On carrying guns in church: thou shalt not kill, or thou shalt not murder?

The New Neo Posted on by

In today’s previous post, I began to tackle the question of whether the parishioners in the Texas church where yesterday’s mass murder took place were banned from carrying guns. In it I quoted the following rules in Texas:

Churches in Texas may prevent handgun license holders from carrying handguns inside church buildings as long as the church gives proper notice. Each church may decide for itself whether to allow:

Both open and concealed carry of handguns
Concealed carry of handguns but not open carry
Open carry of handguns and not concealed carry
No handguns regardless of whether they are carried openly or concealed

A church does not need to take any action if it wishes to allow handgun license holders to conceal carry or open carry in church buildings. If permitting handgun license holders to conceal carry or open carry on church premises is a cause of concern to your church, Texas Penal Code Sections 30.006 and 30.007 provide clear rules for notifying handgun license holders that your church is a gun-free zone or concealed carry only.

I added that it was a church-by-church decision, but I didn’t know which rules were followed by the church where the massacre occurred. Obviously, if there was a no-gun rule there, it didn’t deter the gunman and may have actually encouraged him.

Now I’ve discovered that (if the information on this “progressive” website is correct, as I believe it probably is) this question is actually a hotly debated topic in Christianity:

Whereas states like South Carolina ban guns in church in most instances, Texas allows firearms in sanctuary halls unless a church explicitly says otherwise. And a new Texas law signed in September allows houses of worship in the state to arm their congregations as a security measure.

However, while it’s certainly not unusual for churches to have security precautions or personnel, many faith leaders rebuke Paxton and Jeffress’ ideas that guns should be allowed in Sunday morning services. A 2012 PRRI poll found that 76 percent of Americans oppose allowing concealed weapons in church; This includes pastors in Texas, where many churches opted to ban guns on their premises after open-carry became the law of the land there in 2016. The Catholic Bishop of Dallas, for instance, banned guns in all his diocese’s parishes that year, following the lead of Catholic leaders who took similar steps in Georgia. Other Catholics also spoke out against open carry.

“This policy [of banning guns in church] is rooted in the belief that our churches, schools and other places of worship are intended to be sanctuaries ”“ holy sites where people come to pray and participate in the ministry of the Church,” Dallas Bishop Kevin Farrell wrote at the time.

Religious leaders have long been one of the loudest, most consistent voices calling for legislation that would restrict gun sales and use””not increase them

I followed some of the links in the article, and found statements that seem to me like an invitation to terrorists and other mass murderers. For example, see this:

Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory and Savannah Bishop Gregory Hartmayer issued a decree prohibiting guns and knives with blades longer than 5 inches from parishes, churches, schools, administrative offices and other buildings owned or used by the Catholic community effective July 1.

In a statement, the bishops said Catholic places of worship are sanctuaries where “ways of peace and reconciliation” should be the rule.

“This decree is rooted in the belief that our churches and other places of worship are intended to be sanctuaries — holy sites where people come to pray and to worship God. In this nation of ours, they have seldom been the locations where violence has disrupted the otherwise peaceful atmosphere. Should it be necessary, we will seek the assistance of trained law enforcement personnel for protection, but among ourselves we will first seek ways of peace and reconciliation.”

That statement was issued back in July of 2014. It seems to me that it doesn’t make sense to wait to protect yourself until a certain quota of innocent people are killed. And if you are going to “seek the assistance of trained law enforcement personnel for protection” if the death toll in churches meets your standard for activating self-defense, then why not let your church members protect themselves? After all, an armed guard can be more easily shot or disarmed than a church full of armed—or possibly armed—worshipers. How many guards are you going to hire?

More here:

Other critics of gun violence include Shane Claiborne, a prolific Christian speaker and writer who works with an initiative that literally melts down AR-15s””weapons similar to the one reportedly used by Sutherland shooter””and turns them into plowshares, in keeping with a biblical reference.

When asked about Paxton and Jeffress’ comments, Claiborne responded by citing various Christian scriptures decrying violence and weaponry.

“Jesus carried a cross not a gun,” Claiborne told ThinkProgress. “He said greater love has no one that this””to lay down their life for another. The early Christians said ”˜for Christ we can die but we cannot kill.’ When Peter picked up a sword to protect Jesus and cut off a guys ear, Jesus scolded him and put the ear back on. The early Christians said ”˜when Jesus disarmed peter he disarmed every Christian.’ Evil is real but Jesus teaches us to fight evil without becoming evil. One the cross we see what love looks like when it stares evil in the face. Love is willing to die but not to kill.”

Hey, unlike Claiborne I’m no Christian speaker/writer, prolific or otherwise. But I’ve always been under the impression that that “swords into plowshares” verse—and the Book of Isaiah in general—is a prophecy, not a description of the way things are now. Not only that, but if Christians were to disarm themselves prior to the apocalypse there will be an awful lot of dead Christians.

Apparently, the Crusaders didn’t get the memo, either.

By the way, that story about Jesus, Peter, and the ear (with which I was previously unfamiliar) appears to be not a general call for complete non-violence, but a specific call to allow the process by which Jesus was arrested, sentenced, and later crucified to unfold:

According to the Bible, one of the disciples, Simon Peter, being armed with a sword, cut off the servant’s ear in an attempt to prevent the arrest of Jesus…

Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?

I would add that the Commandment that is often cited as being “Thou shalt not kill” is a mistranslation of the Hebrew, which originally said “Thou shalt not murder.” As far as I know, there is no Torah (Old Testament) prohibition against self-defense:

The Torah chooses its language very carefully, and indeed, every dot and tittle is parsed to understand the full meaning. G-d chose the root R-Tz-Ch for the Ten Commandments to make it clear and explicit: murder is an evil, heinous crime, a crime that — like the others in the Ten Commandments — is destructive of civilization itself. But killing, while a grave action that must be seriously evaluated, is at times a necessary action — one that is a sanctioned last recourse under prescribed circumstances and one that is occasionally morally appropriate as in the taking of life as penalty for a capital offense.

I never thought Christianity was a pacifist religion in terms of self-defense, but apparently there is a pacifist strain. It reminds me of Gandhi’s advice to the Jews to allow themselves to be slaughtered, or to the Hindus of Lahore to do likewise (and if you haven’t already read this post describing both, I urge you to do so).

Lastly, the Texas church killing made me think of this scene from “High Noon.” It’s not really analogous—there is no mass murderer coming to the church—but it’s a discussion in the church about whether the parishioners are going to assist Sheriff Kane in fighting off the Miller gang that is coming to take revenge. Note particularly the pastor’s speech at the end, which I originally thought didn’t ring true, but I’m now thinking he represents a certain strain of more pacifist Christianity (the pastor speaks at 2:34, but it’s worth watching the whole thing):

Here’s a little bit more that constitutes the end of the scene:

Gary Cooper as Kane remains silent for most of the scene, with lasts about four minutes. But his face is more expressive than speech would be. He is not totally silent, however; he says this:

Which in turn reminds me of one of my favorite movie moments:

More on the Texas shooting

The New Neo Posted on by

More news is coming out today on the Texas church shooting, and as often is the case the British papers seem to have more details. We still don’t know the motive, but there are reports that the attacker was an atheist whose Facebook page called churchgoers stupid, and that his former wife and former in-laws had sometimes attended services at the church but were not present on the day of the shooting.

Two intrepid Texans seem to have given chase and been responsible for cornering the perpetrator till police arrived:

The inevitable calls for more gun control have come from the left. Reading the article and seeing the quotes in it, I don’t see a single statement that indicates exactly what gun control measure ought to have been passed, or ought to now be passed, that would have stopped this particular crime. That’s true of an awful lot of these shootings, I might add.

It’s been difficult so far to get much information on how the shooter obtained his weapon. Or rather, it’s been easy so far to get too much information on it, much of it conflicting and some (or all) of it wrong. For example, I’ve read that he tried to buy a gun in Texas and was refused:

The shooter who killed at least 26 people in a small church in rural Texas had previously tried to get a gun license in the state, but was denied.

“So how was it that he was able to get a gun? By all the facts that we seem to know, he was not supposed to have access to a gun,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, citing the director of Texas’ Department of Public Safety. “So how did this happen?”

It wasn’t immediately clear why Devin Kelley, who was shot by an armed neighbour of the church after the massacre, was denied a firearm license. But, initial reporting suggests he had a troubled life, and had committed crimes in the past that could have conceivably barred him from legally obtaining a gun.

So either he obtained a gun illegally somewhere else despite the fact that gun laws worked to deny him one, or someone slipped up later on and didn’t follow the law and sold him a gun without properly checking. Perhaps the latter, because I’ve also read that he obtained a gun in Texas legally, but this should not have been allowed:

The federal government’s firearm transaction record, which buyers must legally fill out, asks about felony convictions. Kelley bought a Ruger AR-556 rifle, used in the attack on the church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in April of last year from an Academy Sports & Outdoors store in San Antonio, a law-enforcement official told CNN.

As far as I can see, the jury is still out on how he obtained this gun, and therefore we don’t know if any law would have changed anything. It’s very possible that the law should have stopped him but didn’t because of human error. I’ll add that whatever the law, I believe this guy (who also had a history of stalking ex-girlfriends) would have obtained a gun illegally if he couldn’t have managed it legally, or would have used other weapons such as a bomb.

Just four days ago I wrote a post on gun-free zones. So today I ask: was the church where the massacre occurred a gun-free zone? I haven’t seen any reports on this yet, but I wonder. If it was, this was another case of sitting ducks. Here’s what I could find about the rules on carrying guns into churches in Texas:

Beginning January 1, 2016, Texans with a handgun license will be allowed to openly carry their handguns. Churches in Texas may prevent handgun license holders from carrying handguns inside church buildings as long as the church gives proper notice. Each church may decide for itself whether to allow:

Both open and concealed carry of handguns
Concealed carry of handguns but not open carry
Open carry of handguns and not concealed carry
No handguns regardless of whether they are carried openly or concealed

A church does not need to take any action if it wishes to allow handgun license holders to conceal carry or open carry in church buildings. If permitting handgun license holders to conceal carry or open carry on church premises is a cause of concern to your church, Texas Penal Code Sections 30.006 and 30.007 provide clear rules for notifying handgun license holders that your church is a gun-free zone or concealed carry only.

So it’s a church-by-church decision. My guess is that more of them will be allowing people to carry legally obtained guns into church after this incident. Quite obviously, there’s no way to prevent a killer from entering with a weapon. Among other things, a killer can kill guards, especially if they are surprised. But it seems to me that a congregation where some of the people were armed might have at least reduced the death toll, if not deterred the perpetrator.

[ADDENDUM: There’s a report that the shooting followed some sort of domestic dispute:

At a press conference Monday morning, Freeman Martin, a regional director of the Texas Department of Safety said the shooting was tied to a domestic situation inside the family of the shooter, identified by authorities as Devin Patrick Kelley.

Martin said Kelly’s in-laws attended the church, but weren’t at the church at the time of the shooting. He said that Kelly’s mother-in-law had received threatening texts from him.

That leads me to believe that the report I referenced in the post that Kelley’s ex in-laws sometimes attended the church may have been wrong. Maybe it was his present in-laws. Or maybe it actually was both (or neither, I suppose).

In addition, there’s this:

[Authorities] said Kelley also used his cellphone to tell his father that he had been shot and didn’t think he would survive.

That indicates to me that one of his pursuers inflicted a serious wound, and that Kelley may have lost control of his car in part because he was starting to bleed out. It’s also not clear whether the fatal wound was self-inflicted, although I’m pretty sure that can be easily ascertained by examination of the bullet.

Also:

Tim Miller is the director of security at a mega church in Florida, one of the largest in the country. He says churches are soft targets.

“Everybody gets it that you need to spiritually protect your people, you need to pray for, but in today’s world you need to have a plan to protect them,” Miller said. “In times past churches have not felt the need. i think this last month has been a huge wake up for churches across the country.”

Last September, Miller hosted a two-day seminar on church security at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, attracting representatives from 35-area churches.

I don’t see any reason you can’t pray while carrying a weapon on your person for self-defense.]

Texas church shooting

The New Neo Posted on by

This is still a breaking story, and I imagine we’ll learn much more tomorrow, but an especially vicious and deadly shooting has occurred in a Texas church:

An armor-clad gunman opened fire inside a rural Texas church on Sunday, killing more than two dozen people in the largest mass shooting in the state’s history, officials said…

We are dealing with the largest mass shooting in our state’s history,” he added.

The shooter is also dead, officials said.

Law enforcement officials identified the gunman on Sunday evening as Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, of neighboring Comal County. Officials were preparing to search his home. Texas officials would say on the record only the shooter was a “young white male.”

Children and a pregnant woman are among the dead, including the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter.

Kelley seems to have been the proverbial bad apple:

Ann Stefanek, a spokeswoman for the Air Force, confirmed that Kelly was court-martialed in 2012 on two charges of assaulting his spouse and their child. He was confined for a year, reduced in rank to airman basic E-1 and given a bad conduct discharge in 2014, Stefanek said.

So far we know nothing about motive. Maybe the gunman left an explanatory note. Or maybe he will continue to be a mystery, just as the Las Vegas shooter Paddock has remained so far. My personal opinion is that at least part of Kelley’s motive was some sort of competition to be the biggest, baddest shooter ever.

It seems that he was planning to kill more, but was stopped by another Texan with a gun:

A local resident confronted the gunman after the shooting began, “grabbed his rifle and engaged that suspect,” Martin said.

The gunman dropped the rifle and then fled with the resident in pursuit, he said.

As law enforcement responded, the suspect ran off the road in his car at the Wilson-Guadalupe county line and crashed, Martin said. The suspect was found dead in the vehicle.

“We don’t know if this was a self-inflicted gunshot wound or if he was shot by our local resident who engaged him with gunfire,” he added.

I imagine we’ll hear more about this “local resident,” too.

What a horror show. I am sure many prayers are going out tonight for the dead and wounded and their families.

The hide-and-seek toolbar

The New Neo Posted on by

I usually take Sundays off from posting. After all, a person’s got to do the dishes now and then, right?

But that doesn’t mean I swear off the computer on Sundays entirely. More’s the pity; I probably should, but that’s what addiction’s all about.

Today I went to the computer to check a few things and discovered that overnight my toolbar had disappeared. I’ve been using computers for over twenty years, and this happens now and then for no reason I’ve even been able to figure out. Periodically, that handy little line way up on top that says things like “File,” “Edit,” “View,” “History,” “Bookmarks,” “Tools” (and the least helpful of them all, “Help”) goes on walkabout and I have no idea why and no idea how to bring it back.

That’s good for at least a half hour of Googling, reading instructions, and trying to apply them when they don’t correspond at all to what I’m seeing on my computer, and then finally finding a set of instructions that wasn’t written by programmers who already know exactly what they’re talking about anyway and see no reason to communicate anything clearly to the rest of us stupidheads.

Do you detect a note of frustration here? If so, you are correct. But at least I have my beloved, much-used toolbar back.

While we’re on the subject, why would a person want to hide every command on the screen? Is there some esthetic that dictates that a clean look is cool? Does the person just want to maximize the size of the display? Does it have something to do with the ubiquity of cellphones and tablets, which have small screens?

More and more I find that my time is taken up with this game of hide-and-seek, or “icon, icon, what’s the meaning of this icon?” I prefer words to graphics, and in that I’m probably in the minority.

Robert Frost on progressive education 100 years ago

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is written in conjunction with this post on recent events on college campuses.]

Robert Frost has long been one of America’s best-known poets. During his lifetime, he was also seen as a sort of folksy New Englander on the lecture circuit.

But Frost was far more than that (as I’ve previously discussed in many posts). Frost not only had a great deal to say about politics, human nature, science, and literature, but he’d been a teacher and a college professor for many years and he had a great deal to say about education as well.

The following excerpts are from a fascinating book called Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, by Peter J. Stanlis. I think they are remarkably apropos to what’s been happening today, because they describe some of its roots [emphasis mine]:

To Frost, progressive education [Dewey] was a closed system that would “compel liberality.” Like Rousseau, it would force students to be free, not merely from self-discipline, but from social traditions and normative beliefs…To Frost, the progressive theory of the child-centered school was false. Its worst feature was to encourage immature and uneducated students to have a decisive voice in determining the curriculum. Frost’s response was to declare, “There is such a thing as not being old enough to understand.”…

Two things in progressive education provoked Frost’s particular rage—their abandonment of the ancient Greek and Roman classics and their attempts to apply the scientific method to teaching. The latter separated form or technique from genuine content…

Frost also rejected the social objective of progressive education—to indoctrinate students in favor of egalitarian democracy. He always favored education that would allow “the cream to rise to the top.” He believed that in secondary education the progressive theory stressed emotion too much, whereas graduate studies were too centered in abstract reason…To Frost, sound education involved all of human nature….

Frost began teaching at Amherst in 1917 (that’s exactly a century ago), under Amherst president Alexander Meiklejohn:

To Frost, Meiklehohn’s conception of academic freedom was merely a collegiate adaptation of Dewey’s progressive education in the form of doctrinaire compulsory liberalism, centered in social problems rather than in psychology. Meiklehohn’s educational reforms were in the spirit of what Frost called “the guild of social planners,” men who assumed that abstract reasoning and logic were sufficient to solve the world’s great perennial problems. After meeting with some of Meiklejohn’s young faculty appointees, Dwight Morrow, an Amherst trustee, described them to a friend as “bumptious young men…who insisted that nobody thought or studied at Amherst until they came.”

Here’s how Frost described them:

They fancied themselves thinkers. At Amherst you thought, while at other colleges you merely learned… I found that by thinking they meant stocking up with radical ideas, by learning they meant stocking up with conservative ideas—a harmless distinction, bless their simple hearts…They had picked up the idea somewhere that the time was now past for the teacher to teach the pupil. From now on it was the thing for the pupil to teach himself using, as he saw fit, the teacher as an instrument…I sat there patiently waiting, waiting for the youth to take education into their own hands and start the new world. Sometimes I laughed and sometimes I cried a little internally…

Here’s more from Stanlis:

The hubris of their young teachers deluded egotistical students to imagine that through their rational discussions they could find easy and valid solutions to the complex problems of society.

Frost wrote of the experience:

I discovered what the Amherst Idea was that is so much talked of, and I got amicably out. The Amherst Idea as I had it in so many words from the high custodian is this: “Freedom for taste and intellect.” Freedom from what? Freedom from every prejudice in favor of state, home, church, morality, etc. I am too much a creature of prejudice to stay and listen to such stuff. Not only in favor of morality am I prejudiced, but in favor of an immorality I could name as against other immoralities. I’d no more set out in pursuit of the truth than I would in pursuit of a living unless mounted on my prejudices.

Stanlis writes:

It was clear that, like Edmund Burke, whom the poet greatly admired, by “prejudice” he simply meant moral habit beyond reflection built into human nature from infancy in favor of home, church, and state. Frost was convinced that Meiklejohn’s “freedom for taste and intellect” was destructive of the norms in the basic institutions of civil society and involved a chronic separation of the intellectual virtues from the moral virtues.

Well, we know how that all turned out, don’t we? Frost experienced a sort of fractal of what was to develop into our current university woes, and recognized at once what the dangers were and what the denouement was likely to be.

Universities: the appeasement of the bullies

The New Neo Posted on by

One turning point in the history of the university in the United States occurred about fifty years ago at Cornell (as later described by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind). And over the years the situation at academia appears to have gotten worse and worse and worse, as evidenced by recent events at the extremely “progressive” Reed College—so much worse that a lot of students are now protesting the protestors:

“The movement cannot continue to manufacture an enemy that has agreed to review the syllabus [and] bended over backwards on all accounts to accommodate the free speech of the protesters,” wrote Misha, another freshman, in the first op-ed critical of RAR [Reedies Against Racism] published in the paper. Yet the more accommodation that’s been made, the more disruptive the protests have become””and the more heightened the rhetoric. “Black Lives Matter” was the common chant at last year’s boycott. This year’s? “No cops, no KKK, no racist USA.” RAR increasingly claims those cops will be unleashed on them””or, in their words, Hum [humanities] professors are “entertaining threatening violence on our bodies.”

I believe that’s exactly what the members of the RAR want. They are Reed students (and hangers-on?) who want to provoke retaliation against themselves by an administration that so far has appeased them.

As yet no limits have been set; the administration’s hunger for appeasement seems nearly insatiable. As Allan Bloom wrote in the late 80s, describing events that had occurred at Cornell during the late 60s:

[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.

“Teachers” includes “administrators,” of course. One difference, though, between the 60s and now, is that I don’t think there’s quite as much talk by professors about academic freedom.

The one good thing about what’s happening at Reed is that the majority of the students at Reed, including some students of color, have grown fed up with the extremists and may have had enough. Quite a few students actually want to learn and are tired of having their classes disrupted by the protest groups.

I also suggest you read Professor William Jacobson’s account of what happened when he tried to speak at Vassar College (more links here):

The students who tried to prevent [my campus talk] from happening, who spread the lies, as far as I know, have not been called out by the administration. They’ve been coddled by the administration, and they need to be held accountable for what they did. Because they tried to deprive all these other students of those students’ right to education. They wanted to hear me speak.

This is similar to what happened at Reed—the few make if difficult for the larger group of more reasonable students. But the squeaky wheel gets the administration’s grease.

[NOTE: Please see my just-published post on Robert Frost’s take on the beginning of this sort of thing, one hundred years ago. Yes, one hundred years ago the administrations at colleges and universities were beginning to defer to their students rather than to teach them, as Frost describes.]

Twitter power

The New Neo Posted on by

After President Trump’s Twitter account was shut down for eleven minutes by a rogue employee or contractor on Thursday, Steven Hayward wondered:

…[T]his does raise an interesting question: If a Twitter employee can shut down Trump’s account, what else might a Twitter employee be able to do? If Trump has used the direct-message feature on Twitter, can Twitter access those? Could a rogue employee on Twitter send out a fake Trump Tweet, like “We begin bombing Pyongyang in five minutes”?

It’s an interesting question indeed. Prior to Twitter, presidents and other government officials communicated with the public through government channels, sometimes filtered through the MSM. Social media such as Twitter allows a president to reach the public more directly. But there’s still a middleman—Twitter itself. The president and the public rely on the integrity of the Twitter system, but is there any real reason to trust it?

The Spacey protection pattern

The New Neo Posted on by

The accusations against Kevin Spacey follow a certain pattern, one of attempted unwanted seductions, some so overt as to be harassment and non-violent assaults. A great deal of it seems to have been in the context of drinking, which doesn’t excuse it at all but probably is an indication of a drinking problem, too. I get the impression of a closeted gay man fighting the idea that he’s gay, but drinking quite a bit and taking advantage of the lowered inhibitions involved with drinking to make passes at any youngish man he saw as gay or possibly gay or willing to have a gay encounter.

Some of this behavior merely amounted to propositioning people. Some of it was worse, such as grabbing for their (clothed) genitals, or lying next to them or on top of them while they were sleeping. Some involved underage teenagers, but many involved young adults. But two things strike me about this. The first is how repetitive and compulsive it seems to have been. The second is how he managed to keep the secret all these years.

Perhaps that later phenomenon is the strangest of all. You’d think that, as a closeted gay person, Spacey would have a greater fear of being outed. But he never was, until Harvey Weinstein was accused and the MeToo campaign got started. Suddenly, it became okay to accuse famous and powerful Hollywood figures.

In all these matters it’s also possible that some of the accusations are lies, people piling on. In this case I just don’t think there’s a whole lot of that, although I can’t swear to it. If it’s all or even mostly true, one of the things Spacey apparently counted on was the fact that he was in the closet. From the article:

In the early 2000s, a journalist, then in his early twenties, interviewed Kevin Spacey in London for a national magazine, he told BuzzFeed News…

The interview, which took place at Spacey’s office at the Old Vic theater, went fine. “He was charming and doing impressions of Jack Lemmon and so on,” he said. Then Spacey invited him to go out with some friends for some drinks. Almost immediately after they arrived at the club, he said, Spacey began aggressively groping him…[[what follows is a lengthy description]…

When the journalist returned home, he said he told his editor immediately about his encounter with Spacey. (The editor confirmed this account to BuzzFeed News.)

…He said that he was astonished by Spacey’s behavior during the encounter because he was a journalist, and what “he’s not realizing is that I can f—ing hang him.” But in the days that followed, the reporter was hit with another realization: Sharing his account would out Spacey as gay.

“I consider that a pretty important principle: You don’t out people,” he said. “But it tied my hands. If I were to publish a story about Kevin Spacey sexually harassing me on the job ”¦ there’s no way without making it quite clear that he likes guys.”…

…”Being closeted has for him enabled him to use this privacy claim as a shield against anybody looking closely at his actual behavior. And then it may have served as this strange, protective mechanism, to say, ‘My whole sexual life is off limits because of my sexuality.'”

Well, I don’t think he’s alleging that Spacey actually said that. The reaction, and the decision, was all in the mind of the journalist. I find it interesting that he considered outing a gay man against his will to be a greater offense than keeping mum about his own sexual harassment at that man’s hands (literally at his hands) and facilitating future behavior of the same sort.

I’m not saying it was an easy decision either way. It sounds as though it was a horrible situation and a dilemma—like one of those hypotheticals that teachers give you to write an essay about on an exam in an ethics course. But it seems to me that once someone is doing that sort of thing to random people in a bar, the question of outing is secondary to the question of calling him on his behavior.

No one was doing Spacey any favors, either, by covering up for him. Just for starters, an intervention about his drinking might have been a good idea.

I can understand why young aspiring actors might have personal reasons for not outing Spacey. After all, he was a powerful man in the business (at the time of this interview, for example, he was director of the Old Vic) and he could hurt them in their careers in two ways: keep them from getting jobs and also out them as gay, if in fact they were. But journalists?

The Hollywood way

The New Neo Posted on by

Prior to the recent revelations about sexual harassment/abuse in the movie business, I don’t think many people thought Hollywood was a place of innocence and merit-based reward. Just one look at the fashions at awards ceremonies and the word “decadent” might easily have come to mind.

But I think the extent of the phenomenon—plus the fact that so many people knew about it and kept quiet—still retains some ability to surprise. And the revelations keep coming, with no end in sight, as emboldened victims come forward. There’s strength in numbers.

It’s impossible to know what’s true and what’s false in terms of these stories, but it seems highly likely that a goodly portion of them are true. It’s as though there previously were fingers plugging up the dike of disclosures with just a leak here and there, and now the dike has broken and the waters have spilled over.

I imagine one of the happiest people about these developments might be Bill Cosby, who can now say he was just doing what everybody does and that others were hypocrites for acting as though his predations were anything special.

Now when I think about the movies it seems to me as though they are like the pyramids, built on the backs of slave labor. Yes, of course that’s an exaggeration and an overreaction, but there’s something to it nevertheless. Not everyone was involved in abusing the younger and less powerful, but enough were. And not everyone knew about it and kept silent, but enough did. And there are also the younger and less powerful who willingly trade on their own sexuality to get ahead, but that’s less of a problem to my way of thinking.

How far does the rot go? I think pretty far. One of the things that happens in a situation like this is that people learn very quickly that something that might have originally shocked them is business as usual here, and that if they want to get ahead they either voluntarily use their sexuality as coin of the realm, acquiesce in their own abuse, and/or keep silent at the abuse of others they witness or hear about.

So the abusive behavior becomes normed, at least among those who stay. The others—the ones who can’t adjust to it, can’t take it in stride, are too disturbed by it, want to speak out—usually leave and we don’t hear much about them after that. One wonders how many of those who made it compromised themselves repeatedly while on the way up? And how many people in power consider sexual harassment to be a sort of lord-of-the-manor droit du seigneur (which, by the way, may have been mostly a myth in anthropological terms—see also this—but you get the idea)?

No prison time for Bergdahl

The New Neo Posted on by

Just a dishonorable discharge and a fine:

Bergdahl’s attorneys asked the judge for leniency during sentencing hearings, arguing he had a previously undiagnosed mental illness when he left his post.

“Hypothetically, he probably should not have been in the Army,” said Capt. Nina Banks, one of his military defense attorneys, in her closing argument.

Bergdahl suffered from numerous mental illnesses, including schizotypal personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to Dr. Charles Morgan, a forensic psychiatrist and professor at the University of New Haven and Yale University. He testified for the defense Wednesday.

The defense also argued the information Bergdahl was able to provide upon his return — and his willingness to share that information and cooperate with investigators — warranted a more lenient sentence.

But government prosecutors said Bergdahl was aware of the risks when he deserted, and that doing so put his fellow soldiers in danger.

I remember thinking that Bergdahl really did seem so unbalanced that the initial error was letting him into the armed forces in the first place. However, his actions resulted in so much harm that it seems he should have been punished with some sort of prison term, and that his mental problems were not so great as to absolve him of responsibility.

What’s more, at least some of the harm his behavior caused was actually the result of President Obama’s decision to release so many dangerous people in exchange for Bergdahl, and Bergdahl himself bears no responsibility for that.

The Brazile revelations

The New Neo Posted on by

Hillary and Bernie and the DNC in 2015-2016:

Consider, then, that a formal agreement signed by the DNC and the Clinton campaign was executed in August 2015…

The agreement, according to Brazile, “specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.”…

Democrats need to understand their own role in their own rotting position ”” including how they sold themselves to the Clintons for a mess of pottage they never even got to eat ”” if they are to have any hope of reversing the Republican tide.

Even if their fantasies were made flesh today and Donald Trump were somehow banished from Washington, the Democratic Party would be in no stronger institutional shape than it was yesterday.

Donna Brazile has given her unwilling fellow party members a good, long, unwelcome look in the mirror.

One question I have is why? Why did Brazile reveal this, and why now?

Here’s a theory that doesn’t make much sense to me:

But though the revelations dredge up old tensions from the Democratic primary, they may also counterintuitively show that the party is trying to heal old wounds ”” and bring Sanders supporters into the fold…

…overall, since the 2016 election, mainstream Democrats and Sanders have taken several key steps to ease tensions in the party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer elevated Sanders to a leadership position within the caucus. Sanders campaigned across the country to save Obamacare, winning plaudits from national Democrats. Seventeen Senate Democrats signed on to Sanders’s Medicare-for-all health care bill.

This is one way to read Brazile’s revelation: as yet another sign that the Democratic establishment is trying to incorporate Sanders and his movement, by publicly distancing itself from those who allegedly tipped the scales of the primary away from him.

If I were a Sanders supporter, it certainly wouldn’t make me want to embrace the Clinton forces.

Known wolf from a known wolf den

The New Neo Posted on by

Of interest:

The NYPD had suspected New Jersey’s Masjid Omar Mosque, where jihadist Sayfullo Saipov reportedly worshipped, of having radical ties for over 10 years, allegedly keeping all its worshippers under watch.

Moreover, the FBI, which claims it had nothing to do with monitoring the mosque, interviewed Saipov as a potential Islamic terrorist in 2015, but ultimately let him go…

“The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing,” reported the Associated Press (AP)…

Although the “terrorism enterprise investigations” (TEIs) into mosques allow the NYPD to carry out surveillance for years, it has not reportedly yielded a criminally charged mosque or Islamic organization with serving as a jihadist organization.

What this tells us is that the police have been able to identify some of the places where jihadis find aid and comfort (and in some cases are created). These places are not only identified but investigated and monitored by infiltration and recording devices. And yet these efforts have not yielded the desired effects, which would included stopping someone such as Saipov.

What’s more, the FBI keeps encountering and even interrogating people who end up becoming mass murderers of the jihadi variety, and letting them go.

This is a kind of “good news bad news” scenario. The good news is that the authorities know where to look and are identifying the places where the bad apples lurk and even at times which apples are likely to go bad. The bad news is that they cannot seem to distinguish such people from the larger potential-jihadi crowd in these radical mosques and in particular they cannot seem to find a reason to detain them.

Our system protects liberty, particularly the liberty of citizens, and preventative detention of large groups of people without due cause is just not something we are willing to do. Nor is it something I think we should be willing to do, particularly to citizens. However, what about non-citizens such as Saipov? In other words, what about deportation? Here’s a list of reasons for deportation of legal residents such as Saipov. It’s rather long, but one of the items of particular interest might be this sort of thing:

…has engaged in or appears likely to engage in terrorist activity, or has incited terrorist activity, or is a representative a terrorist organization or group that endorses or espouses terrorist activity, or is a member of a terrorist organization (unless the person proves that he had no idea of its terrorist aims), or endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to do so, or has received military-type training from or on behalf a terrorist organization, or is the terrorist’s spouse or child, if the relevant activity took place within the last five years.

It’s that “appears likely to engage in terrorist activity” part that’s tricky yet potentially promising. How broadly or narrowly should this be defined? Someone like Saipov also had a wife and several children, and the children had apparently been born here and were citizens. What to do in a case such as that? And how dramatic should the red flags have to be before acting?

I am of the opinion that there is no reason we should be encouraging immigration through the diversity visa program from countries otherwise underrepresented in our immigration population (this is the program under which Saipov entered in 2010). That program is nonsensical and in this case it turned out to be self-destructive.

In addition, monitoring of mosques that are known to be hotbeds of radical Islamic jihadist thought is obviously inadequate at this point. Mosques, of course, are protected by the First Amendment, but if they’re preaching violence they’ve gone beyond the usual definition of “religion” and have segued into something quite different.

It’s not easy to draw the line, but in parts of Europe they have been far more Draconian than in this country. For example, in France:

French authorities shut down 20 mosques and prayer halls they found to be preaching radical Islamic ideology since December, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday.

“Fight against the #radicalization: since December 2015, twenty Muslim places of worship have been closed,” the Interior Ministry tweeted.

Of the country’s 2,500 mosques and prayer halls, approximately 120 of them have been suspected by French authorities of preaching radical Salafism, a fundamentalist interpretation of Sunni Islam, according to France 24.

“There is no place … in France for those who call for and incite hatred in prayer halls or in mosques ”¦ About 20 mosques have been closed, and there will be others,” Cazeneuve said.

Where does freedom of religion end and where does self-protection begin? I don’t think this is an easy question at all, but radical Islamic jihadism cloaks itself in the mantle of religious liberty, a liberty it would destroy if it had its way. Surely that should not be protected.