The Catholic Church is a political organization

There's been a bit of a fuss in Pittsburgh over a public art performance in which a CMU student dressed up as the pope and handed out condoms -- while showing off her cross-shaped pubic hair. It took a couple of days, but eventually someone complained: first the local bishop, and then a bunch of rabble-rouses across the nation (such as the "Catholic League").

The bishop seems to be the most articulate and reasonable among these complainers. He apparently is primarily concerned with the use of the cross in this demonstration, and with an increasing disregard for "the sacred". My inclination is to respond "fuck the sacred". In my experience, "the sacred" is a ploy that some people use to impose themselves on others, and I am quite happy to say that either everything is sacred, or nothing is. (These opinions have not received extensive thought, so I'd love to discuss them). Furthermore, if a powerful person uses a sacred symbol to reinforce his authority, then he is the one who politicized it and invited sacrilege.

The more obnoxious complaints are of the "victimized American Christian" variety... as if American Christians are an oppressed class. Catholics may have some claim to special consideration in America, since they were historically marginalized (particularly if they migrated from English-occupied Ireland), but as a group, Catholics have made a pretty solid transition into the establishment. For instance, they are over-represented in Congress (31%), and it's been about 50 years since the USA had it's first Catholic President. Given this influence, I'm don't give serious attention to superficial claims that Catholics are being treated unfairly. That's not to say that Catholics aren't subject to hate crimes (like every other group), but only that there is no reason to assume that any mockery of Catholicism represents anti-Catholic bigotry and likewise that our society doesn't need organizations that are specifically dedicated to protecting them (such as the "anti-defamation" Catholic League, which was founded after Kennedy's presidency).

So anyway, as is common for American Christians who deny their privilege, these offended Catholics are claiming that a major university (i.e. liberals) would not tolerate mockery of other religious figures. My first counter-example would be the Iranian Ayatollah's, and I'd follow up with the King/Queen of England (head of the Anglican church), Pat Robertson, and the generic character of a revival tent-preacher or faith-healer. Granted, most of these are Christians, but there's a good reason for that -- only Christian religious leaders have substantial influence in our society. My remaining counter-example is a political leader, but so is the Pope.

The Pope is not only is influential, but he heads an explicitly political organization. As such, he is fair game for criticism and mockery. While all religious institutions have political impact, this passive political influence is not enough for the Catholic Church. Rather than just teaching that "abortion is evil" and then allowing laymen to take up the political battles, Church leaders insist on getting directly involved with organization of political campaigns and lobbying of politicians. For instance, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops takes positions on state policies that are not directly relevant to the church (e.g. access to emergency contraceptives), and many bishops use their religious authority to pressure state officials to change public policy (e.g. by denying communion to supporters of abortion rights).

While the political activities of the Catholic Church in the USA are not very intense, the church can  be downright oppressive in countries where it is dominant. The pressure that they expert on legislators is much more intense in parts of Latin America, both because exclusion from the Church has a much greater impact and because the Church strives to influence a wider range of topics. Furthermore, there are several countries where the Catholic Church receives special privileges and powers (such as subsidies in many countries).

All in all, the Pope is a political leader, therefore he has opened himself up to a range of attacks that would normally be considered inappropriate if targeted at catholic laymen or a low-key religious leader.

tip

FD: Legalize non-sexual marriage

published at Freedom Democrats 3/28/2006

 

In all the brouhaha over "gay" or "homosexual" marriage, Americans have been overlooking another sexual minority and ignoring how including sex in the legal definition of marriage may interfere with their ability to develop healthy familial relationships.

Asexual Americans, like many dispersed minority groups, are using the Internet to form a community. Browsing the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network website , I was unable find any evidence of a political agenda, and I have no interest in presenting asexuals as the next step in identity-politics.

Instead, I bring up asexuality as a conceptual framework that can help us to think about the role of sexuality in our society, and in particular, the role of the state in defining sexual norms.

How does a person live in a predominantly sexual society if that person has no sexual desire? I suspect such individuals are commonly frustrated as they develop intimate relationships with others, only to find that those others expect sexual behavior to be part of those relationships. If such confusion doesn't exist, they still find that the importance of their (asexual) relationships is minimized by comparison and competition against sexual relationships. I suspect they have trouble finding others who share similar views towards intimate and committed relationships. When they do find a person to form a committed relationship with, half of the time they are frustrated by society (including the state) declaring that their relationships are less important, and less respectable than (hetero)sexual relationships.

Thinking about these asexual relationships can help us clarify what we want from socially sanctioned relationships and why state promotion of heterosexuality is so deeply offensive, even for those who comfortably fit the heterosexual mold. We support "homosexual" marriage not because we like gays, nor because we want to promote homo-sexual activity. We simply want to remove sexuality from the definition of marriage. We want the state to stop thinking of us as sexual objects, and to start thinking of us as independent humans with a right to our own bodies and a right to define our own relationships.

If you'd like more information on asexuality, I recommend the Wikipedia article. The article presents a range of views and issues regarding asexuality , along with links to mainstream news sources and other resources on asexuality.

With those thoughts, I'd like to refer you to two articles that have caught my attention. The first is a libertarian perspective on how to reform state policy regarding marriage:Tully's Page: As the Free State grapples with gay marriage...

The second is a bit more radical analysis of state-sponsored sexuality from the New Times in Russia:WHAT COMES AFTER A MAN AND A WOMAN , by Denis Dragunsky, excerpts follow:

"The state did not care a whit about the thick book which priests showed to people from time to time. A state...needed statistics and control.

"To be more exact, it demanded two things: a population census with a view to collecting taxes and calling up young men for military service....So it would be no exaggeration to say that heterosexuality as a norm derived from certain functions of power, namely, the registration of the population, tax collection and the formation of a regular army.

"Heterosexuality was a general standard of behavior toward one's own body (and soul) forced by the state on its citizens, inasmuch as their bodies and souls were, if not its full property, then at its disposal."

FD: Libertarian evaluation of anti-discrimination laws

published at Freedom Democrats, 5/22/10

With the recent hub-bub over Rand Paul's dislike for laws against discrimination in employment, I thought it would be good to lay out the issues from a libertarian perspective. I think that Paul's description of the issues has been pretty weak, so I want to dig into those issues a little more.

Proponents of anti-discrimination laws appeal to two benefits of the laws:

 1. Creation of economic opportunities for excluded groups.
 2. Normalization of interactions between the dominant group and excluded groups.

My own libertarian attitudes prompt a few questions to evaluate the justice of anti-discrimination laws:

 1. Is the law burdensome?
 2. Is the law effective?
 3. Is the law necessary?

The answers to these questions are in large part a matter of fact. I have not gathered the relevant facts here (that job is much too big for a blog); instead, I am just going to discuss which facts would be relevant to the case.

* Is the law burdensome?* This is what I see as the crux of the libertarian critique. If a law imposes no costs on anyone, then it is irrelevant. Obviously, anti-discrimination laws will be seen as costly by those who wish to discriminate. Let's just assume that they are worthless people anyway, and ignore this cost. Do the laws place burdens on people who would not discriminate on their own? The people to ask are probably business owners, who are the ones who face discrimination lawsuits. How often are they sued, and how often are accusations dismissed as unfounded? What do businesses pay to retain legal counsel? How do they change their practices to avoid lawsuits. As an anecdote, a small-business owner once told me that she had been the target of discrimination lawsuits from a few disgruntled employees, and consequently limited her job advertisements to locations where "protected" workers would be unlikely to see them. I cannot vouch for the legitimacy of this anecdote, or how generalizable it is, but it does suggest a way that the law may place a burden on businesses. I can also speculate that businesses may try to shield themselves from lawsuits by using affirmative action in promotions or investing in "sensitivity" training. Rather than being a dead-weight loss of compliance, these may amount to transfers from the business to the excluded group.

* Is the law effective?* Libertarians often like to point to the unintended consequences of laws. Just because a law says "thou shalt" does not mean that everyone will. In fact, rather than following the spirit of the law, some members of the public will develop behaviors that comply with the letter of the law, or help to evade the law. Sometimes these behaviors can exacerbate the original problem, or prevent the development of alternative solutions to the problem. The anecdote above suggests that anti-discrimination laws could create discrimination in situations where it would not exist. Taking a cue from the opponents of affirmative action, there's a chance that anti-discrimination laws cause members of the dominant group to feel threatened by members of the excluded group, thereby interfering with the normalization of attitudes. I don't believe that there is any way to actually quantify this for long/standing anti-discrimination laws (though I'm sure many people have tried). Perhaps when the law is originally initiated, the expansion of economic opportunity could be measured by looking at the businesses that had openly discriminated prior to the law, and then see how much business they did with the excluded group after the law went into effect.

*Is the law necessary?* I think this is where Rand Paul really failed. The principles of libertarian law are not absolute. Human institutions, including the law, exist to serve human needs. To paraphrase one libertarian I know: notions of property rights are worthless to a starving person who sees a loaf of bread cooling on a windowsill. So, given the conditions of 1964, were anti-discrimination laws necessary (assuming that they were effective)? */Most definitely, yes/*. The economic argument for anti-discrimination laws is based on the fact that humans need access to physical materials (often called land and capital) in order to survive, but our property system does not provide such materials to anyone by right. Therefore, many people must ask others for permission to use the materials that they need to survive--they must sell their labor. On top of that, they are sometimes prevented from selling their labor because of anti-competition clauses in contracts.

This may be a tough situation in day-to-day life, but in 1964, the situation had been exacerbated to an intolerable degree. The dominant group (whites) had systematically and violently prevented the excluded group (blacks) from acquiring ownership of the materials that they needed to survive. In the absence of laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, blacks would have been dependent upon whites for their survival, and it was well known that many whites fully intended to discriminate against them. If I had faced what blacks had faced before the Civil Rights Act, I would consider the USA to be absolutely illegitimate, and a CRA without the private anti-discrimination considerations would not be enough to convince me that I would live within that system.

Rand Paul completely overlooks this situation when he compares the anti-discrimination laws to other regulations that may be placed on businesses (e.g. unable to prohibit guns) or to freedom of speech.

Some libertarians may be uncomfortable with the identity group mentalities that permeate our society, but our ideological opposition to such mentalities does not provide any excuse to ignore their role in real life, and the legacies of injustices done in their name.

FD: More discrimination against homosexual couples

published at Freedom Democrats, 12/12/07

Homosexual couples can be separated by law, while heterosexual (married) couples cannot. How's that for discrimination?

While it is customary for the U. S. Probation Office to bar people on supervision from associating with other felons while on supervised release, it ordinarily makes exceptions for close family members. After their release, Mangini and Roberts were informed that same-sex relationships were not treated as family and that they would have to stay away from each other.

Barter-based schools

A group called "Trade School" is encouraging people to organize classroom instruction as part of a barter system. They are providing organizational advice and software to enable such schools. Based on this interview at Shareable, it looks like it is driven by an ideology of inclusiveness that is somewhat (but not completely) hostile to markets.

Based on my quick evaluation of the system, it seems like it could be a good set-up for hobbyists, but not for high-productivity education. The potential to teach high value skills is limited both by the complexity of organizing payment by barter, and particularly the difficulty of getting instructors to make substantial time commitments when their only compensation is barter (e.g. I'm not going to pay the rent through barter). Still, I think it will be a nice addition to a community's culture, and this will help introduce/maintain some diversity of educational systems, allowing for the possibility to develop into something larger.

via Slashdot.

American patents, Chinese slavery

Yesterday, I made the argument that copyright is slavery, yet I admitted that it is only a tiny bit of slavery. Today, B. Psycho inadvertently reminds me that I should not have made any such concession; Intellectual Property plays a central role in a system that comes quite close to total slavery -- the devil's bargain between American tech companies and the Chinese state.

The gist of this accusation is Chinese workers allow themselves to be worked like slaves only because various restrictions on commerce (such as Apple's patents) prevent them from making a living any other way. These laws undermine the traditional method by which a free man would earn a living -- by working under an established and experienced mentor, and eventually setting up his own enterprise using the skills he learned on the job and the reputation that he developed. However, in the modern world, this form of upward mobility is prohibited by the law (both here and in China), creating permanent classes of employers and employees -- masters and slaves. In the Apple/China situation, patents prevent the workers from being independent, but other legal arrangements can produce a similar effect. The most glaring in my mind are the "non-compete" clauses found in many employment contracts; it's too bad that most progressives are satisfied to reform slavery without eradicating it.

Absolute Sexual Equality

Over at Philosophical Disquisitions, John Danaher is discussing the "Polygamy, Incest, Bestiality" (PIB) slippery slope objection to homosexuality. He reviews several attempts to counter this argument by describing how homosexual activity is different from PIB, and (paraphrasing John Corvino) rightly points out that there is logically no need to make such arguments because the people who equate homosexuality to PIB do not provide any argument supporting that position (the only similarity being that they are all "forbidden" or "gross").

Along those lines, the PIB argument really isn't an argument in itself; it seems to be a reductio ad absurdum for some unspecified justification for acceptance of homosexuality. The logic seems to be:

1) You say that we should accept homosexuality because of principle X.
2) Principle X would cause us to accept PIB (or pedophilia) .
3) Therefore, principle X is invalid.

Of course, the force of this argument relies entirely on what "principle X" actually is; if principle X does not apply to PIB, then the PIB-argument is pointless.

So this brings us to my favorite "principle X" : absolute sexual equality.

My principle is that I should not treat a person differently due solely to their biological sex (aside from my own sexual relationships). I realized that this principle applies to homosexuality when I read that some opponents of the sexual Equal Rights Amendment had predicted that the ERA would forbid discrimination against homosexual relationships. Many proponents of the ERA reject this interpretation. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say anything about that -- but I do agree that the principle of sexual non-discrimination implies acceptance of homosexuality.

Attempts to distinguish homophobia from sexism often rest on the idea of reciprocal equality: that discrimination against homosexuality will limit a man's options just as much as it would limit a woman's options-- both men and women would be limited to sexual relationships with the opposite sex (let's ignore the intersex in this argument).

Superficially, this argument seems reasonable, but for any American it should quickly raise a red-flag, since it is reminiscent of the principle of "separate but equal". Based on history, we know that an arrangement that is superficially egalitarian can act as a cover for severe oppression. Based on logic, we know that when we treat people differently, it is very difficult to perfectly balance the moral worth of those differences; this is especially true in a world where people have different opinions regarding the moral worth of different conditions. In essence, requiring that men marry women and women marry men is the same as requiring that men work outside of the home and women work inside the home. We may believe that we can put aside our personal preferences and assert than marrying a man is objectively just as good as marrying a woman. However, as with a belief that working inside the home is just as good as working outside the home, this is actually a personal preference and not an objective description of reality. Furthermore, we cannot give the benefit of the doubt to these assertions of equal value, because such arrangements are quite easy to manipulate in favor of one group or the other (as we have seen in history).

For the sake of illustration, consider these two ways in which this "reciprocal equality" could lead to clearly non-equal outcomes. These may seem silly on their own, but they are sufficient to demonstrate the inequality implicit in considering sex when judging relationships.

The first inequality arises from the physical and emotional differences between men and women. For instance, men (as a group) are stronger than women (as a group); if we were to forbid a person from choosing a partner from either group, then we clearly would be influencing the likely characteristics of the partner that they eventually find.

The second aspect of inequality is apparent when the population is divided into two "reciprocal" groups that vary drastically in size. Consider splitting the human population into two groups, each of which is forbidden from marrying within its own group. Now imagine that one group constitutes 90% of the population, and the other is 10%; the 10% is clearly the elite group here, having their choice of partners from the other group, whereas most of the members of the larger group will be effectively forbidden from marrying at all (unless the members of the smaller group can take multiple spouses). Normally, the population of males and females is nearly equal, so this isn't a big deal, but this thought experiment does emphasize the fact that men and women are selecting their partners from different groups, competing for attention with a different group of people, and that these group dynamics will influence the likely outcome of their quests to find partners. To bring this back to the real world, some societies have experienced substantial imbalances between the male and female population -- a deficit of males following major wars, and a deficit of females is societies that practice prenatal sex selection.

Now that I've stated my position, let's consider how it compares to the position of others. Many people consider themselves "anti-sexist", yet would balk at taking this position of non-discrimination between homosexual and heterosexual couples. Looking at the marriage issue and their behavior in general, they apparently think that discrimination is quite appropriate; they actually are sexist, they only object to the idea that one sex is superior to the other. They will treat men and women differently in everyday encounters and believe that it is totally just for the law to recognize these categories for issues such as marriage. My objection to such categorization is both moral and empirical. Morally, individuals should be free to structure their lives as they see fit, and pigeonholing a person into a gender role places a fairly arbitrary restriction on their freedom. Empirically, many people lack the stereotypical traits of their gender on which theories of sexual discrimination are based (e.g. many men have less strength than the median strength among women). Trying to force a person into a role based on their genitalia is a simplistic approach that ignores the many ways in which each person deviates from any sexual ideal.

On the other side, there may be people who consider my view of sexual equality to be limited, in that I do consider there to be difference between men and women. These differences are apparent both in how I relate to them sexually (which only applies to my wife now) and that the male and female populations differ in many socially important respects. I won't deny that our sexual preferences and relationships have myriad ramifications in other aspects of society (thereby undermining the idea of sexual non-discrimination); however, by recognizing that the male and female populations are in fact different, I do not automatically assume that any difference in social/economic standing is due to discrimination. There is simply no getting around the fact that people are different from each other, and the details of how these differences arise (e.g. genetic, chemical, social) are not really important. We cannot and should not treat each individual identically, all we can do is make sure that our discrimination is not based on unsound ideology and prejudice.

So to bring this back to the issue of social acceptance of homosexuality and the "PIB objection", I think that it is immediately clear that this principle of equality does not compel us to accept polygamy, pedophilia, or bestiality. A variant of this principle (non-discrimination on the basis of parentage) could be used to argue that incest should not be discouraged. Of course, this would in no way affect the situations where incest could be viewed as rape (whether statutory or forcible). I'm not too concerned by this use of the argument to destigmatize incest,partly because I don't think that cousin marriage needs to be stigmatized, and so this issue is limited to sibling marriage. More importantly, most of these arguments for sexual equality do not apply strongly to incest -- primarily because the the prohibition of incestuous sexual activity does not place a substantial restriction on a person's choice of mates.

The advancement of sexual equality is one of the major struggles of our age, and no attempt to equate it with sexual perversion should distract us from eliminating sexual discrimination from our institutions.

Are you on the inside or the outside?

Many commentators have been describing the new forms of segregation in American society -- where people are either members of an "in" group with special privileges, or you aren't. Much of the talk has focused on the segregation of workers into "protected" jobs from which they cannot be fired, and the rest who cannot get steady employment, in large part as a side effect of the protection system.

However, we are also seeing increasing segregation of Americans into the group with security clearance, who have access to massive government databases, and the rest of us who are forbidden to access this information. This segregation has troubling similarities to the system of the Chinese Communist Party, which maintains separate media systems for privileged insiders and the ignorant masses.

The Washington Post has taken the lead in exposing the scale of "Top Secret America", first by revealing that hundreds of thousands of Americans have this clearance, indicating that such clearance is increasingly a requirement for a decent job (like Party membership in Communist countries). Now the Post has described a massive database of "suspicious" Americans, which is available to pretty much every law enforcement agent. So next time a cop stops you for some trivial reason, he can check to see if you've ever done anything suspicious, and adjust his behavior accordingly. This is a good reason to use a pseudonym on the Internet.

A summary is here: Monitoring America: How the U.S. Sees You - CBS News

The best quote:

"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.

Apparently the mainstream media is finally waking up to what commentators like Kevin Carson have been describing for years:

Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

Anyway, this reminds us that the main resistance to this trend is being attacked by "the authorities" as we speak, and these authorities are called out by John Wilkins in Statism and Wikileaks.

the real lesson is the extent to which the professional political classes of the west are statists. They have no concern for their citizenry. They have no concern for their economies or even for the corporations or big labor organisations they nominally represent. They only care that they are in power, or might get into power, and so the state is what they care about, so they can have that power.

The last thing on my mind today is the fact that the Dream Act failed to pass. It sounded pretty innocuous to me, but there are enough authoritarian nationalists in Congress that even this law couldn't pass. Not a big surprise, but the likely hypocrisy of these nationalists was conveniently illuminated by the contrast against a recent essay describing the pseudo-liberal argument against affirmative action that conservatives trot out so often -- "since we're all equal, all discrimination is wrong". Of course, this ignores the central role of group identity in our society. Sometimes this group identity is implicit (e.g. cultural affinity), sometimes it is explicit (e.g. citizenship, family), but either way it is very important. If a person can't recognize that and consider how this factors into our decisions, then they are pretty naive. If they continue to advocate for group identity in one situation, even as they dismiss its complexities in another, then they are just hypocrites. I don't know what this particular author believes about nationality and migration, but if he's like most conservatives who use terms like "equality" or "individualism", then he's just an opportunist who will use whatever argument he can to secure privileges for himself and his favored identity group.