Would Rick Perry go for this idea: The forced circumcision of middle school boys?

In last night's CNN/Tea Party debate among Republican presidential candidates, Michelle Bachmann slammed Texas Gov. Rick Perry for trying to mandate the HPV vaccination for middle school girls in his state and for taking contributions from the manufacturer of the drug. For some reason, Perry tried to defend the policy even after he has already said it was a mistake. The following is my blog post from 2007, after the Kentucky house of Representatives passed a bill that would have mandated the administration of the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, manufactured by Merck & Co., to middle school girls. It had an "opt out" provision in it, just like the same policy in Perry's Texas. Well, if the arguments for Gardasil are valid for Gardasil, then why aren't those same arguments applicable to, say, mandating circumcision for middle school boys?

According to the new issue of Time Magazine, a new National Institutes of Health study shows that circumcision reduces the risk of contracting HIV by 60 percent. A report of the study appears in the most recent issue of The Lancet, a widely regarded British medical journal.

Now obviously this means that the more boys who are circumcised, the better off we will be. The more circumcisions, the less HIV. And the less HIV, the fewer deaths that will result from it. And how best to ensure that more boys are circumcised? Surely the answer to that question is obvious:

Mandate the circumcision of middle school boys.

Just look at the HIV statistics. How many people die of HIV every year? Imagine the lives that might be saved if we ensured that every young boy was circumcised before entering middle school.

And that's why we need to mandate circumcision in Kentucky: because it will save lives.

Now undoubtedly there will be those detractors who will oppose this idea. But these are the same people who opposed mandating the HPV vaccine: religious people. And we know about them, don't we?

These people say that the decision to circumcise their children should be left up to parents. And that would be a fine idea—if all parents were good parents. But we all know that is not the case. All parents are not good parents. There are some parents who will not do what is best for their own children (according to us), and so we must make these decisions for them.

According to most statistics, only 76 percent of boys are circumcised. But among some groups of people—and these are the people who we are really concerned about, even though we don’t like to admit it because we want them to continue to vote for us—the rate is as low as 45 percent.

The government has the responsibility to step into the relationship between families and their physicians for their own good. Of course, this principle does not extend to the abortion issue, where we take the complete opposite position. There, the government has no business in the health care decisions of individuals, as we have said repeatedly until we are blue in the face, and then decide to say something completely different.

But that is another issue altogether that we really don't want to talk about right now.

Back to these religious people who think that parents have rights. Even though these people will argue that mandating circumcision violates parental rights, they really have an ulterior motive. What really bothers them about mandating the circumcision of middle school boys is that it has to do with sex. In fact, as State Rep. Tom Burch points out, they wouldn't even be involved in debates like this if it weren't for sex.

Come to think of it, nobody would be involved in any debate if it weren't for sex. In fact, nobody would be here at all. But regardless, we need a mandate.

Mandate?

What mandate? Who said mandate? When did we ever say we should mandate circumcision? We're not talking about a mandate, and anyone who says that we ever proposed a mandate is misrepresenting us.

Now of course one of the reasons we need to mandate circumcision is that if we don't mandate it, insurance plans won't have to cover it. But, of course, like we just said, this isn't really a mandate. It's only a mandate in this paragraph so that we can make this argument. In the next paragraph, it isn't a mandate anymore.

You've got to follow along closely here and pay attention.

Never mind that most insurance plans already cover circumcision (just like they cover Gardasil, the HPV vaccine). Theoretically, under different circumstances, maybe in a different dimension (possibly in the one inhabited by the Lexington Herald-Leader), they could conceivably not cover circumcision. And what would happen then? Why, we would have uncovered circumcisions, that's what. And we know how embarrassing that would be.

That's why we need a mandate—even though that's not what this is.

One of the reasons this isn't a mandate is because we are going to allow the families of these boys to opt out. Now there are some people (those religious people) who ask why, if it is not a mandate, we need an opt out in the first place. They point out that there is no reason for an opt out unless it is a mandate. If it's not a mandate, there would be nothing to opt out from. They say we are talking out of both sides of our mouth. But remember, these are just crazy religious people.

And we say that out of both sides of our mouth.

Besides, if these people don't stop misrepresenting us, we're going to mandate this for them too—whether they need it or not. No anesthesia, no opt outs, no nothin'.

Remember, this non-mandate mandate could save thousands of lives nationally and worldwide. Now you may be wondering how a Kentucky law could save all of these lives across the nation and around the world. Well, we wonder about that also, but this same argument worked for the bill to mandate the HPV vaccination (SB 345, the mandate that wasn't a mandate), so we figure it will work on this issue too.

And let's deal right here with the nasty rumor going around that our support for mandatory circumcision of middle school boys has anything to do with campaign contributions to key Kentucky legislators by the National Association of Rabbinical and Non-Rabbinical Mohels (NARNRM). We can't deny this, of course, any more than we can deny that there were campaign contributions in 2004 and 2006 from Merck & Co., the developer of Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, to legislators in whose committees HB 345 was considered. But so what?

Have you seen anything in the news media about these contributions? No. Just like there was nothing ever said about Merck's contributions. Now wouldn't you think that if there had been something amiss, the intrepid investigative reporters at newspapers like the Lexington Herald-Leader and the Louisville Courier-Journal would have said something about it?

Huh?

But all this is just a distraction from the main point that anyone who opposes the idea of mandating circumcision is opposed to saving lives. If they were really concerned about lives, they would ignore the inherent contradictions and illogical arguments offered for this mandate that really isn't a mandate even though we keep saying so and then denying it.

But what do they do instead? They just keep confusing the issue with logic and facts that have nothing to do with whether it's a mandate—or isn't. Maybe.

In fact, speaking of the HPV vaccination for girls: in comparison to that idea, circumcision for boys is simple. Girls have to endure the ordeal of going in for three different shots. But circumcision for boys? It's quick and easy. Whack! and it's over.

Come to think of it, if we could get the doctor to slice just a few more inches closer to the body, we could probably prevent a lot of other societal havoc. But that's a discussion for another day. Or maybe next week, when we decide to mandate something else we think is good for everybody and then pretend that it's not a mandate, except on Tuesdays.

But for right now we need to think about HIV, and all the other diseases that have nothing to do with HIV but that kill people too because they all make us sad. And sadness is a bad thing—except when it gets people so emotional they forget that these other diseases have absolutely nothing to do with HIV and whether a mandate will actually reduce it, and whether this is really a mandate or not.

And that is why we need this new policy. Because it isn't a mandate.

Except when it is.

The above cartoon comes by way of On the Right, Steve Manning's blog.

Europeans are going nuts. Really.

The next time you get a lecture from some liberal who thinks that the highest aspiration of America is to be Sweden (you may replace the name of Sweden with any other European country they might happen to mention), just point them to this study, showing that, in fact, the whole place is going crazy.

On Continuing to get Galileo Wrong: NCSE's Josh Rosenau still can't get science history right

After botching his science history in a post about Texas Governor Rick Perry, and having several people, including Yours Truly, call him on the carpet for it, Josh Roseau of the National Center for Science Education's Department of Historical Revisionism now writes a post trying to explain himself which basically ends up as a sort of data dump of everything he was able to find out about the Galileo incident on short notice and under the gun.

In a passing remark on the issue of whether global warming is caused by humans, Rick Perry had said, "Just because you have a group of scientists that stood up and said, this is the fact ... Galileo got outvoted for a spell." Rosenau responded by charging Perry, on the basis of that one statement, with endorsing "the legitimacy of letting religious and political authority suppress ('outvote,' in his words) scientific results." Then, going from the not very sublime to the clearly ridiculous, he declared:

By the time Galileo was publishing on heliocentrism, the idea was already circulating and widely accepted in scientific circles, including Jesuits. He wasn't outvoted by scientists, he was outvoted by the political and religious leadership of his country. [Emphasis in original]

Rosenau was then beset by several of his own natural allies who pointed out that he screwed up.

Rosenau partly tries to hang his hat on Perry not knowing what he was talking about. Yeah, well, there's not much argument there. Perry's a politician without a very good education in science or history and was speaking out of the side of his mouth. Rosenau tried to blow it up into some significant gaffe. What's amusing about it is that Perry got more right by accident than Rosenau got right speaking intentionally from his NCSE high horse.

Rosenau quotes Thony Christie saying that Perry was "speaking through his arse..." So if Perry was "speaking through his arse" and getting it largely right and Rosenau is speaking out of the more conventional orifice and getting it wrong, then, in the contest of competing orifices, Rosenau' mouth isn't comparing too well.


After beginning his post with his obligatory personal insults which he keeps repeating, hoping, in doing so, that it will make them true, he says, "[I]t's worth teasing out some of the history." Well, I suppose that's better than running roughshod over it like he did in his first post. And "teasing out" the history of the Galileo affair, had he actually done it, would have been better than what he actually does do, which is to practically torture it to death.

His new post begins promisingly, with indications that he is now listening to other people who actually know what happened in the Galileo affair and admissions that he got key points of his post wrong. But then, all of a sudden, the points he got wrong are not keys points any more. "I don't think this alters any of the basic results," he says. No it doesn't alter any of the basic results: it blows them out of the water.

Heliocentrism, he says, "was already circulating and widely accepted in scientific circles, including Jesuits." When it was pointed out that this was not true, Rosenau then says, "When Galileo's heliocentrism was first taken up by church authorities in 1610, heliocentrism didn't have wide support, but I don't think I claimed it did." "Widely accepted" doesn't mean "wide support"?

Not, apparently, in Josh's world.

No historian who delves below the level of popular legend on the Galileo controversy thinks that heliocentrism (and Copernicanism in particular) was a proven theory of how reality really was at the time Galileo pressed the issue in the early 1600s. But there were many scholars inside and outside the official church who accepted the heliocentric theory as a more useful mathematical construct than the Ptolemaic system--as a better way, in Bellarmine's terms to "save the appearances." In fact, most scholars seemed to realize the insufficiency of the Ptolemaic system and supported either Copernican heliocentrism or, more commonly, Tycho Brahe's geoheliocentrism (in which the earth and moon are stationary and the other planets revolve around the sun) as constructs that made better sense of the data.

Rosenau then launches on his version of the history of the debate over heliocentirism, presumably to back up his point that Galileo was "outvoted by the political and religious leadership of his country." He says the period of the acceptance of heliocentrism was "extended by Galileo's persecution in the1610s." Persecution? In what way was Galileo "persecuted" in the 1610s--particularly by the "political and religious leadership of his country"?

After becoming the "Chief Mathematician and Philosopher" to the Medicis, he went to Rome, where he received a hero's welcome. Fredrico Cesi gave him a banquet; Pope Paul V give him a friendly audience; the Jesuit Roman College had ceremonies all day. This was largely the treatment Galileo received from the very politicians and religious leadership Rosenau thinks were persecuting him. And he received this kind of adulatory treatment repeatedly throughout his career by the fashionable politicians of  his time.

He was equally well treated by the religious leaders. After Barberini became Pope, Galileo's stock rose even higher. "He had six long audiences with Urban in the course of six weeks," says Arthur Koestler in his great history of science, The Sleepwalkers:

The Pope showered favors on him--a pension for Galileo's son, a precious painting, a gold and sliver medal. He also provided him with a glowing testimonial, addressed to the new Grand Duke, extolling the virtues and piety "of this great man, whose fame shines in the heavens, and goes on earth far and wide."

The Jesuits, who were perhaps the most astronomically sophisticated group of the time, were also great admirers--until, that is, Galileo began showing his posterior. After a Jesuit astronomer and several others had published their discovery of sunspots, Galileo publicly attacked them and claimed he had discovered them first, saying he had witnesses to prove it, but refused to name any.  Whenever he heard that anyone had disagreed with him in private conversations, he sent them surly letters demanding explanations, most notably the Letter to Cassini. In the the whole debate his frequent method was to level personal attacks at his opponents, questioning their integrity, calling them names, and confusing the issue (no wonder Rosenau likes this guy).

"You cannot help it, Signor Sarsi," he wrote to the Pope's Chamberlain, "that it was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else. This is the truth which neither malice nor envy can suppress."

It was all about Galileo all the time.

Was it the fact that people challenged him? Is this the "persecution" Rosenau refers to? In 1614 Father Niccolo Lorini filed a complaint against him to the Consultor for the Holy Office, but it was dismissed. Then, in 1615, a rabble rousing priest came to Rome to accuse him, but the same Holy Office ruled these complaints fabrications. "For the next 18 years," says Koestler, "Galileo lived honoured and unmolested, befriended by Pope Urban VIII and an impressive array of cardinals."

What precisely is this "persecution" Galileo suffered during this period? And who were the politicians and religious leaders who perpetrated it? The only physical danger Galileo was in was eating too much at all the dinner parties his admirers were constantly throwing for him.

And then we come to the decree of 1616, where Rosenau becomes completely confused.

He writes that Galileo "chafed" at restrictions the Church placed on him, "and the 1616 ruling of a jury of theologians who declared heliocentrism 'foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture,'" he says, "further constrained him."

Really?

Rosenau is apparently unaware that the document he is quoting from is the "Consultant's Report on Copernicanism," which was issued by the Qualifiers (or theologians) of the Holy Office who met on Feb. 23, 1616, and which was quickly overruled by a higher panel of cardinals--and only became public some 17 years later. Galileo was never even aware of it until 1633, when it was referenced in his trial.

How can you be "chafed" at a document you never even knew the existence of?

The document which was made public at the time and which Galileo did see was the ruling by the General Congregation of the Index, issued on March 5, 1616. But there was no mention of "heresy" in the decree of March 5 nor was there any mention of Galileo in it. In fact, it was not even directed at Galileo. And Galileo didn't seem to be particularly "chafed" about it, writing to Picchena, on the following June 3, "I am not in the least concerned..." In fact, six days after the decree was issued, Galileo was enjoying, by his own account, a pleasant audience with the Pope that lasted for three quarters of an hour.

When a rumor began making the rounds that Galileo had somehow been personally indicted in the decree, Cardinal Bellarmine, two months later, issued a formal declaration in Galileo's defense, pointing out that "Galileo has not abjured in our hands, or in the hands of others here in Rome, or anywhere else that we know, any opinion or doctrine of his." Ironically, this is in the very documentation Rosenau links to in his post!

Rosenau then makes the strange claim that the Church was simply trying to impose theological restrictions on Galileo that science could never overcome. He quotes the part of Cardinal Bellarmine's letter in which he discusses the distinction between Copernicanism as way to "save the appearances" and as a way to see the reality of the world (something I said in my post, but which Rosenau dismissed as whiggishness), and concludes:

Again, this is not a question of being outvoted by scientists, but of holding scientific claims up to theological standards, and to absurd ones at that. Bellarmine never suggests a way to demonstrate heliocentrism, nor is it clear why the burden should be on Galileo to supply both the empirical findings and a theological justification for them.

This is utter nonsense based on a selective use of sources. What Rosenau doesn't quote is the rest of the letter, in which Bellarmine says:

Third, I say that, if there were a real proof that the Sun is in the center of the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true. [Emphasis mine]

This is not "holding scientific claims up to theological standards," this is a clear statement that the Church would be forced to change its theological position if scientific evidence turned up that rendered the previous theological interpretations mistaken. Rosenau has completely misrepresented Bellarmine and the Church's position.

Rosenau then says "Galileo's books built on solid observational science to argue that not only was heliocentric math easier, it better described the shape of the solar system."

Solid observational evidence?

Galileo repeatedly attacked those who agreed with him that heliocentrism was a more economical way to interpret the data of heavenly movements but disagreed with him that it was proven. In fact he finally ended up alienating most the Jesuits who had formerly supported him. When he was challenged by Bellarmine and others to prove his case he simply obfuscated the issue with personal attacks and rhetorical demonstrations that did nothing to supply a proof. He eventually raised the stakes so high by continuing to push the issue that he was forced to offer something.

What "solid observational evidence" did Galileo finally produced to prove heliocentrism as a reality?

His theory of tides.

Galileo had repeatedly hinted that he had the decisive physical proof of the Copernican theory, and it was the idea that the tides could be explained by the combined motions of the earth that caused the water to move at a different speed from the land. Never mind that Kepler had already figured out that the movement of the tides resulted from lunar gravity several years earlier, Galileo dismissed Kepler's idea as a superstition--just like he dismissed Tycho Brahe's largely correct view of comets, calling them "optical illusions."

He also argued tried to establish heliocentrism on the basis of a spurious theory of sunspots.

Galileo produced no "solid observational evidence" for heliocentrism and to say so is to demonstrate an utter lack of knowledge of the facts of the case. The only thing "solid" about Galileo's evidence is that it was solidly wrong.

"Copernicanism was a slogan," says Koestler, "but not a defendable system of astronomy." As E. A. Burtt says in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science:

It is safe to say that even had there been no religious scruples whatever against the Copernican astronomy, sensible men all over Europe, especially the most empirically minded, would have pronounced it a wild appeal to accept the premature fruits of an uncontrolled imagination, in preference to the solid inductions, built up gradually through the ages of men's confirmed sense experience ... Contemporary empiricists, had the lived in the 16th century, would have been the first to scoff out of court the new philosophy of the universe.

And then of course, there was the problem with the stellar parallax, a problem which Galileo just avoided: If the earth really orbited round the sun, then, given the beliefs at the time in regard to the distance of the stars, the stars should have appeared to move in relation to the earth. They didn't. It was only in the 19th century that this problem was resolved.

"The truth is," says Koestler, "after his sensational discoveries in 1610, Galileo neglected both observational research and astronomic theory in favour of his propaganda crusade. By the time he wrote the Dialogue he had lost touch with new developments in that field, and forgotten even what Copernicus had said."

Despite the fact that Galileo did not have proof of heliocentrism (nor did anyone else at the time), he tried to claim that the burden of proof was on those who disagreed with it. Go figure. It was a silly gambit that Bellarmine threw back in his face, resulting in the spurious tides theory.

Finally, at his trial, Galileo defended himself at his trial by simply lying. After writing his Dialogue on the Great World Systems (which Galileo wanted to call Dialogue on the Flux and Reflux of the Tides, highlighting what would later be shown to be his mistaken view of tides, but which the Pope convinced him, in an attempt to help him, to rename), in which he clearly argued for Copernicanism as an explanation of reality, he denied that that's what he had done.

"... I held," he said, "as I still hold, as most true and indisputable the opinion of Ptolemy, that is to say, the stability of the earth." He knew he was lying and the Inquisitors knew he was lying. But, as Church officials had continually done throughout the history of the dispute: they gave him a break. They could have easily convicted him of perjury and imprisoned him, but they didn't. "And as nothing further could be done in execution of the decree," said the Inquisitors, "his signature was obtained to his deposition and he was sent back."

Was the Church wrong in putting him on trial? Probably. But the Church attempted in numerous ways to avoid a confrontation and Galileo did everything in his power to provoke it. After tricking the Pope by breaking an agreement concerning the publication of his book and publicly embarrassing him, Urban (not one of the better popes mind you) finally had had it. But all they basically did was to embarrass Galileo. They shouldna oughta done it. But historically speaking, the motivation was at least understandable.

What is clear, however, is that the real story is nothing like it is portrayed in the popular accounts.

What happened to him? He was sentenced to ... reject the Copernican opinion (which he already claimed he had done), and say weekly for three years to come the seven penitential Psalms.

Oh, and then there's that little matter of "imprisonment," a term Rosenau uses to characterize what happened to him afterward although, and then in another part of the post, in typical Rosenauian fashion, he says he wasn't. In fact, he went to the Grand Duke's villa at Trinita del Monte where he was furnished with an apartment "covered in silk and most richly furnished." Then he returned to his farm and later to his house in Florence. Not exactly what you call "hard time."

And those penitential Psalms? He had his daughter say them for him.

The liberal's favorite economist said social security based on a "Ponzi" scheme

Is Rick Perry really out in political left field because he called social security a "Ponzi scheme"? That's what many liberal commentators have charged. But Harvard economist Greg Mankiw has dug up a gem of the quote from the most influential liberal economist of the late 20th century, Paul Samuelson, the Keynesian economist who authored of the most popular economics textbook of all time: Economics: An Introductory Analysis.

When I was studying economics at the University of California in the early 1980s, Samuelson's book was reviled by the monetarists--and worshiped by the Kenynesians--who peopled the economics department there. Samuelson was Keynes' bulldog. Here is Samuelson, in a remark that was intended, ironically, as a compliment to social security, using the "P" word:

The beauty of social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound. Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privileges that far exceed anything he has paid in -- exceed his payments by more than ten times (or five times counting employer payments)! 

How is it possible? It stems from the fact that the national product is growing at a compound interest rate and can be expected to do so for as far ahead as the eye cannot see. Always there are more youths than old folks in a growing population. 

More important, with real income going up at 3% per year, the taxable base on which benefits rest is always much greater than the taxes paid historically by the generation now retired. 

Social Security is squarely based on what has been called the eighth wonder of the world -- compound interest. A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived.

Read the rest here.

Rick Perry: 1, NCSE: 0: National Center for Science Education official flubs his science history in critique of Rick Perry

In last night's Republican candidates debate at the Reagan library, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that climate science was still unsettled on the issue of human-induced global warming. In his answer to a media panelist's question, he compared the current question of whether humans are unquestionably causing global warming to Galileo's situation in relation to the scientific community and the Church of the 17th century: "'Just because you have a group of scientists that stood up and said, this is the fact'," said Perry, "… Galileo got outvoted for a spell."

You just knew Scientoids would be all over this. Sure enough, here they come. And in the battle to preserve the myths of scientific history, who should be the first to show up for duty but the National Center for Science Education's Josh Rosenau, who claims Perry got it wrong:

His opening passage, like his comments on evolution, seem to forthrightly endorse the legitimacy of letting religious and political authority suppress ("outvote," in his words) scientific results. By the time Galileo was publishing on heliocentrism, the idea was already circulating and widely accepted in scientific circles, including Jesuits. He wasn't outvoted by scientists, he was outvoted by the political and religious leadership of his country. [Emphasis in original]

Not only did Perry not get it wrong, he got it more right that Rosenau.

For one thing, was Perry necessarily saying that the majority rules in science? If he was (which, I'm sorry, just isn't clear here), then he would be in no worse a position than defenders of Darwinist dogmatism and Meteorological End Times like Rosenau, who regularly point to the level of support among those working in their fields as evidence that their beliefs are true. If there's something wrong with Perry doing it, then why isn't there something wrong with scientists doing it?

Secondly, let's look at Josh's claim about Galileo. For one thing, he assumes that the issue of the Galileo episode was the truth of the heliocentrism. Where is my wrong answer buzzer? Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with what happened between Galileo and the Church (as opposed to the historical myths about it) knows that this was not the issue. The issue was the epistemological status of the theory--whether it was a legitimate hypothesis or a proven fact. At the time of the controversy, it was not a proven fact and there were a number of unanswered problems with it--a fact acknowledged by both scientists (such as they were) and Church officials.

Galileo was, by all accounts, a reckless and arrogant controversialist who demanded that others accept his theories before he had adequately documented them, and demanded that his theological views be acknowledged as legitimate despite his demonstrable lack of expertise in the field. In fact, he was so reckless and arrogant, he managed even to alienate his friends.

So when we come to Josh's final point that "He wasn't outvoted by scientists, he was outvoted by the political and religious leadership of his country," we are taken from a complete misunderstanding of history to a complete misrepresentation of it: The political and religious leadership of Galileo's day opposed heliocentrism.

Really?

In reality most of the scientists of the time opposed it, since most of the university scholars working in what was then natural philosophy (it wasn't even called "science" until the 19th century) believed in a version of Aristotelian teaching that precluded Copernicanism. Church officials of the time largely accepted Copernicus' theory as better fitting the data than the Ptolemaic theory, but were content to let the scholars duke it out. And a number of high Church officials not only didn't oppose Galileo's heliocentrism, but encouraged his writings on the issue, include a future pope.

One of the ironies here is that one of the things the Church was defending was proper scientific methodology: you have to actually prove your theories, and until they are proven, you need to keep your powder dry.

Next thing you know, Josh will be passing along the historical canard that Galileo was tortured for his beliefs and burned at the stake.

The NCSE gets a booby prize here. Score the win for Perry.

The Four Religions

James Kalb, the author of the incredible Tyranny of Liberalism, on the "four religions:

• Liberalism: A single human world ordered only by reason, based on pure (content-free) concepts. Freedom says you ignore the content of human goals and promote all of them simply as such, and equality says you ignore the content of human qualities so you treat all men as equal in value. Put them together and you get liberalism.
• Islam: A single human world ordered by pure will. There’s no place for reason, since God, who acts by arbitrary choice and is not bound by reason, is the immediate cause of everything.
• Judaism: Two parallel human worlds, the public world everyone is part of that can be appropriately ordered by pure reason, and a private Jewish world ordered by will in the form of a contract between God and the Jewish people that imposes arbitrary conditions like keeping kosher.
• Catholicism: Two human worlds, the order of nature and the order of grace, that are conceptually distinct but cannot be separated without violence because they are part of a single rational divine order: grace completes nature, and is meant for all.

Read the rest here.

The Newest Left Wing Conspiracy Theory

The grocery store shelves may have been cleaned off. Supplies of water may be running low. Batteries may be hard to find. No, it's not fear of hurricanes and floods: it's liberals in panic mode because they think the theocrats are coming.

Remember Hilary's Vast Right Wing Conspiracy? Well, now there's a new conspiracy. Here is Terry Gross, host of NPR's "Fresh Air" waxing paranoidal:

An emerging Christian movement that seeks to take dominion over politics, business and culture in preparation for the end times and the return of Jesus is establishing a presence in American politics. The leaders are considered apostles and prophets, gifted by God for this role.

The international apostolic and prophetic movement was named the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, by its leading architect, C. Peter Wagner. My guest, Rachel Tabachnick, has been researching and writing about this movement. She says although the movement is larger than the network of apostles organized by Wagner, and not all those connected with the movement describe themselves as part of Wagner’s NAR, the apostles and prophets of the movement have an identifiable ideology that separates them from other evangelicals.

The occasion for all the alarm bells are two articles, one by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker, in which he dredges up a relatively obscure school of evangelical thought and somehow reads it into Michelle Bachman's campaign platform, and another by Michelle Goldberg at Newsweek, who extrapolates the Plot For A Theocratic Takeover Of The United States Government to include Texas Governor Rick Perry.

These writers purport to have discovered disturbing indications of the covert influence of something called "Dominionism," which in its weak form is simply the belief that Christians should take their values into the voting booth, and in its strong form is that, well, that you should take your religiously-based values into the voting booth--but that you should be up front about the fact that your doing it.

The strong form of Dominionism scares liberals. The weak form scares them even more because they can convince themselves that it's conspiratorial and  get themselves all worked up about it.

The general paranoid drift of these articles is that, lurking underneath the apparent mainstream evangelical beliefs of some Republican candidates is the plan to spring a theocracy on the voters once they are elected, thereby helping to bring about the Second Coming.

We may just be facing the prospect of hypersensitive liberals building bomb shelters and storing canned food and ammunition in order to ride out the coming takeover by apocalyptic evangelicals. There should be some special name for people who think we should all take shelter because other people think the end is near.

The Fountain of Youth is bad for your health

Would immortality be a blessing or a curse? The New York Times asks the question and then confuses immortality here on earth with the afterlife promised by some religions (which presumes death). If the author would had read Tuck Everlasting rather than consulting a "study," he would have been a lot better off.

The Hapsburg Approach to Education Reform: The EKU education forum

I suppose it's not a big secret that education policy is plagued by ideological inbreeding. If there were any doubts about this, they would be dispelled by a cursory look at the line-up at the Forum on the History of Education in Kentucky, which will be held at Eastern Kentucky University on Sept. 8.

While one can count on hearing the endless slogans about Diversity among the educrats, you won't find it in the line-up of establishment figures included in the program. Here are the "approved panelists" for the 10:00 session:

• o P. G. Peeples, Lexington Fayette County Urban League
• o Stu Silberman, Prichard Committee for academic Excellence
• o Elaine Farris, Clark Co Superintendent
• o Ruthanne Palumbo, Fayette County legislator
• o Kevin Noland, KDE/UofL
• o Richard Angelo, UK Education Policy
• o Terry Holliday, Kentucky Education Commissioner
• o Sharron Oxendine, KEA President
• o Erik Myrup, History, UK/FayetteABC

If this were a breeding program instead of an education conference, we'd end up with a bunch of hemophiliacs on our hands. The state teacher's union is included, but not the professional associations representing school administrators, school superintendents, and school boards? And you will look in vain for any representation from parent organizations.

And don't even bother to look for organizations that have been critical of mainstream education policies in Kentucky. The only panelist on any of the three panels that appears to be from an organization critical of the establishment is Erik Myrup, a professor of history at the University of Kentucky who wrote an opinion piece in the Herald-Leader last July critical of the inordinate emphasis on testing in schools. Other than that, it appears to be pretty slim pickins in the Diversity department.

I know, I know. Who would actually take them seriously when it came to all the Diversity rhetoric. What was I thinking?

And since when do you class professional spinmeisters for large institutions as "media"? Here's the list for the "Media Forum":

• o Linda Blackford, H-L
• o Mark Neikirk, NKU
• o Mark Hebert, WHAS/UofL
• o Ronnie Ellis, CNHI News
• o Richard Wilson, C-J/Independent Colleges

Folks, Northern Kentucky University and U of L are not "media" in the sense anyone uses that word in this context. Both Neikirk and Hebert are former reporters and editors. I don't know Neikirk, I'm sure he's a very competent at what he does; I know Hebert is, but if you think they have latitude to let their hair down in a discussion in which their institutions are self-interested, you don't know how the world works.

Where is Mandy Connell, WHAS radio's morning talk show host? She's actually, like, really a media person. Where is Lucy May, the former Lexington Herald-Leader reporter who covered the controversy over the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (KERA) in the late 90's--and who (much to the chagrin of the educational establishment) reported both sides of the issues?

And where in all this mix is Penny Sanders, the former director of the Office for Education Accountability, the legislature's education enforcement arm (which had its wings unceremoniously clipped when it was reckless enough to take an honest look at the state's KIRIS tests in the late 90's)?

This is one of the many things that doom any efforts to reform public education: the unwillingness to include anyone in the discussion who might question the fundamental assumptions of the educational establishment.

Here we go again.

The people who are gay but really aren't

Jake at Page One makes fun today of Indiana State Rep. Phil Hinkle, who was caught with a male gay prostitute but who, despite this, claims he's not gay.

Pretty preposterous. In fact, it's almost as preposterous as the people who have been arguing that the priests involved in the sex abuse scandal who were abusing post-pubescent boys (which was the majority of them) were not gay.

But don't count on hearing that point made on Jake's blog.

College Quotas for Gays

As the price of higher education continues to skyrocket, the priorities of universities continue to move from academics to other things. Elmhurst College has become the first college to ask applicants about their "sexual orientation."

College diversity quotas favor traditionally low academically performing minorities. There has also been discussion of applying Title IX quotas to math and science programs because of the high percentage of males studying these disciplines. Now we could see quotas for gays in higher education.

In other words, it's a bad time to be a straight Asian male wanting to be a scientist or an engineer.

But this idea could potentially have disastrous consequences for gays. In Sweden, a national gender equity plan to eliminate discrimination against women turned ugly when, instead of helping women, it resulted in discrimination against them when females began applying in larger numbers than males. Just think, if colleges and universities impose sexual orientation quotes at their institutions, what would happen to dance and drama programs.

NY Mayor Bloomburg to exclude clergy from 9/11 event

New York Major Michael Bloomburg is excluding clergy from participation in the 10th anniversary commemoration of 9/11. Wouldn't it make more sense to exclude politicians?