Getting Dr. Carson, and the gotcha-Republican quotes du jour

The New Neo Posted on by

It had to happen, didn’t it? The MSM and the left (is that becoming redundant?) scours Republican utterances for evidence of bigotry on a daily (perhaps hourly?) basis. And sure enough, every now and then someone slips according to the PC rules in operation today.

No longer is it necessary to find actual bigotry—as in, acts of bigotry, or the advocacy of bigotry—mainly because few except some neo-Nazis somewhere are in fact advocating it. Now we have the variety of bigotry that relies on more subtle means of detection, sort of like a Geiger counter—mostly the use of forbidden words or phrases (macada; wetback)), which may or may not be evidence of actual bigotry on the part of the speaker. But who cares whether they are or not, as long as they can be used to show what bigoted rotters all Republicans are?

You be the judge (and remember as you read this that Rep. Young is 79 years old):

Young, an Alaska congressman, discussing the labor market during an interview with radio station KRBD in Ketchikan, Alaska, said that on his father’s ranch, “we used to have 50-60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes.” He said, “It takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It’s all done by machine.”

He added that during the interview, he had “discussed the compassion and understanding I have for these workers and the hurdles they face in obtaining citizenship” and said the country must tackle the issue of immigration reform.

“Shame on Don Young,” said Congressional Hispanic Caucus chairman Ruben Hinojosa, D-Texas. “It is deeply disheartening that in 2013, we are forced to have a discussion about a member of Congress using such hateful words and racial slurs.”

Oh, I very much doubt it’s “deeply disheartening” in the least. On the contrary, it’s deeply satisfying to trumpet the gotcha quote du jour and be able to further advance the cause of the gloriously bigotry-free Democratic Party. And with the cooperation of the press, it’s fairly easy to do that, as well as to minimize the very real racism in the history of certain older Democratic members of Congress only recently retired, and the verbal slips of present-day figures such as Harry Reid.

The charges against someone like Young gain traction, while any Democratic goofs go down the memory hole, because the former fit into a near-seamless media narrative of Republican bigotry whereas the latter are set against one of Democratic racial harmony and love. Never mind the reality, and never mind the ruthless attacks from the left on any black people so misguided as to leave the Democratic fold and become (gasp!) conservatives. They are no longer black people (just as Sarah Palin is no longer a woman), and so they can be safely savaged by the left.

Now, Don Young of the “wetback” remark is hardly my poster boy for who I would like to see in Congress. But I doubt he’s especially latino-hating, and I doubt he’d even have used the word if he’d been talking about something current rather than something in his far-off youth (he himself said he’d “used a term that was commonly used during my days growing up on a farm in central California” and it’s clear that for just a moment he was stepping back in memory and letting down his PC guard).

Which brings us to Dr. Ben Carson, he-who-had-to-be-destroyed. That was a bit trickier, because since Carson is black it probably couldn’t be on racial grounds. But it turned out to be pretty easy after all, because Carson said this the other day in an appearance on Sean Hannity’s show (unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a more complete transcript, so I don’t know the context):

My thoughts are that marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s a well-established, fundamental pillar of society and no group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality ”” it doesn’t matter what they are ”” they don’t get to change the definition.

Just a few short years ago these remarks would probably have been unremarkable. That was then, this is now.

And empirically speaking, those groups (at least the first one) do get to change the definition, if current trends continue. So Dr. Carson may be factually wrong in terms of what will happen.

But that’s not what the uproar was about. Liberals and the left are outraged because they say that Carson compared, and therefore equated (in their rhetoric, anyway) all these groups, thus insulting gay people by lumping them all together.

Of course. We all know that when a bunch of things are listed as having a single trait in common, those things are all being equated, right?—at least if it suits the purposes of those who are out to discredit someone. So Dr. Carson is saying that gays, NAMBLA, and those who think it’s fine to have sex with animals are all the same.

Of course he’s not. It’s as though a person were discussing (to take one example) the issue of black separatism, and said that black separatism was a bad idea no matter who advocated it—black people who are fed up with racism in white-dominated society, members of the KKK, or neo-Nazis. We’d all understand that the person had listed widely disparate groups who happen to unite on their opinions of that particular policy, not groups who were comparable in any other way.

The fact that Carson was largely correct about the similar long-term aim of some of these groups regarding the traditional definition of marriage and/or who can have sex (although IMHO he should have included polygamists on his list rather than the bestiality folks—who as far as I know do not as yet advocate marriage between humans and animals) does not change a thing. The left will do what the left will do, and one of the things the left will do is to destroy articulate black conservatives.

[NOTE: Looking at the text of the Johns Hopkins medical students’ petition to disinvite Carson as commencement speaker, I’m struck by how it fits in with my previous post here, in which I point out that until his prayer breakfast speech disagreeing with Obama (after which he became a goat) Carson was considered a hero to liberals. The commencement invitation was offered before that speech, and my guess is that the students have been looking for a way out ever since he dissed Obama. Now they have found one.]

[NOTE II: And just to underline the ubiquity of the term “wetback” when Rep. Young (who was born in 1933) was a child and young man, see the history of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s program officially designated Operation Wetback in 1954:

The effort began in California and Arizona in 1954 and coordinated 1,075 Border Patrol agents, along with state and local police agencies. Tactics employed included going house to house in Mexican-American neighborhoods and citizenship checks during standard traffic stops.

Some 750 agents targeted agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions per day. By the end of July, over 50,000 illegal aliens were caught in the two states. An estimated 488,000 illegal aliens are believed to have left voluntarily, for fear of being apprehended. By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and the INS estimated that 500,000 to 700,000 had left Texas of their own accord. To discourage illicit re-entry, buses and trains took many deportees deep within Mexican territory before releasing them.

Tens of thousands more were deported by two chartered ships: the Emancipation and the Mercurio. The ships ferried them from Port Isabel, Texas, to Veracruz, Mexico, more than 500 miles (800 km) to the south. Some were taken as far as 1,000 miles. Deportation by sea was ended after seven deportees jumped overboard from the Mercurio and drowned, provoking a mutiny that led to a public outcry in Mexico.

The tide of history has taken us in another direction, hasn’t it? Now it’s a huge scandal to use the word “wetback”—or even to suggest that these are illegal immigrants rather than “undocumented workers.” Funny thing was that Rep. Young’s words were not the least bit critical of these workers. But that doesn’t matter, of course.]

Why the EU is a really, really bad idea

The New Neo Posted on by

This article by Timothy Garton Ash goes into only part of the reason:

Why is Europe in this downward spiral of mutual resentment? Because of the basic design flaws of the euro, certainly. Also because of mistaken economic policies in some of the “peripheral” countries of the Eurozone and, more recently, in the northern core. Meanwhile, each short-term Eurozone fix sows the seeds of another Eurozone crisis. Thus, a 50% haircut for holders of Greek government bonds, agreed to in autumn 2011, helped topple Cypriot banks into the abyss.

Yet the deepest cause is the mismatch between a single currency area and 17 national polities. The economics are continental; the politics are still national. What is more, those politics are democratic. If this is not 1913, it is also not the 1930s. Instead of the “Europe of the dictators,” we have a Europe of democracies. Instead of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution,” we have permanent elections. Some leader somewhere in Europe is always having to trim the jib and pull in the mainsail because of an imminent vote.

All of this is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. It’s not just the design flaws of the Euro, it’s the design flaws of the EU. If elections are a problem in each country, at least those leaders are accountable to someone. How much more problematic is the lack of elections for the EU commissioners:

All these countries, you know, we joined this thing 30 years ago, you joined it 15 years ago – and we all thought we were joining a Europe where we trade together, cooperate together – they were the promises that were made. And now we find we have a European Commission, unelected by the people, unremovable, and they are the government of Europe.

Most of the laws that are made in your country every year come directly from those unelected European commissioners and what’s happening in every country in Europe is the politicians are moving in this direction, wanting more and more power, and the people are saying, ‘What’s going on? What’s happened to our democracy?’ So there is a big gap that is opening up.

Another design flaw is that most of the European welfare states are living beyond their economic means. And the EU (until now, anyway) has encouraged this rather than discouraging it, because of the perception that other EU countries have deep pockets that can be tapped into when the going gets rough.

[NOTE: The end of Ash’s article reads like this, “you can’t blame [the English] for the shemozzle of the Eurozone.”

Say what? I’d never heard that word before—although I’m familiar with “schlemozle” (a born loser) which is close (all these words have a gazillion different alternate spellings). Turns out that “shemozzle” is Yiddish for “a noisy confusion or dispute; uproar.”

Learn something new every day, sometimes from the most unexpected sources.]

Getting organized

The New Neo Posted on by

For years I’ve been meaning to reorganize my files.

Last time I tried was probably fifteen years ago at least, and even then I should have weeded out a lot more. But now it’s gotten to the point where I have trouble finding things, even though they’re labeled. The labels are frayed and the writing has faded, and the whole enterprise has expanded to the point that I don’t know where to look for the proper folder, or exactly what might be in it anymore even if I were to find it.

Months of wringing my hands and leaving some of my unfiled piles of paper out on the dining room table in order to jump-start my project by shaming me into it had no effect except to make my living space seem even more chaotic. And so I took the unprecedented step (to me, at least) of hiring an organizer.

It’s a time-limited task; she only comes here to help me with my papers. Already it’s borne fruit; about a quarter of my files look like models in an ad photo, neatly color-coded by topic, no papers sticking out to mar their almost-military order, with lovely readable printed labels that are easy to see now that I’ve installed a battery-powered closet light over them (I used to have to take a flashlight to this particular set of files, but no more).

And then last night I decided to start on my taxes. With my new system partly in place it would be easier, right? But when I went to get my 2011 tax returns, which had not been re-organized and should have been in the place where all my tax returns have been happily residing for years, they were nowhere to be found.

It seemed they’d disappeared off the face of the earth, unlikely though that seemed. And where did I finally find them after hours of searching? In the last place I looked—and that’s not a joke, because it turns out that the last place I looked was the very last place I figured they could have been, after looking just about everywhere else. They were in the very rear of the very bottom drawer of a completely different file cabinet on a different floor than where they’d always been.

And why was that? Well, it turns out the organizer had hastily (and temporarily) put them there after clearing out a file drawer upstairs in order to store something else in it. Without telling me.

Well, nobody’s perfect.

Meanwhile, in North Korea…

The New Neo Posted on by

…plans continue—or at the very least, nuke-rattling propaganda continues.

North Korea has been on this path for many years, confounding at least three administrations which have had no idea what to do about it. I’ve never read an article on the subject that convinces me that anyone else knows what to do about it, either.

I note, though, that although Los Angeles and Washington DC make a certain amount of sense, what’s Austin doing there? Has Kim got something against the Longhorns?

Celebrate freedom: Passover and beyond

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. The sentiments still seem to me to be highly, highly appropriate. Maybe even more so, if anything. And once again, the holidays of Passover and Easter intersect.]

It’s the holiday season, and one of those rare years when Passover and Easter come close together, as they did during the original Easter. So I get a twofer when I wish my readers “Happy Holidays!”

In recent years whenever I’ve attended a Seder, I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.

Offhand, I can’t think of another religious holiday that takes the trouble to celebrate freedom. Nations certainly do: there’s our own Fourth of July, France’s Bastille Day, and various other independence days around the world. But these are secular holidays rather than religious ones.

For those who’ve never been to a Seder ceremony, I suggest attending one (and these days it’s easier, since they are usually a lot shorter and more varied than in the past). A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:

“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”

Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”

Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars such as that in Iraq only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it; and what we’ve observed there in recent years has been the hard, long, and dangerous task of attempting to secure it in a place with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.

Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Sometimes they are cynical and power-mad; sometimes they are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.

As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”

Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.

History has borne that out, I’m afraid. That’s one of the reasons the people of Eastern Europe have been more inclined to ally themselves recently with the US than those of Western Europe have–the former have only recently come out from under the Soviet yoke of being regarded as those small black and meaningless dots in the huge Communist “idyll.”

Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined (appropriately enough for the approaching Easter holiday) a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee of bread (just ask the Ukrainians).

Is freedom a “basic need, then? Ask, also, the Vietnamese “boat people.” And then ask them what they think of John Kerry’s assertion, during his 1971 Senate testimony, that they didn’t care what sort of government they had as long as their other “basic needs” were met:

How important is freedom? We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart…

So that when we in fact state, let us say, that we will have a ceasefire or have a coalition government, most of the 2 million men you often hear quoted under arms, most of whom are regional popular reconnaissance forces, which is to say militia, and a very poor militia at that, will simply lay down their arms, if they haven’t done so already, and not fight. And I think you will find they will respond to whatever government evolves which answers their needs, and those needs quite simply are to be fed, to bury their dead in plots where their ancestors lived, to be allowed to extend their culture, to try and exist as human beings. And I think that is what will happen…

I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist.

I beg to differ. I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.

Happy Passover, and Happy Easter! And that was no non sequitor.

To be slim, you need to change your—gut microbiota?

The New Neo Posted on by

This may seem like science fiction stuff, but it may be true nonetheless:

Not only are the “gut microbiota” different in lean people and obese people, but the mix of microbes changes after an obese patient undergoes gastric bypass and becomes more like the microbiota in lean people…

[The experiment described in the article] is the first experimental evidence that changes in the gut microbiota cause the weight loss after gastric bypass, and that the new, post-bypass mix of microbes can cause weight loss in animals that did not have surgery…

Slimming bacteria work their magic in either of two ways, studies of gut microbiota show. They seem to raise metabolism, allowing people to burn off a 630-calorie chocolate chip muffin more easily.

They also extract fewer calories from the muffin in the first place. In contrast, fattening bacteria wrest every last calorie from food.

Transferring slimming bacteria into obese people might be one way to give them the benefits of weight-loss surgery without an operation. It might also be possible to devise a menu that encourages the proliferation of slimming bacteria and reduces the population of fattening bacteria.

This information harks back to our recent very contentious discussion about weight-loss and willpower, the one that pretty much caused me to swear off writing about weight loss, a vow I broke almost instantly.

But to revisit (I’m a glutton for punishment, as well as pectin jelly beans), the argument centered on my contention that a significant number of overweight people do not eat more (or exercise less) than a significant number of thin people. Of course, many do, but I’m not sure what the breakdown is.

That’s why the above study interests me. As much as I’ve read about diet and weight, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about these magic bacteria. But it’s not new; see this for another study, this time one in which naturally obese-resistant mice (bred for the ability to eat all they want, be kept from exercising, and still not gain weight) became obese when the human bacterium enterobacter was introduced into their guts.

I’d like a lot more research before I come to any conclusions, but it certainly supports my previous observations. It also makes me wonder, though, if introducing these bacteria into heavy people’s guts would ultimately be good for their health. I suspect it has something to do with how much extra weight they already carry and how much their health has suffered from it, because there is plenty of evidence (see this, for example) that being underweight is more destructive to health than being mildly overweight. Could it be that slimming bacteria, or the lack of food absorption they foster, impairs health in some way over time?

And of course, if famine comes, the slim people will be out of luck. Then they’ll wish they’d kept their old gut flora and fauna.

The SSM slippery slope?

The New Neo Posted on by

What slippery slope?

See this:

Above, you’ll find a short video composed of the floor speeches some top Democrats made about SSM. At the time, Republicans wanted to block gay marriage in Massachusetts by amending the constitution with an official marriage definition. Democrats argued against that, but they didn’t argue in favor of gay marriage. They argued that DOMA made such an amendment unneccessary. They assured people like Rick Santorum that the slippery slope case for gay marriage was bogus.

The new Democratic advocates for SSM fall into two camps. The first consists of people who always liked the idea of this but worried about losing national elections. In his memoir, Democratic consultant Bob Shrum remembers John Kerry fretting that the Massachusetts Supreme Court had forced Democrats to talk about gay marriage before they were ready to. “Why couldn’t they just wait a year?” he asked Shrum, mournfully. The second camp consists of people who really do oppose the idea of gay people getting married. Republicans argued that this second camp was tiny, and that liberals were hiding behind it. They were right!

Yes, Republicans were right. But that and a dime will get them almost nothing these days.

Other Republicans are saying we’ve not heard the end of this issue even if SSM becomes the law of the land:

Any Christian who refuses to recognize that man wants to upend God’s order [through same sex marriage] will have to be driven from the national conversation. They will be labeled bigots and ultimately criminals.

Already we have seen florists, bakers, and photographers suffer because they have refused to go along with the cultural shift toward gay marriage. There will be more.

Once the world decides that real marriage is something other than natural or Godly, those who would point it out must be silenced and, if not, punished. The state must be used to do this. Consequently, the libertarian pipe dream of getting government out of marriage can never ever be possible.

My understanding of the underpinnings of the religious attitude towards marriage (that it should be limited to one man and one woman—an attitude that used to include all the major religions in this country except the Church of Latter Day Saints, and they came on board quite some time ago too) was the idea that the sexual impulse was sacred when channeled towards an institution that favored procreative sex. Whether or not some marriages (the elderly, the infertile) did not yield children was considered irrelevant; it was the institution of marriage with that particular structure that was sacred, favored, and also protected by law because it encouraged reproduction and a stable environment in which to raise children.

Religion, society, and law had an interest in furthering all of that. And religion, society, and law (which were more unified back then, despite the official separation of church and state in terms of forbidding state-established religions) also had an interest in discouraging types of sex that channeled the all-powerful and easily-distracted sexual impulse into avenues that could never lead to procreation, or that potentially wreaked some sort of havoc with the stability of marriage and the raising of children. To further support those ends, society passed laws (which I’m old enough to remember) that forbid not only homosexual acts, but also laws that banned the sale of contraception even to married couples, or that forbid sodomy even to heterosexuals (see this for a relevant chart of how recently many of these laws were repealed). The forbidden practices continued, of course—under the table, as it were—but they were not sanctioned and celebrated.

So it wasn’t just an anti-gay vendetta. It was a fairly seamless religious/societal/legal consensus on what was approved and what was disapproved, and why. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah? The people of yesteryear did.

I’m not personally a follower of a religion or religious subdivision that still subscribes to such beliefs in the literal sense. But I respect religious people and think I understand the reasons for their objections to same sex marriage. I believe that Eric Erickson’s cautions that I quoted above are extremely valid, and that SSM is merely one step in a long “progressive” march towards the eradication of religion and/or its demonization (a word that has an ironic twist in this context, does it not?).

And I see the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as expressing a cultural truth about anything-goes societies, which is that unbridled sexual license is part and parcel of a spiraling multifaceted decline in that society as a whole into more general chaos and amorality, especially as regards the rearing of the next generation. Which comes first—the specifically sexual license or the more generalized decline—is unclear, although I happen to think it’s the latter, and that each feeds into and amplifies the other.

And that, if one looks at the family today in the US, it’s fairly obvious that we’ve been sliding down that slippery slope for quite some time now.

[NOTE: As for the specific question of what effect same sex marriage has on all this, my honest answer is that I don’t know and I don’t think anyone knows. That’s one of the many reasons—federalism being another—that I think it should be left to the states. There’s even an argument to be made that, once homosexual behavior and homosexual couples are accepted in a society (something that’s already occurred), the institution of gay marriage helps to stabilize their behavior and to create less promiscuity and sexual license, not more. But being pretty much of a libertarian and federalist on this issue does not stop me from recognizing the potential dangers to religious freedom, which concern me very much.]

DOMA unconstitutional?

The New Neo Posted on by

Signs may be pointing to the idea that SCOTUS will strike down Congress’s 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as unconstitutionally exceeding federal power.

That’s because Justice Kennedy (who may be the only one who counts) appears to be leaning that way. Then again, we’ve learned from the Obamacare SCOTUS hearings that we can’t tell all that much from the questions justices ask under those circumstances. Perhaps they are playing devil’s advocate.

Because I believe in federalism, my opinion is that DOMA actually is unconstitutional. I also think California’s Proposition 8 is constitutional, because the issue should be left to the states and banning same sex marriage (as opposed to same sex civil unions) does not violate the 14th Amendment.

So, in the first case federalism would cut in favor of allowing SSM if a state so desires, and of applying that state law to federal rules affecting marriage (such as those involving federal tax breaks). In the second it would cut in favor of defending a ban on SSM if a state so desires.

If the nation wants to pass something like DOMA, the proper path would be an amendment to the federal Constitution. I’m not at all sure that route would have succeeded had they tried that in 1996. But instead they went the shorter, more simple, more achievable—and more vulnerable—way of working through Congress. At present a DOMA-type amendment would have no chance of passing. I don’t foresee that changing, either.

[NOTE: It will be interesting if DOMA is struck down by SCOTUS as unconstitutional. I believe that the same Court found Obamacare constitutional in part because the justices were reluctant to declare a major act of Congress unconstitutional. In DOMA is struck down, they will be doing just that.]

RIP Rabbi Herschel Schacter

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following article actually appeared in the NY Times. But since the Times is behind a firewall, I’m linking instead to this copy of the piece. Note also that it is about Rabbi Herschel Schacter, whose last name has only one “h,” and who died recently at the age of 95. There is another very prominent Rabbi Herschel Schachter, whose last name has two “h”s.]

The story of Rabbi Herschel Schacter is well worth reading. Here’s one of the more interesting excerpts:

It was April 11, 1945, and Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army had liberated the concentration camp scarcely an hour before. Rabbi Schacter, who was attached to the Third Army’s VIII Corps, was the first Jewish chaplain to enter in its wake…

He was led to the Kleine Lager, or Little Camp, a smaller camp within the larger one. There, in filthy barracks, men lay on raw wooden planks stacked from floor to ceiling. They stared down at the rabbi, in his unfamiliar military uniform, with unmistakable fright.

“Shalom Aleichem, Yidden,” Rabbi Schacter cried in Yiddish, “ihr zint frei!” ”” “Peace be upon you, Jews, you are free!” He ran from barracks to barracks, repeating those words. He was joined by those Jews who could walk, until a stream of people swelled behind him.

As he passed a mound of corpses, Rabbi Schacter spied a flicker of movement. Drawing closer, he saw a small boy, Prisoner 17030, hiding in terror behind the mound.

“I was afraid of him,” the child would recall long afterward in an interview with The New York Times. “I knew all the uniforms of SS and Gestapo and Wehrmacht, and all of a sudden, a new kind of uniform. I thought, ”˜A new kind of enemy.’ ”

With tears streaming down his face, Rabbi Schacter picked the boy up. “What’s your name, my child?” he asked in Yiddish.

“Lulek,” the child replied.

“How old are you?” the rabbi asked.

“What difference does it make?” Lulek, who was 7, said. “I’m older than you, anyway.”

“Why do you think you’re older?” Rabbi Schacter asked, smiling.

“Because you cry and laugh like a child,” Lulek replied. “I haven’t laughed in a long time, and I don’t even cry anymore. So which one of us is older?”…

Please read the whole thing. If you do, you’ll find out what eventually happened to Lulek.

[NOTE: Much more about Lulek here. Quite an extraordinary child from an extraordinary family.]

More on same-sex marriage and the law

The New Neo Posted on by

Because of the current SCOTUS hearings on two cases involving the legality of same-sex marriage, you can read thousands of new articles about it, discussing the social science aspects (see this, for example, about that dubious data), the cultural ramifications, and of course the legal issues.

It’s an enormous amount to wade through, and perhaps that’s why so much commentary on it is muddled (present company excluded, of course :-)). Few people understand the rather complex legal issues involved, and most of the opinion I’ve read comes down to “I think SSM is the right thing to do” or “I think it’s the wrong thing to do.” But the Court is supposed to decide its cases based on whether it’s the legal thing to do under the Constitution, and what role federal vs. state government has in the regulation of marriage.

This post would be book-length if I tried to explain all of the legal issues, and it would probably take me at least six months more research to delve into the details and speak intelligibly about them. I’m not about to do that. But whether you think that the case for SSM is self-evidently progress in the cause of liberty, or whether you think it represents the further precipitous decline of Western culture into immorality and chaos, the Court’s charge is much narrower: the law on the subject. Questions as to whether the federal government (Congress, in the case of DOMA) can regulate marriage or whether that function is relegated to the states, and whether (in the Proposition 8 case) a state ban on SSM violates the Fourteenth Amendment protections that apply to states as well as the federal government, are the essential ones before the Court.

I make no predictions about how the Court will go on this. I don’t have a gut sense of it, the way I did with the Obamacare case (where I correctly predicted Obamacare would be found constitutional, although I did not foresee the exact reasons Roberts would cite). I have to say that since most experts were wrong on their predictions about Obamacare, I don’t trust their prognostications on the SSM cases either (the questions the justices ask during oral arguments are a far from infallible indication of anything about the final decision).

I will say this, though: not only do the justices have their own prejudices and biases which are hard to weed out (assuming that they’re trying), but it seems to me that in recent years SCOTUS decisions have more and more reflected justices’ concerns with public opinion and trends, and a desire to move with the times.

In both of the cases now before the Supreme Court the law offers the justices a way out, which is to punt (as I wrote yesterday about the first one, which deals with California’s Proposition 8). Punting would have the advantage of letting the times (rather than the Court) move with the times. But that may involve too much waiting and watching for the more eagerly activist members of the Court to bear.

Why government won’t leave us alone

The New Neo Posted on by

For all you libertarians out there (and I pretty much include myself in that group, although I’m not of the most extreme Ron Paulish type)—this is why you’ve got a very difficult task in bucking the government-intervention tide:

Let’s take a step back for a moment first. Many prominent conservatives, like anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, argue that conservatives just want to be left alone. In fact, Norquist has dubbed conservatism the “leave us alone” coalition.

Cultural conservatives see this as naé¯ve. The state, they reason, will never leave us alone. We either win or we lose the culture war, but you can’t opt out. In this regard, they are like Winston Churchill, who said of his predecessor: “Mr. Chamberlain can’t seem to understand that we live in a very wicked world ”¦ English people want to be left alone, and I daresay a great many other people want to be left alone too. But the world is like a tired old horse plodding down a long road. Every time it strays off and tries to graze peacefully in some nice green pasture, along comes a new master to flog it a bit further along.’”

Since the state will never really leave us alone, social conservatives reason that the state should encourage ordered liberty. That means that the state should incentivize behavior that has served Western Civilization well over the years. In other words, as Dylan said, “you’re gonna have to serve somebody,” so social conservatives reason that a virtuous society should encourage behavior deemed virtuous by traditional Judeo-Christian culture, and discourage behavior at odds with that.

This, of course, is unpopular in the modern world ”” not just amongst liberals, but also with libertarian-leaning conservatives, and the general public.

This doesn’t mean libertarianism should be abandoned; not at all. But it does explain quite succinctly why it often seems to be a losing battle.

And sometimes I think Churchill could trot out a brilliant comment on just about anything.