Luck be an update tonight….November 9, 2009
Little Pink Houses, For Pfizer And Me
Timothy Carney at Washington Examiner:
The private homes that New London, Conn., took away from Suzette Kelo and her neighbors have been torn down. Their former site is a wasteland of fields of weeds, a monument to the power of eminent domain.
But now Pfizer, the drug company whose neighboring research facility had been the original cause of the homes’ seizure, has just announced that it is closing up shop in New London.
To lure those jobs to New London a decade ago, the local government promised to demolish the older residential neighborhood adjacent to the land Pfizer was buying for next-to-nothing. Suzette Kelo fought the taking to the Supreme Court, and lost. Five justices found this redevelopment met the constitutional hurdle of “public use.”
Mary Katherine Ham at The Weekly Standard:
Well, the public certainly was used.
Jacob Sullum at Reason:
A decade ago, when it began seizing property in the Fort Trumbull section of New London, Connecticut, the local redevelopment authority had grand plans. They were so impressive that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a highly controversial 2005 ruling, said they took precedence over the individual plans of the people who happened to own the neighborhood’s homes and businesses. The Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London cleared the way for the neighborhood to be cleared away. But the “waterfront conference hotel at the center of a ’small urban village’ that will include restaurants and shopping” never materialized. Neither did the “marinas for both recreational and commercial uses,” the ”pedestrian ‘riverwalk,’” or the “80 new residences.” The one major benefit the city could cite was the Pfizer R&D center that opened adjacent to Fort Trumbull in 2001, lured partly by the redevelopment plan. But today the pharmaceutical company announced that it will close the facility and transfer most of the 1,400 people who work there to Groton. As Scott Bullock of the Institute for Justice, one of the attorneys who represented Susette Kelo in her unsuccessful attempt to stop the bulldozing of Fort Trumbull, told the Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney, “This shows the folly of these redevelopment projects that use massive taxpayer subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare and abuse eminent domain.”
Ilya Shapiro at Cato:
That this purported “public use” is now exposed as the façade for corporate welfare that it always was is, of course, little comfort to Suzette Kelo and the other homeowners whose land was seized. But hopefully this will be an object lesson for other companies considering eminent domain abuse as a route to acquire land on the cheap — and especially for state and local officials who acquiesce in this type of behavior.
You can read Cato’s amicus brief for the ill-fated case here. Cato also hosted a book forum for the story of Suzette’s struggle, Little Pink House, featuring the author, Jeff Benedict, the attorney who argued the case, the Institute for Justice’s Scott Bullock, and Ms. Kelo herself, here.
What are the lessons from this debacle? First, the American system should protect private property from the reach of government as a starting point. The Kelo decision — which was not a radical departure by any means, but the nadir of a slow trend of hostility towards private property — assumed that the decision about the best use of private property by private entities was better off being made by the government. That insulted the entire notion of private property and put individual liberty in jeopardy. Essentially, the Supreme Court endorsed the idea that using eminent domain to transfer property from one private entity to another was entirely legitimate as long as the government in question liked one owner over another.
Think of it as an early endorsement of Barack Obama’s response to Joe the Plumber on redistributionism, only in this case, Kelo and New London stole from the poor and gave to the rich.
And guess what? New London chose poorly anyway. Instead of having homeowners on that property, paying taxes and providing stability, the city now has an empty lot and a ton of political baggage. The biggest lesson is that private owners should have the benefit of deciding for themselves the best private use of their land — primarily to bolster the rule of law and the concept of private property that lies at the heart of our personal liberty, but also because government is a lot more likely to muck it up.
November 9, 2009
What We Are Talking About When We Say Certain Words, Part II
Lots of chatter and several threads here.
Jonah Goldberg at The Corner, in two parts. Here:
Much of the chatter over the weekend was whether or not the Fort Hood shooting can be classified a “terrorist attack.” It seems to me this reveals one of the shortcomings of the language of the war on terror. I know there are all sorts of legalistic definitions about what constitutes terrorism and what doesn’t. But it seems to me a case could be made that this was, variously, an act of war, an act of treason, or a war crime, but not an act of terrorism.
Terrorism is, by conventional definition, an attack on civilians intended to strike fear in the non-military population in order to advance a political or ideological agenda. Hasan didn’t attack civilians, he attacked uniformed members of the U.S. Army in advance of their deployment to the frontlines. It was an evil act, but was it an act of terrorism?
Ultimately, if we’re going to call the violent acts of Jihadis “terrorism” wherever and whenever they occur, then I guess I’m fine with calling it terrorism. But I can’t help but think this illuminates some blind spots in the way we think about these questions.
And here:
Again, I am very uncomfortable with the idea that I might sound like I’m trying to diminish the guy’s crimes. He committed treason and murder. It was a cowardly act. If we are at war, then it was a war crime.
But I think the reader’s definition of terrorism might move us into dangerous territory. In Pakistan, we launch missiles at people’s homes with civilians in or around them to take out al-Qaeda leadership. The attacks are — hopefully — always intended to be something of a surprise. But I wouldn’t call that terrorism. I’m just uncomfortable with the word terrorism metastasizing into “anything the bad guys do to us.” Why not call what Hasan did a war crime? Terrorism is a war crime but not all war crimes are terrorism.
Of course, the fact that Jihadis reject all of the rules of war makes it very difficult to figure out how to even talk about the rules. (Just out of curiosity, what would the legal definition be of, say, a Japanese officer turning on fellow Japanese troops during World War Two in the apparent hope of aiding the Allies?)
As I said before, if terrorism is now the catchall for dastardly acts committed by Jihadis, then calling this attack terrorism works fine for me. But if this is really a war — and I think it is — then I think we could spend some more time thinking a bit more rigorously about our vocabulary. For those interested, this is a longstanding interest of mine.
Kevin Drum on Goldberg:
I think that’s right, and it’s nice to see some pushback from the right on this. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that Nidal Malik Hasan was (a) quite mentally disturbed and (b) motivated by religious beliefs, but that doesn’t make what he did a terrorist act. Unlike, say, a suicide bomber in Jerusalem, there’s hardly even a hint that he was trying to make any kind of political statement. There was no note, no videotape left behind, no explanation while he was shooting, no nothing. What kind of terrorist does that?
A consensus seems to have formed here at The Atlantic that the Ft. Hood massacre means not very much at all. Megan McArdle writes that “there is absolutely no political lesson to be learned from this.” James Fallows says: “The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre ‘mean’? A decade later, do we ‘know’ anything about Columbine?” And the Atlantic Wire has already investigated the motivation for the shooting, and released its preliminary findings. Of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Wire states: “A 39-year-old Army psychiatrist, he appears to have not been motivated by his Muslim religion, his Palestinian heritage (he is American by nationality), or any related political causes.”
It seems, though, that when an American military officer who is a practicing Muslim allegedly shoots forty of his fellow soldiers who are about to deploy to the two wars the United States is currently fighting in Muslim countries, some broader meaning might, over time, be discerned, especially if the officer did, in fact, yell “Allahu Akbar” while murdering his fellow soldiers, as some soldiers say he did. This is the second time this year American soldiers on American soil have been gunned down by a Muslim who was reportedly unhappy with America’s wars in the Middle East (the first took place in Arkansas, to modest levels of notice). And, of course, this would not be the first instance of an American Muslim soldier killing fellow soldiers over his disagreements with American foreign policy; in 2003, Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar killed two officers and wounded fourteen others when he rolled a grenade into a tent in a homicidal protest against American policy.
I am not arguing, of course, that American Muslims, as a whole, are violently unhappy with America (I’ve argued the opposite, in fact). But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here’s a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.
I made it clear that I believed Hasan was trying to follow in the footsteps of Al Qaeda, et al–either because he was crazy, or because he was a deeply evil human being with no regard for the lives of others. Even a few hours after the shooting, what we knew of him made it likely that this was somehow connected to his religion, and the war.
So why did I say that there were no political lessons to be learned from this? Because it wasn’t new information that there are Muslims in the world who object to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and would like to kill a bunch of Americans. It was always possible that one of them, somewhere, was going to find their way to somewhere where they could do damage. I can think of half a dozen easy ways to kill a significant number of people without getting caught, if I wanted to. So could most of you. The terrorist’s job is made harder by wanting a certain sort of spectacular crime, not merely a death toll. But not much harder.
As of last week, what information did we have that would lead to any useful political response? Were we going to start kicking Muslims out of the government and the armed forces? That’s unconstitutional, would brutally wrong the overwhelming majority of the Muslim community that is not involved in terrorism, and would deprive us of a valuable source of translators and other advisers to our military and intelligence efforts. We know that some number of Muslims living in this country hate our government and want to act against it. We also know (by the rarity of attacks, if nothing else) that this number is small, and any loose networks are poorly organized and largely ineffective. Given this, there’s not very much you can do with this information, other than what we’re already doing, which is have the FBI try to track down terrorist plots. Something that they seem to be doing very well when the attacker is not a lone gunman with no need for a support team. This particular attack would have been very hard to stop for anyone, without doing terrible, terrible things to our Muslim citizens.
And if you think that’s okay, I invite you to consider whether you would be all right with similar incursions into evangelical churches every time an abortion clinic or doctor gets attacked. After all, the pro-life community does produce these wackos, and its radical fringe may even shelter them. Why shouldn’t every Southern Baptist get a little extra scrutiny?
Jason Zengerle at TNR:
I continue to be puzzled/annoyed by the reluctance to call the Fort Hood shootings a terrorist act. If we’re going to label Scott Roeder–a man with a history of mental illness and extreme religious and political views who allegedly killed George Tiller–an anti-abortion terrorist, then I don’t see the problem in calling Nidal Hassan a terrorist, since there’s plenty of evidence* that his actions were motivated, in part, by his religious and political views. The fact that he also appears to have been under severe psychological duress doesn’t make him any less of a terrorist than Roeder.
That said, there’s the larger question of what political lessons to draw from Hassan and the Fort Hood shootings, and I think Megan McArdle is spot-on
[...]
Of course, this is why I think it’s important not to shy away from using the t-word when discussing the Hassan shootings: so that people of good will can then move on to make McArdle’s point, which can’t be said enough, since there’s no dearth of people loudly making the arguments McArdle is taking head-on.
*– When I say “evidence,” I’m talking about the reports of relatives and colleagues of Hassan who describe him as upset by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and increasingly radical in his religious beliefs. I’m not talking about this Brian Ross report for ABC News that Hassan had tried to reach out and touch Al Qaeda. Given Ross’s sorry track record on some of this stuff, I’ll wait for another reporter to confirm it before I believe it.
John Judis at TNR, responding Zengerle:
Jason Zengerle argues that if one calls Scott Roeder’s killing of abortion doctor George Tillman a terrorist act, then one has to call Nidal Hassan, who perpetrated the Fort Hood massacre, a terrorist because his actions were “motivated, in part, by religious and political views.” I don’t think I agree with Jason – at least given the evidence to date about Nidal Hassan’s motives.
We don’t know yet what motivated Nidal Hassan – to say the same thing, what he hoped to accomplish by killing his fellow soldiers. It is not enough to say he had political or religious views. To make a case that he was a terrorist, you have to know a little more than we do.
I associate terrorism generally with a political movement that has certain objectives that it believes it cannot accomplish either through ordinary politics or conventional military engagement, but only – given the asymmetry of force — through solitary acts that by sowing fear and creating discord, force the oppressor to cede power or to cease whatever activity the movement objects to – from Czarist rule to performing abortions in a clinic.
We don’t know yet whether Nidal Hassan had any connection to al Qaeda or a similar terrorist movement, or even whether, like the Oklahoma City bombers or Scott Roeder, he imagined that he was acting on behalf of such a movement. It is still possible that his was an act of suicidal protest at his being sent to Afghanistan and was not intended to reduce support among Americans for the war in Afghanistan. Until we know this about him, I am reluctant to call him a terrorist, particularly because doing so arouses fears of a Jihadist conspiracy in our midst that may not exist, or that may be containable by the same means we are presently using.
November 9, 2009
When The Old Men Talk About The Googles, We All Strain To Listen
Jared Newman at PC World:
Once News Corps’ Web Sites go behind a paywall, chief executive Rupert Murdoch suggested that they’ll disappear from searches on Google and other engines.
Murdoch was responding to Sky News political editor David Speers, who asked why News Corp. hasn’t blocked search engines from indexing sites. “Well, I think we will, but that’s when we start charging,” Murdoch said.
In August, Murdoch said that all News Corp. Web sites will go behind a paywall by next summer, a bold move as many Web sites have abandoned their unsuccessful paid subscription strategies, relying on eyeballs and advertising revenue instead.
I’m not sure Murdoch fully understood Speers’ question about blocking search engines, because he then adds “We do it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling.” Many reports on Murdoch’s comments suggest that Murdoch will block search engines entirely, but that’s not the case with the Wall Street Journal. You can still find occasional stories by searching Google News.
Regardless of what Murdoch meant, the bigger point remains that he’s not interested in readers who find News Corp. articles through search engines. “Who knows who they are or where they are,” Murdoch said, referring to search-driven visitors, “and they don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content.”
Murdoch’s philosophy of getting money from loyal readers is still a huge gamble, because there’s no guarantee those readers will stick around once they’re forced to pay. Think of it this way: If we’ve been friends for five years, and I suddenly tell you that our friendship requires a lot of work on my end, and that I’ll need money to keep it going, will you happily pony it up because you value what I provide, or will you look for someone new?
John C. Abell at Wired News:
Rupert Murdoch has made this kind of noise before (and he gets wrong the extent of actual public access to Wall Street Journal content online, which is 100%). But in an interview with Sky News the News Corp chairman sounds a lot like he would be inclined to take up Google on its oft-repeated suggestion — to all old media titans who think they are being ripped off — to programatically withhold content from the search giant’s massive gene pool of news links.
We all know that these are uncertain times for traditional publishers. Newspaper circulation is cratering; the latest numbers show it down another 10% in the last year, and Murdoch’s New York Post is down nearly 30% in the past 2-1/2 years).
Many newspaper executives grumble that the internet’s link economy is to blame. But we’ll believe that New Corp intends privatize all of its digital content when we see it. This just might be Murdoch’s way of goading competitors to beat him to a punch he never intends to throw. Nevertheless, he talks the talk very well.
“We’d rather have fewer people coming to our web sites — but paying,” Murdoch tells Sky News Australia, explaining that “the fact is, there isn’t enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the websites profitable.”
Ryan Tate at Valley Wag:
This isn’t the first time Murdoch, 78, and his lieutenants have been made unfriendly noises about Google; they’ve recently attacked the search engine as a “parasite” with “promiscuous” users. This hostility must seem perfectly sensible if you’re an old man who has your secretary find and print up Web pages on your behalf. But here’s a pro tip, Rupert: Old media doesn’t instant message those pages to your assistant’s Twitter, via Blogger, on AOL. She just does what your newspaper reporters and Fox News producers and sales executives and tabloid editors and attack-dog flacks and mid-level accountants do all the time every day: Sticks a hot, throbbing search query into Google and gets busy with a bunch of strange website she doesn’t subscribe to. Welcome to the internet.
Stan Schroeder at Mashable:
It proves that Murdoch is sticking with the old model of how news and information is disseminated, and doesn’t plan to change it. The problem is, things don’t work the way they used to any more. Sometimes, a visitor will come to a news site or a blog and won’t even know where he is; he might think he’s still on Facebook (
) or MySpace (
). And he won’t be interested in anything on the site except that tiny bit of information that made him click on the link. Sometimes, the conversation will develop around your article, but not on your site; it may develop on Twitter (
) or Digg (
E.D. Kain at The League:
Rupert Murdoch, media mogul extrordinaire, has decided that links coming from the search engine monolith Google are parasitic and should be banned outright. Yes – what most of us online strive for – links from everywhere and especially Google – Murdoch has decided actually hurts his business model. This really, really confuses the hell out of me.
I was always under the impression that links pointing people to your content improved the visibility of that content – paywall or no. I guess, one way or another, this move will be a great experiment for the online news model.
November 9, 2009
Too Much Of Nothing Can Make A Man Ill At Ease
David Sanger at the New York Times:
The Obama administration, attempting to salvage a faltering nuclear deal with Iran, has told Iran’s leaders in back-channel messages that it is willing to allow the country to send its stockpile of enriched uranium to any of several nations, including Turkey, for temporary safekeeping, according to administration officials and diplomats involved in the exchanges.
But the overtures, made through the International Atomic Energy Agency over the past two weeks, have all been ignored, the officials said. Instead, they said, the Iranians have revived an old counterproposal: that international arms inspectors take custody of much of Iran’s fuel, but keep it on Kish, a Persian Gulf resort island that is part of Iran.
A senior Obama administration official said that proposal had been rejected because leaving the nuclear material on Iranian territory would allow for the possibility that the Iranians could evict the international inspectors at any moment. That happened in North Korea in 2003, and within months the country had converted its fuel into the material for several nuclear weapons.
The intermediary in the exchanges between Washington and Tehran has been Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the energy agency. He confirmed some of the proposals — including one to send Iran’s fuel to Turkey, which has nurtured close relations with Iran — in interviews in New York late last week.
But members of the Obama administration, in interviews over the weekend, said that they had now all but lost hope that Iran would follow through with an agreement reached in Geneva on Oct. 1 to send its fuel out of the country temporarily — buying some time for negotiations over its nuclear program.
Jennifer Rubin at Commentary:
Why are we waiting until the end of the year — haven’t we already given Iran sufficient breathing room to proceed with its nuclear-weapons program?
One can only conclude that the Obami have neither the skill nor the will to move from the quicksand of negotiations to any more stringent action. It seems as though they are simply buying time, trying to keep Israel at bay and waiting for the day when they proclaim that Iran’s nuclear-weapons capability is a foregone conclusion. But don’t worry, we’ll be told. We can do business with the regime.
This is what appeasement looks like — cowering, self-deluding, and embarrassing. The administration has failed to address the most serious national-security issue of the day. The American people, not to mention the people of the Middle East most directly threatened by a revolutionary Islamic state with nuclear weapons, should be alarmed.
Gee, what a shock that must have been to “members of the Obama administration,” suddenly realizing that Iran didn’t intend to “follow through with an agreement” that would have limited its pursuit of nuclear weapons! Why, who could possibly have foreseen that? The fact that the previous two administrations got the same result from their attempts to engage Iran, and just because the intelligence we had in hand showed the Iranians in hot pursuit of nukes doesn’t mean that gabbing on about “outstretched hands” wouldn’t suddenly bring a new dawn of rationality in Tehran!
Well, at least Barack Obama won that Nobel Peace Prize. Thank goodness something of substance came out of all that Smart Power.
Jason Zengerle at TNR:
And now comes the news that Iran is charging those three American hikers with espionage. At this point, it’s almost impossible to see how Obama meets his self-imposed end-of-the-year deadline for diplomatic progress with Iran.
Now, that might not really be a substantive renegotiation. The destination of the fuel is less important to the administration than getting the stockpile of it out of Iran all at once. But that’s what the Iranians are apparently still holding out to do. Will the Obama administration agree to that? And if so, how much time would any such agreement put back on Iran’s nuclear clock?
November 8, 2009
What We’ve Built This Weekend
November 8, 2009
What We Are Talking About When We Say Certain Words
Unless I’m missing something, in the 31 states in which voters had a say on whether or not gay marriage was going to be the law of the land, they all rejected it. Every single state. Even California, the national bellwether state on liberalizing social trends. Even Maine, in the most liberal region of the country.
You can come up with all kinds of theories about why this is, blaming the voters for being bigots, accuse the churches of playing dirty, whatever. The plain fact is, every single time it’s been put to a popular vote (as opposed to allowing a tiny number of elites to vote on it), gay marriage has been a loser.
Do I think it always will be? No, I do not, in part because homosexuality is far more accepted by young Americans, and in part because heterosexual America has already conceded the philosophical grounds on which traditional marriage was based (which is why younger Americans are more comfortable with gay marriage). Nor do I believe that the voters are always right. But unless you’re prepared to call more than half the country bigots — and I have no doubt that many, perhaps most, gay marriage supporters are, and let that self-serving explanation suffice — maybe, just maybe, you ought to ask yourself if there’s something else going on here. And that maybe, just maybe, serious attention should be paid, instead of paying attention long enough to insult people who disagree with you as evil people who deserved to be excoriated and harrassed.
I probably wouldn’t use the word “bigot.” I don’t think, for instance, that half this country thinks hate crimes against gays is a good thing. But I have no problem believing that half the country–maybe more–is deeply prejudiced against gays. This generally fits into my view of all -isms. I think prejudice is part of who we are as humans, and thus as Americans. Following from that, I think prejudice is one of the many forces that influence how we vote. Hence the notion that half this country is deeply prejudiced against gays really doesn’t shock me.
The obvious parallel is civil rights. It’s quite clear to me that Jim Crow in the South could not have been struck down by a majority vote; interracial marriage was banned in Alabama until 2000, and even then, some 40 percent of Alabamans voted to keep it. It’s quite clear to me that Jim Crow in the North, enforced through housing segregation, restrictive covenants, block-busting realtors, and the federal government red-lining could not have been defeated by a majority vote.
But more than that, the sense that prejudice is actually not a common and potent force among straight people today, and white people then, that the group intent on discriminating is “essentially good” is the most remarkable parallel. Rod believes that most of the people voting against gay marriage aren’t prejudiced against gay people per se.
[...]
Conservatives pride themselves on their skepticism, and generally dismiss liberals as soft-headed Utopians. But in so many ways, political conservatism is Utopianism for the powerful. It isn’t broadly skeptical of human nature, so much as it’s broadly skeptical of people its agents don’t particularly like. Hence the sense that Americans are intrinsically “good people,” that this country “is the best nation that ever existed in history,” that the South is home to “the greatest people that have ever trod the earth,” and that the murder of four little girls in Birmingham was the work of a “Communist” or “crazed Negro,” which had “set back the cause of white people.”
Hence the notion that those voting against gay marriage, are not actually, in the main, motivated by bigotry, but a belief in tradition and family. But very few people would actually ever describe themselves as bigots. We think we know so much about ourselves. This is a country–like many countries–which is deeply riven by ethnic bias, and gender discrimination. And yet we don’t seem to know any of the agents of that discrimination.
Conor Friedersdorf at The American Scene, responding to Dreher:
Since he’s grappled many times with arguments for and against gay marriage, I haven’t any desire to rehash the whole debate, but I do want to challenge Rod on one small aspect of how he characterizes this issue: Would the legalization of gay marriage really be a “radical redefinition” of the social and cultural institution? Maybe same sex marriage is a radical departure from marriage as understood by orthodox Christians, or people for whom it is primarily a procreative union.
But I submit that a majority of Americans subscribe to a definition that more closely resembles the following: Marriage is the union of people who fall in love with one another, decide that they want to spend the rest of their lives together, and commit to do so monogamously. The definition I’ve offered isn’t merely more commonly accepted among Americans than whatever Rod Dreher would describe, it is perfectly consistent with marriage laws as now written.
Expanding marriage to include gay people doesn’t radically redefine the understanding of marriage that prevails in our culture. As Rod himself writes, “heterosexual America has already conceded the philosophical grounds on which traditional marriage was based.” It is therefore specious for opponents of same sex marriage to invoke as an argument the proposition that “it’s dangerous to radically redefine the status quo.”
Obviously, Rod has other arguments to offer against same sex marriage, but if they want to remain on intellectually solid ground, he and other opponents of same sex marriage must stop using that particular argument. Same sex marriage may be an advantageous or disadvantageous change in our society’s understanding of marriage — I believe it is the former — but it is most definitely a marginal change that flows logically from the institution’s prior evolution, not a radical change.
Jamelle at The League:
This exchange between Rod Dreher and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the basis of opposition to same-sex marriage is interesting, if only because it provides another striking example of how ones identity has an incredible impact on how one views the world and other human beings. That is, it’s pretty easy to believe that bigotry drives political action against same-sex marriage when you yourself belong to a minority group that was a regular target of disenfranchisement (or worse) for more than a century. That said, while I see where Dreher is coming from, if Pew has their numbers right, the data is firmly on Ta-Nehisi’s side
[...]
49 percent of Americans believe that homosexuality is “morally wrong,” while only 9 percent view it as morally acceptable. 35 percent say that homosexuality isn’t a moral issue at all, and 7 percent say that it depends (and I’m not sure what that means, at all). Broken down by age, the numbers tell a familiar story: a solid majority of Americans 50 and older view homosexuality as morally wrong (about 53 percent), whereas only 38 percent of the 29 and younger crowd feels similarly. Surprisingly (to me at least) a slight majority – 51 percent – of Americans aged 30-49 view homosexuality as morally wrong. Though if disaggregated, the number of people who disapprove of homosexuality might be greater at the end of the age distribution.
If there’s any takeaway from this, it’s that we really should stop underestimating the extent to which raw prejudice drives political decisions. As Freddie remarked on Twitter recently:
It has become impolite to say so, in either direction, but never doubt many in this country hate and fear gay people.
The corollary to this, of course, is that in a country where a near-majority is morally opposed to homosexuality, it is ridiculous (and almost cruel) to expect gay people to rely exclusively on legislatures as they fight to secure their rights as American citizens. And that’s especially the case when you realize that when legislative efforts are successful, there is almost always an immediate effort to rescind or overturn the legislation. The simple fact is that if current demographic trends hold true, a majority of Americans will eventually support marriage equality. In the meantime though, I think LGBT activist groups should take a page from the Civil Rights Movement and again begin focusing their challenges on the courts. It simply doesn’t make any sense to rely on the generosity of the majority (indeed, if black people did, segregation would have lasted for a whole lot longer).
Rod Dreher responds:
What’s interesting, and illuminating on both sides, is the definition of “bigot” that each of us is working with. Jamelle points to Pew survey data showing that 49 percent of Americans think homosexuality is immoral, only 9 percent view it as “morally acceptable,” and everybody else is in the mushy middle. That, according to Jamelle, confirms Ta-Nehisi’s view that most Americans are “deeply prejudiced” against gays, and that drives their political views on gay marriage.
I’m not sure that Ta-Nehisi and I disagree, actually, on the basic data. That is, I would have agreed with him from the get-go that a large percentage of Americans, probably a majority, disapprove morally of homosexuality. What I dispute is whether that counts as “bigotry” as we generally use the term in our political debate.
I don’t count moral disapproval as “bigotry” on its face, because the word “bigotry” connotes malicious, unthinking prejudice. Is it really the case that someone who morally disapproves of a particular behavior is therefore a “bigot”? Are people who are vegans therefore anti-meat bigots? Do we really want to think of pacifists — that is, people who object on moral grounds to war — as anti-military bigots? Are those who oppose the death penalty on moral grounds in some sense bigoted against murder victims?
[...]
There are many people — seemingly everyone who has a blog or works for the media — who have decided that homosexuality is either morally neutral or morally good — and who cannot comprehend why anybody would disagree. Therefore, because these folks do not understand why anyone could object to homosexuality, anyone who doesn’t share their view could only be motivated by irrational hatred of the most odious kind. It’s a peculiar thing, to impute bigotry to half the people in one’s own country, because they happen to hold a negative viewpoint about the moral licitness of the sexual practices of a tiny minority — a viewpoint that has been thoroughly and overwhelmingly mainstream in Western culture from, say, 1,500 years ago up until the day before yesterday.
Understand that I’m not making the argument here that the traditional, Biblical view of homosexuality is morally wrong; I’m saying that to ascribe all opposition to homosexual behavior to irrational, malicious prejudice is an extremely parochial and ahistorical stance. Given what most people in the West have long believed about homosexuality and the Biblical basis for sexual ethics and morality, it is completely unsurprising that so many people take a dim view of the morality of homosexuality.
What I’m saying is that I believe people can be morally wrong in their prejudices without being bigots, a strong word that I think should be reserved for knotheads and thugs (of which both sides in this debate have more than a few). Ta-Nehisi and I would agree that some degree of animus against homosexuality, either visceral or formal, drives most of the opposition to same-sex marriage. Where we’d part, it seems to me, is how to regard that opposition, both in their views and in their person. If you believe deep down that I am a bigot, that tells me that, like the letter-writer above, you have no respect for my point of view or me at all, and that you will do your very best to run over me the first chance you get. Bigots exist, but I think it’s dangerous to look for them behind ever tree, because the temptation to self-righteousness can be overwhelming. If one’s opponents can all be written off as bigots, then one relieves oneself the duty to see them as human beings who can be talked to, reasoned with, treated with respect even in defeat, and, finally, loved, despite it all. They become an abstraction, and less than human. Again, is that really the kind of society we want to live in?
UPDATE: Of course, this is impossibly naive.
And I forgot to point out that very many of us simply do not agree that homosexuality is morally neutral, like race is. If you don’t believe that it’s morally neutral, then arguments for same-sex marriage that depend on comparing gays today to blacks in the pre-civil rights era simply don’t work.
UPDATE.2: To clarify, I’m not saying that if somebody is raised in a culture in which a particular prejudice is mainstream, then that person’s prejudice is beyond moral judgment. If one’s Alabama grandfather believes racial segregation was just and right, it’s perfectly legitimate to judge his view as immoral, even though he had been formed by a culture that taught segregation. Indeed, I would describe Granddad’s view as bigoted, because I see no basis, neither in reason nor in the Christian religion, to uphold Granddad’s segregationist views. On the other hand, unless he was a malicious jerk, knowing Granddad’s background would make me reluctant to apply the word “bigot” to him, even if I thought privately that he was exactly that. Why? Because I would have an appreciation for the world that made Granddad’s conscience, and how it distorted his moral lens; I would know how much he has to overcome to see things rightly, and would extend him understanding and mercy, even as I judge him to hold immoral views, and would feel morally bound to challenge him on those views if they came up, and I would certainly believe that Granddad’s segregationist views should not be enshrined in law.
UPDATE: Scott H. Payne at The League
November 8, 2009
The Number Will Be Anywhere From 0 To 2,000,000,000
Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy:
There are increasing signs the administration is wrapping up its Afghanistan strategy review and planning a rollout toward the end of the week beginning November 16, immediately after President Obama and other top officials return from Asia.
Reliable sources tell The Cable that the review has entered its final stages, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Jim Jones now taking the lead and putting on the final touches.
Today, Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke cancelled a planned speaking event scheduled for Wednesday, November 18, at the Women’s Foreign Policy Group, “due to unforeseen changes in the speaker’s schedule,” a group representative said.
And the rest of the President’s team is back in town on Thursday, November 19.
The administration sent a team to Brussels this week to consult with all 43 member nations of the International Security Assistance Force, including all 28 NATO nations.
“Their trip will serve to both brief allies on where our efforts stand and to hear their comments and questions about the review,” said Michael Hammer, spokesman for the National Security Council.
Jon Landay at McClatchy — he of Nobody’s Business, who might have won Journopalooza if Mike Hayden was the judge — has the first leak of Afghanistan escalation numbers: 34,000, which is, Landay reports, inclusive of combat, support, trainer forces and a new division HQ for RC-South in Kandahar. His reporting, which matches something I was told Friday and which Josh Rogin reported earlier that day, indicates that Obama will roll out the new strategy and the troop increase after returning from his Asia trip on November 19. I should say that Taken For Action thinks that the real number here is 55,000.
The thing is, can we actually get 34,000 new troops into Afghanistan before summer of 2010? Remember that in the McChrystal strategy review, completed in late August, the commanding general talks about a window of about 12-18 month wherein he’ll know if he can arrest Taliban momentum. (That’s different, notice, than rolling back Taliban gains.) Check out David Wood’s latest Politics Daily column. Wood crunches the numbers on available Army brigade combat teams and finds that… there really aren’t any uncommitted brigades, at least not if the current year of “dwell time” (the time between deployments) holds.
O’s advisors are working up three options Afghanistan troop options. Glad to hear he’s still working on that. I was a little concerned that, like some other federal agents, his eye was off the al-Qaeda ball. Here’s the status of the last three months of war strategizing, via NYT. Sounds like he’s taking pains to be minimally invasive:
WASHINGTON — Advisers to President Obama are preparing three options for escalating the war effort in Afghanistan, all of them calling for more American troops, as he moves closer to a decision on the way forward in the eight-year-old war, officials said Saturday.
The options include Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly another 40,000 troops; a middle scenario sending about 30,000 more troops; and a lower alternative involving 20,000 to 25,000 reinforcements, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Officials hope to present the options to Mr. Obama this week before he leaves on a trip to Asia.
No cruel eenie-meenie-miney-moe jokes, please. I don’t want to be so cynical as to suggest that in neat increments of 5,000 to 10,000, the president’s precision decision-making process smacks of micromanagement, a desire to show he’s no sap for generals, or some effort to please everyone. Clearly they’ve put a lot of thought into whether 5,000 or 10,000 in one direction or the other stresses the Afghan population more or less, stresses the U.S. military more or less. Presumably it reflects a precision response to some precise level of Taliban and al-Qaeda activity that McChrystal,* unable to see trees from his forest perch, was unable to discern, and a more advanced level of thinking on exactly how much harder or easier it needs to be for each soldier on the ground in Afghanistan to do whatever it is they are supposed to do with every last bullet and bean the American people send over there.
Something like that. I don’t know. But as an exercise in strategic brain surgery, it is impressive. Not just picking a halfway range between the opposing ears of no-more-troops and McChrystal’s full request and planting a medieval battleaxe in the patient’s forehead, but futzing about with digital knob-fiddling exactitude on multiple options in the mid-range. It certain creates a greater impression of thoughtfulness, like the president and his advisors really know what they’re doing. Not like some journeyman neurosurgeon left with the patient while the senior surgeon takes a potty break, who says “ummmmmm,” and takes a minute or three months to figure out whether that open cranium in front of him wants a scalpel, forceps or some kind of probey thingy.
Max Boot at Commentary:
A few weeks ago, the rumor emanating from the White House was that President Obama might approve as few as 10,000 to 20,000 additional troops for Afghanistan. Now the rumor I’ve been hearing is that he will approve more than 30,000 — still considerably short of the 40,000 or so that General McChrystal would like but a lot better than the lowball alternatives being aired earlier. This McClatchy newspapers article flatly reports that the president plans to send 34,000 more troops. This New York Times article claims, no doubt correctly, that no actual decision has been made but that the president is considering three options: “Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly another 40,000 troops; a middle scenario sending about 30,000 more troops; and a lower alternative involving 20,000 to 25,000 reinforcements.”
As anyone familiar with the ways of Washington will know, the president almost always chooses the “middle option.” Indeed aides sometimes game the process with, as insiders like to joke, the “high” option being nuclear war, the “low” option being unilateral disarmament, and the “middle” option being whatever the president’s advisers favor. Given this reality, there has been an interesting and subtle redefinition of the middle option going on. Under General McChrystal’s troop request, 40,000 was the middle of the road, moderate-risk option; 60,000 troops was the low-risk option, and 20,000 troops was the high-risk option. If the Times article is accurate, the White House has arbitrarily made McChrystal’s request the high-end estimate and added a third option that’s higher than his low-end request but lower than his middle option. Presumably this is so that Obama can tell his liberal base that he didn’t just “cave” in to what the generals wanted, though why the president should be afraid of “rubber-stamping” a request from his handpicked commander in the field isn’t clear.
I would be more comfortable if the president were to give General McChrystal at least 40,000 troops, but if he does approve at least 30,000, that will enable the general to implement a good deal of his counterinsurgency strategy, albeit with more risk than should be necessary for the troops involved.
Putting that aside, the delay in making a decision has become an embarrassment, even if it does look as though Obama will move in the right direction by committing more resources to the Af-Pak theater. This is, after all, a war, a shooting war in which Americans and our allies are getting killed while Obama ruminates over a series of options that he’s had for months. Resolving the Karzai-Abdullah election standoff should not have precluded the Obama administration from consulting NATO about the troop levels needed for the war. It sounds like the latest excuse for an entire series of procrastinations that Obama has used to avoid a politically damaging decision.
And now the war has to wait for Obama to get some face time in Asia? Why not wait until after the Christmas shopping season?
UPDATE: Leslie Gelb at Daily Beast
November 8, 2009
News Of The Week In Music Vol. 28
#1 The Ft. Hood Shooting
#2 Health care passes in the House
#3 Tea party protest in DC
#4 Unemployment at 10%
#5 Yankees win World Series
November 9, 2009
Know When To Fold ‘Em
Joe Klein at Swampland at Time:
Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy (sorry quotes not working):
“Most of the Palestinian and Arab commentary I’ve seen since his announcement falls into three basic trends: the first thinks he’s bluffing, attempting to leverage his weakness into pressure on the U.S. and Israel; the second thinks it’s irrelevant, because the elections will not actually be held in January; and the third is cheering his departure, and hoping that it will lead to a collective admission that the PA’s strategy has failed. The three perspectives are obviously not mutually exclusive. When I asked leading Palestinian academic Salim Tamari yesterday about the impact it would have on the peace process, he just looked at me quizically and said “what peace process?”There’s been a collective moment of clarity over the last week about the disastrous course of the attempt to get to serious peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Hillary Clinton’s comments about the Israeli “unprecedented” positions and the prospect of starting talks without a settlement freeze have thrown people into paroxysms of premature postmortems. I don’t think her comments actually changed very much — the dynamic was bad before she came to the region, it’s still bad. At least now maybe the shock of this sudden view of the abyss will concentrate people’s minds and get them to try something new.
This all gets back to the basic point I’ve been harping on for months (for instance in the CAP report I co-authored with Brian Katulis in the early summer): the administration has lacked a viable strategy for, or an adequate appreciation of, intra-Palestinian politics and the implications of the deep structural weakness of the Palestinian Authority. Now, perhaps, they’ll have to get it. There’s no viable path forward which doesn’t include alleviating the blockade of Gaza and reunifying it politically with the West Bank, and no serious prospect that the institutions of the Palestinian Authority can be built up along Salam Fayyad’s model without also dealing seriously with the political horizon of peace talks aimed at rapidly achieving a two state solution. The settlement freeze demand, which is being blamed wrongly for the current problems, was not a luxury — it was essential for the Palestinian political track. And now that track needs a serious American re-think.”
Daniel Levy at Talking Points Memo
John Podhoretz at Commentary:
Saree Makdisi at Foreign Policy:
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Tags: Joe Klein, Swampland, Talking Points Memo, Commentary, Foreign Policy, Time, John Podhoretz, Marc Lynch, Palestine, Daniel Levy, Saree Makdisi