The definition of marriage under strict scrutiny

Daffyd ap Hugh looks at the rational basis for defining marriage as between opposite sex parters: Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Companion Piece: Risible Racism vs. Gender Benders”

Thus we long ago concluded that legally, there is no essential difference among people on the basis of race. And therefore any racial classification or racial law is inherently invidious and requires the absolute strictest of scrutiny.

In the case of laws banning miscegenation, no compelling government interest other than the even more vile racial supremacism or separatism has been offered for banning mixed-race marriages... so such laws clearly fail the test of "strict scrutiny" and were rightly struck down as unconstitutional.

Contrariwise, only the most radical of radicals would dispute the essential difference between men and women. The claim itself is preposterous: Men can impregnate, women cannot; women can give birth, men cannot.

Moreover, much scientific testing has discovered profound differences in the way men and women think, behave, and react; and as any parent knows, such profound differences begin at birth (some say even earlier) -- so they are not simply constructs of an oppressive society, as the most radical feminists argue.

One can easily find many compelling government interests in promoting traditional marriage over SSM (and over polyandry):

• To raise the fertility rate, so our population doesn't dwindle (as it has in many European countries), causing society to collapse.
• To provide a more stable, well-rounded environment for raising children, thus lowering crime, drug use, and other socially destructive behaviors.
• To mate the aggressive male personality with the loving female personality, in order to civilize the former and embolden the latter.
• To prevent the objectivization and abuse of women by restricting men to but one wife, not the harems we find in, e.g., the ummah and among primitive tribal cultures.
• To promote marriages that tend to last longer and be more stable -- as research clearly shows traditional marriages do, compared to same-sex or polyamorous marriages -- which in turn makes society itself more stable.

Each of these interests is compelling in itself; and traditional marriage promotes all of them. And please notice one point: Not a single one of these listed compelling government interests is in any way driven by religion. In fact, I myself am not in the least religious, yet I support all of them.

So yes, marriage to the person of one's choice is a fundamental right; but both laws that prohibit racial discrimination in marriage and laws that define marriage as between one man and one woman clearly pass the "strict scrutiny" test. We can prohibit racial separatism and supremacism, saying there is no essential difference between the so-called "races," without having to profess the absurdity that there is no essential difference between the sexes. The two claims are worlds apart.

"Luke warmer"

Anthony Watts discusses his position on global warming: I’m Not Schizophrenic (And Neither Am I) | Watts Up With That?

I am a ‘lukewarmer,’ one who believes that the physics of climate change are not by theselves controversial, but who believes that the sensitivity of the earth’s atmosphere to a doubling of concentrations of CO2 is not yet known, but is likely to be lower than activists have claimed.

I suppose it should bother me that I am getting slammed at activist websites such as Only In It For the Gold, Deltoid and ThingsBreak because they think I don’t go far enough, and slammed again here and at The Air Vent because I go too far. Although I want to be liked as much as the next fellow, it doesn’t, because the reasons given for slamming me never seem to match up to the reality of what I write.

Patterns of hate and fear

Sixth graders are taken on a field trip to a mosque, taught a nonstandard version of history, and led in prayer. No one would dream of "balancing" this with a similar field trip to a Catholic church, a synagogue, a Mormon temple, or even a Hindu temple. Why the difference?

I've attributed it to Islamophobia – of the religions mentioned above, only one has demonstrated, in the here and now, a significant population of shock troops willing to kill infidels. The others are much safer, even if you insult them.

Bookworm sees a larger pattern at play: We only hate what we fear — why liberals hate the church and pay lip service to the mosque

The interesting question is why the Left doesn’t perceive a similar separation problem when it comes to mosque and state. I think it has to do with the liberal’s perception of an institution’s potential power over the masses.

A few months ago, I did a post about Rush Limbaugh, and the inordinate fear Leftists, not just extreme Leftists, but garden-variety Democrats, feel when they think about Rush. After a lot of background talk (I do love my background talk), I boiled it down to my key thesis, which is that liberals fear Rush because he is the one they worry will penetrate their defenses, make them think, and change their minds...

The same dynamic is at work when it comes to Leftists on the one hand, and mosques and churches on the other hand. For all their multicultural bloviating, so-called liberals don’t think much of Islam. They recognize that its moral teachings are limited (nothing clear and humanist like the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, or the Golden Rule), that its history is ugly, and that its current practice, with all the demands about daily prayers and handwashing and fasting, is not going to be that attractive to the majority of Americans.

The Progressives therefore don’t seriously believe that anyone can go to a mosque and convert. Sure, if you go to prison you might convert, but anything looks good in prison. Further, as my cousin, the prison pastor, says:

It is not a contradiction to be a Muslim and a murderer, even a mass murderer. That is one reason why criminals “convert” to Islam in prison. They don’t convert at all; they similarly remain the angry judgmental vicious beings they always have been. They simply add “religious” diatribes to their personal invective. Islam does not inspire a crisis of conscience, just inspirations to outrage.

In other words, it’s not really a conversion at all.

Christianity, though, is scary. If you’ve got a good minister or priest or pastor, suddenly all sorts of persuasive stuff is going to appearing on people’s radars and penetrate their ignorance or defenses. You know what I mean: Stuff about justice, about dignity, about respect, about love, about forbearance. Worse, all this icky, non-Marxist stuff is going to fall on fertile soil, because even forty years of Progressivism in the public sphere hasn’t completely managed to leech away the Judeo-Christian beliefs that underlie American culture. Worse, Christ doesn’t demand of his followers grueling physical rituals. Instead, he demands faith. Not lip service and clean feet, but faith.

Fluoride and anemia?

An article that's been making the rounds at work alleges that fluoride is linked with anemia in pregnant women. The article, Effective interventional approach to control anaemia in pregnant women, looks at a number of women in India, and evaluates whether lowering fluoride intake had a positive effect.

Anaemia in pregnancy and low birth weight babies, a serious public health problem, troubles India and several other nations. This article reports the results of a approach to address the issue.
....
Results reveal that (1) the urine fluoride levels decreased in 67% and 53% of the pregnant women respectively, who attended ANCs during 1st and 2nd trimester of pregnancy. (2) An increase in Hb upon withdrawal of fluoride followed by nutritional intervention in 73% and 83% respectively has also been recorded. (3) Body mass index (BMI) also enhanced. (4) The percentage of pre-term deliveries was decreased in sample group compared to control. (5) Birth weight of babies enhanced in 80% and 77% in sample group women who attended ANC in 1st and 2nd trimester respectively as opposed to 49% and 47% respectively in the control group. (6) The number of low birth weight babies was reduced to 20% and 23% respectively in sample as opposed to 51% and 53% in control groups.

So we have fluoride levels in urine dropping, and at the same time, hemoglobin levels and body mass index increase. In addition, we see a decrease in birth complications.

Looks pretty telling, until you read this from the abstract:

The sample group was introduced to two interventions, viz.: (1) removal of fluoride from ingestion through drinking water, food and other sources, (2) counselling based intake of essential nutrients, viz. calcium, iron, folic acid, vitamins C, E and other antioxidants through dairy products, vegetables and fruits. No intervention was introduced for the control group.

The researchers changed two things at once – reduce fluoride intake, and increase the intake of essential nutrients. After both changes are made, the change in fluoride intake is given all the credit.

It would have been very interesting to see what the effect would have been had the women only gotten nutritional counseling. I suspect there'd have been positive results just from the improvement in nutrition.

Conservatism does not equal racism. So why do many liberals assume it does?

From the Washington Post: Conservatism does not equal racism. So why do many liberals assume it does?

The answer is that the liberals are the party of self congratulation. They are convinced that they are good, kind, wise, and educated, so their answers to the world's problems must be the right ones. Anyone who disagrees is either too stupid to see the obvious truth of the liberal position, or is acting from bad motives.

Asking the Right Questions

Bookworm looks at the art of asking inconvenient questions: Asking the Right Questions

Over time, in business negotiations, I have learned that the best way to buy time while digesting information is to ask questions to better flesh out the issue. I don’t mean a Socratic dialog, I mean questions meant to make the other person think about their position(s). I offer the following in the context of the very excellent comments that have been made on this blog, recently, about how to constructively engage Liberals, especially the Liberals who have no idea of why they think the way they do, not to mention having a clue regarding why conservatives and libertarians think as we do. I propose that this latter designation represents a very significant block of prospective voters and we need to work on them, not just before November but with an eye to 2012.
....
Here are some examples of what I mean:

When a Liberal uses the race card: "why do you think that people on the Left are so utterly obsessed with peoples’ race?"

When a Liberal talks about America’s supposed insults to Islam: "Why do you think that all countries the surrounding the world of Islam are subject to Muslim attacks and terrorism?"

On Democrats being for the little guy: "Why do you think it is that the Democrat leadership is so filthy rich?"

On the Tea Party: "With what beliefs of the Tea Party do you disagree?"

On Democrats being for minorities: "Why do you think that blacks have fared so badly in Democrat-controlled inner cities since Johnson’s War on Poverty of 50 years-ago?"

One Liberal Dependency on Government: “"lease share your thoughts with me on how one can be simultaneously dependent on Government programs and still be free?"

When Liberals talk about Islam’s tolerance for others: "How many Muslims do you know? Can you tell me what’s in the Koran about tolerance toward others?" (OK, that’s two questions).

A "pattern" of anti-Muslim hate crime?

Bookworm looks at a piece in the SF Chronicle: About that “growing” anti-Muslim sentiment

The MSM is bewildered. How is it that nine years after 9/11, people are more hostile to Muslims than they were the day of 9/11, when 20 Muslims murdered thousands of Americans, and sought to decapitate the American government?
....
Here’s the deal: The majority of Americans are more than smart enough to understand that the majority of Muslims worldwide are people who have no desire to bomb buildings or decapitate people. Like us, they just want to live their lives. We wish them well.

But we, the American people, have learned something in the last nine years, something that, prior to 9/11, only hyper-aware people knew: There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. A small percentage of them are jihadists, who are actively engaged in war against the United States and against Western culture generally, and have been so, with varying degrees of success and intensity since the early Middle Ages.

Given the 1.3 billion starting point, this small percentage point adds up to well more than a million Muslims around the world who actively wish us ill. Actively.

They fight American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, they blow up our cultural allies in Israel, England, Spain, Bali, and other places around the world. They gleefully decapitate their perceived enemies wherever they find them, whether in the Philippines, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, or anywhere else in the world.

They are also engaged in a concerted effort to use the threat of violence to blackmail Western culture into abject capitulation. Free speech within the boundaries of Western nations = death threats or, if you’re Theo van Gogh, actual death. Women appearing in public per the norms of Western culture, within the boundaries of Western nations = death threats, rape, acid attacks, etc. Open debate about Islam = death threats.

What Americans have also figured out is that the remaining billions or so non-violent Muslims are utterly passive. With remarkably few exceptions, beyond saying “we’re not violent,” they are doing nothing whatsoever to stop the cancer that lies at the heart of their religious affiliation. Frankly, that’s not good enough. Fine, I understand that they’re deathly afraid too, but they certainly cannot expect Americans to respect them unreservedly if they (a) keep repeating, contrary to available evidence, that Islam is not connected to violence; and (b) do nothing to stem the violence.

So the reason Americans are more anti-Islamic now than they were on 9/11 is that, in the ensuing nine years, they’ve learned more about Islam. What they’ve learned is that Islam, in active mode, is indeed a violent and threatening religion; and that Islam in passive mode, despite being the majority of Muslims, is useless at stemming the tide of millions of murderous Islamists. This has nothing to do with American ignorance, paranoia and economic fear, and everything to do with paying attention.

The Koran: Don’t burn it. Read it.

Michelle Malkin offers this advice: The Koran: Don’t burn it. Read it.

Gen. Petraeus says the provocation endangers the troops. But what’s in the Koran is far more of an inflammatory threat to American soldiers than any match with which to light it. What’s in the Koran has inspired decades of bloody warfare by Muslim operatives targeting our troops, civilians, and Western infidels around the world.

Don’t take my word for it. Take the time to re-read Ft. Hood massacre suspect and Muslim avenger Nidal Hasan’s own powerpoint presentation on “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.”

Why marriage?

An editorial at NRO looks at the move to redefine marriage.

The emerging elite consensus in favor of same-sex marriage has an element of self-delusion about it. It denies that same-sex marriage would work a radical change in American law or society, insisting to the contrary that within a few years of its triumph everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. But its simultaneous insistence that opponents are the moral equivalent of the white supremacists of yesteryear belies these bland assurances. Our tolerance for racism is quite limited: The government, while it generally respects the relevant constitutional limits, is active in the cause of marginalizing racists and eradicating racist beliefs and behaviors. Moreover, social sanctions against racism, both overt and implied, are robust. If our society is truly to regard opposition to same-sex marriage as equivalent to racism, it will have to undergo change both dramatic and extensive. Churches that object, for example, will have to be put in the same cultural position as Bob Jones University was in the days when it banned interracial dating, until they too join the consensus.

If proponents of same-sex marriage thought through these implications, their confidence might evaporate, for it seems highly unlikely that this project will succeed at all, and impossible that it will do so without decades of arduous and divisive social “reform.” That is no reason to shrink from the task, if it is truly a just one. But we should first consider whether the historic and cross-cultural understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman really has so little to be said for it.

It is true that marriage is, in part, an emotional union, and it is also true that spouses often take care of each other and thereby reduce the caregiving burden on other people. But neither of these truths is the fundamental reason for marriage. The reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children. If it did not produce children, neither society nor the government would have much reason, let alone a valid reason, to regulate people’s emotional unions. (The government does not regulate non-marital friendships, no matter how intense they are.) If mutual caregiving were the purpose of marriage, there would be no reason to exclude adult incestuous unions from marriage. What the institution and policy of marriage aims to regulate is sex, not love or commitment. These days, marriage regulates sex (to the extent it does regulate it) in a wholly non-coercive manner, sex outside of marriage no longer being a crime.

Marriage exists, in other words, to solve a problem that arises from sex between men and women but not from sex between partners of the same gender: what to do about its generativity. It has always been the union of a man and a woman (even in polygamous marriages in which a spouse has a marriage with each of two or more persons of the opposite sex) for the same reason that there are two sexes: It takes one of each type in our species to perform the act that produces children. That does not mean that marriage is worthwhile only insofar as it yields children. (The law has never taken that view.) But the institution is oriented toward child-rearing. (The law has taken exactly that view.) What a healthy marriage culture does is encourage adults to arrange their lives so that as many children as possible are raised and nurtured by their biological parents in a common household.

Same-sex marriage is often likened to interracial marriage, which the law once proscribed. But the reason governments refused to recognize (and even criminalized) interracial marriages was not that they did not believe that such marriages were possible; it is that they wanted to discourage them from happening, in the interests of white supremacy. Sexual complementarity is a legitimate condition of marriage because of the institution’s orientation toward children; racial homogeneity has nothing to do with that orientation. Laws against interracial marriage thus violated the right to form an actual marriage in a way that laws defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman do not violate it. The argument about what the equal rights of all citizens entail for marriage laws turns, in other words, on what marriage is. If marriage just is by its nature oriented toward procreation, the refusal to redefine it to accommodate same-sex partners unjustly discriminates against them no more than the military does against the flat-footed.

Same-sex marriage would introduce a new, less justifiable distinction into the law. This new version of marriage would exclude pairs of people who qualify for it in every way except for their lack of a sexual relationship. Elderly brothers who take care of each other; two friends who share a house and bills and even help raise a child after one loses a spouse: Why shouldn’t their relationships, too, be recognized by the government? The traditional conception of marriage holds that however valuable those relationships may be, the fact that they are not oriented toward procreation makes them non-marital. (Note that this is true even if those relationships involve caring for children: We do not treat a grandmother and widowed daughter raising a child together as married because their relationship is not part of an institution oriented toward procreation.) On what possible basis can the revisionists’ conception of marriage justify discriminating against couples simply because they do not have sex?

How, for that matter, can it justify discriminating against groups of more than two involved in overlapping sexual relationships? The argument that same-sex marriage cannot be justified without also, in principle, justifying polygamy and polyamory infuriates many advocates of the former. There is, however, no good answer to the charge; and the arguments and especially the rhetoric of same-sex marriage proponents clearly apply with equal force to polygamy and polyamory. How does it affect your marriage if two women decide to wed? goes the question from same-sex marriage advocates; you don’t have to enter a same-sex union yourself. They might just as accurately be told that they would still be free to have two-person marriages if other people wed in groups.

We cannot say with any confidence that legal recognition of same-sex marriage would cause infidelity or illegitimacy to increase; we can say that it would make the countervailing norms, and the public policy of marriage itself, incoherent. The symbolic message of inclusion for same-sex couples — in an institution that makes no sense for them — would be coupled with another message: that marriage is about the desires of adults rather than the interests of children.

It may be that the conventional wisdom is correct, and legal recognition of same-sex marriage really is our inevitable future. Perhaps it will even become an unquestioned policy and all who resisted it will be universally seen as bigots. We doubt it, but cannot exclude the possibility. If our understanding of marriage changes in this way, so much the worse for the future.

Bible Burnings Could Provoke Reprisals

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Monday criticized a Florida church's plan to burn copies of the Bible on September 11, warning the demonstration "could cause significant problems" for American troops overseas.

"It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort in Afghanistan," Gen. David Petraeus said in a statement issued Monday.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/06/florida.quran.burning/

OK, some of the details are wrong, but Bible *is* Latin for "book", and last time I looked, the Quran was a book.

Seriously -- you can immerse a crucifix in urine, and no one worries about "significant problems" from much of anyone.  You say you're going to burn a Quran, and members of the "Religion Of Peace" will kill our soldiers.

Give me a break.

History like you never learned it

Steven Horowitz at The Freeman on The Importance of History:

I’m doing this in two different classes this semester. The more historical of the two is a senior seminar on the Great Depression, which I’m teaching for the second time. (The syllabus is here). We started the class last week by walking through what I like to call the “High School History” version of the Great Depression. This is the version in which laissez-faire capitalism caused the stock market crash and Herbert Hoover stood around doing nothing (committed lover of laissez-faire that he was), allowing the crash to become a depression. Of course this version also tells us that FDR and the New Deal saved us from utter chaos and that our entry into World War II finally pulled us out of the Depression.

The students nod quietly as I repeat this narrative, only to look a little shocked when I then say, “Every piece of that story is wrong and we’re going to explore why over the course of the semester.”

The other course is comparative economics. We started by talking about how the West grew rich (and reading Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell’s wonderful book by that name). In the opening chapter, Rosenberg and Birdzell offer nine different commonly believed reasons the West grew rich, including three that are staples of the contemporary college curriculum: exploitation, colonialism/imperialism, and slavery.

My students who have studied First-Third World relationships in other courses nod their heads quietly until I start to explore the counterevidence Rosenberg and Birdzell offer. It’s hard to argue exploitation, they point out, when the real wages of labor have steadily risen over the last 200 years and capitalists have more or less willingly paid them. As for the other two, they offer examples of western countries that were colonial powers but did not get rich and other countries that had no colonies but did get rich. As for slavery, they make the same point: Some slave societies did not get rich, and some rich countries did not have slaves. The bottom line of their first chapter is that none of these “standard” explanations seem reliable. They argue instead that it was the unique institutions of the West (private property, limited government, freedom of thought and exchange) that generated our prosperity.

This unmasking of history is not just powerful in the college classroom; it should be one of the key ways we classical liberals make our arguments and try to persuade anyone of our views. Arguing theory is fine, but many who disagree with us often trot out historical examples they believe undermine the theory. Those examples are usually wrong, but to show it, classical liberals must have a good command of history and be prepared to offer a different narrative of the event in question. I submit that at the bottom of most disagreements with classical liberalism lies a bad reading of history.

“Gam ha’oyev oved beshabbat”

A nice piece from the Jerusalem Post: The Ground Zero mosque - what US could learn from Israel

Life in our region has taught us that the first necessary step to defending yourself is acknowledging that someone is out to destroy you.
....
I still recall being jarred, when we made aliya, by the matter-of-factness with which Israelis use the word “enemy.” But it wasn’t a judgment or an accusation. It was simply a fact: There are people out to destroy our state, who seek to kill us and our children. And as the intifada later amply demonstrated, they did not yearn for our understanding or our friendship. They wanted our demise.

YEARS AGO, we took our then teenage daughter to an evening sponsored by the army, at which religious parents could ask questions about what the army would be like for their daughters. Some of the parents were downright hostile, clearly opposed to the prospect of their daughters joining the IDF. At one point, an obviously angry father stood up, turned to the base commander and asked (or more accurately hissed), “Do you make the girls work on Shabbat?”

The room was perfectly silent, for everyone knew the answer. No one moved. Even the base rabbi said nothing. He stood at the podium, leaned into the mike and, lost in thought, played with his beard.

Suddenly, one of the three soldiers who’d been brought to address the parents, a young woman with her uniform shirt buttoned up to her chin, her sleeves extending to her wrists and her armyissued skirt down to her ankles, looked the father right in the eye, and without being called on, said to him, “Of course we work on Shabbat.” And then, after a second’s pause, she added, “Gam ha’oyev oved beshabbat” – the enemy also works on Shabbat.

It was a game changer. “What?” she essentially asked. “You think we do this for fun? There are people out there trying to destroy us. Either we’re as serious about this conflict as they are, or they’re going to win.”

I hadn’t thought of that young woman in years, but ever since the Cordoba Initiative controversy erupted, I’ve remembered her repeatedly. For Israelis do have something to teach Americans, and it’s very similar to what she said to that father. It goes something like this: It’s fine to say that “America is not at war with Islam,” to point out that most Muslims are not terrorists and that many American Muslims are moderates. That’s true, as far as it goes.

But it only goes so far. Because America is at war and its enemies are Muslims.

Gender has never mattered in marriage...

The Anchoress comments on the recent decision overturning Proposition 8. Gender No Longer Essential to Marriage

My first thought: the churches–any of them who wish to remain able to practice their faith in relative freedom–will have to seriously consider getting out of the business of acting as “duly recognized” agents of the state in legalizing marriages. The alternative will be inevitable lawsuits charging “discrimination” for disallowing church weddings, a diminution of our constitutional right to free worship, and a further emptying of church coffers as settlements and fines are levied.

Time for separation of marriage and State, it would seem.

Bias in the Media

Another Karl at Patterico's Pontifications looks at "manufacturing dissent".

Why was the establishment media so slow to recognize the turnaround in the Iraq war? Why did they largely rush to judgment when the Duke lacrosse team members were accused of rape? Why did they get the Jena 6 case wrong? Why was the establishment media narrative about Hurricane Katrina built on myths, including grisly fables about violence and death in the Superdome? And why is the establishment media celebrating it?

These examples are but the tip of the establishment media's "faux news" iceberg. Folks on the far left probably have an entirely different list, but that is the point — the establishment media's center-left epistemic closure produces the same problems critics identify in the conservative media. That the critics are only concerned about closure in conservative media — and dismiss the theory that conservative media closure is partially caused by the establishment's marginalization of conservatives — suggests they are less interested in solutions than they are in further marginalizing the right.

As with the epistemic closure obsessives, don't hold your breath waiting for the center-left to consider that that their shrill stereotyping only adds to the problem. And as with the epistemic closure obsessives, the offense they give to everyone else is fueled in part by the double or triple standards at work. If you think the Ground Zero mosque is a bad idea (as I do), you are deemed a religious bigot, or are empowering religious bigots. In contrast, if you think Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptists protesting at military funerals (or Bill Keller setting up shop near Ground Zero) is a bad idea (as I do, for many of the same reasons), the center-left does not unleash the same gushing firehose of vitriol. When the passage of California's Proposition 8 caused people to engage in anti-Mormon protests and boycotts, and to practice the politics of personal destruction against Miss California, the center-left was not denouncing it as religious bigotry. And to bring it full circle, if the folks behind the Ground Zero mosque are not entirely gay-friendly, the center-left media ignores it.

Polyamory case in Canada

Same-sex marriage is legal in Canada.  Now polygamous/polyamorous marriage is on the docket. 

But "slippery slope" arguments are bunk, right?

 

Canada has its own pending marriage case, which is likely headed for the Canadian Supreme Court. Canada, which redefined marriage nationwide to include same-sex couples in 2005, against the backdrop of successful provincial lawsuits against the country's marriage law, could be moving on to bigger things -- literally. Specifically, polygamy and polyamory, as this case invokes the question of whether the government can continue to criminalize multiple-partner marriages.

....

It may also be true that there is a dearth of published studies of harm caused by polyamory. This would not be surprising given the novelty of the practice and its small set of practitioners. There seems to be no shortage of breathless stories in newspapers and magazines about these kinds of arrangements but these do not equate to research. Any study of polyamorous "families" is likely to be plagued by methodological difficulties -- large holes in data, voluntary samples, reliance on self-reporting, small sample sizes, poor comparisons, and misplaced focus.

Even if the courts accept the egalitarianism, consent, and no data arguments as true, the proposed distinction between multiple-wife polygamy and polyamory in terms of social harms is spurious. In fact, it may be the case that acceptance of polyamory would, if possible, be more harmful.

For instance, the social science data we do have on children who experience a succession of relationships with parents' cohabiting partners (a kind of de facto serial polyamory, or as the sociologists call it, "multiple partner fertility") is not encouraging (here and here). They are at higher risk for abuse, behavioral problems, and household instability. The presence of two sets of unrelated children mentioned in some of the affidavits also does not sound promising for the well-being of younger children. We should not be sanguine, therefore, that children raised in polyamorous homes will be just fine.

If we take seriously the idea that marriage laws have an educative function, polyamory raises red flags. On each of the core functions of marriage -- promoting fidelity, providing a tie between children and parents, securing permanence for spouses and their children -- polyamory seems particularly harmful. Both traditional polygamy and polyamory promote types of infidelity (though the former is of a more orderly variety), of course, but the chaos of polyamory blurs distinctions of parenthood more significantly than does a setting where a child has an established set of parents and lots of half-siblings. The ethic of "choice" at the root of polyamory does not bode well for permanence either.

As complicated as the day to day existence must be for children in homes with multiple adults acting as "parents," the breakup of polyamorous relationships would be dramatically more complicated for children. There would be an exponential increase in the possible divisions of a child's time, of decision-making authority and demands for the child's loyalty, when the dispute involves three or more people than when only two disputants are involved.

Clearly, when it comes to marriage, the adage "the more the merrier" does not apply.

 

Figures for references

In the news (American Spectator):

 

...a new study from the Heritage Foundation also shows that wind power could be more dangerous to worker safety than traditional energy sources.

 

It seems the fatality rate among wind power workers averages 0.0220 deaths per terawatt-hour (TWH). 

This does not compare favorably with the statistic for coal power of 0.0164 deaths per TWH.

 

800 X (.0220 - .0164) = 4.48 additional deaths per year.

Now granted, these are "statistical lives", and past performance is no guarantee of future trends, but it's worth considering.

 

...............Karl

Government-Run Health Care

Again, linked from Jon Ray's blog.

 

Doctors do not prevent homicides or car crashes. In the things that doctors can affect, such as the survival rates of cancer patients, the United States leads the world.

Americans get the latest pharmaceutical drugs, sometimes years before those drugs are available to people in Britain or in other countries where the government runs the medical system. Why? Because the latest drugs cost more and it is cheaper to let people die.

The media have often said that we have higher infant mortality rates than other countries with government medical care systems. But we count every baby that dies and other countries do not. If the media don't tell you that, so much the better for ObamaCare. But is life and death something to play spin games about?

SOURCE

Note: EVERY DAY there are stories on my EYE ON BRITAIN blog about the horrors of the British socialized medicine system. And there are also pretty frequent stories on my AUSTRALIAN POLITICS blog about the horrors of its Australian equivalent.

White Man's Burden

Jon Ray has some thoughts on Kipling's poem.

That's amazingly good prophecy by my lights. Very wicked of him to mention skin color judged by today's hysterical political standards but Britain and America WERE largely white countries at the time, and still are.

About "GWB's War in Iraq"

From the New Republic:

 

Some nice historical perspective, from someone who does not approve of the war at all.

For those Americans still persuaded that everything changed the moment Obama entered the Oval Office, let's provide a little context. The event that historians will enshrine as the Iraq war actually began back in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Iraq's unloved and unlovable neighbor. Through much of the previous decade, the United States had viewed Saddam as an ally of sorts, a secular bulwark against the looming threat of Islamic radicalism then seemingly centered in Tehran. Saddam's war of aggression against Iran, launched in 1980, did not much discomfit Washington, which offered the Iraqi dictator a helping hand when his legions faced apparent defeat. 

Yet when Saddam subsequently turned on Kuwait, he overstepped. President George H.W. Bush drew a line in the sand, likened the Iraqi dictator to Hitler, and dispatched 500,000 American troops to the Persian Gulf. The plan was to give Saddam a good spanking, make sure all concerned knew who was boss, and go home. 

Operation Desert Storm didn't turn out that way. An ostensibly great victory gave way to even greater complications. Although, in evicting the Iraqi army from Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces did what they had been sent to do, Washington became seized with the notion merely turning back aggression wasn't enough: In Baghdad, Bush's nemesis survived and remained defiant. So what began as a war to liberate Kuwait morphed into an obsession with deposing Saddam himself. In the form of air strikes and missile attacks, feints and demonstrations, CIA plots and crushing sanctions, America's war against Iraq persisted throughout the 1990s, finally reaching a climax with George W. Bush's decision after September 11, 2001, to put Saddam ahead of Osama bin Laden in the line of evildoers requiring elimination. 

The U.S.-led assault on Baghdad in 2003 finally finished the work left undone in 1991—so it appeared at least. Here was decisive victory, sealed by the capture of Saddam Hussein himself in December 2003. "Ladies and gentlemen," announced L. Paul Bremer, the beaming American viceroy to Baghdad, "we got him." 

....

Which brings us to the present. After seven-plus years, Operation Iraqi Freedom has concluded. Operation New Dawn, its name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid, now begins. (What ever happened to the practice of using terms like Torch or Overlord or Dragoon to describe military campaigns?) Although something like 50,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, their mission is not to fight, but simply to advise and assist their Iraqi counterparts. In another year, if all goes well, even this last remnant of an American military presence will disappear. 

So the Americans are bowing out, having achieved few of the ambitious goals articulated in the heady aftermath of Baghdad's fall. The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation, and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget. 

Back in Iraq, meanwhile, nothing has been resolved and nothing settled. Round one of the Iraq war produced a great upheaval that round two served only to exacerbate. As the convoys of U.S. armored vehicles trundle south toward Kuwait and then home, they leave the stage set for round three. 

Call this the War of Iraqi Self-Determination (2010–?). As the United States removes itself from the scene, Iraqis will avail themselves of the opportunity to decide their own fate, a process almost certain to be rife with ethnic, sectarian, and tribal bloodletting. What the outcome will be, no one can say with certainty, but it won't be pretty.

 

More Democrat Recession Figures

Democrat Congress responsible for recession

Jumping in the Pool:

A large National Debt data is also something that Democrats like to blame President Bush for. However, examining our debt as a percent of our GDP shows the truth again. This number sounds complicated, but in fact it is pretty simple. "Our debt as a percent of our GDP" simply means that if our GDP is $100 and our debt is $60, then our "debt as a percent of our GDP" is 60%. From 2001-2007 (when Republicans left office), the percent of our debt grew from 57.4% to 65.6%, or 8.8% (around 1.2% a year). Though the number did rise, you must take into account 9/11, the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Further, from 2005-2007, it slowed to an average of .5% per year, which means it may have began to go down in the near future.

Then Democrats took office. In their first full year in office, the debt as a percent of GDP rose 4.6%, from 65.6% to 70.2%. The next year was even more astounding, as the percent rose 15.9%, to 86.1%. So far this year, the percent is up another 5% to 91.1%....

There is much more including some helpful charts.

Omar Khadr Was Not Tortured

Omar Khadr Was Not Tortured | The Weekly Standard

In a motion to suppress Khadr’s confessions, Khadr’s lawyers claimed Khadr was: “forced into various ‘stress positions’ and left there for many hours on end”; “suffocated until he passed out, revived, and then suffocated again”; “terrorized by barking dogs while his head was covered by a plastic bag tied tightly around his neck, making it hard for him to breathe”; “doused with freezing water and left cold and shivering”; forced to “urinate on himself” during lengthy interrogations; temporarily blinded by a technique called “light pushing”; “beaten by interrogators who shackled his hands and feet together”; “abused until he could not stand”; and “used by military police as a human mop to wipe his own urine and pine oil off the floor of an interrogations chamber.”

This is awful.

There is just one problem: It never happened.

The cause of the deficit

Randall Hoven at American Thinker writes: Iraq: The War That Broke Us -- Not

Hoven looks at the costs of the Iraq War and the tax cuts. Were they what drove the deficit up so high? How much did that war cost?

The correct answer to my question, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is $709 billion. The Iraq War cost $709 billion. Why Carville, Bilmes, and Nobel-winning economist Stiglitz thought the answer was $3 trillion is anybody's guess. But what's a 323% error among friends?

The CBO breaks that cost down over the eight calendar years of 2003-2010. Below is a picture of federal deficits over those years with and without Iraq War spending.



Sources: CBO and U.S. Statistical Abstract (see below).

Just for grins, use the above chart to dissect Christopher Hayes' statement that our current and future deficits are caused by "three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession."

Two of those three things -- the wars and tax cuts -- were in effect from 2003 through 2007. Do you see alarming deficits or trends from 2003 through 2007 in the above chart? No. In fact, the trend through 2007 is shrinking deficits. What you see is a significant upward tick in 2008, and then an explosion in 2009. Now, what might have happened between 2007 and 2008, and then 2009?

Democrats taking over both houses of Congress, and then the presidency, was what happened.

Glenn Beck Event

An eyewitness account of the "Restoring Honor" event at the Lincoln Memorial from Paul at PowerLine.

Bookworm on Beck event coverage

Bookworm looks at the morning after media coverage of the Glenn Beck Event at the Lincoln Memorial.

Marriage Backgrounder

A backgrounder on marriage may be found at MercatorNet. Topics include:

• Why Western culture has privileged marriage
• Why homosexual relationships disadvantage children
• Is contemporary marriage “shot to hell” anyway?
• Who should decide: judges or voters?
• Is denying homosexuals the right to marry discriminatory?
• An uncertain future for marriage

About those "occupied territories"

From The American Thinker, Ted Belman writes about which laws Israel is breaking in occupying the West Bank. Or more precisely, not breaking.

Israel is accused of occupying the West Bank and Gaza. In fact, these territories are described as "the occupied Palestinian territories." Not only are they not occupied in a legal sense, but also, they are not "Palestinian" lands in a sovereign sense.

The Forth Geneva Convention (FGC) is a treaty among signatory states that are called High Contracting Parties (HCP). It regulates the obligations of one HCP, who occupies the land of another HCP. It defines the terms "Occupying Power" and "Occupied State." Thus, this convention does not apply to the territories because they were not the land of any HCP. They have never been the land of an HCP. Prior to 1967, Jordan was in occupation of these territories, just as Israel is currently in occupation. Jordanian sovereignty over these lands was never recognized, and ultimately, Jordan relinquished any claims over them. The FGC was never applied when Jordan occupied the land, and it shouldn't be applied now that Israel does.
....
According to David Matas, an international lawyer of considerable repute.... Matas notes that "the Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War do not recognize the legal possibility of the occupation of a people, only the occupation of the territory of a state." A Protocol to these conventions does recognize such a possibility, but Israel is not a signatory to it and is thus not bound by it.

It must be clearly understood that Israel's occupation is not illegal, and the U.N. has never claimed it to be. In fact, Resolution 242 permits Israel to remain in occupation until they have an agreement on "secure and recognized borders."

The Palestinians have no greater claim to a state than any minority group in any other state that wants a state of its own. The Basques and the Kurds come to mind. No one is demanding that they be given statehood.
....
Settlements

The anti-Zionists argue the settlements are illegal and rely solely on the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which provides that the occupying power is prohibited from transferring civilian populations to occupied territories. They say that the prohibition against transfer includes a prohibition against encouragement to settle. The matter has never been put to a court for interpretation or determination. But the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) advises "that this provision was intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War in which certain powers transferred portions of their populations to occupied territories for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed to colonize those territories."
....
The anti-Zionists reject the notion that the proscription is against only forced transfers and argue that the FGC proscribes inducement to move as well. But how can there be a crime of inducement when the person committing the act, the settler, has done nothing wrong? How can you be guilty of a crime by inducing someone to do something which is not a crime? Furthermore, this inducement would be a war crime on an equal footing with genocide. The equation is ludicrous. And if the settlers settle of their own volition and not due to inducements, what then? Also, it is impossible to prosecute an occupying power. So what individuals would be held responsible?
....
Matas opines, "The interpretation defies the ordinary understanding of criminal responsibility where the person committing the act is the primary wrongdoer and the person inducing the act is only an accessory."

Matas concludes, "There is all the difference in the world between forcible transfer, the offence of the Geneva Convention, and voluntary settlement, even where the settlement is encouraged" (by are merely providing inducements). [...] "Transfer is something that is done to people. Settlement is something people do."

The "Screw the Court" Constitutional Amendment

Dafydd at Big Lizards offers:

The "Screw the Court" Constitutional Amendment

I would love to see the following offered on January 3rd, 2011, in the 112th Congress of the United States, as an amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Section 1. State definition of 'marriage':

The power to declare the legal definition of marriage within any State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe is reserved to such State, territory, possession, or tribe.

Section 2. Federal definition of 'marriage' and 'spouse':

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.

Section 3. Powers reserved to the states:

No State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex, or more than two persons, that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship.

Love and Marriage

A piece by philosophy professor (associate) Stephen J. Heaney at Mercator.net:

Religions may bless marriage, but they did not invent it. Because it involves such profoundly important human realities, it is no surprise that sex and marriage have religious significance. But sex and marriage have existed as long as there have been human communities.

If we accept the misdefinition of marriage using non-essential characteristics as the complete story, it would be impossible to reject same-sex marriage. Given the whole truth, however, it is impossible to accept it. No matter how superficially similar they are to real marriages, same-sex relationships cannot function as marriages.

Solutions for America by Heritage

The Heritage Foundation has a publication, Solutions for America.

Historical basis of marriage

B. Daniel Blatt at Gay Patriot finds something in his dissertation research that has some bearing on the news:

I read this in Carl Kerényi’s The Heroes of the Greeks:

We are told that [Kekrops] discovered, as it were, the double descent of human beings, that they come not only from a mother but also from a father. He founded the institution of marriage between one man and one woman, which was to be under the protection of the goddess Athene.

Legend held Kekrops to be the first king of Attica (Athens).

Further evidence that marriage is an institution based on sex difference. This is not to say that it always must remain so, but a reminder that sex difference, to borrow an expression, is at the “historical core” of the ancient (and honorable) institution.

If we seek to expand its definition so that it encompasses same-sex relationships, let’s not tinker with the cultural record by pretending that it has always been a mere union of loving individuals. State recognition of same-sex marriage represents a real social change. And that change should not be treated lightly nor dismissed casually as some judges have been wont to do.

I find it interesting that Marriage is under Athene, not Aphrodite or Hera.

Why the opposition to Islam?

Jay Tea at Wizbang looks at the reasons for opposition to Islam on the part of many Americans.

There is something visceral, something deeply passionate, about the opponents' sentiments that surprises a lot of people. In others, it is entirely understandable. But in either case, it's hard to put into words.
....
Here's my theory, that most people find hard to verbalize.

America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and tenets. ("Ju-DAY-o! Ju-DAY-AY-AY-o! Judeo-Christian, what de hell is dat?") Sorry, folks... What that means is that when we think of "religion," we tend to think of it in terms of Christianity or Judaism, and see it through that prism.

Christianity is pretty much separated from politics, at least in the way most of the world thinks. We don't have a "Christian" party or official state church, and only the mercifully-few tiny fringe wants to have the government enforce Christian tenets and rules. We have taken to heart the "separation of church and state" to heart in an intrinsic sense when it comes to Christianity. There are Christians in government -- hell, they dominate -- but they are hardly unified and stand solidly on both sides of most issues.

To most Americans, there is a firm wall between faith and politics. The two influence the other, but it is almost strictly an internal struggle. Those who talk about the religious right as an "American Taliban" only go to show just how utterly full of shit they are.

Judaism is a bit closer to extending their faith beyond the purely theological. "Jewish" has multiple meanings. It's a faith, it's a culture, it's a race, it's a floor wax, it's a dessert topping. (OK, maybe not the last two.) There are Jewish atheists and Jewish Christians. (That last group -- "Jews for Jesus" -- tends to piss off Jewish Jews. I know of two in particular.) Israel is a Jewish nation, but accepts all three definitions of "Jew."

And then there's Islam. It's a faith, like Judaism and Christianity, but it's a lot more besides. In its truest form, it's a "one-stop shopping" that covers religion, social structure, economics, politics, foreign relations, law -- everything that we all take for granted as being apart from "religion."

It's those other, "non-religious" aspects that are part and parcel of "Islam" that cause the objections. That generate such fierce pushback, such staunch resistance.

That is what we speak of when we talk about the "fundamental incompatibility" between Islam and the West. The religious aspects of Islam -- no problem. We got plenty of weirdos already who believe plenty of crazy things. We got Mormons, we got Scientologists, we got Pastafarians, we got god-hating Atheists, we got tree-worshipping Gaeans, we got Wiccans. We can handle Muslims.

It's all the other baggage that comes with Islam that causes the problems. All the other baggage that tries to worm its way in under the "religion" exception.

To us, that's a form of "bait and switch." We're saying, "hey, practice your religion, but all that other crap you're trying to foist off on us -- that's not religion. We already have our own politics, legal system, social structure, economics, and whatnot."
....
So, back to James' question. What do I think about this trend for locals to resist the establishment of mosques in their neighborhoods?

Two things. First, in most cases, these are local issues, and will most likely be settled locally.

Second, for nigh on a decade we've heard the incessant whining about the "anti-Muslim backlash" that is just around the corner, as hate-filled, intolerant Americans rise up and do unspeakable things against individual Muslims as revenge for the actions of others who proclaim to share the same faith. If "we're going to make trouble for you in zoning hearings" is the worst, then my faith in the fundamental fairness and decency of the American people is, indeed, well founded.

How Good is Judge Walker's Evidence?

From MercatorNet,

And there's a lot of activity in the comments.

Memory Holes Need to be Deeper

Big Peace features a piece by Sun Tzu on the hidden pages (now either hidden better, or removed entirely) about the "Sharia Index Project". Because of the labile nature of web pages, Big Peace has PDF files of the pages. Now, anyone can put together a spoof page and save a PDF of it. I have free software on my laptop that'll let me do that very thing.

Nevertheless, the post, Something to Hide? Cordoba’s Hidden Website Disappears After Big Peace Exposé

George Will on Israel

George Will writes in the Washington Post: Skip the lecture on Israel's 'risks for peace'

In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America's eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take "risks for peace."
....
The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.

Obama ‘With His Poll Numbers Dropping’

One item taken as a sign of media bias is the apparent double standard according to which side gets tagged with which labels. One discrepancy is the use of labels like "conservative" and "liberal". The Heritage Foundation is labeled "conservative" for user reference, but the Brookings Institution passes without a label.

Ron Futrell looks at when the media felt the need to tag a president with "his poll numbers dropping" and when it didn't. Media Furiously Spinning for Obama ‘With His Poll Numbers Dropping’ - Big Journalism.

Certainly, there has not been equal treatment by the media when comparing the poll numbers of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Obama’s numbers are plunging faster than the economy itself, faster than W’s and faster than anybody could’ve ever imagined at this point. The activist old media is building up Obama, while his public numbers are takin’ a terrific tumble. It’s blatant. We all see it, we all know it.

It’s also subtle.

The line in the title of this column was used often in stories about George W. Bush. “With his poll numbers dropping….” You could add just about anything you want after that, and usually the media did:

• “With his poll numbers dropping President Bush addressed the media today.”
• “With his poll numbers dropping President Bush welcomed the Prime Minister of Great Britain today.”
• “With his poll numbers dropping President Bush participated in the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House today.”

I remember that line well because I removed it many times from scripts when it was not relevant. I left it in when it was. Just because the AP put something in a script didn’t mean that I had to read it.

I’m still waiting to hear that line used relative to the Cold Hearted Social Engineer in the White House.

About the Ground Zero Mosque

Big Journalism fact-checks the AP's fact-checking.

AP’s Deputy Managing Editor for Standards and Production, Tom Kent, sent this “guidance” out to his colleagues, with inputs from Chad Roedemeier in the New York bureau and Terry Hunt in Washington: “We should continue to avoid the phrase ‘Ground Zero mosque’ or ‘mosque at Ground Zero’ on all platforms. (We’ve very rarely used this wording, except in slugs, though we sometimes see other news sources using the term.) The site of the proposed Islamic center and mosque is not at Ground Zero, but two blocks away in a busy commercial area. We should continue to say it’s “near” Ground Zero, or two blocks away.”

Interestingly, among those who formerly used the now-proscribed descriptor “Ground Zero mosque” is none other than Feisal Abdul Rauf, its imam and chief promoter. He called it that even though the proposed venue has always been two blocks away from the World Trade Center site.

It behooves us, therefore, to do a fact check on AP’s “fact check”:

AP: “A New York imam and his proposed mosque near ground zero are being demonized by political candidates — mostly Republicans — despite the fact that Islam is already very much a part of the World Trade Center neighborhood. And that Muslims pray inside the Pentagon, too, less than 80 feet from where terrorists attacked.”

THE FACTS: “Demonized” is a loaded term that denigrates the criticism Republicans and a growing number of Democrats – including Sen. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader – have properly made of the site of the Ground Zero Mosque and, in some cases, of its Imam. The issue is not whether Muslims pray in proximity to Ground Zero – or the Pentagon’s equally hallowed ground. Rather, it is whether they and the facility in which they pray are dedicated to the promotion of the seditious, anti-constitutional program of Shariah. If so, it is a problem. If not, not.

Meese on Prop. 8 ruling

Short version: He doesn't like it.

Edwin Meese III - Prop. 8 ruling ignores precedent, evidence and common sense

By refusing to acknowledge binding Supreme Court precedent, substantial evidence produced at trial that was contrary to the holding and plain common sense, the ruling exhibits none of the requirements of a traditional decision. This opinion is arbitrary and capricious, and its alarming legal methodology and overtly policy-driven tenor are too extreme to stand.

Regardless of whether one agrees with the result, structurally sound opinions always confront binding legal precedent. Walker's is a clear exception because the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken on whether a state's refusal to authorize same-sex marriage violates the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment. In 1972, Baker v. Nelson, a case over whether Minnesota violated the Constitution by issuing marriage licenses only to opposite-sex couples, was unanimously thrown out on the merits, for lack of a substantial federal question. The Supreme Court's action establishes a binding precedent in favor of Proposition 8. But Judge Walker's ruling doesn't mention Baker, much less attempt to distinguish it or accept its findings.

During a trial, litigants from both sides introduce various types of evidence, including witness testimony, documentary evidence and legal opinions that involve "judicial notice" of certain well-known or legally controlling facts. Sound judicial opinions consider the facts and evidence on both sides of an argument, apply them fairly to the dispute at hand and determine which legal cases are on point.

Yet Walker's opinion pretends that the voluminous evidence introduced on the side of Proposition 8 does not exist. It neither acknowledges nor attempts to distinguish the writings of renowned scholars presented at trial in support of Proposition 8, including that of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, history professor Robina Quale and social scientist Kingsley Davis. It ignores the writings of legal giant William Blackstone and philosophers John Locke and Bertrand Russell. It even refused to address the fact that Congress, in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, defined marriage as the "legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife."

Despite ample evidence introduced into the record that only a union of a man and woman can produce offspring (as if that needs proof), Walker's opinion denied the relevance of that biological fact. That difference has been the main reason civilization recognized the uniqueness of marriage as between a man and woman, and why courts have repeatedly relied on that common-sense truth.

Despite voluminous evidence and common sense pointing to the contrary, the judge also declared that opposite sexes were never part of the "historical core of the institution of marriage"; "evidence shows conclusively that moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different than opposite-sex couples"; traditional marriage is an "artifact"; and, also without reference to the monumental evidence to the contrary, that it is beyond "any doubt that parents' genders are irrelevant to children's developmental outcomes."

These assertions appear in the opinion's "findings of fact" section, yet they are not facts. These "findings" derive from arbitrary and capricious non-analysis and are forcefully contradicted by evidence in the court record. No appellate court should allow the ruling to stand.

Having ignored everything courts typically rely on in making sound judgments, Walker concluded that Proposition 8 was enacted "without reason" and demonstrates "a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples [and are] . . . not as good as opposite-sex couples." Nothing in Proposition 8 supports such conclusions, particularly since California law grants same-sex couples all the benefits and protections that apply in traditional marriage.

People can differ on whether, as a matter of policy, states should allow same-sex marriage. The robust debate on that topic should not be short-circuited by judicial fiat.

Yet, according to the federal district court, Americans such as President Obama, Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the majority of members of Congress and the 7 million Californians who voted for Proposition 8 are all bigots who have "no rational reason" to oppose gay marriage.

Even the usually liberal U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has reservations about immediately implementing Walker's exercise in judicial social engineering. A three-judge panel of the court issued a stay late Monday to prevent California's law from being cast aside before a panel can fully review the matter. It was right to do so. The rule of law demands more careful consideration of this important issue than Walker's decision delivered.

Judge Walker and CDD

Gay Patriot deems Judge Walker clueless about the history of marriage.

While Judge Walker is right about one thing in his discussion of marriage, but dead-wrong about another:

Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage. . . . Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals.

“Miscegenation” laws prohibiting marriages between individuals of different races were a statutory invention. The historical (as well as literary, see, e.g., Othello) record is full of such marriages.

Sex difference, however, has always been at the core of the definition of marriage – long before governments recognized such unions. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you study the marriage rituals of any culture; you’ll find that each treats the bride and groom differently.

Or, look at the cultures which have recognized same-sex unions. They either called them something other than marriage or required that one spouse live in the guise of the opposite sex — at a time when sexual roles were far more stratified that they are today. In Native American cultures (called either berdache or Two-Spirit), that meant that in male-male unions partner not only had to dress like a woman, but perform or social roles as well.

The Native American culture is frequently cited as an example of a culture recognizing same-sex marriage. What this is evidence of is a culture that based sex differentiation on something other than genitalia.

Questions about Same-Sex Marriage

Dafydd at Big Lizards offers some responses to questions asked by supporters of SSM: Big Lizards: “The Distinction Goes Sub Silentio”

The Question is, of course, "If you applaud the courts overturning anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia, how can you decry the courts overturning anti-gay-marriage laws in Perry v. Schwarzenegger? Doesn't everyone has the right to marry the person he or she loves?"

(Answer: No, no more than everyone has the right to be the most popular person on campus.)
....
Paul [Mirengoff at PowerLine blog] answers the question as would a lawyer, oddly enough:

Loving v. Virginia did not implicate the definition of marriage. The largely regional ban on inter-racial marriages was not founded on the belief that such unions cannot be marriages under the nearly universal understanding of what a marriage is (i.e., between a man and a woman). Rather, the ban was based on the notion that, although it is possible for blacks to be married to whites under that understanding -- just as it is possible for blacks to sit on the front of a bus -- such marriages represented an undesirable mixing of the races.

The decision in Loving no more changed the definition of marriage than allowing James Meredith (a black) to attend the University of Mississippi changed the definition of "student," or requiring the lunch counter at Woolworth's to serve blacks changed the definition of "customer." But recognizing a marriage between two men (say) changes the definition of "wife" (say). [And changing the definition changes the concept itself. --DaH]....

...nobody in his right mind can argue that there is no intrinsic or essential distinction between men and women. Any parent knows that boys are worlds apart from girls; any human being knows (excepting only hermits who have never met anyone of the opposite sex) that women and men think differently, react differently, argue differently, take revenge in different ways, hate differently, and yes, love differently.

Marriage has always been, by definition, the union of opposites -- man plus woman (or some number of women); the synthesis is more than the sum of its parts. Thus, same-sex marriage is logically inconceivable... like a monochrome checkerboard, a coin with only one side, or a debate between proponent and proponent: By its very nature, marriage requires at least one member of each sex, or else it isn't a marriage... it's just a partnership or merger.

Get it?

I see nothing wrong with sexual, emotional, and financial partnerships of all sorts; enjoy! But such unions that involve only one sex are not marriages -- and redefining the word "marriage" won't change that fact.

If you call a cow's tail a leg, how many legs does she have? Four, of course, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.

In another post, Dafydd writes:

I do not support a putative "right" to legally marry anybody one "loves", without exception or qualification. Marriage comes with a host of restrictions that bind everyone:

1. You cannot marry a person without his or her consent.
2. You cannot marry your sibling, your parent, or your close cousin.
3. You cannot marry a child.
4. You cannot marry multiple people at once (group marriage).
5. You cannot marry someone who currently is already married (bigamy).
6. And... you cannot marry a person of the same gender as you.

That last restriction applies equally to heterosexuals; consider two old biddies, best girlfriends, both widowed, and both completely straight, but who want to marry for the financial benefits. Sorry, ladies, you cannot. We forbid you to abuse the legal status of being married.
....
...marriage is not a private affair; it's a public, communal celebration and societal endorsement of a relationship; it says, "This is a special relationship that we, in this state, believe is better than other types of relationships. Thus, to encourage this type of relationship, we will reward it above and beyond other relationships." Given that description, state citizens have the right to decide what particular types of relationships we will so celebrate and endorse.

We can decide how close a relationship must be in order to put that person off limits. We can decide how old a person must be to get married. If we so choose, we can decide to allow polyamorous marriage. And if we so choose, we can decide to allow SSM; but by the same token, if we choose -- which we have done -- we can likewise decide to disallow it. And until and unless we have the same legal infrastructure anent marital rights for gays as we had the 1940s-1960s anent civil rights for blacks, no damned court has the power to overturn the people's law and make its own law.

If it did have that power, then America would no longer be a constitutional republic... we would instead be a kritarchy, ruled by unelected, robèd lords with lifetime tenure.

Obama the Homophobe

From the San Francisco Chronicle: Prop. 8 judge makes strange charge

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that President Obama is a bigot. And not just the president. Joe Biden as well, and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sandra Day O'Connor. And maybe you, too.
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This was a strange ruling. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1971 that an identical challenge to the traditional definition of marriage was meritless. Nor has the Supreme Court ever suggested that its 1971 decision was wrong. Wednesday's ruling relied primarily on a constitutional doctrine that forbids laws having no conceivable rational purpose or no purpose except to oppress a politically unpopular minority group. After a lengthy trial, the judge found that the people of California must have adopted the traditional definition of marriage because of moral or religious contempt for homosexuals and their relationships.
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Until very recently, same-sex marriage was unknown in human history, and it is opposed today by many progressive leaders, like Obama and Clinton. Can this be explained only by irrational prejudice or religious zeal? No. Only unions between men and women are capable of producing offspring, and every civilization has recognized that responsible procreation is critical to its survival. After the desire for self-preservation, sexual passion is probably the most powerful drive in human nature. Heterosexual intercourse naturally produces children, sometimes unintentionally and only after nine months.

Without marriage, men often would be uncertain about paternity or indifferent to it. If left unchecked, many men would have little incentive to invest in the rearing of their offspring, and the ensuing irresponsibility would have made the development of civilization impossible.

The fundamental purpose of marriage is to encourage biological parents, especially fathers, to take responsibility for their children. Because this institution responds to a phenomenon uniquely created by heterosexual intercourse, the meaning of marriage has always been inseparable from the problem it addresses.

Homosexual relationships (and lots of others as well), have nothing to do with the purpose of marriage, which is why marriage does not extend to them. Constitutional doctrine requires only one conceivable rational reason for a law, and the traditional definition of marriage easily meets that test.
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Recently, a few states have begun to experiment with same-sex marriage. Maybe this will work out well, and the more cautious states eventually will catch up. But some experiments fail. Our democracy allows different states to change their marriage laws and to abandon experiments that don't succeed. But if this judge's ruling is upheld on appeal, that will be that, and every state will be forced to conform, for good or ill.

Here is a roundup of commentary The Chronicle has published.

David Boies: One of those most invidious of the state-sponsored discriminations against gays and lesbians is the prohibition of same-sex marriage. http://sfg.ly/d67zD4

Maggie Gallagher: Same-sex marriage is a government takeover of an institution the government did not make, cannot in justice redefine and ought to protect. http://sfg.ly/aOsQW2

Debra J. Saunders: Although Prop. 8 opponents style themselves as champions of tolerance, they've chosen judicial fiat over the surer route of persuasion. http://sfg.ly/aswF8N

Jeremy Adam Smith: This this new civil rights struggle has something to teach us all about the value of commitment and family. http://sfg.ly/c1Xlxa

Brian S. Brown: The basic civil rights of millions of Americans to govern themselves taken away by judge. http://sfg.ly/9l4OV7

Hank Plante:The governor who vetoed same-sex marriage legislation twice now announces he is in support. http://sfg.ly/bOBz66

Why is the state involved in marriage at all?

From Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, a question I've been asking for over a year now: Why is the state involved in marriage at all?

Really, if we didn't have marriage in this society, why would we have to invent it? Wouldn't some contractual arrangement work as well? Maybe a "Chapter M" corporation? Do we really need a specialized arrangement for sharing goodies between two people?

...Townhall’s David Harsanyi offers the argument that government involvement may do more harm than good to the institution, and results from a historical mistake in the first place. Time to get on with the divorce, Harsanyi insists:

In the 1500s, a pestering theologian instituted something called the Marriage Ordinance in Geneva, which made “state registration and church consecration” a dual requirement of matrimony.

We have yet to get over this mistake. But isn’t it about time we freed marriage from the state?

Imagine if government had no interest in the definition of marriage. Individuals could commit to each other, head to the local priest or rabbi or shaman — or no one at all — and enter into contractual agreements, call their blissful union whatever they felt it should be called and go about the business of their lives.

I don’t think that this is an easy path to adopt, it’s going to be the eventual solution. Not only does it take government out of people’s private lives, it also means an end to a divisive and essentially meaningless debate — and it protects houses of faith and ends a potential government interference in matters of religion.
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We would do much better to require people to create partnership contracts in the civil context than get marriage licenses for issues like property sharing, access to family, and so on. If people want to live together and share their lives to that extent, it’s healthier and much less confusing later to have those issues expressly spelled out in an agreement up front, just like any prenuptial agreement today. If two people don’t want to go that far in formalizing their relationship, then they shouldn’t be considered married anyway — and shouldn’t get access to “palimony” and have debates over oral contracts, and so on. If you don’t get it in writing, it doesn’t exist, in the context of personal partnerships.

Then, if people want to get “married,” they can go to the institutions that actually care about marriage: churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, and so on. Marriage can be a private, faith-based recognition of a sacramental relationship that exists outside of the civil context entirely, and houses of faith can set their own requirements as to what it means and who can participate — just as they do now. Not only does that protect the sanctity of actual marriage much more than a government, but it also means that government has no way to poke the camel’s nose of intervention into the religious tent, as it were, to force houses of faith to conduct marriages that violate their tenets in the name of fairness. Divorcing marriage from the state and dissolving the partnership between government and religion benefits the latter more than the former.

Let government define and enforce contract law, not marriage. If we don’t follow that path, people will shortly become very unhappy about the eventual government definition.

Comments on a pro SSM clip

This can be found on YouTube:

Some comments:

So when a religion declines to change its practices, it won't be denigrated and compared with a White Supremacist group that refuses to perform interracial marriages.

Hmmm... Ocean Grove Camp had its tax exemption on its pavilion because it claimed the pavilion was "open to the public". But does "open to the public" mean "open for any use any member of the public cares to make of it"? What if someone wanted to have a Spam cook-off in a parked belonging to a nearby mosque? Do the owners have any grounds to object?

‎"The case was based on discrimination laws, not gay marriage." Oh, you mean like equal protection and 14th Amendment law, cited in the Walker decision?

"Catholic Charites of Boston ... could have refused to take Federal funds, but they opted just to shut down their adoption services" I'm sure they were swimming in money, and could have easily kept the service going without Federal funds. Oh, well. I'm sure someone else will take up the slack.

Now, what we may need to address is, why have civil marriage in the first place? Why not abolish it and let the churches have it? Indeed, if marriage is a religious institution, and we're supposed to be keeping Church and State separate, maybe it's time we quit having the government endorse a religious institution.

Prop 8 overturned

Prop 8 has been overturned for now. It will be appealed to the 9th Circuit. It may make it to the Supreme Court.

I'm thinking, if the Proposition stays overturned, maybe the next initiative should be one stating that marriage is a purely religious institution, and the State of California does not support a civil version, on First Amendment establishment grounds.

Pew Rates the Press

A poll from Pew Research Center shows some interesting numbers. Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two Decade Low: Overview

Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate. In the initial survey in this series about the news media’s performance in 1985, 55% said news stories were accurate while 34% said they were inaccurate. That percentage had fallen sharply by the late 1990s and has remained low over the last decade.

Press Criticism Now More Bipartisan

Stories often inaccurate	Jul 07 %	Jul 09 %	Change
Total	53	63	+10
Republicans	63	69	+6
Democrats	43	59	+16
Independents	43	59	-3
R-D Gap	+20	+10
Tend to favor one side
Total	66	74	+8
Republicans	81	84	+3
Democrats	54	67	+13
Independents	68	73	+5
R-D Gap	+27	+17
Too critical of America
Total	43	44	+1
Republicans	63	60	-3
Democrats	23	33	+10
Independents	45	41	-4
R-D Gap	+10	+27

Partisan Views of Leading News Outlets

	Total	Rep	Dem	Ind	R-D Gap
CNN	%	%	%	%
Favorable	60	44	75	55	-31
Unfavorable	19	34	7	22	+27
DK / Can't rate	21	22	18	23
Fox News	%	%	%	%
Favorable	55	72	43	55	+29
Unfavorable	25	13	36	24	-23
DK / Can't rate	20	15	21	21
MSNBC	%	%	%	%
Favorable	48	34	60	47	-26
Unfavorable	19	35	7	20	+28
DK / Can't rate	33	31	32	33
Network TV	%	%	%	%
Favorable	64	55	81	54	-26
Unfavorable	24	25	9	33	+26
DK / Can't rate	21	22	18	23
NY Times	%	%	%	%
Favorable	29	16	39	29	-23
Unfavorable	17	31	8	18	+23
DK / Can't rate	21	22	18	23
NPR	%	%	%	%
Favorable	44	39	50	43	-11
Unfavorable	12	13	7	16	+6
DK / Can't rate	44	48	43	40
Wall St. Journal	%	%	%	%
Favorable	32	39	29	32	+10
Unfavorable	13	12	16	12	-4
DK / Can't rate	55	29	56	56

Why the honest discussion won't happen

Eugene Volokh looks at why... “A Discussion [About Race] … Around … Water Coolers” just isn't going to happen.

I certainly agree that it would be good for people to discuss racial issues in a truthful, mature, and responsible way. But I’m pretty sure that discussing such issues around “water coolers” is pretty dangerous advice, at least if one really wants a discussion in which people aren’t afraid to air their views.

1. To begin with, any arguments that some might see as racist could lead to complaints and even lawsuits about a supposedly “racially hostile work environment”; and while such lawsuits are hard for plaintiffs to win, no employer wants to have to fight them, and no employee should want to have his speech be the subject of such suits.
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2. Moreover, statements that could be seen as involving race-based generalizations could be later introduced as evidence of racial animus in a discriminatory discharge/demotion/failure to hire/failure to promote case, if the speaker has a role in the hiring process. Recall the Alan-Betty exchange: When Alan is later discharged, and sues for race discrimination, he argues that Betty had some role in the discharge decision, and that Betty’s statement is evidence that she likely discriminated against him based on race.

Again, it’s not clear that such a statement would lead to a victory in court; the jury might not find it probative enough, and in any case it might in some situations be seen as insufficient evidence under the “stray remarks” doctrine. But the risk is sufficient, I think, that many an employer will immediately discipline Betty for her statement, and that at the very least people like Betty would be reluctant to express their true views, either at work or elsewhere.
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3. Finally, this isn’t just a matter of liability: Allegedly racist comments can yield bad publicity for the employer, can waste a huge amount of employer time and energy on internal investigation and discussion, and can cause morale problems that interfere with productivity. Even without the risk of litigation, many people have long been cautious about talking about matters that their listeners might feel strongly about a deep and personal level — race, religion, politics, sexuality, and more. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the risk of vast liability has been an important factor in dramatically increasing the cost of expressing one’s candid views about race (especially at work), and in deterring people from expressing those views.

4. What strikes me as most interesting about this phenomenon — other than the practical unsoundness of President Obama’s suggestion — is that the very fight against discrimination and prejudice that the President is trying to promote in his statement has made it much harder to have candid discussions about race. We see the same happening in some measure as to candid discussions about sexual orientation. (The early phases of the gay rights movement also made it socially easier to have such candid discussions, but as sexual orientation discrimination law is beginning to follow the path of racial discrimination law, such discussions are becoming more professionally and legally perilous.) That might be an inevitable and acceptable consequence of that fight. But I don’t think that we can ignore it, and suggest that more discussion — at least around the water cooler — is going to help solve the problem.

Without fathers

Dafydd at Big Lizards looks at marriage and fathers in his post: “A Quick Chip to Patterico...”

In a post today, my old blog-boss Patterico argued the inarguable and obvious point that children raised without fathers were more likely to suffer a number of significant drawbacks in life than children raised in an intact home with a mother and father.
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Patterico is spot on; I couldn't have said it better. And I'll give you another generalization that is equally true: Children raised without fathers tend to have a difficult time being fathers -- and a difficult time being firm without being cruel, being assertive without being aggressive, and balancing immediate desire with long-term planning.

And children raised without mothers tend to have a hard time empathizing with others, dealing with women, sharing and caring, and showing real love and affection. So it's a terrible shame when government policy encourages marriages that shun either fathers or mothers.

But he doesn't agree with Patterico in every particular:

Alas, Patterico seems not to have thought this last point through to its logical conclusion... for there is another issue besides crime and welfare that is driven by the Left's desire to sever the sacred bond between male and female in American and Western society; and last time we talked about it, he was all for the radical and progressive transformation being shoved down our throats.