets:

I remember learning in school that communists don't believe in the family. They say they're going to "free" the woman from the home and put her to work.

Today we had all-new teachers at school. They call it Soviet School 32 instead of St. Joseph's. Teacher said there is no God and that communism is all-good and all-powerful!

As with any dystopian work, this comic book gets its efficacy from taking a contemporary problem -- communism and extended it to a logical, if far-fetched, conclusion. It also makes use of the old wives' tale of an international, monolithic communism.

The second part of the comic book is a "history" of communism as it might be written by J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, or Ann Coulter. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin are all depicted as practically good buddies. The story of Marx is intertwined with the story of Lenin, making appear as though the two were contemporaries, when in fact Marx died in 1883, loooong before the Russian Revolution and longer still before Lenin.

In any case, this is a terrific read. Be sure to be on the lookout for similar comics books today, perhaps with the title "These Godless Terrorists" or something like that.

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Seriously, John Leo is great. I've been reading his columns since the eighth grade, when, as a computer lab aide in the school library, I got bored and started looking at magazines. As I flipped through U.S. News and World Report, I happened by his column, which is called "On Society." John Leo was probably complaining about the restrictive "speech codes" at a university somewhere, which is one of his favorite things to do (the other is to shed light on dopey laws). This week's Leo column is about arguing. In this day and age, Leo says, commentators, pundits, editorialists, and everyone of their ilk spend too much time preaching to the choir. He quotes P.J. O'Rourke (another stand-up guy) in this month's Atlantic Monthly: "Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, seems to have gone out of fashion with everyone." Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, and Al Franken aren't writing (or speaking) in order to persuade a group of people who don't think like them to think like them. Their audiences are people that already agree with them!

Leo laments the loss of "arguing," although I'd much rather call it "debate." In my mind, "arguing" is two people expressing their views to each other without any hope of persuasion. In a debate, each person is trying to persuade the other. The end result of this lack of debate is a lack of anything fundamental coming out of arguing. Rush complains about liberals. Michael Moore complains about Bush. Ann Coulter is an evil cyborg from Hell. Where does this all get us? Nowhere! Debate involves Hegelian dialectics: an idea (a thesis) and its opposite (an antithesis) combine, creating a new idea (synthesis). This is how history moves foward: ideas and their opposites coming together (compromising, to use a word that Rush hates) to form a new idea which retains parts of both old ideas. Instead of a fine mixture of new ideas, the culture of argument mixes as much as two cinder-blocks smashing together.

If we never put our opinions to the test of debate, how will we know if they're right or not? When I have an opinion, I perform the test described by Leo:

If we wish to be engaged in serious argument, Lasch explained, we must enter into another person's mental universe and put our own ideas at risk. Exactly. When a friend launches an argument and your rebuttal starts to sound tinny to your own ears, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out that something's wrong -- usually, that you don't really agree with the words coming out of your own mouth. Arguing can rescue us from our own half-formed opinions.

If I can't defend my own arguments, either morally or factually, then I immediately think there must be something wrong with my position. And I'll change it, if necessary. Our atmosphere of preaching to the choir works in a society where we're all the same -- but we're not. John Milton thought that no belief we held could be true until it stood the test of its antithesis. Want to test your chastity? It's not enough to say you're chaste: you have to test it in an unchaste environment (maybe when you're trapped in Comus's lair?). Learning the fine art of "convincing" is all but lost these days.

Entry #100! Woo!

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Do we need the government to protect us from companies? In a word, yes. The United States has a long history of protecting citizens from industries that it feels would, unchecked, harm citizens. The Sherman Antitrust Act became law in 1890, and it is still the law today. Based on Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce, the law declared illegal contracts, combinations, or conspiracies in restraint of interstate and foreign trade. The law, however, was not enforced until the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. TR went after what were called "trusts" or collections of companies from the same industry. There were beef trusts and railroad trusts and steel trusts and so on for every industry. With their powers combined, they could exercise a great deal of influence on the marketplace. They could also exercise a great deal of influence on politicians. TR put a stop to this and became heralded (and defamed) as a "trust-buster." In 1914, Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to help oversee the enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Sherman was used to break up Standard Oil and Ma Bell (until the 1970s, one company – AT&T – controlled the American telephone system). As recently as the 1990s, the Sherman Antitrust Act was invoked in the United States' case against Microsoft, where the company was accused of using business practices that illegally attempted to shoulder competitors out of the marketplace. In the case of trusts, the government felt that the consumer was being denied a fair market due to the power of a business or businesses.

The government also implements health and safety standards to protect the physical well-being of U.S. citizens, as well as their wallets. Again, we go back to the early 1900s, when the meatpacking industry used unsanitary practices in the production of beef. Selling spoiled meat that had been disguised by additives, grinding up different kinds of animals and selling it as beef, and workers losing extremities in machinery was not uncommon in the meatpacking industry. While capitalism provides a maximum of efficiency and innovation, its downfall is that social welfare is unnecessary unless it affects the bottom line. The journalist Upton Sinclair wrote his book The Jungle in an attempt to demonstrate how poor the working conditions of workers in the meatpacking industry were. Instead of focusing on the plight of the workers, however, the nation focused instead on the unsanitary practices (Sinclair later remarked, "I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit its stomach"). New regulations were put into place requiring minimum standards for food sanitation.

The government still does both of these things today. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) exists, ostensibly, to ensure that drugs which enter the market are safe for human beings. Laws exist now which regulate prices; for example, there are caps on how much a power company can charge for its services. Cigarettes are required by federal law to carry a Surgeon General's warning. The FDA requires food manufacturers to list the ingredients of their food on the package and provide accurate nutrition information. Without question, the government regulates industry. Anyone who is under the impression that the government has nothing to do with corporations is sadly mistaken. The United States' economy is not purely capitalistic.

What, then, should be done about fast food? Michelle, Kristi, and I had a small debate yesterday about who is to blame for the obesity described in Fat Land. Michelle believes that the fault lies with the individuals who choose to eat so much junk food that they become overweight. Personal responsibility is, of course, always a factor in things like these. I have nothing but contempt for smokers who are engaged in lawsuits against cigarette companies claiming that these companies somehow "forced" people into smoking. Then again, if these companies misrepresented the health risks involved in smoking, then that's another thing. The consumer relies on advertising to be a source of information in making a decision about whether or not to buy something. If that advertising is deceptive, then the consumer cannot make a well-informed decision.

Fast food, though, has become a staple of our lives. Michelle took issue with the assertion that obesity strikes the poor more than anyone else, insisting that it costs more to go to McDonald's than it does to go to the grocery store and make food. This is true: a value meal at McDonald's costs at least five dollars, whereas I can go to Kroger and buy ingredients to make several days' worth of fruit salad for the same amount. Also at issue is the fact that the poor, invariably, work. (Though Ann Coulter derides "working families" as families in which no one works, this is not the case: they do work, but they do not make that much money.) People would rather pay for convenience than health, and the only way – so far – to have convenience and low prices is to utilize junk food. What if these people live in an area where the closest store is a 7-11? What if they don't have the time to devote to making meals at home? Their demand for convenience food is more inelastic than middle-class people living in the suburbs, if quantity demanded is plotted against healthfulness of food: they will demand fast food no matter how bad it is for them.

Certainly the government should not ban fast food outright, but perhaps a little more information is in order. Michelle told me that of course everyone knew how bad fast food is. Do they? I wonder about this assertion. Perhaps they know that it certainly isn't healthy, but do they know that a single Big Mac value meal contains all the calories you need for an entire day? That's really unhealthy! The public needs to be educated about the nutrition facts behind McDonald's food, and books like Fast Food Nation and Fat Land are trying to do just that.

Michelle contends that there is a component of personal responsibility at work, here: rather than immediately react to the problem with more government regulation, we should consider the choices of the people who are obese. Have they not chosen to eat this terrible food? There is something to this, for Fat Land doesn't just indict fast food purveyors for offering unhealthy products; rather, it chastises the American culture of eating. Most of us were probably taught as children that it's a sin to waste food: eat what's on your plate, then eat some more. Where did this attitude come from? From our parents, and where did they get it? From their parents, who were more than likely children of the Depression, who learned the hard way that food is precious and every bit of it should be consumed. Now, we live in a time of food excess, and we finish eating when all the food is gone, not when we're full.

I contend that fast food has transcended personal responsibility and has become a staple of life. Since it is so ingrained in American society, something must be done to actively change American attitudes toward fast food. Cigarettes are a matter of personal choice, and yet they have warning labels. Could fast food carry warning labels, as well? The government has a compelling interest in keeping its citizens healthy, and while it cannot tell them, "Don't eat this food," it can say, "I hope you know that the food you're eating is very bad for you." The government should educate people on the dangers of fast food in the same way it educates them on the dangers of cigarettes and alcohol.

Telephones, automobiles, railroads, electricity – these have all become staples of American society, and they are all regulated by the government in some way or another. We know from history that, given the opportunity, the food industry will cut corners to decrease its overhead, since maximizing profit, not providing the most social justice, is the goal of capitalism (read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser for more information on how food companies cut corners). It is not too much to ask for minimum nutrition requirements in companies that make up such an important part of our lives.

But perhaps this regulation won't be necessary. McDonald's announced in March that it was eliminating "Super-sized" fries and drinks due to health concerns. Kristi suggested that this might be the result of the recent documentary Super Size Me, and it very well could be. Recall that the film first appeared at the Sundance Film Festival in February: plenty of time for McDonald's to decide that the phrase "super size" would develop negative connotations overnight. Companies work quickly when negative publicity is involved.

As Kristi pointed out, there is no single cause that we can point to in order to explain the cause of obesity. One cause is the creation of the culture of food; another cause is our desire for convenience; still another is the marketing of cheap, unhealthy fast food. All of these reasons are cited in Fat Land as causes of the obesity epidemic occurring throughout the world.

Posted by Mark at 3:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Utah-based company called ClearPlay has received some press this week as the Directors' Guild of America (DGA) takes it to court for copyright violation.

For years, ClearPlay has made software technology for computer DVD players that censors violent, lewd, or profane material from DVDs. The company recently released a standalone DVD player that does the same thing. The company's website touts the consumer's ability to "watch great Hollywood movies without having to worry about the profanity, nudity and gory violence" with the ClearPlay-enabled DVD player.

The problem is, the creators of the film had no say in the censoring process (and even though it's a loaded word, "censor" is the appropriate word). The makers of ClearPlay were the ones who chose what was violent, what was lewd, and most importantly, what was profane (if this were Taliban Afghanistan, we'd have no movies, as the Koran prohibits the depiction of humans or animals).

ClearPlay CEO Bill Aho says he has received "hundreds of e-mails saying, 'We will watch more movies with this.' When people watch more movies, that's good for Hollywood." In terms of profit, yes. In terms of creative control, no. The resultant art that we see produced by an artist looks the way it does for a reason, and those reasons are entirely the artist's. The viewer has absolutely no control -- and shouldn't have control -- over the form or content of the artist's work. "When you buy a video or a DVD of a film, you expect to see the work re-created in its original form, not some bastardization for the sake of someone else's idea of morality," director Irwin Winkler said. "If you go into the museum and see the painting of the Three Graces, you don't expect them to be wearing bras because nudity offends some of the people who attend an exhibit with their children."

Research Director Doug Gentile of the National Institute on Media and the Family said, "Anything that makes it easier for parents to monitor and control the amount and content of media their kids watch is a good thing." But does this control have to come at the expense of the artist? What if a museum did clothe nudity in paintings because the museum's directors felt that nudity was morally wrong?

But enough about my dislike of pushing morals onto others. Let's talk about the legal issues.

In its suit, DGA claims that ClearPlay and twelve other companies who similarly censor content "are renting, selling, or distributing versions of movies, which neither the Guild's members nor the studios authorized, and which are altered versions of members' works." In a counterclaim, DGA charges these thirteen companies with violation of the Lanham Act, which, among other things, "has been applied to protect an artist's right not to be associated with an unauthorized, edited version of his or her work." ClearPlay is not advertising Steven Spielberg's film; rather, it's advertising its version of Steven Spielberg's film, and Steven Spielberg has not authorized such a version. What if the resultant ClearPlay version of the film excludes scenes that Spielberg felt were important, but, due to their lewd content, were dismissed as "trash" by the employees at ClearPlay? The DGA counterclaim complains, "The Counterdefendants attempt to impose upon the Director Counterclaimants, and the public, the Counterdefendants’ values, vision, story telling, and artistry, if any."

Okay, back to moral-pushing.

More and more, I see that the Purtians are winning. The ridiculous levels of outrage at seeing Janet Jackson's boobie for half a second prompted a firestorm of Puritans to war against anything "immoral." Come on, people: you didn't see a boobie. The camera cut away. Live shows are time-delayed to preclude the possibilty of exactly what happened from happening. But there was the possibility that a boobie could have appeared on television. Since then, a fine-crazy FCC has redefined indecency and attacked Howard Stern with an unprecedented $495,000 fine. Months ago, when Bono used the f-word during the Golden Globes, the FCC said that Bono's words were not indecent. After the Janet Jackson shocker, the FCC reversed itself, saying that not only was Bono's "fleeting" and "non-sexual" use of the f-word indecent, but "other cases holding that isolated or fleeting use of the “F-word” are not indecent are no longer good law. The FCC redefined the legal definition of the word "indecent." Is there a clear political agenda behind this? Why wasn't the F-word indecent in 2003, but suddenly became so in March, 2004? The Libertarian in me can only say, "Don't legislate morality." The FCC has never -- ever -- been a content-censoring organization. This is a new thing, with FCC using its power over broadcast licenses as leverage: "all broadcast licensees are on clear notice that similar broadcasts in the future will lead to forfeitures and potential license revocation, if appropriate."

Between ClearPlay, the FCC, and Attorney General John Ashcroft's renewed War on Pornography (because the FBI wasn't busy enough with international terrorism), there is a Puritan reaction to American lewdness. Does this mean that the government must become involved? Does this mean that artists' rights must be foresaken for the sake of morality ("Oh, won't someone please think of the children?!")? Or are we so lazy that we want to be able to have our cake and eat it, too -- sit our children in front of the idiot-box and simultaneously be assured that, while their brains are turning to jelly and they are becoming the up-and-coming consumers that Procter & Gamble wants them to be, they are not being exposed to nudity and violence? There's a wonderful Anne Bradstreet poem about growing up. "The Author to Her Book" is about how children must grow up someday, whether we like it or not.

Posted by Mark at 3:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Lest anyone think that Phillip Johnson is just another crazy, here's an excerpt from another one of those "in the year 2025" articles from World magazine, this time by Jonathan Wells. Acting as an objective scientist, Wells writes about how students became disillusioned with Darwinism:

Biology classrooms became platforms for indoctrinating students in Darwinism and its underlying philosophy of naturalism-the anti-religious view that nature is all there is and God is an illusion. In the ensuing public backlash, some people demanded that evolution be removed from the curriculum entirely. A larger number of people, however, favored a "teach the controversy" approach that presented students with the evidence against evolutionary theory as well as the evidence for it.

That reminds me of my old high school biology textbook, chapter 4, entitled "God is an Illusion." The textbook was written by Frederich Nietzsche, as all good biology textbooks are.

How did Darwinism alienate everyone? By lying, you see. Wells writes:

It didn't help the Darwinists when it became public knowledge that they had faked some of their most widely advertised evidence. For example, they had distorted drawings of early embryos to make them look more similar than they really are (in order to convince students that they had descended from a common ancestor) [. . .]

No, he doesn't write. He lies. Take a look at photographs of mammalian embryos. I dare you to correctly pick out the human embryo. Wells is not referring to the true nature of embryos, but to a controversy surrounding 19th-century (well, 1899) drawings of mammalian embryos. To read a fanatical account of this, go here. (But look out! It's the textual equivalent of arm-flailing and yelling.) A biologist named Earnst Haeckel made drawings of human embryos and then, assuming all mammals developed the same way, created drawings of other mammalian embryos in various stages of growth -- but without actually observing them. However, Stephen Jay Gould observes that Haeckel's theories were debunked fifty years ago.

Wells does a great job coming up with a fictional future for Darwinism, but this is only a piece of creative writing. How someone would make the jump from Darwinism to intelligent design (which is, despite the protestations of its supporters, rooted in Christian theology) is beyond me. "Well, science has failed. Time to move on to the supernatural!" That's certainly a scientific attitude. Or, perhaps, science will continue to investigate scientific explanations for evolutionary mechanisms, whether it is natural selection or a theory as-yet unproposed.

I emphasize that I acknowledge the flaws inherent in the theory of natural selection; I do not assume that it is a perfect theory whose conclusions should not be questioned. Of course they should be questioned, and it is largely intelligent design theorists that are doing the questioning. Good for them.

At the same time, intelligent designers are proposing a counter-theory to natural selection, one rooted in the a priori existence of a higher being, or some "intelligence" that created the universe. The next logical question to the intelligent design theorists is, "Who or what is this being?" Some of them are mute on this point; others suggest that it is the God of Christianity. Wells and Johnson imagine a future in which everyone agrees with Christian cosmology and science has died -- because it continually claims that God is dead.

Or it could be that Wells and Johnson completely misrepresent science, which is not concerned with God at all. Science concerns itself with testable and provable hypotheses, and there is no lab test for God.

Posted by Mark at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When Ohio's Board of Regents said that it would make optional a chapter about alternatives to evolutionary theory, evolutionists cried "foul" and intelligent design theorists (only a step below creationists) put a tally mark in the "success" category. Not so fast.

Intelligent design is, for all intents and purposes, creationism masquerading as science. Intelligent design theorists choose to remain ambiguous about who or what the intelligent designer is, and well they should, for the gum-chewing public "knows" what creationism is. Phillip Johnson is the author of the dubiously-titled books Darwin on Trial, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, Reason in the Balance, The Wedge of Truth, and The Right Questions. These books sound innocent enough; who could possibly be against reason or truth? But look at what the man is writing. In wondering what the future will be like in the year 2025 (when no one believes Darwin anymore) he observes:

Only the fool says that there is no God, or that God has forgotten us. Folly like that is as dead today as the discredited Inherit the Wind stereotype, which fit the facts of history no better than the secularization thesis. We no longer expect to meet intelligent beings on other planets, for we have learned how uniquely fitted to shelter life our own planet has been created to be.

The man advocates a belief in God in place of evolution. This is what the intelligent designers do: they theorize that since our physical world is so complex, it couldn't have arisen by pure chance, therefore a higher power must have intervened. But where is the science? Where is the testable hypothesis? In science, we cannot test hypotheses like, "I think fruit punch is superior to orange juice." There's no way to objectively test that. We also cannot test untestable assertions like, "A higher power created the universe." Since this higher power is beyond the range of our comprehension, it is logically impossible to determine whether or not he exists. Intelligent designers have created this little conundrum for scientists: to prove that a higher being doesn't exist. Of course, they can't, and intelligent designers cry "victory!" But science doesn't work that way. Simply because I can't prove something, that is not proof that it is true.

Evolution -- excuse me, natural selection -- is great. The theory conforms to the observations we have made in fossils thus far, and continues to conform to observations we make about genes. Sometimes. There are holes in natural selection, and the problem is that many scientists are unwilling to acknowledge the existence of these holes. I was never taught in high school that natural selection is the subject of a heated debate in the scientific world, which it is. I make a distinction between "evolution" and "natural selection" because practically every scientist believes in evolution, the process of organisms changing over time. Scientists merely disagree on the mechanism of evolution, the most popular of which is Darwin's theory of natural selection. Since they can't come up with anything better, some scientists stubbornly adhere to the natural selection theory without question. It has risen to the level of "dogma," and if you don't believe it, you're a heretic -- in spite of evidence which suggests that natural selection isn't all it's scientifically cracked up to be. The spirit of the scientific method is continued inquiry, and evolution must be approached the same way: we must continue to experiment and determine definitively what it is that makes evolution operate.

Given the flaws with natural selection, does that mean we must turn the debate over to intelligent design? Hell, no! Intelligent design is not grounded in any kind of science and it is wholly dependent upon one's belief in an untestable "higher being." There's no reason involved in that mode of thinking; the source of information there is not empirical, but supernatural. It does not belong in any public school. Natural selection belongs there, but with a clearly displayed caveat that it is only a theory and it does not have all the answers, but it is the best answer we have so far. Other scientific theories besides natural selection are permissible in a public school curriculum, but a blatantly religious-based theory is not. Intelligent design is merely creationism wearing a funny new hat.

If the world in 2025 is anything like Phillip Johnson predicts, I'm moving out. "We no longer need to meet intelligent beings on other planets"? Intelligent design theorists like to point to probabilities and say, "It's highly unlikely that we evolved by chance." I would point them to the same probabilities and say, "It's highly unlikely that, given the size of the universe, Earth is the only planet inhabited by intelligent life." "Only the fool says that there is no God"? Why is that? Have scientists empirically determined the existence of God? If they have, then good for them. We will have a lot more answers in 2025 than we have now. But if scientists in the future adhere unquestioningly to a belief in creationism, it is the end of reason and the death of enlightenment.

Posted by Mark at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My local newspaper carried an editorial yesterday morning slamming Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington's forthcoming book, as did no less an authority than The Economist, in a column last week. Huntington's book Who We Are should cause astir when it is released in May.

The premise, according to press reports, is that the current Latino immigration, unlike previous arrivals from Europe, is not integrating into mainstream America. While this does seem at first blush to fit into the "Ivy League professor brilliantly states the obvious" category, both newspapers argued that his conclusions are false.

"Lexington," one of The Economist's famed unsigned columns, makes the argument in the March 4 issue that Latinos are, in fact, becoming mainstream. While the highly visible first generation continues to speak Spanish and even travel back to Latin America to vote (Mexican dual-citizens can do this), younger Hispanics, born or raised in the U.S., feel less of a connection with the "old country."

The difference, Lexington maintains, is that the first generation's ties to "the old country" are heightened in an age when television and the Internet are shrinking the world and in the geographical reality that unllike the Irish or Czechs of immigrations past, many Latinos in Southern California, Texas, etc., are only a few hours' drive away from the land they fled.

Nonetheless, Lexington backs up his (or her) claim by noting that Latino children and young adults see themselves as Americans first, Guatemalans (or whatever) second.

The Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette made a different case in a March 9 editorial, basically denying that a "melting pot" ever existed. Because the T&G requires a 60-cent-per-day toll for nonsubscribers to access its site, here's a free taste of what they said:

... History suggests it is risky to predict that America as we know it is in danger of being culturally submerged by newcomers. For more than two centuries, immigrants representing hundreds of national, ethnic and religious groups have assimilated, but, thankfully, have not disappeared. The melting pot contains not a homogenized "American" puree, but a stew of diverse, distinct and mostly complementary flavors -- as the cultural richness of communities such as Worcester attests.

That's one way of looking at diversity, and in fact it's the one that was in vogue in the fairly liberal school district in which I was educated. But it's not a melting pot; it's what we called "the salad bowl" -- a meal to be taken as a unit, but you surely can pick out the individual croutons, lettuce leaves, tomatos and carrots just as distinctly as you can pick out the individual Britons, Argentinians and Russians at a meeting of the U.N.

In the true melting pot, it comes as a revelation that John Kerry is not really Irish, because we're so used to seeing Irish-Americans who act and talk, well, like Americans. Because of the factors that Lexington (and, we are led to believe, Huntington) mentioned -- proximity to the old country, advances in international communication -- substantial numbers of Latinos SEEM TO see themselves as Hispanics first, Americans second.

Two questions arise that, in my mind, make or break Huntington's hypothesis, which is that the "melting pot" is not working for Hispanics. One: is Lexington right? Is the integration of Hispanics into mainstream American culture farther along than it seems? Two: did the Irish, Czechs and others really integrate into American culture as readily as we seem to think? In other words, is it NORMAL for a group to assert its separateness prior to being fully assimilated?

I don't have the answers, but Huntington is a guy I'm willing to trust to a certain extent. In 1993, he wrote a brilliant book, The Clash of Civilizations, which I recently read. Recall that in '93, we had just finished the Cold War and most everyone expected a Pax Americana and the democratization of just about everyone else.

This, of course, did not happen, even though there was no great ideological conflict (as had existed between Russia and America prior). Communism was dead, but conflict continued. Why?

Huntington's hypothesis was that in the post-Cold War world, conflicts would arise at "civilizational fault lines" -- that is to say, places where distinct religious and ethnic groups meet. He was criticized for singling out the Muslim world as a probable source of many of these conflicts, but the history of the 2000s seems to be bearing him out.

He fears, according to the T&G editorial, that America will become a "two culture" nation, which they say has happened in nearby Canada. This is at once a clear analysis of what should be one of Huntington's great fears and a disservice to his ideas.

To have a cultural fault line running through your own country is probably the worst-case scenario, under Huntington's Clash of Civilizations logic. Iraq is seeing this with its Kurds; Russia is seeing it with its Muslim enclaves, like Chechnya. But to call Canada's French-English divide a "cultural fault line" doesn't make sense; sure, they eat more baguettes in Montreal than in Moose Jaw, but the divide in Canada is more linguistic than anything else. Both France and England are members of "the West," a unified cultural history that draws on Greek, Roman and Enlightenment, among other, sources.

On the other hand, Latin America -- source of the immigration to the U.S. -- is sometimes counted as culturally distinct from "The West." South and Central America missed out on the 20th-century economic boom of North America and Europe. Immigrants to the U.S. come from countries that are poorer, less educated and more religious, on average.

If Huntington is right, there are indeed profound implications. We might see a large-scale cultural shift, the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1960s and the rise of the Baby Boom generation.

Posted by MB at 5:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

So I was wrangling about the gay marriage thing, trying to mediate the Fourteenth Amendment with MB's comment that there is no "right" to gay marriage. But neither is there a "right" to heterosexual marriage. So I asked a friend about this. And she said that the problem is that there are really two kinds of marriage in the United States. The first kind is the legal marriage, what you get when you go to the courthouse and file an application for a marriage license or get married by a justice of the peace. When we talk about "gay marriage," this is really what we're talking about, since this is the kind of marriage that confers legal benefits on the partners, and this is what gay marriage advocates are fighting for. I have no problem with this.

The second kind of marriage is the religious marriage. Don't forget that marriage is also a religious ceremony, and in this country where Puritan religious ideals blend in with the law, the religious ceremony has a secular counterpart. No one would advocate a law forcing churches to confer the sacrament of marriage upon gay couples if it didn't want to, and no one is. Churches will decide whom they want to marry, and I have no problem with this.

But why do people like President Bush (who said yesterday that he supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage) insist on using the word "civil union"? Largely because the word "marriage" is loaded with quite a bit of meaning. MB told me that he doesn't agree with the analogy between interracial marriages and the current gay marriage controversy because the dictionary never defined marriage as between two people of the same race; it does, however, define marriage as between two people of opposite genders. But even the Oxford English Dictionary, the staunch lexicon of English, admits that the word "marriage" is being used to describe same-sex couples who enter into a binding relationship just like heterosexuals do. The dictionary does not set the meanings of words in stone; rather, it reflects the current usage of words. Even though the singular for data is datum, the dictionary admits that the plural form is commonly used in both the singular and plural senses. It is we who define words by their use, and then these uses make their way into the dictionary. The dictionary is a reflection of words; it does not explain the "correct" definitions of words and it is not a keeper of the Platonic forms of words. Thus, we may alter the definition of "marriage" and the dictionary definition cannot stop us, for meanings of words are altered all the time. (Although, this only happens when many people start using words in an altered sense; when only a few people go against the grain, they are not innovative, but "incorrect.")

Homosexuals insist on the use of the word "marriage" not for its legal value but for its cultural value. To say that gay marriages are merely "civil unions" is to say that they are a second-class marriage, not a "real" marriage as far as our culture is concerned. The use of the word "marriage" amounts to an endorsement of the homosexual lifestyle. It brings it up from the depths of cultural abberation to something as normal as Ward and June's lifestyle. I have no problem with this, either; I am still free to think that it is a cultural abberation if I wish (even though I don't). As long as I am not impacted by the choice of a particular group of people, that group can do whatever it wants.

But in comes the proposed constitutional amendment. Why? It's the "activist judges" again. How are these so-called activists wrenching the definition of marriage away from the people? Perhaps they are wrenching the definition away from Bush and other conservatives, but it is not their job to pander to the opinions of a particular group of people. The definition of marriage is changing in this country, whether Bush and the Religious Right want to admit it or not (this is the same head-in-the-sand attitude that they take with sex education; by funding solely abstinence-only programs, he can pretend that sex among teenagers doesn't happen). Court judges do not set standards of how people should live. That's not their job, and it is not the government's job to teach people a particular set of morals. I assert that it is Bush who is the activist in his attempt to force a particular moral standard on the United States, to prevent things from changing. Society does change, and it is the job of the courts to acknowledge and respect these changes, as long as they don't break any laws. If they do, then it is their job to look to the higher form of Justice, just as the justices in Brown v. Board of Education did when they realized that an earlier Supreme Court decision had legally rendered blacks second-class citizens. Would Republicans argue that that decision was a case of "activism"? Because it was, by Bush's definition -- and built into that definition is a particular appeal to the idea that "we are the majority, and we make the rules." Plessy v. Ferguson was acceptable because of the ethics of the day, not the law. In the same way, Bush's definition of "activism" encompasses his ethics, not the law.

To those who maintain that the Constitution is not a living document, I ask: why the amendments? Why amendments 9 and 10, which state that the Bill of Rights does not enumerate all of a person's rights and also says that any rights not granted to the federal government are reserved for the states and the people? Sounds pretty open to interpretation to me. If the writers of the Constitution had intended for it to be read to the letter, they would have enumerated all of a person's rights. Similarly, if the writers wanted to keep the United States in an 18th-century mindset, they would have prevented it from being amendable, but they understood that times do change and the law must change with the times (there were laws once that sanctioned the treatment of blacks as second-class citizens. Where did they go? Oh, yeah: society's opinions changed, and the law changed with them. Otherwise, we'd still be living in the 19th century).

Posted by Mark at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

USA Today (a.k.a. McNews) published an op-ed today comparing laws preventing gays from getting married to laws preventing people from different races from getting married. The arguments are the same in both cases: they have biblical origins.

Let's pretend for a moment that laws preventing gays from getting married are not rooted in hatred; what is their basis? If it's biblical, then why are we not willing to grant same-sex couples any of the privileges afforded married heterosexual couples? The recent Ohio law barring gay marriage prevents homosexual couples from receiving any state benefits from marriage that are enjoyed by heterosexual couples. The proposed constitutional amendment -- now known as the Defense of Marriage Act -- would do the same on a federal level. Is there a legal basis for this denial of rights? Biblical arguments and discussions of "sanctity of marriage" get put down quickly by the Fourteenth Amendment. Our leaders would do well to remember that the law that governs this country is the constitution and not the Bible.

Okay, okay. Let's let the people opposed to same-sex marriage speak for themselves. How about Leadership University, which advertises itself as "a brochure site" whose mission is "to provide answers to many of science's, religion's and life's weightier issues free of charge. [They] are sponsored by Christian Leadership Ministries, a non-profit organization." That should tell us where they're coming from.

One of the "brochures" on this site is entitled "Same-Sex 'Marriage': Should America Allow 'Gay Rights' Activists to Cross The Last Cultural Frontier?" This "public policy analysis" first denigrates a movement for homosexual rights, making it out to be nothing more than an attempt at political power: "Certain gains awarded to 'minorities' in the decades following the 1964 Civil Rights Act's passage added important incentives to gay militants' aspirations to secure 'minority' status." Portions of this analysis hint that gay people are not so politically active so as to secure equal rights; rather, they want superlegal rights that are afforded to minorities, viz. "the ability to claim discrimination if a member or members of a minority class are denied access to employment, housing, public accommodations and/or public services." So, obviously, same-sex marriage is a political sham. Good job, guys.

Posted by Mark at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On Tuesday, the US Senate introduced an amendment to the Constitution that would define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. (Full Story.) Thankfully, for the rest of dumb America, NewsMax.com does not give the full text of the amendment nor a link to it, proving once again that we are not smart enough to analyze primary sources for ourselves, and we should just let our favorite conservative op-ed outlets tell us what we should think about this. At least someone here is sane: "'The U.S. Constitution is no place to play election-year politics, particularly when our nation is facing other critical issues such as an uncertain economy, threats to our homeland, the safety of our troops in Iraq and skyrocketing health care costs,' said HRC Executive Director Elizabeth Birch in a press release." Good for you, Elizabeth Birch! The Constitution is not a place for unilateral issues that are the pet issues of a particular group in this country.

NewsMax gives its own opinion of the amendment: "But supporters of traditional marriage say a constitutional amendment is the only way to protect the institution of marriage from courts that go beyond their constitutional mandates." Go beyond their mandates? What?! The courts of the United States, ever since Marbury v. Madison, have been given the power to review decisions of the states or of lower courts. Strangely, when the Supreme Court used this very methodology in Bush v. Gore to stop the recount process in Florida, the Republicans were curiously quiet on the issue of going "beyond their constitutional mandates." And yet, when the courts rule in a manner that they disagree with, suddenly, the judiciary is "activist" and "re-writing the law."

Article III of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes a federal court system, says, "The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;--to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;--to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;--to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;--to Controversies between two or more States;-- between a State and Citizens of another State;--between Citizens of different States;--between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects."

Chief Justice John Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison, writes, "The constitution is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and, like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the constitution is not law: if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable. [. . .] It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each. So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution, disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty."

For two hundred years, the foundation of our judicial system has been the ability of the judiciary to uphold the superiority of the Constitution. For an outlet so mediocre as NewsMax.com to declare that that tenet is wrong simply because it allows the judiciary to do something it happens to personally disagree with shows a resounding lack of understanding about what the Constitution means. "The Constitution should only be used to expand individual rights, not to single out a group of Americans for discrimination, Birch added."

Posted by Mark at 4:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From NewsMax.com, a decidedly conservative op-ed (not news) outlet: "Writing on the op-ed page of Wednesday's New York Times, Broadway star Harvey Fierstein announced that he'll be cross-dressed as Mrs. Santa Claus on a float dedicated to his hit Broadway show Hairspray." (Full story.) Wrong. Fierstein portrayed his character from Hairspray and dressed in a Christmasy costume, but Mrs. Santa Claus, who appeared with Santa on his float at the end of the parade, was decidedly a little old lady. Macy's put the kaibosh on Fierstein's plans, which were apparently his own: "By the end of the day, it was clear that tradition would hold: Santa Claus would be on the final sleigh float, accompanied by Mrs. Claus, a woman. Mr. Fierstein would be on a separate float. But the confusion set Macy's, owned by Federated Department Stores, on a madcap public relations campaign to distance its parade from his opinions without addressing the topics he raised. [. . .] The statement emphasized that Mr. Fierstein would be dressed not as Mrs. Claus but as "his beloved character Mrs. Edna Turnblad of the Broadway hit musical Hairspray." (Full story.) The NewsMax article was headlined, "Macy's Thanksgiving Parade to Celebrate Gay Marriage." What a nice way to scare conservatives and middle-class America for Thanksgiving.

Posted by Mark at 4:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Area studies" is bogus. Asian studies, American studies, Latin American studies: it's all really dumb. Is it a good idea to lump countries together and talk about their cultures and politics in such a broad way? Area studies gives us the impression that all of the countries in a given area are homogenous, that we can talk about "Latin America" in a general way and, in doing so, encompass all the countries that make up Latin America. This is not possible. Each country is different, with its own problems and history. Argentina is not the same as Mexico (indeed, even within the geographically-defined region of Latin America, they have very little to do with each other except for the language they speak) or Brazil (which speaks Portuguese) or Cuba or Chile. Why not have individual classes that talk about the history and culture of each country? And make them history classes, because that's what area studies is: the history of an area whose countries' only commonality is that these countries are in the same geographic area.

Area studies is another easy way for people to get doctorates. This is the difference between old-school history in which we investigate the past and look for new evidence of things. New-school history involves using fancy linguistical or theoretical terms to re-interpret history (the physical penetration into the jungles of Africa was really metaphorical for the sexual penetration into the female. Don't give me that crap that would make even Freud's hair stand on end) and apply fancy philosophy to it (usually of the post-colonial variety). This re-interpretation does not contribute anything new to history. It's like the dotcoms of the late '90s that failed because they didn't actually produce anything.

This is the continuing cycle of academia: people become academics because it easy and they don't have to do produce anything tangible. They can engage in a lot of abstract philosophising, which I can do from the comfort and convenience of the bathtub. One day, academia will suffer from this lack of new, concrete information -- like academic incest -- which furthers human beings' understanding of the world.

Perhaps the best example of the meaningless academic is Jacques Derrida, a French linguist and the father of deconstructionism. Derrida developed his career simply by saying that everyone else was wrong. You think this is the correct interpretation of this literature? Wrong. In fact, guess what? There is no correct interpretation, due to the subjectivity of language. This is not the correct way to contribute to human understanding; saying that everything is wrong does not make the human race any smarter than it was before. This is the same reason why Weird Al Yankovic isn't too terribly respected: he criticizes others' work but produces no original work of his own.

Posted by Mark at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why can't anyone leave moral arguments out of discussions of the gay marriage issue? Phyllis Schlafly, writing for Human Events Online, notes, "President Bush has proclaimed Oct. 12-18 as Marriage Protection Week because it is becoming clearer all the time that the institution of marriage needs protection from the courts." Discussing the ruling in the case Lawrence v. Texas, Schlafly mistakenly reports that Justice Anthony Kennedy cited "a European court ruling, because he couldn't cite the U.S. Constitution." This is completely and totally false; readers of the decision will realize that the Constitution comes up immediately, in section II of the decision: "We conclude the case should be resolved by determining whether the petitioners were free as adults to engage in the private conduct in the exercise of their liberty under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution."

Schlafly succeeds in vilifying any judge who tries to legalize same-sex marriage by calling him an "activist," which is only pejorative to those people who don't like activist judges, viz., Schlafly herself. Her only defense for why gay marriage should be illegal is the repetition of the word "sanctity," as though by repeating this word, her argument will become stronger. But she never succeeds in getting by the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires equal protection under the law. Limiting marriage to heterosexuals only violates the Fourteenth Amendment due to the legal guarantees afforded couples classified as "married." The website ReligiousTolerance.org enumerates some of the 1,400 privileges afforded couples simply because they are married ("Typically these are composed of about 400 state benefits and over 1,000 federal benefits"). These include joint parenting; joint adoption; joint foster care, custody, and visitation (including non-biological parents); status as next-of-kin for hospital visits and medical decisions where one partner is too ill to be competent; joint insurance policies for home, auto and health; and dissolution and divorce protections such as community property and child support (more examples are available at the website).

Where is Schlafly's answer to the equal protection issue? It's nowhere, ostensibly because she does not want to afford homosexuals that same rights as everyone else. This is not a question of sanctity of anything; it's a question of one group of people imposing its morals on everyone else. This is why those opposed to gay marriage can only offer demagogical arguments: they understand that if it were a straigh-up legal issue, homosexuals would be allowed to marry. As such, they try to entangle morality and "sanctity" into the debate to try and confuse everyone on the outside of that debate. "A public uninformed about the U.S. Constitution, an acquiescent bar and a spineless Congress have for years allowed activist judges to expand their powers at the expense of elected representatives and in violation of the separation of powers," she writes at the same time she relies on the same uninformed public to believe her arguments.

Posted by Mark at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“When I say I believe in a square deal I do not mean . . . to give every man the best hand. If the cards do not come to any man, or if they do come, and he has not got the power to play them, that is his affair. All I mean is that there shall be no crookedness in the dealing.”

Attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, the above quote should serve as a motto for every government everywhere. What does this mean, though? Roosevelt does not advocate a handout, that every person in this metaphorical game of cards deserves to win; rather, each person should have an equality of opportunity to win: each person should have the same chances for success. Of course, no entity short of God himself can guarantee success for everyone.

TR did not suggest that everyone is capable of the same level of success or that everyone should have the same level of success. What we all ought to have is the equal chance to use our different gifts to our own individual potential, and this is the key: the individual ability to succeed or fail.

Take a marathon. All the participants in a marathon have different abilities, and not everyone will finish first. Indeed, only one person can finish first. Let us call this aspect of the race the “nature” aspect; each person is endowed, by virtue of his physical composition – over which he has no control – with different abilities. Also, each person in a marathon will experience the event differently, and these experiences will be based on chance. One runner may experience a sudden cramp, another may trip and fall, while another surges forward, having spent the race shielded from the drag of the wind by runners ahead of him. Let us call this aspect “nurture”: that which a person experiences. A man also has no control over nurture, for the events of his life affect him completely at random. Nonetheless, his nature will determine how he deals with the problems of his nurture.

Regardless of nature or nurture, everyone begins the marathon on an equal playing field: the starting line. This is the only certainty that the runners have: that they all begin at the same place. This provides a maximum of personal liberty – the ability to succeed or fail – and equality of opportunity. The race officials, however, cannot guarantee victory for everyone. All that they can guarantee is that everyone has the same ability to use his or her gifts to succeed.

Guaranteeing success is an affront to personal liberty – it requires an external force to manipulate the dealing of the cards (to use TR’s metaphor) so that one person wins and one person necessarily loses. The affront is to the loser, who was essentially cheated out of his ability to use his talents to determine his own fate. His fate was decided for him by someone else, and his fate was determined to be that of the loser. Individual liberty – the ability to determine what you want to do with your life and how you want to do it – is the most important thing that a human being can have. Starting the race on an equal line is okay; ending it that way is not, since it is the agency of the people themselves that determines the outcome of the race.

What role, then, must government play in ensuring that such a “square deal” exists? A government, in the ideal, exists to protect the rights of its citizens from infringement by other citizens and other governments. It tells you what you cannot do because these things are affronts to others’ liberty. What, then, are the powers of the ideal government? It must, first and foremost, ensure that the people are free to use their individual natures to determine their own futures and it must defend individuals against those who would take that freedom away or limit those liberties.

A government is obligated to provide education to all its citizens. Education is the greatest equalizer, the most important requirement for success in civil society. In times past, he who had the largest army or the biggest gun was the one who held all the power; the human race has advanced to the point where merit is the criterion of a person’s success in society, and more education creates more merit – in a general sense. Of course having a higher-level education does not automatically mean that one is the most qualified member of a society. It does mean that that person, generally speaking, of course (as there are exceptions to every rule), is more qualified than someone who never had a higher-level education. A government must provide its citizens with the skills necessary to live in civil society: literacy and an understanding of mathematics (“reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic,” as they used to say). People, of course, are free to use their individual judgment to decide whether or not they want to be educated, and that is their prerogative.

A government is not allowed to make moral judgments. No moral is absolute, for what I may consider right is not what others consider to be right. With this statement comes the caveat that the purpose of a government is to protect the individual liberty of its citizens, and thus any action which hinders the liberty of those citizens should be punished or should be punishable so as to deter such acts from happening. Murder, theft, and other such crimes are not crimes against morality but crimes against individual liberty. The use of force to override merit and individual liberty cannot stand as a valid method of success. This said, the people may otherwise decide what morals they have, respectively. The only thing the government may do is take actions that allow the people to exercise their own individual liberty or punish those that limit others’ liberty.

TR never believed in handouts; he believed in hard work. But he also believed, in an age of unfair working practices, that people should not have artificial hindrances to their success: how can a worker achieve success with a pittance wage? How can consumers be successful when faced with monopolies and trusts that artificially increase prices? TR’s Square Deal is not Marxism (“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”), for it does not depend on the doctrine of need: “I deserve this because I need it”; rather, it depends on the doctrine of equality of opportunity: “I deserve this because I work hard, but my liberty is being usurped by forces beyond my control.” The true Marxism is the elimination of individual liberty in favor of collective equality, exactly the opposite of the TR ideal.

Posted by Mark at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes I wonder why I read both to read TownHall.com. All it does is anger up the blood.

Case in point: an editorial from Robert E. Rector at the Heritage Foundation concerning sex education. Rector has much to complain about: most sex ed programs these days don't preach abstinence as the only option, he says. The implication, of course, is that the school should teach that the only method of contraception is to say "no" to sex.

And what about the rest of us that live in the real world? He addresses this issue: "Far worse, though, is what abstinence-plus programs do contain: explicit demonstrations of contraceptive use -- especially condoms -- and direct encouragement to experiment sexually." I'd be hard-pressed to find a program that actually encourages sexual activity. At the same time, though, an abstinence-only program ignores the fact that kids are having sex. As we've found out many times before, ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away or change it for the better. Preventing kids from discovering other methods of contraception doesn't encourage sexual behavior; it acknowledges that it is not the school's job to tell kids whether or not sex is moral. In the same way that a library which shelves Mein Kampf doesn't necessarily support those ideas, so too does a school which markets "abstinence-plus" programs not necessarily endorse sex for children. Like the library, it merely provides information so that those kids who do decide to have sex know what their options are, instead of being shut out and labeled as evil by some institution which only recognizes abstinence as a method of contraception.

Rector's column is the rhetorical equivalent of closing one's eyes when a car is coming, as though pretending it's not there will change it. Or, we can be realistic and acknowledge the fact that sex among kids does exist. And rather than shunning those that do and giving them a stern lecture about how it is evil and that, if they want to have contraception, they cannot have any, since abstinence is the only "correct" method of contraception, we should tell them what they want to know.

This, of course, only goes for schools. It is the parents that set morals, and as always, it is not the school's job to teach morality, despite certain folks who feel that a particular morality -- their morality -- should be taught to all children. These same people proceed to balk when the school takes an amoral stance or begins teaching a morality contrary to theirs. It's a great day when hypocrisy walks into a room disguised as virtue and then becomes unmasked, revealing its true, decrepit face.

Posted by Mark at 7:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finally, there’s a voice in the discussion of gay marriage that doesn’t preach Scripture or the protection of moral values. As expected, it’s William F. Buckley, the vanguard of reason, and he injects a constitutional question into the debate: “gay marriage evangelists are ready to take advantage of that clause in the Constitution (the ‘full faith and credit’ clause) that requires individual states to respect legislation and judicial findings of other states in respect of citizens of those states. A couple who are [sic] married in the state of Virginia must be treated, when traveling in Wisconsin, as married.” The gay marriage advocates also have a safe haven in Article IV, which says, “Congress may by general laws prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof.” Buckley balks at the use of this clause to force other states to acknowledge gay marriage: “The authority of Congress here is presumably evidentiary, not substantive,” meaning that past Supreme Court cases have established Congress’s breadth with regard to this clause; it is not specifically written into the Constitution. And this is where the problem is for him: the ability for state laws to be applied to other states via Congress is inferred, not explicit. This ability comes from the Supreme Court.

As expected, Buckley attacks the Supreme Court’s judicial activism, citing it as responsible for the “juggernaut determined to go all the way with the license given by the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision.” The Lawrence decision (Lawrence v. Texas, 02-102) is the most recent ruling regarding gay rights, the Texas sodomy case that was decided just before the court went into its summer recess.

Buckley asks, “How does a self-governing republic proceed with a judiciary that has taken to writing basic laws?” This is a question that, if it were asked, should have been asked in 1801 with Marbury v. Madison. This case established the ability of the Supreme Court to override acts of other states or other branches of government if these acts conflict with the federal Constitution. This “writing basic laws” has been going on for two hundred years, and it is only when the ruling of the Supreme Court is in conflict with Buckley’s (and others’) opinions is judicial review a bad thing. The only answer to the Supreme Court’s usurpation of the legislature is an amendment to the constitution – in fact, “if the Supreme Court is going to continue to perform as a standing constitutional convention, then it becomes a conservative warrant to employ constitutional defenses.” Such an amendment to the constitution would, like the prohibition amendment, target one specific issue on behalf of a single group of people: “the necessary amendment need go no further – nor should go any further – than to limit the application of the full-faith-and-credit clause to exclude any requirement to abide by laws or judicial findings authorizing same-sex marriage.” These single-issue amendments (like the flag burning amendment) reek of a group attempting to exercise control of the country on behalf of an agenda it seeks to advance. The real issue here is not the misuse of the full-faith-and-credit clause, for if it were, the amendment Buckley suggests would close all the loopholes pertaining to that clause, like the “Reno divorces” that he cites (in the 1930s, people whose states didn’t permit divorce would go to Nevada – where divorce was legal – and get a divorce there. They would then return to their home states, which would be forced to acknowledge the divorce under the full-faith-and-credit clause, since it was made in a state where divorce was legal). Buckley seeks not to close this loophole altogether: just to close it for same-sex marriages. (And how do I know this, you ask? The sarcastic way in which Buckley refers to same-sex marriage, as well as his standing as a bastion of conservatism; conservatives don’t like the idea of same-sex marriage.)

The Supreme Court’s activism – at which Buckley and others balk – is what keeps the Constitution up-to-date. Supreme Court ruling are integral to ensuring that the framework written in 1787 is as relevant to us today as it was then. How so? Take “equal protection,” the key phrase of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Supreme Court found as meaning that “separate but equal” is unconstitutional (Brown v. Board of Education) – albeit after an earlier court said it was okay (Plessy v. Ferguson) and that accused persons who cannot afford an attorney are entitled to one (Gideon v. Wainwright). Buckley and other conservatives also have a hard time dealing with Roe v. Wade, which pieced together several amendments into a patchwork version of a right to privacy (“privacy advocates are perfectly free to reason that somehow, implicit in the ‘spirit’ of the Constitution, there is something that permits the destruction of fetal life in deference to the private rights of women,” says Buckley).

While Buckley’s argument is more based in reason than arguments from, say, Pat Robertson, there is still something lacking: Buckley’s own refusal to acknowledge the equal protection clause of the Fourte