Marriage Equality in MA on Firmer Ground
A mere year ago, when campaign passions were running high and the rhetoric was white hot, those of us who support marriage equality (and know that it will ultimately prevail) were a little taken aback by the ease with which the Massachusettes legislature passed an amendment to their state constitution that would have undone the pioneering, court-directed advance that allowed gays and lesbians to marry in their state. In that vote, the amendment was favored 105 to 92.
Fortunately, the process in Massachusettes requires that any such constitutional amendment pass in two consecutive legislative sessions before it could be voted on by the general population. At the time, we expressed confidence that such an amendment could never garner enough votes to pass a second time, that the first vote was just mean-spirited, election-year posturing, and that marriage rights in the state would be safe. Publically, at least. Privately, there were nagging anxieties.
Now we can stop worrying. As the AP reports*: "…the political and social landscape had changed dramatically since then."
Election fervor has receeded and Bush's coat-tails have shortened considerably since then. There were even some state elections in which this was the defining issue, and the bad guys lost. Now we are free once again to praise the clear-headed, right-thinking people of Massachusettes for their progressive wisdom. This time the legislature defeated the proposed amendment 157 to 39, a rather more definitive majority than accepted it the first time around.
In the days ahead can we perhaps expect to see more rhetoric like this?
"Gay marriage has begun, and life has not changed for the citizens of the commonwealth, with the exception of those who can now marry," said state Sen. Brian Lees, a Republican who had been a co-sponsor of the amendment. "This amendment which was an appropriate measure or compromise a year ago, is no longer, I feel, a compromise today."*
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*Steve LeBlanc, "Mass. Lawmakers Reject Gay Marriage Ban", AP via Yahoo! News, 14 September 2005.
Ali Baba's Ass
In this week's Carnival of Education, hostess Ms. Frizzle tells of an e-mail contribution she received from one Graycie, an anecdote about Graycie's first ever day of teaching, which reportedly happened years ago:
The assigned first unit of the year for me was short stories. The first part of this unit covered the characteristics of fairy tales. The first story I was to teach with was “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” The first sentence in that story read: “Once upon a time, Ali Baba was out in the forest with his ass gathering faggots.”
We're told that the fast-thinking Graycie reacted by telling her students that mature readers see old phrases like that and laugh for 30 seconds — never more, says good taste — which they all did.
My reaction, of course, is to copy it here so that I have it handy as inspiration for a story.
In: All, Such Language!
Miller's Skepticism
But science is more than the sum of its hypotheses, its observations, and its experiments. From the point of view of rationality, science is above all its method–essentially the critical method of searching for errors. It is the staunch devotion of science to this method that makes the difference.
[…*]
It took Popper's genius to realize that what is central to rationality is criticism, not justification or proof; and to scientific rationality, empirical criticism. To rescue science as a rational enterprise, perhaps the rational enterprise par excellence, there is accordingly no need to attribute to well-tested scientific hypotheses a security or reliability that they do not possess. Scientific hypotheses are not trustworthy or reliable, except in the sense of being, in some instances, true; and they are not in any interesting respect based on experience.
[David Miller, "Being an Absolute Skeptic", Science, 4 June 1999.]
———-
*The bit that I excised between the parts I quoted was not uninteresting, it just didn't seem to carry the flow of the idea that I wanted to note by quoting Miller. Here are the words represented by the elipsis belonging, in the original, to the first paragraph:
What is wrong with pseudoscience is the manner in which it handles its hypotheses, not normally the hypotheses themselves (though if they are designed to be unassailable and unfalsifiable, then unassailed and unfalsified they doubtless remain). But although a hypothesis that survives all criticism thrown at it is preferable to a hypothesis that dies, it does not become a better hypothesis through being tested. It may have been a better hypothesis from the outset, of course; it may be true. True hypotheses are what we seek.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
State of Mind of State
Oddly, at the end of their article commenting on that little pee-pee note that Bush wrote to Condi while sitting in a UN meeting, The Scotsman commented:
In January, a sheet of doodles sparked a debate on the state of Tony Blair's mind, even though it turned out the note was created by the Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates. The notes were found on the Prime Minister's desk following a meeting in Switzerland, alongside Mr Gates and U2 singer Bono.
[Alan Roden, "Condie, can I go to the bathroom?", The Scotsman, 15 September 2005.]
What strikes me as odd is that, when the sheet of doodles was thought to be the work of Tony Blair, it sparked a debate on the state of his mind. However, when it turned out to be the work of Bill Gates, it apparently sparked no debate whatsoever about the state of his mind.
Why is that, do you think?
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
In Shambles
How many places will be in shambles by the time the Bush crew leaves office?
[Maureen Dowd, "A Fatal Incuriosity", The New York Times, 14 September 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
Furchtbar Herzig
[Kurt] Gödel, who has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, was a strange and ultimately tragic man. Whereas Einstein was gregarious and full of laughter, Gödel was solemn, solitary, and pessimistic. Einstein, a passionate amateur violinist, loved Beethoven and Mozart. Gödel’s taste ran in another direction: his favorite movie was Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and when his wife put a pink flamingo in their front yard he pronounced it furchtbar herzig—“awfully charming.”
[Jim Holt, "Time Bandits: What Were Einstein and Gödel Talking About?", The New Yorker, 21 February 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book
Yer Better Constants
I know, two quotations in a row from the same person who isn't even Bill Moyers, but there is a reason, mostly that I've been going through some of the archives at Slate and having an enjoyable time. For the last little while I've been looking at "Do The Math" articles by Jordan Ellenberg, whither the previous entry as well as this one.
The previous one was curious; this one made me laugh. It startled Isaac so much that I had to read it to him, although I'm not sure he really saw the humor. Anyway, this is from Ellenberg's analysis of when one should buy a Powerball ticket; my guffawing was in response to the part I've marked in bold face. It's the bit about "the better constants" that seemed the real knee-slapper to me.
First of all, it was pretty clear somebody was going to win. There's a nice rule of thumb for working out questions like this. Suppose there's an event whose probability is 1 in X, where X is a really big number. And suppose you have Y chances for this event to happen. Then the chance the event will happen is just about 1 – e-Y/X; here e is a famous mathematical constant whose value is about 2.718. The unexpected entrance here of e, the base of the natural logarithms, is one of life's happy mysteries; the better constants, like e and pi, appear in all kinds of contexts having no connection whatever with logarithms or with the circumferences of circles.
[Jordan Ellenberg, "Is Powerball a Mug's Game? It all depends on when you play—and what value you put on a dollar." Slate, 31 August 2001.]
In: All, Laughing Matters
What Gödel Didn't Say
What is it about Gödel's theorem that so captures the imagination? Probably that its oversimplified plain-English form–"There are true things which cannot be proved"–is naturally appealing to anyone with a remotely romantic sensibility. Call it "the curse of the slogan": Any scientific result that can be approximated by an aphorism is ripe for misappropriation. The precise mathematical formulation that is Gödel's theorem doesn't really say "there are true things which cannot be proved" any more than Einstein's theory means "everything is relative, dude, it just depends on your point of view." And it certainly doesn't say anything directly about the world outside mathematics, though the physicist Roger Penrose does use the incompleteness theorem in making his controversial case for the role of quantum mechanics in human consciousness. Yet, Gödel is routinely deployed by people with antirationalist agendas as a stick to whack any offending piece of science that happens by. A typical recent article, "Why Evolutionary Theories Are Unbelievable," claims, "Basically, Gödel's theorems prove the Doctrine of Original Sin, the need for the sacrament of penance, and that there is a future eternity." If Gödel's theorems could prove that, he'd be even more important than Einstein and Heisenberg!
[Jordan Ellenberg, "Does Gödel Matter? The romantic's favorite mathematician didn't prove what you think he did." Slate, 10 March 2005.]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
Why There is Something
Why is there Something rather than Nothing? Why, in other words, should anything exist at all?
This is a question that has torn great minds asunder, from Leibniz to Wittgenstein. Philosophers seem to have given up on it. When I asked Arthur Danto why there was something rather than nothing, he irritably responded, "Who says there's not nothing?" I then put the question to his colleague Sidney Morgenbesser, the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy emeritus at Columbia. "Even if there was nothing," Morgenbesser shot back, "you still wouldn't be satisfied!"
Now it is the physicists who are trying to resolve this ultimate "why" question. But in the scientific community, nobody understands Nothing. The laws of physics, they argue, dictate that Nothing is unstable, so it must give rise to Something–i.e., the universe. But where are these laws writ? In the mind of God? Aren't they part of the Something to be explained?
I have the real explanation for why there is Something rather than Nothing. It is a reductio. Suppose there were nothing. Then, pace the physicists, there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something. If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted. But if everything is permitted, nothing is forbidden. So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden. Nothing, in other words, is self-forbidding. Therefore THERE MUST BE SOMETHING.
This epiphany came to me while I was shaving on June 14, 1994, the sixteen-billion-four-hundred-twenty-millionth anniversary of the Big Bang.
[Jim Holt, "Diary", Slate, 1 March 1996.]
Who Makes What Most?
What in most fetuses turns either into a penis and scrotum or a clitoris and labia can also develop into something in between. And while most babies are born with either ovaries or testicles, some are born with both, or one of each. Many cultures have categories for such in-between people; in India, for instance, they're called hijras, dress as women, and are expected to have sex with men.
In America, however, medical doctrine for the past 40 years has dictated that babies born with ambiguous sex organs be surgically corrected. Estimates on the percentage of babies born with some sort of sexual ambiguity range from 1 percent to 4 percent (that's some 3 million to 10 million people, notes William O. Beeman, an anthropologist at Brown University). It's a sufficiently common occurrence in hospitals that at least one training video exists showing doctors how to make an intersexual baby into a proper girl–one whose vagina can accommodate her future partner's penis. It's also common enough that different medical subprofessions have evolved different responses. "Pediatric urologists make boys," says Cheryl Chase, founder and head of the Intersex Society of North America. "Gynecologists and endocrinologists make girls. Of course there tend to be more girls made, 'cause surgeons say 'it's easier to dig a hole than build a pole.' " She estimates there are some 2,000 operations on American intersexual children a year.
[David Berreby, "Quelle Différence? Biology dooms the Defense of Marriage Act", Slate, 11 September 1996.]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Moyers on Fundamentalist Facism
These are words from a speech given by Bill Moyers the week of 5 September 2005 at Union Theological Seminary. The speech was called "9/11 And The Sport of God".
Before the main excerpt, here is a short quotation from near the end of the speech, a statement of the impediment that right-thinking Americans must overcome to prevail:
Our democratic values are imperiled because too many people of reason are willing to appease irrational people just because they are pious.
Now, the larger excerpt, which more or less summarizes the thesis of the speech.
We can’t wiggle out of this, people. Alvin Hawkins states it frankly: “This is a problem we can’t walk away from.” We’re talking about a powerful religious constituency that claims the right to tell us what’s on God’s mind and to decide the laws of the land according to their interpretation of biblical revelation and to enforce those laws on the nation as a whole. For the Bible is not just the foundational text of their faith; it has become the foundational text for a political movement.
True, people of faith have always tried to bring their interpretation of the Bible to bear on American laws and morals—this very seminary is part of that tradition; it’s the American way, encouraged and protected by the First Amendment. But what is unique today is that the radical religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America’s great political parties—the country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is—and they are driving American politics, using God as a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services and so on.
What’s also unique is the intensity, organization, and anger they have brought to the public square. Listen to their preachers, evangelists, and homegrown ayatollahs: Their viral intolerance—their loathing of other people’s beliefs, of America’s secular and liberal values, of an independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and the search for objective knowledge—has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for state power. They use the language of faith to demonize political opponents, mislead and misinform voters, censor writers and artists, ostracize dissenters, and marginalize the poor.
And now, from the concluding moments of the speech.
As I look back on the conflicts and clamor of our boisterous past, one lesson about democracy stands above all others: Bullies—political bullies, economic bullies and religious bullies—cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with a stubbornness to match their own. This is never easy; these guys don’t fight fair; “Robert’s Rules of Order” is not one of their holy texts. But freedom on any front—and especially freedom of conscience—never comes to those who rock and wait, hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting.
Truisms for Older Men
A few years ago, in a period of reading the excellent Saratoga mysteries by Stephen Dobyns, I read Saratoga Backtalk (finishing it on 17 April 2000, according to my database of books read for the year 2000). Since then, I've had occasion to retell as sage wisdom some advice for men past middle age that I read there on the first page of the narrative.
As I remembered it, it went like this. There are three warnings that men over 50 should heed:
- Never waste an erection;
- Never trust a fart; and
- another one I could never recall.
Now, these may sound peculiar to the younger crowd, as though we men in our golden age have some peculiar obsessions, but they (the first two as remembered, at least) are really just useful observations about getting on with daily life, useful because we can save embarrassment and frustration if we pay attention to the advice instead of forcing ourselves to relearn these wise admonitions separately and individually.
Last night as we mentioned once again these golden bits of wisdom in conversation with our friend Richard, he asked yet again what #3 was and, again, and yet again I couldn't remember.
Finally, tonight, when Isaac and I were at the public library, I thought (in the final moments before closing) to rush to the "D" section of the mysteries and look through all the Dobyns titles until I found the remembered lines. I found them pretty quickly, in the volume mentioned above, since it was at the bottom of the first page of narrative (page 11 of the book) as I pictured it in my memory.
I was pretty accurate on the meaning, but not too precise in my memory of the phrasing. This is what Dobyns had written:
My name is Victor Plotz and I'm fifty-nine years old, or thereabouts. The age when they say you don't waste a hard-on, trust a fart, or bust your noggin on dumb ideas.
Not bad, I'd say. In fact, although #3 was useful in the novel to get the story going, I don't think it really has the force of human-natural law that #1 and #2 do (as I know from personal experience), so I'm not surprised that it slipped from my memory. In fact, I seem even more inclined to bust my noggin on dumb ideas now than, say, 20 years ago, so I'm not so certain about that one anyway.
In fact, now that I have noted the exact quotation, I may go back to my own list of two when I next have occasion to mention them, which I'm sure will be soon.
In: All, Crime Fiction, Writing
White House Under Water
One of the creepier vanities of most political leaders is the private yearning to be tested on a historical scale. Bill Clinton used to confide that, no matter what else he did as President, without a major war to fight he could never join the ranks of Lincoln and F.D.R. During the Presidential debates in 2000, George W. Bush informed his opponent, Al Gore, that natural catastrophes are “a time to test your mettle.” Bush had seen his father falter after a hurricane in South Florida. But now he has done far worse. Over five days last week, from the onset of the hurricane on the Gulf Coast on Monday morning to his belated visit to the region on Friday, Bush’s mettle was tested—and he failed in almost every respect.
[David Remnick, "The White House: Under Water", The New Yorker, 3 September 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book
Trying to Learn a Lesson
Very popular this week has been remarking on the parallels between preparedness for large-scale natural disasters and preparedness for large-scale terrorists attacks, which finds people saying "if Katrina had been an actual terrorist attack" and this had been the response of the "we can keep you safer" Bush League, we'd be in deep water, just like New Orleans is now.
I have another parallel I wish to mention. We know now how carefully the Bush League vets its important nominees to head major federal agencies, and we can still remember the breath-taking haste with which they dug up Roberts to be a Supreme-Court nominee, now nominee to be Chief Justice. Well, if Michael Brown had been a Supreme Court nominee….
I'm just sayin'.
Dressed for Success
I think y'all are being unfair about whether Michael Brown, the besieged head of FEMA, is qualified for his job. One should be careful to keep in mind the current set of standards that we use.
You may recall that when the newly named Secretary of State Rice made her first official visit to Europe, commentators were stunned and bedazzled by the sartorial qualifications she displayed: she looked, they exclaimed, incredibly Secretary of Stately in her lucious outfits.
Now, let's ask Michael Brown's former boss in Edmond, Oklahoma (where he wasn't quite the "assistant city manager" as claimed, but "assistant to the city manager" — aren't we supposed to leave out little words like prepositions on resumes) what he remembers most about Mr. Brown's professional qualifications:
He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt.[*]
[Daren Fonda and Rita Healy, "How Reliable Is Brown's Resume?", Time, 8 September 2005.]
There ya go! Not quite Secretary of Stately, but way up there, if you ask me, depending of course on whether his ties coordinated with his suits. And — hey! — what about his shoes? Maybe he could get some advice from his colleague Condi….
———-
* I'm only being a little unfair. Brown's boss also praised him for being consistently on time to work, which is more than usually has been said about Brown's current boss, the President.
We'll Be Back
It's a shame that "Schwarzenegger" is so difficult to spell when he looks to be heading towards a significant spot in the history of impeding social progress. Tsk.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a profile in timidity this week when he vowed to veto a pioneering bill authorizing gay marriage in California. The bill, which both houses of the Legislature passed by narrow margins, would expand the definition of marriage to include a civil contract between two people, not exclusively a man and woman. This was an enlightened and fair-minded stand that made California's Legislature the first in the nation to approve same-sex marriages.
Too bad Mr. Schwarzenegger could not find the courage to sign the bill into law. Instead, even before receiving the bill, he announced a tortured rationale for vetoing it. For years, social conservatives have accused judges of deciding social issues that should be left to legislators. Now Mr. Schwarzenegger wants to ignore his Legislature and leave gay marriage to the courts or the voters at large to decide.
[…]
Mr. Schwarzenegger's own views of gay marriage are hidden beneath vague, elusive, sometimes contradictory comments that add up to ducking the issue. The former Mr. Universe who has derided political opponents as "girlie men" is afraid to say what he really thinks. He falls back on a rationale that would leave the issue to the courts or another vote of the people. Anything to get him off the hook.[editorial, "Where's the Governator Now?", New York Times, 9 September 2005.]
In: All, Plus Ca Change..., Splenetics
Poor Oil Companies
It seems fitting to paraphrase Barbara Bush and say that things seem to be working out pretty well for the poor oil companies:
Oil companies came under new fire yesterday when it emerged that ExxonMobil's profits are likely to soar above $10 billion this quarter on the back of the fuel crisis.
That's $110 million a day, and more net income than any company has ever made in a quarter. It's also a stunning 69 percent increase over the same period a year ago and a 34 percent jump from the $7.6 billion Exxon made just last quarter.
[Brett Arends, "Exxon's $10B fill-up: Cashing in on crunch", Boston Herald, 7 September 2005.]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
Let Them Eat Cheap Cake Then!
On Aug. 30, the day after the hurricane hit, the Census Bureau released figures showing that the poor had increased by 1.1 million since 2003, to 12.7 percent of the population, the fourth annual increase, with blacks and Hispanics the poorest, and the South remaining the poorest region. Since Bush has been in office, poverty has grown by almost 9 percent. (Under President Clinton, poverty fell by 25 percent.)
[Sidney Blumenthal, "What Didn't Go Right?", Salon.com, 8 September 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
Did He or Didn't He?
Well, this is silly. Kartina made landfall on Monday, 29 August. The "enormous gay rights celebration", known as "Southern Decadence", takes place on Memorial-Day weekend, which is to say it didn't even get started until 5 days later.
As I've pointed out before, if He was really so upset with New Oreans over the homo angle, surely He would have waited until the weekend to toss a hurricane its direction so He could have taken out a whole slew of faggots, right?
Either that, or this group is making the dangerous assertion that His aim is only good to plus-or-minus 5 days, which doesn't sound like a good thing to suggest about their Omnipotent One.
Gay rights supporters in Maine gained little solace Wednesday from a religious conservative group's defense of its suggestion that Hurricane Katrina's landfall might have purposefully coincided with a gay pride celebration in New Orleans.
"The view that such events are caused by God is a matter of opinion – faith if you will – and are not capable of proof," Michael Heath, the executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine, wrote in Wednesday's edition of the group's online newsletter. "Every man must decide for himself whether or not Hurricane Katrina brought the wrath of God down on New Orleans.
"So we are not blaming the homosexuals for the disaster," continued Heath, whose group is spearheading the "people's veto" campaign aimed at repealing Maine's new gay rights law at the Nov. 8 referendum.
[…]
Heath's original post read: "By an odd coincidence – and it was perhaps no more than a coincidence – an enormous gay rights celebration was scheduled for New Orleans just as the worst natural disaster ever to strike our nation was venting its full fury on that helpless city."["Heath tries to quell storm", Bangor Daily News, 8 September 2005.]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
Well, It Did Happen
Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane – it's your hurricane."
[…]
The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch – that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.
[…]
As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency.
[Thomas L. Friedman, "Osama and Katrina", New York Times, 7 September 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book