Sirleaf Johnson Backs Bigtory

In Liberia, homosexual acts are punishable by one year in prison, gay activists are persecuted, and their efforts to challenge the country's sodomy laws are countered by politicians' calls for harsher punishments. Rather than side with the besieged human rights activists, President and Nobel Laureate Ellen Sirleaf Johnson has joined the ranks of the bigots:

Such were the tensions over the topic that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was inaugurated for a second six-year term in January, came out to assure people that she would never sign a bill granting same-sex marriages or gay rights.

"The president is clear on this matter - she will not sign such a bill," Norris Tweh, a Liberian government spokesman, told the BBC.

She is joined in her prejudice by the wife of Charles of Taylor, who wishes to add nine years to the current punishment of homosexuality. Strange that such company does not make Sirleaf Johnson question her position, but unreasoning hatred can make for strange bedfellows.

Skipping the Light Fandango

Hat tip to Will Ferrell's Casa de mi Padre for demonstrating that Procol Harum's masterpiece would make a great wedding march:

Religious Freedom: Whose Principles Should Be Protected?

While admitting that he was wrong to refer to a philosophical opponent as a "slut" and "prostitute," Rush Limbaugh renewed his accusation that Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke was trying to "force a religious institution to abandon its principles to meet hers." Fluke had testified before Congress that she believed her Catholic-affiliated university should cover the cost of contraception in its healthcare plan, prompting Limbaugh's sexist insults.

Setting aside his hateful and lecherous comments, I think that Limbaugh has stumbled upon the crux of the issue. It comes down to the rights of individuals vs those of institutions, the rights of healthcare recipients to their personal religious and philosophical beliefs vs. the rights of the institutions that fund healthcare to theirs.

I cannot see the reasoning that would lead us as a nation to enforce the rights of institutions at the expense of the rights of individuals, especially when those institutions base their claim on the Bill of Rights, the portion of the Constitution that was explicitly written to protect individual liberty. Individuals who work for religious institutions have the right to practice their religion as they see fit and to make use of the medical coverage that is guaranteed to them by law if they choose to do so. Religious institutions do not have the right to hinder those decisions and so deny their employees their rights to freedom of religion and equal protection under the law.

History has shown that legitimate institutions that derive their power from the support of individuals do not need special protection in societies where the rights of individuals are respected. The law guarantees the liberty of individuals, who in turn guarantee the liberty of the institutions that they support. It is the individual who needs legal protection so that he or she is not crushed by institutions and other forms of human collectivity. We cannot promote liberty in the reverse---through institutions and filtering down to individuals. That way lies the tyranny of the majority, and it's what our Bill of Rights was designed to escape.

[The images above are of Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke.]

Time!

Mr. Deity tackles the problems of time and nothingness (h/t: Swans on Tea).

Right Back at Ya, Mr. Jefferson

In a 2004 essay in The Atlantic, reprinted in Arguably, Christopher Hitchens quotes this 1791 criticism of Edmund Burke by Thomas Jefferson for Burke's negative assessment of the French Revolution:

The Revolution of France does not astonish me so much as the revolution of Mr. Burke. I wish I could believe the latter proceeded from as pure motives as the former. . . How mortifying that this evidence of the rottenness of his mind must oblige us now to ascribe to wicked motives those actions of his life which wore the virtue of patriotism.

First of all, the French Revolution did not proceed from pure motives. The execution of aristocrats and royalty who had already been deposed from their positions of power suggests that vengeance and hatred were mixed in with the citizens' more noble motivation to establish a democratic form of government.

Second, the "wicked motives" that were attributed to Burke in his criticism of the French Revolution arose because he had accepted a £2,500 pension from the British government for his work on the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings and was, therefore, supposedly obligated to adopt the British view of events in France. This seems like a rather tenuous argument, given the smallness of the pension and the lack of documentary evidence that Burke was ever given to selling his opinions. With Jefferson, on the other hand, we see a man who openly sold his moral convictions, choosing to lead a life of luxury and contemplation that he could not have lived without the unpaid labor of his slaves, while at the same time bemoaning the existence of slavery. Jefferson scholar Clay Jenkinson conceded as much in the most recent discussion on the Thomas Jefferson Hour but was sympathetic to Jefferson's plight. I am not. If you must choose between two options and one of the options is owning other human beings, morally, you are constrained to choose the other option (unless it happens that the other option involves murder, rape, torture, the world coming to an end, etc.).

Third, how is it that the man who favored violence for violence' sake could accuse another of having rottenness of mind? Jefferson famously asserted that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure," preferably within twenty years of the last such refreshment. Lest one think this is violence in pursuit of a cause, Jefferson precedes this statement by saying that "[t]he people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive." Citizens will rebel in error, but that doesn't matter because the value of the rebellion is in the process of blood-letting, not in righting the wrongs that set the rebellion in motion.

Burke was a great liberal who did not shrink from challenging the excesses of those who shared many of his convictions but used unacceptable means. Jefferson was a cowardly liberal who could not live up to his own convictions and cheered on those who caused blood to run in the streets. Which man better deserved the epithet "rottenness of . . . mind"?

Protecting the Group at the Expense of the Individual

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court has held that the Lutheran Church cannot be bound by federal employment laws:

The court called the government's claim that religious organizations are no different than other organizations "hard to square with the text of the First Amendment itself, which gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations."

The First Amendment does not give special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations---it gives special solicitude to the "free exercise" of religion, without reference to institutions. This could be construed as applying to individual persons rather than organizations and, given the Bill of Rights' emphasis on individual liberty, that is likely the intent behind the text. Of course, that's not how the Supreme Court has viewed it, either now or in the past, when it held in Yoder v. Wisconsin that Amish children could be denied an education beyond the 8th grade because their parents' religious belief was a "true and objective religious practice" and not an individual standard.

This is deeply disturbing because by elevating a group's beliefs and practices above the law---particularly above the protections that the law provides for individuals---it allows for the very tyranny the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent. Individuals within these groups are denied their full individual rights, as the claimant in this recent case was. They lack legal redress for many of the wrongs done to them by these institutions and are less able to challenge their worst practices because the law is helpless to intervene. This is the tyranny of the majority in microcosm, and it is the flexuous law of the land (I say flexuous because Congress has outlawed female genital mutilation despite its status as a religious practice and has allowed the state to intervene when parents have refused to seek medical treatment for their seriously ill children because of their religious beliefs).

We can claim to be a nation at the forefront of personal liberty, but this noli me tangere policy for religions pushes us back in the pack.

Freedom of Speech for Genocide Deniers

While France's senators congratulate themselves for their commitment to historical rectitude at the expense of personal liberty in the case of the Armenian genocide, they might want to mull the words of the late, great Christopher Hitchens (actually, it would have been better if they had considered his views before they passed the Gayssot Act in 1990, but what can you do?):

Well, if everybody in North America is forced to attend, at school, training in sensitivity in Holocaust awareness and is taught to study the Final Solution, about which nothing was actually done by this country [Canada] or by North America or by the United Kingdom while it was going on, but let’s say as if in compensation for that everyone is made to swallow an official and unalterable story of it now, and it’s taught as the great moral exemplar, the moral equivalent of the morally lacking elements of the Second World War, a way of stilling our uneasy conscience about that combat. If that’s the case with everybody, as it more or less is, and one person gets up and says, “You know, about this Holocaust, I’m not sure it even happened. In fact, I’m pretty certain it didn’t. Indeed, I begin to wonder if the only thing is that the Jews brought a little bit of violence on themselves.” That person doesn’t just have a right to speak, that person’s right to speak must be given extra protection because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with, might contain a grain of historical truth, might in any case give people to think about why do they know what they already think they know. How do I know that I know this, except that I’ve always been taught this and never heard anything else?

Movies That Should Not Have Been Made

A new film from a convicted child rapist (also known as Carnage)



and one about Nazi sympathizers in love (also known as W.E.)




Have pedophilia and fascism really become such small issues that they can be brushed aside for the greater demands of cinema?

(As for Madonna's contention that Wallis Simpson and Edward Windsor were not Nazi sympathizers, people don't have affairs with Joachim von Ribbentrop and stay in constant communication with him at least through Spring 1940 unless they are sympathetic with National Socialist ideals. They probably don't agree to be feted by Hitler in 1937 either, but that could be excused by great stupidity and ignorance.)

Passage of the Day

From The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) by Steven Pinker, agrarian grotesquerie:

In Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, the historian Ben Kiernan notes another curious feature of utopian ideologies. Time and again they hark back to a vanished agrarian paradise, which they seek to restore as a healthful substitute for prevailing urban decadence. In chapter 4 we saw that after the Enlightenment had emerged from the intellectual bazaar of cosmopolitan cities, the German counter-Enlightenment romanticized the attachment of a people to their land---the blood and soil of Kiernan's title. The ungovernable metropolis, with its fluid population and ethnic and occupational enclaves, is an affront to the mindset that envisions a world of harmony, purity, and organic wholeness. Many of the nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th centuries were guided by utopian images of ethnic groups flourishing in their native homelands, often based on myths of ancestral tribes who settled the territory at the dawn of time. This agrarian utopianism lay behind Hitler's dual obsessions: his loathing of Jewry, which he associated with commerce and cities, and his deranged plan to depopulate Eastern Europe to provide farmland for German city-dwellers to colonize. Mao's massive agrarian communes and Pol Pot's expulsion of Cambodian city-dwellers to rural killing fields are other examples.

We have this streak in American society as well, though it has resulted in substantially less violence. From Jeffersonian democracy to the Populist Movement to the sometimes counter-Enlightenment 60s and, recently, to the often overlapping, backward-looking ideals of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Movements, we have seen anti-cosmopolitanism and (in the case of the first three at least) pro-agrarianism with undertones of revolution (sometimes violent revolution in the case of the first two). That we have managed to keep this counter-Enlightenment tendency in check is a testament to our strong cosmopolitanism and classical liberal roots.

Now We Have the Power to Cause Cancer?

Hugo Chavez has long accused the US of outlandishly malevolent behavior, so I suppose his latest accusations shouldn't be surprising, but they still are:

Would it be so strange that they've invented the technology to spread cancer and we won't know about it for 50 years?" Chávez pondered, one day after Argentina's president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced she had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and would undergo surgery in January.

Speaking on Wednesday during an end-of-year address to the armed forces, Chávez hinted that a spate of cancer among the region's leaders could be a US plot – although he conceded he had no proof and did not want to make "reckless" accusations.

"I repeat: I am not accusing anyone. I am simply taking advantage of my freedom to reflect and air my opinions faced with some very strange and hard to explain goings-on," he said at the event, broadcast live on state television.

You are making accusations when you state such reflections publicly, and you are trying to influence your citizens to believe that American officials could/would do such a thing. No one deserves to have cancer, but I think Chavez definitely deserves a bout of food poisoning for his comments.