Ever since Will posted about Roger Ebert earlier I’ve been reading Ebert’s blog (which is fantastic) and came across this explanation of why he never formally reviewed the Ben Stein mockumentary (er, documentary) Expelled.  For those of you who don’t know the premise of that film, it’s basically Stein’s extremely dishonest propaganda exposé on Intelligent Design.  Here’s a passage (though you should read the whole thing):

This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.

And there is worse, much worse. Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actuallydid want to title it “From Darwin to Hitler.” He finds a Creationist who informs him, “Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism.” He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment.

Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one “result” of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. “As a Jew,” he says, “I wanted to see for myself.” We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. “It’s difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place,” he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.

I know that both Ebert’s post and Expelled are old news at this point, but the debate itself is ongoing.  Will linked to this frightening story of the revanchist push in Texas to infuse creationism into Texas public school classrooms.  Whatever else Texas may have going for it, teaching religion in science class is inexcusable, whether or not it’s dressed in the deceptive language of intelligent design.  My (very) conservative Catholic grandma believes that evolution and faith are compatible.  Plenty of people do.  That’s because they are compatible.  The evolution vs. creation debate is less about that issue than it is about cultural dominance in general. It’s just one battleground chosen in the ongoing culture wars. [Read more →]

Well, this is the trajectory of the modern Christian right.  Its leaders have signed this declaration, further entwining religion and politics, and further entrenching the culture wars in the useless “us against them” language that has proved so ineffective for so long.

I prefer the Nicene Creed, myself.

But we’d have to be naive or worse to think that either the religious right or the most extreme secularists on the left have any intention of letting go of this fight anytime soon.  It pays dividends to be at war, even if only the participants of that war reap the benefits and everyone else is a casualty of some sort.  Peacemakers would find a way to compromise, not because compromise has any inherent value in and of itself, but because there are times when fighting a war endlessly does more damage than good.  In fact, I’d say almost all wars fit that description.

The Christian right should back off the gay marriage fight and focus more on pro-life issues – and not merely abortion, but also the death penalty and war.  The left isn’t nearly as organized in these matters, and will likely suffer defeat simply by having one fewer cause to take up arms against. [Read more →]

I have been very glad to read the many arguments against David Brooks’ column announcing the end of moral philosophy. My own problems with what seems like the cyclical and predictable tendency for new scientific discoveries to signal the end of other modalities of knowing are reasonably well documented on this site. Insofar as I tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to what I often can’t help but see as the aggressive imperial tendencies of some strong science proponents — somewhat ironically, it occurs to me that the most aggressive amongst the proponents are often not themselves members of the scientific community — that is not to say that I question the power of science’s explanatory model. It’s just to say that I think that as powerful as science happens to be that it has certain limits that ought not to crowd out other modalities of knowing. Mark had an excellent post on this point some time back when we were batting about the existence of God.

Wrote Mark,

Indeed, in insisting otherwise, both sides insure the continued conflation of science and religion, and both science and religion get demeaned in the process.  For instance, when religion gets up in arms over the teaching of evolution in science class and demands that intelligent design theory be given equal time – also in science class – it must pretend to be something it is not, and was never intended to be.  Religion is not science, and in attempting to gain acceptance as a science, it allows itself to be treated on the same terms as science.  In other words, it begs to be treated as if it were falsifiable, when the entire point in faith is that it is something that is unfalsifiable.  Worse, it forces religion to get tied up in arguments that have precious little to do with the elements of faith that are so very important: things like morality, conscience, meaning, etc.  And so it loses the forest for the trees, to use a cliche.

But similarly, science demeans itself when it used as a proof of the non-existence of god.  Science is not meant to provide unfalsifiable answers, nor is it intended to answer questions that can only admit of unfalsifiable answers.  To do so is to turn the scientific method on its head.  And in so doing, science demeans itself because it loses part of its very essence.

In all honesty, I think that my own cautionary tendencies around the reach of science are at least in part based on a cultural bug. Canada simply doesn’t house the same degree of religiosity as the US and so I don’t perceive myself to operate day-in-day-out within an environment that houses the same degree of antipathy towards science as many of our commenters here at the League do. To my own mind, and in the minds of most of those with whom I interact, the power and position of science in interpreting the world is largely unassailable, so the more pressing exercise is to stand up for those other, less buttressed but, I would argue, equally valuable modalities of knowing.

Post teaser: discussion of torture memos after the jump. [Read more →]

Kyle Cupp has this to say about my professed culture-war pacifism: [Read more →]

Andrew Sullivan has been taking flak from movement conservatives (what else is new?) for calling the Tea Party protests nothing more than childish “temper tantrums.”  He has repeatedly pointed out the hypocrisy of these protests being launched only after a Democrat is in the White House, rather than at any time in the last 8 years’ orgy of spending.  He has further noted the complete lack of focus that these protests seem to have, noting that it’s tough to figure out what they’re protesting at all.

He is right, of course.  And at the same time, completely wrong.

As Stephen Gordon, fresh from the Bob Barr campaign, has been taking great pains to document, the people at the root – though for quite some time no longer the forefront – of the Tea Party protests have been as vocal as could be over the last 8 years’ orgy of spending, “preemptive” war, civil liberties abuses, etc., etc.  Gordon is – rightly -skeptical that the other groups joining in the demonstrations are only fair weather friends.  I suspect and expect that he will quickly find his skepticism validated as the protests increasingly become nothing more than a vehicle for movement conservatives to advance their whole agenda, including a whole host of things that were the reason people like Bob Barr and others turned their backs on Republicans in the first place. 

The trouble is that in order for a protest to have any success, it must become a movement.  And in order to become a movement, you have to attact people who may agree with the specific cause you are protesting, but have exactly zero interest in signing on to your other beliefs.  Worse, you cannot control the message they try to send in their own protest.  Sure, you can try to limit the people who actually get to hold a microphone at the protests, but good luck prohibiting someone from speaking who has agreed to donate substantial resources to the protest, and even more good luck preventing individual protesters from carrying signs that convey an irrelevant message that you or – more importantly – the average observer may find appalling.  Even if the average observer might not find that irrelevant message appalling, its existence makes it increasingly difficult for the average observer to figure out exactly what it is you’re protesting, and the result is that it just looks like you’re throwing a collective temper tantrum because your “side” lost an election, even if you never considered yourself part of that “side” in the first place.

And this is exactly what happened in the case of the Tea Parties.  The concept started out as a relatively small idea organized by a handful of libertarian activists.  Movement conservatives saw an opportunity to co-opt it – and they did. 

To them, the Tea Parties aren’t just an outlet for expressing frustration over the recent orgy of government spending, they are an opportunity to complain about gay marriage, affirmative action programs in government hiring policies, and just about everything else that movement conservatives oppose even more vehemently now that they’ve been beaten – badly – in consecutive national elections.  Never mind that the original point of the Tea Parties, so far as I can tell, was completely libertarian in nature and was to be as much a protest of the Republicans as it was of the Democrats.

Of course, if the Tea Parties had remained the sole province of a handful of libertarian activists, they never would have received the national attention they’re now able to receive, and thus would have had even less impact.  By accepting the involvement of the movement conservative multitudes, the originators have lost control of their message even as the message has access to an ever-larger platform.  The result?  An incoherent jumble of protests that is going to wind up resembling the same sort of incoherence that has characterized large-scale protests and demonstrations for decades.

Sadly, I’m going to guess that “Pardon Scooter!” signs are likely to be the Tea Party versions of “Free Mumia!”

“Saving” marriage obviously means objecting to gay-marriage. But what does this have to do with abortion? Can someone please explain to me what on earth King means? Seriously, I have no idea. ~ Alex Massie, responding to Steve King

King had said, “If we don’t save marriage, we can’t remain pro-life” and in a sense he’s right though not at all in the way he intended it.  There are a number of fires burning in the ongoing culture wars – from immigration to censorship to gay rights and of course, abortion.  Some of these are more controversial than others.  Some are a whole lot less morally clear than others.  And almost universally, the way the culture warriors fight their battles – on the left and the right – is by waging divisive wars, demonizing the other side, and through the incessant politicization of our culture.

Look, to me, the gay marriage debate is not really a controversial item anymore.  I think it’s unequivocally right that gays to be allowed to marry, and for Churches to choose who they do and do not marry.  I believe both the religious and the homosexual population will be protected this way, though I think there’s another trial in store for religious homosexuals, but that’s another story.  In this sense, why Rod Dreher, for instance, is making this about religion is beyond me.  That struggle will be made within the Churches and the individuals who attend them.

However, the issue of abortion is much more difficult.  No matter how hard I try to see it from a pro-choice perspective – and I do try – I cannot think of a fetus as merely that, as merely an extension of the mother.  I think of a fetus as a baby, and I think of babies as people with basic human rights.  As such, I think of abortion as a violation of that baby’s right to life.  I don’t consider girls who receive abortions or their doctors as murderers, though.  I don’t think of pro-choicers as “evil” and in fact, I have a lot of sympathy for the moderates in that camp, because I think more people than not – pro-life and pro-choice – would like to see the end of abortion, they just often disagree about the means by which to achieve that end.  There are deep cultural beliefs at play here, and it’s wrong to think of the other side as “the enemy” or as bad, immoral people – it misses the larger point, and denies them the compassion and respect they deserve. [Read more →]

In the comments to Chris’ excellent post on Roe v. Wade and the culture wars, I wrote:

…The issue, fundamentally, is whether Roe was legally and Constitutionally correct; on that point, you would be surprised the number of legal scholars who have criticized its reasoning.

Importantly, Roe did not define personhood as beginning only at birth for purposes of abortions; nor, obviously, did it define personhood as beginning at conception. Instead, it sought to draw a line between personhood and non-personhood that was inherently arbitrary [N/B: Justice Blackmun's papers explicitly acknowledge this] in a way that defining it as beginning at birth or at conception would not have been….

But this, to me, is the great problem with Roe – Courts should not put themselves in the position of drawing fundamentally arbitrary lines, which is the province of the legislature.

To which Freddie responded:

No. That was the issue while the decision was being decided. Now the issue is that abortion foes don’t have the popular support to pass a constitutional amendment to change the law.

To a point, I agree: it may well be that this is the issue for many, even most, abortion foes, as well as for many, even most, supporters of Roe.  This is largely why Roe continues to play such a central role in the Culture Wars.

But the shoddy reasoning of Roe very much made this inevitable, and ensures it will continue for quite some time. (For a pro-choice legal scholar’s explanation of why that reasoning was so shoddy and problematic, see this legendary law review article by John Hart Ely written shortly after Roe). 

First, Roe did not occur in a vacuum – it has precedential effects that can go far beyond the issue of abortion law.   More importantly, within the arena of reproductive rights law, its arbitrariness and incoherence create a lot of unnecessary confusion for all sides, confusion that ensures issues related to abortion will continue to make their way through the courts for a very long time – and will thus allow Roe to remain at the center of the Culture Wars.  

And this last leads to the biggest problem of all: Roe’s central place in exacerbating the politicization of the judiciary. 

[Read more →]