There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man.
The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.
Hindu proverb
Were You Really Surprised?
Obama "Comes Out" in Favor of "Gay Marriage"
The Ditherer-in-Chief: It's Not Just Afghanistan....
The social conservatives are going to leap all over this; it was the lead story for Glenn Beck's daily email, and I have heard Sean Hannity constantly reference to Obama's "opposition" to "gay marriage" so many times, I'm sure he'll have something to say, but I know at least once or twice I posted skeptical comments in the blog after Hannity spoke of the President's support of traditional marriage.
The only thing that surprised me was the timing; in fact, in fact, I had written an ad lib a Jay Leno joke (referencing Obama and Biden's "different positions" on "gay marriage" in my political humor section below before Obama's comments in a national interview today, affirming his support for "gay marriage".
Before going further, let me point out as a libertarian-conservative, my opinion on this issue varies from many, if not most libertarians. In fact, I have purposefully not covered "pro-gay marriage" Reason clips in the blog. My libertarian beliefs allow for the right of freely consenting, competent adults to couple. This is not the same thing as the government conferring a certain status on these couples. I maintain that marriage and family are not arbitrary distinctions but institutions that have evolved for purposes of social stability and self-preservation.
Obama from the get-go (back in 1996 when he first ran for public office) made clear he opposed DOMA--the Defense of Marriage Act. This simply ensured traditional marriage was set in federal law and prohibited states from unilateral changes to the definition of marriage in reciprocity arrangements (e.g., a gay couple goes to tie the gay knot in Massachusetts, moves back to Texas and sues Texas to get their marriage recognized; at that point, gay couples in Texas sue on equal protection grounds, arguing that they should have the same rights.)
Only someone who still believes in fairy tales, as Clinton knows, would believe that even for the Ditherer-in-Chief, it took years to sort out the concept of marriage. Let's recall that in the fall of 2008, he still believed in the traditional concept of marriage--but he opposed California's Proposition 8. The California Supreme Court earlier had struck down an earlier California proposition establishing the traditional definition of marriage. (California gays had a coexisting sanctioned relationship with similar rights.) Interestingly enough, the minority voters who came out to elect Obama also heavily voted for Proposition 8 (which was designed to bypass California Supreme Court review).
So let's see: he opposed DOMA, which protected the concept of traditional marriage; he opposed Proposition 8 restoring the traditional definition of marriage to the California constitution. But he believed in traditional marriage.
Now flash forward to the 2010 lame duck session when Congress finally passed the repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell', i.e., military gays had to be discreet about their sexual identity. Reporters went to the next item on the gay agenda: "gay marriage", and Obama had this to say:
"My feelings about this are constantly evolving. I struggle with this. I have friends, I have people who work for me who are in powerful, strong, long-lasting gay or lesbian unions. And they are extraordinary people. And this is something that means a lot to them and they care deeply about. At this point, what I've said is that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have, and I think that's the right thing to do. But I recognize that from their perspective it is not enough, and I think this is something that we're going to continue to debate, and I personally am going to continue to wrestle with going forward. This is going to be an issue that is not unique to the military, this is an issue that extends to all of our society and I think we're all going to have to have a conversation about it."So then as I listened to Sunday talk soup (Meet the Press) and Biden casually threw into the mix the comment that HE supported gay marriage, carefully noting that he didn't speak for the President on the issue, my antenna instantly went up. Granted, the VP is a walking gaffe machine, but the guy spent over half his life in the US Senate. He knew exactly what he was doing--he was no political novice. Other people, including National Journal's Major Garrett earlier today (hours before the announcement), have suggested that it was a deliberate, tactical move on Obama's part.
I did, too, but I wasn't quite sure when or where. You could make a cogent argument that Obama didn't want to give Blue Collar/Reagan Democrats in battleground states another reason to vote against him on culturally conservative grounds.
But in hindsight it's obvious: yesterday there was a high-profile vote on North Carolina's vote on making the state's traditional marriage law judge-proof. Obama wasn't about to announce before the election, which would make the election a proxy on Obama himself--and a political defeat
So is this an instance of Obama's "profile in courage"? Standing out to defy the majoritarian victory in North Carolina? No. IT WAS ENTIRELY POLITICAL. He knew it was going to be an issue with his supporters, he's trying to motivate the base, it's better to get it out there sooner than later: he's got 6 months to win back any supporters upset at his decision.
,
Where was Obama's "leadership" on this? After votes in Vermont, New York, Maryland, Washington state, Iowa, Connecticut, DC, and New Hampshire, Ditherer-in-Chief Barack Obama decided to lead--from behind? The one point every voter should keep in mind as we close in on the election this fall is if it takes him years to decide where he stands on marriage (we know he also dithered on the Afghanistan surge and the UBL operation), where will he be in a crisis, when you don't have years to come to a decision???
The
POLITICAL PROPAGANDA IS NOT SCHOLARSHIP
Progressive Academia Run Amok, Morally Bankrupt
Academic Freedom Left Dying Under Rosa Parks' Bus
THUMBS DOWN!
Even when I was a political liberal during my salad years, I had my misgivings about multiculturalism. OLL is located in the middle of a generally poor Hispanic section of San Antonio (at least when I attended there). Probably most of the students were Latino. OLL is operated by the Sisters of Divine Providence, and there were sisters whom lived not in the convent but in the surrounding neighborhoods. I had to go to lectures or read indulgent works by obscure multicultural authors, none of whom you would ever confuse with William Shakespeare. The politically active Latinos were picketing while I was there; I'll never forget they were calling one of my professors, a very nice sister with a Spanish surname, a "racist" (I never found out what was behind the smear), and they had filed a complaint with a government agency, which produced a report citing, among other things, my beloved philosophy department for being underrepresented in Latino professors. That was a really cheap shot: we had a small department: less than a handful of professors; we had a couple of Oblate Father/scholars (I believe they were Irish immigrants), and I have written multiple posts referencing Sister Mary Christine Morkovsky, a Czech-American niece of a Houston bishop. (I don't know about the supply of Latino philosophy PhD's in the United States, but in affirmative action academia, they could probably have attracted their pick of very good offers from top schools.)
Personally, I don't have any intellectual respect for multicultural programs; and I seriously doubt these areas have a truly balanced perspective. There are a number studies that show that academia is pervasively progressive (see here); I generally kept my mouth shut on political topics while in academia--which is supposed to be a free market of ideas.
I haven't had a chance to review the firing of a recent blogger, Naomi Schaefer Riley, after she took up some black studies dissertations, questioning their scholarly contribution. Admittedly, she wrote some provocative things, e.g.,
If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.This passage has gotten the attention of many conservative bloggers:
But topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights? Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates.I think Ms. Riley is spot on. Instead of looking at substantive issues like single-parent homes, a high dropout or incarceration rate of young men of color, we have a propaganda study smearing the integrity of black conservatives. I believe Sandra Day O'Connor talked about the need for affirmative action to wither away in the future (Grutter v Bollinger). I will let black conservatives speak for themselves, but I know that there were a number of outstanding black professionals, scholars and businessmen BEFORE the enactment of affirmative action, and it seems rather presumptuous, arbitrary and insulting to believe that all scholarly accomplishments are attributed to incredibly ineffective, bad government policies versus the individuals' own hard work....
As one might expect, progressives reacted with their characteristic intolerance of others' perspectives with ad hominem attacks:
The comments regarding my post seem to boil down to the following:This is typical academia. I once wrote an article questioning a well-known computer user satisfaction measure on various technical grounds (methodology, reliability, validity, etc.). Even though literally dozens of studies had been conducted using this measure and scores of others in process, my article was tersely rejected (want to bet scholars using the measures reviewed the article?), I got back adverse reviews, none of them directly addressing the criticisms I made--to the best of my knowledge, unpublished in the literature (I was the boy noticing the emperor was wearing no clothes); a typical criticism was instead of criticizing other people's measures, I should be constructive and publish my own (easier said than done when you're a junior/untenured professor); I hadn't referenced anything new in the field of psychometrics, etc. All I was trying to do was start a conversation. I didn't think it was right for fellow scholars to rely on a measure that was seriously flawed, and most did not have my background on methodology.
I am picking on people because they are black (and I am a racist).
I am picking on people even though I don’t have a Ph.D.
I am picking on people who are too young and inexperienced to defend themselves.
I am picking on people even though I haven’t read their entire dissertations.
As for the Chronicle throwing Ms. Riley under the bus: editor Liz McMillen: FOR SHAME!
Several thousand of you spoke out in outrage and disappointment that The Chronicle had published an article that did not conform to the journalistic standards and civil tone that you expect from us. We’ve heard you, and we have taken to heart what you said. We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles. As a result, we have asked Ms. Riley to leave the Brainstorm blog.Yeah, "it's not what you said: it's how you said it"; can we PLEASE get past fifth grade? "Journalistic standards"--are you saying a woman whom has written articles on academia for major newspapers around the US for 15 years somehow abandoned those standards in this one post? This is thinly veiled censorship, pure and simple. She said a couple of things which were provocative but not out of bounds, particularly for a newspaper and particularly in one covering academia!
Don Boudreaux (Cafe Hayek)'s Selective
Letters to the Editor To Be Published This July
I had been trying to find a way to work Boudreaux's upcoming volume of letters to the editor into one of my miscellany segments when Reason uploaded this interview promotion. I have probably covered two or 3 letters in the blog (I don't know if they were published; he says here maybe one of every 25 are printed by the target publication). Boudreaux is remarkably pithy (my dissertation chair and various people in the professional ranks have accused me of being long-winded) with scalpel-precision humor; he mentions in the video others have used a description like sniper humor (e.g., like sniper winning bids on eBay). You should be able to preorder Don Boudreaux's new book here.
Political Humor
Now I would like to dedicate the next song to "Cherokee Liz" Warren, the Massachusetts progressive piece of work challenging one of the best Senators in Washington, Scott Brown, standing for reelection this fall. Liz claims to be 1/32nd Native American. No doubt she got mercilessly teased growing up with blue eyes and blond hair--after all, her grandfather had high cheekbones! (I have high cheekbones which my mom claimed I had inherited from a paternal great-grandmother Cherokee. I always thought it was way cool to have a Cherokee great-grandmother. But I identify myself as Franco-American; my family is all blue-eyed (except for one green-eyed) with blond or light brown hair.) So while Liz Warren identifies with a distant Indian ancestor, Barack Obama distances himself from his 1/2 Caucasian side...
On a more serious note, my favorite Kenny Loggins track
America is a natural wonder...I thought Loggins did a version
with Native American backing but I couldn't locate it on Youtube
"Vice President Joe Biden has come out in support of same-sex marriage. President Obama never endorsed gay marriage. But now he's in favor of gay Secret Service agents. " - Jay Leno
[Jay, let Congressman Barney Frank place a call to Steve Gobie. He might be able to tell you what the going rate for a male prostitute is in Colombia...]
"New predictions out today claim 42 percent of Americans will be obese by the year 2030. They say the only way to stop that is for the government to step in. Oh yeah, when it comes to trimming the fat and tightening your belt, what better way than the U.S. government?" - Jay Leno
[Of course... You have millions of federal workers, and guess what happens when you sit on your butt all day telling other people what to do, while scarfing down taxpayer-paid $16 muffins?]
"Apparently Rick Santorum endorsed Mitt Romney last night very late via email. That just makes Santorum one of the 10 million guys ashamed of what he did late last night on his computer." - Conan O'Brien
[Romney was confused; he had gotten Santorum's endorsement in the mail earlier that day. But it turned out the postmark was from 2008...]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Rolling Stones, "Tumbling Dice"
