Kansas blogger defends gay hate speech

My comment that gay rights groups may be evolving into hate groups elicited the response of a blogger in Kansas whose specialty is, ironically, defending evolution.

Josh Rosenau, who teaches at the ever more ludicrous National Association for Science Education (NASE) and runs the blog "Thoughts from Kansas," apparently had some time on his hands after a hard day of stamping out creationism and responded to my earlier post in which I pointed out the increasing intolerance and hatefulness emanating from the general direction of the gay rights movement.

I pointed out the increasing facility such groups have displayed in the use of terms such as "bigot" and "gay-hater" to smear their opponents. Rosenau used basically the same argument as an anonymous commenter on the original post who said, "But you guys are bigots. It's not hateful if it's true."

To which I responded, "So then it's okay for people to call gays 'faggots' on the grounds that its true?"

On the one hand it is understandable that there would be heated rhetoric in a debate about closely held beliefs, but when the rhetoric descends to pretty hateful name-calling--particularly when committed by the side that is always giving preachy lectures to everyone else about the evils of being hateful--someone needs to be called on the carpet about it.

Rosenau justifies his use of hate speech this way:

Trying to take away people's marriages, simply because one is prejudiced against those people's sexualities, is bigotry. And that's hateful.

Take away people's marriages? Isn't the whole debate about whether they are marriages in the first place? Do they teach about avoiding the fallacy of begging the question over at NASE these days?

Apparently not.

And how is the moral position that marriage is between a man and a woman "hateful" anymore than believing that yellow and blue make green is hateful? Does Rosenau really believe that the belief that marriage, by definition, is a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently hateful? That believing it somehow elicits the emotion of hate in the person contemplating it?

Of course he doesn't. But I'm sure it makes him feel all righteous in his crusade of moral condemnation to say it. Congratulations to him.

I have been involved in innumerable public debates and discussions about this issue ever since I walked the language of Kentucky's Marriage Amendment into a state legislator's office four years ago and started the process that ended up in our constitutional language--language that did little more than codify what already had been assumed. And one thing you can always count on: however civil you are, the people with whom you debate on this issue, with a few notable exceptions, will be ill-tempered and vindictive in the extreme.

And then they'll accuse you of being hateful.

The bottom line is this: If the defenders of traditional marriage employed name-calling in any way, shape, or form, gay rights groups would be squealing to high heaven and the media would be on it in a second and calling on them to account about it. But when gay rights groups themselves engage in the very behavior they are always condemning, they become indignant when someone else point it out.

Gay rights groups are the ones who are constantly championing tolerance. But when they themselves start goose-stepping, we're supposed to sit calmly by and admire the parade.

The Rosenau proffers this bit of logic:

The question, less stupid than the one Cothran originally posed, is whether you should be enacting discriminatory social policies on the basis of those personal beliefs. The answer is still: No.

That leads to things like the eugenic anti-miscegenation laws struck down in 1967's Loving v. Virginia (several years after our biracial President-elect's parents were able to marry in Hawaii), and before that in a California Supreme Court ruling from the 1940s which was the basis for the decision which (all-too-briefly) allowed full marriage equality in California. Cothran's argument would apply equally well (modulo small changes in wording) to those earlier laws, which suggests that it is not the way we should be making policy.

What social policy is he referring to being "enacted"? Same-sex couples were never able to marry precisely because marriage was always understood to be--by definition--between a man and a woman. Nothing needed to be done to keep it that way--until gays convinced judges and a few local politicians to change the clear meaning of words.

You can bring about all kinds of social change by just going into the law and redefining words, but by what manner of disingenuousness do you then go and accuse people who don't like it when you do that that they're the ones "enacting" something?

When the public has to act in self-defense when gays start changing the meanings of words, it isn't because they're the ones who want to change anything.

Gays are always arguing that they don't want special treatment, they just want to be treated like everyone else--except they don't want to be criticized (that's "bigotry"), they don't want to be disagreed with (that's "intolerance"), and they want the right to change the law without going through the normal channels of the democratic process--oh, and the right to overturn decisions made through that same process.

And now they want the right to change the definition of words without anyone else complaining. Special rights? What special rights?

And then there's Rosenau's argument that observing the meaning of the word "marriage" is the same as miscagenation. Right. Interracial marriage never violated the definition of the word "marriage." The argument in miscagenation was that people of different races shouldn't be married because of whatever racist belief that is based on. The argument in same-sex marriage is that people of the same sex literally can't be married because that not even what marriage is.

The dictionary never defined marriage as being the union of two people of the same race. But, before the exponents of postmodernist sex started changing the meanings of words, it always defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

But such is the state of "thought" in Kansas.

They Have a List: What McCarthy would do if he were gay

That sound you hear may be goosestepping from the Tolerance Police. Now someone has posted a "blacklist" of individuals and businesses that contributed to the effort to pass Proposition 8. If a conservative did this, they would be skewered.

That silence you hear is the media completely ignoring this.

Will Obama's soak the rich economic plan work?

With Obama's plan to effectively raise marginal tax rates from roughly 38 percent to around 50, it is instructive to note the relationship between marginal tax rates and economic productivity, which can be seen in the graph to the left.

"Hauser's Law" is the observation by economist Kurt Hauser that revenue as a percentage of GDP remains at about 19.5% of GDP no matter what the marginal tax rate is. It is apparently the result of the fact that increases in marginal rates, which characterize soak the rich schemes like Barack Obama's, simply cause people to shift or hide their income to avoid higher taxes:

As David Ransom put it in an article written earlier this year for the Wall Street Journal:

What makes Hauser's Law work? For supply-siders there is no mystery. As Mr. Hauser said: "Raising taxes encourages taxpayers to shift, hide and underreport income. . . . Higher taxes reduce the incentives to work, produce, invest and save, thereby dampening overall economic activity and job creation."

Putting it a different way, capital migrates away from regimes in which it is treated harshly, and toward regimes in which it is free to be invested profitably and safely. In this regard, the capital controlled by our richest citizens is especially tax-intolerant.

In other words, if the farmer takes more of the golden eggs produced by the goose who lays them, then it will simply lay less of them--or find ways to hide them from the farmer.

Hat tip to Sophistpundit on the graph.

Courier-Journal asks questions about Obama's election

I was quoted in the Louisville Courier-Journal's article "True melting pot of voters pushed Obama over top," which appeared on Sunday.

Were Obama's economic policies realistic? Greg Mankiw's economic advice for Obama

A sampling of Harvard economist Greg Mankiw's advice for Obama:

[D]uring the campaign, you promised that you would cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, that you would vastly expand health insurance coverage, and that you would never cut Social Security benefits or raise the retirement age. You will almost surely have to renege on some of these promises. As your economic team will often remind you, even if the laws of arithmetic are ignored during campaigns, they provide a real constraint when making actual policy.

The rest is well-worth a read. It is here.

The divisions of philosophy

David Chalmers at Fragments of Consciousness is attempting a taxonomy of philosophy (what us Thomists would call a "division" or "system of classification of philosophy). You can find the monstrosity he is currently working on here.

I don't call this a monstrosity in the pejorative sense of that word, I mean it in its literal sense: something frightening in size or complexity. Compare the unwieldy thing he is trying to get a grip on, which, I kid you not, has got to be about 50 pages long, to the more ordered and manageable Thomist classification:

Now of course the Thomistic classification assumes things he doesn't assume, since he is clearly not a Thomist. His classification also gets very detailed, including actual schools of thought and their exponents. It also includes things that don't properly belong to philosophy, such as scientific sub-disciplines. I mean are things like "homology," "robotics," and "computers,"--much less things like "trade union rights" and "life"--actually a part of the classification of philosophy?

Chalmers taxonomy is a draft, and he has invited comment, so I guess this is my comment: In order for any taxonomy to be useful, it has to be manageable and incorporate principles of division that make sense. It also has to limit itself to philosophy, and not attempt to encompass all of thought. After all, philosophy has to have some limitations to be a distinct discipline, doesn't it?

The above division is the one used in my book Material Logic: A Traditional Approach to Thinking Skills.

Are gay rights groups turning into hate groups?

For all their rhetoric about tolerance and diversity, when it comes right down to it the Tolerance Police really don't give a rip about anything other then imposing their own political agenda. And if you don't go along with it, they'll call you names, question your integrity, and now this.

Most gay rights groups have not explicitly called for violence, but they positively glory in hurling hateful epithets like "bigot" at their opponents and accusing them of all sorts of malicious motives simply because they don't want to be forced to repudiate their beliefs about sexuality. Hate speech, in fact, is becoming their specialty.

At some point, someone is going to start labeling them as hate groups. Heck, why not now?

Did McCain's defeat mean anything?

George Will, getting it exactly right:

Although John McCain’s loss was not as numerically stunning as the 1964 defeat of Barry Goldwater, who won 16 fewer states and 122 fewer electoral votes than McCain seems to have won as of this writing, Tuesday’s trouncing was more dispiriting for conservatives. Goldwater’s loss was constructive; it invigorated his party by reorienting it ideologically. McCain’s loss was sterile, containing no seeds of intellectual rebirth.

Thanks to Commentary magazine.

What do GRE scores tell us about the competence of people in different professions?

If you want to get an idea of the intellectual rigor of the different professions, the chart below may be a good place to start. This comes from Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. It represents Graduate Record Exam (GRE) scores broken down by the field of intended field of graduate study. It is based on 2002 data, so is a little dated.

Several things have been pointed out elsewhere: namely, that quantitative fields may be overstated (meaning that fields like philosophy may be understated), and fields in which students tend to take tests other than the GRE may be understated (The better business students, for example, ten to take the GMAT in order).

Also, since this data is based on the intended area of graduate study, it doesn't necessarily comport with the field of undergraduate study, but it should be pretty close.

In any case, not the bottom two categories: education and public administration. That explains a few things. It also may add credence to my observation that an education major may be the closest thing in the academic world (other than maybe public administration) to a lobotomy--or the best evidence that one has already been performed.

Bureaucratizing Charity: Obama's plan to make all Americans community organizers

According to his website, President-in-Waiting Barack Obama has a plan to conscript American youth into voluntary service:

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.

So, how exactly is this different, in principle, from the draft?

I'm not sure conservatives even understand what is wrong with this. So let me give it a try.

A conservative approach to help people in society would involve offering incentives for people to help others, and encouraging charitable institutions outside of government to do the work that is natural to them.

The liberal approach is to mandate that people help each other. It's chief impulse is to systemize and standardize as much of society as possible. In this respect it is socialism on a much grander scale. Socialism is at least content with organizing and controlling the economy. But plans like this one betray an even larger liberal vision beyond socialism. Programs like mandatory community service are a sign that the government is not content with trying to control the economy, but, having grown fat (and powerful) by gorging itself on the economy, it has now set its hungry sights on the rest of society.

But you can't force people to love their neighbor: all you can do is to keep government from weakening those voluntary associations in society, like churches, who can best persuade them to do so. And, unfortunately, programs that try to mandate charity only serve to undermine the natural charitable acts of private individuals operating through private institutions.

It has been pointed out by people such as Thomas Sowell and James Kalb that the modus operandi of the secular liberal elite is to discourage the natural workings of society in favor of large scale rational planning. Here is James Kalb, in his excellent new book, The Tyranny of Liberalism, explaining the underpinnings Obama's community organization plan:

Because liberalism is a principle of government, its triumph arrives with the triumph of the men and institutions favored by the arrangement of power it proposes. It is thus the ideology of the ruling class. The victory of liberalism is the victory of managers, experts, educators, media organizations, and rationally organized bureaucratic and commercial interests. Such people and institutions benefit from large-scale rationalized organization of social life, which demands comprehensive systems of planning, training, indoctrination, and control, and of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating the information large formal institutions need to operate.... [T]he reduction of politics to administration and technique puts power in the hands of those who find it most persuasive and do most to promote it. Liberalism advances their interests and they determine its content.

These kinds of policies are no different, in principle, than the welfare programs of the Great Society and forced busing: they are social engineering programs.

UPDATE: The website has since changed the language from what was quoted above. Wonder why.

Get over it (the election that is)

I have now seen countless posts coming across my feed reader from various conservatives on the web who are expressing wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Obama victory. This is part of what is wrong with modern conservatism: it has invested itself almost exclusively in politics and forgotten about the culture.

We will know that conservatism has righted itself when its adherents don't go into a funk when they lose one election.

In which the Cothranator reminds you of his original election prediction

Although an Obama win is not what I wanted, it is what I predicted. I do not at all hate saying "I told you so," so now I'm going to point out that I did. I told you so.

Here is my post following the very first primary. The date was January 2,008, the day after the Iowa caucuses. The post was titled, "The political ramifications of Iowa." Here are the relevant sections:

1. His success in Iowa propels Obama into the Democratic nomination. For one thing, a third place finish in Iowa takes away Hillary's air of inevitability, and once Obama gets the upper hand, it's over. For one thing, Edwards will have to drop out of the race fairly quickly (because of money), and the majority of his support will go to Obama. Iowa gives Obama, who already has a large base of support (and lots of money), momentum and excitement, and takes it away from Hillary. Also, Obama got the "change" vote--and will continue to get it. Not only that, but Obama has an attractive personality and low negatives--the opposite of Hillary. Oh, and his victory speech was awesome--and Hillary's concession speech was not.

That is, of course, exactly what happened. Then there was this:

4. If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, he wins the general election. Obama has a Kennedyesque air to him: he's young, articulate, and sophisticated. Oh, and America is ready for a Black president.

Got that right too. In fact, I think everything in that post proved out, although my predictions about the Republicans were less specific. I love it when that happens.

I am now accepting offers for political consulting. But my fees just went up.