Don’t Mistake Rioters for Protesters

In Minneapolis Friday a police officer was arrested for the murder of a black man he was detaining and restraining in a manner that led to death. It was captured on video, so the whole country has seen it.

Protests break out calling for justice for George Floyd. The perpetrator is in custody. The other officers, who didn’t step in to prevent the officer’s actions, are also charged as accessories. All were immediately fired, not suspended, no waiting to see.

Terrence Floyd, brother of George Floyd, calls for peace.
"That's not going to bring my brother back at all," he says of riots.
Image from here.

The arrest wasn’t instantaneous. In such a high-profile case (because of the media), the prosecutors need to be careful not to charge more than they can prove. It doesn’t appear to be premeditated, for example, so if they charged first-degree murder and couldn’t prove it, the officer would be found not guilty. And, because of double jeopardy protection, he couldn’t be charged again for the same incident. So the charges are what they can prove for certain. If evidence later appears to prove a higher level crime, the charges can be raised.

There were things to take into account. I suggest this op-ed, which explains those legal details. 

But do you know anyone or have you heard anyone say that the brutality was justified and the police officer should be let off? In regular media? On social media? Anywhere?

This is one of those times that civil society is in agreement. A serious crime was committed, and there must be justice.

found on Ben Shapiro's Facebook page today

So what is being protested?

If justice is underway, what is the message of the protest?

I think it’s something like, “Until America can guarantee that this will never happen to another black person, America is evil.”

But that’s an impossible ask.

America was founded on the principle that all people are created equal—no one is entitled to more consideration under the law than another. Society isn’t stratified by birth, as it has historically been in most countries on earth throughout history.

Unfortunately, slavery of blacks was instituted on this continent by the Mother Country, and it needed to be rooted out. The Constitution was written with that expectation. It took too long, and it took a bloody Civil War to accomplish. But that’s what America sacrificed to make it happen.

Even then, people who had been taught their whole lives that people of a certain bloodline were inferior didn’t automatically unlearn that false teaching. It took another century for people to get fed up and actually grant equal rights.

We’re still divided. But let’s define things a little more carefully.

The Republican Party was created to fight slavery. All slaveholders were Democrats. Even in the northern non-slave states before the Civil War, the pro-slavery people were only Democrats. Coincidentally, it is Democrats who run the cities with most of the racial issues. This is true in Minneapolis—local on up to the governor.

The Republican Party pushed for the Civil Rights laws in the 60s. It was Democrats, mainly from former slave states, that resisted letting go of the Jim Crow laws they had perpetuated.

Then, somehow, the lie got told that it was the Republicans all along who had been racist. The lie became that what conservatives wanted to conserve were the old, pre-Civil Rights, ways. That conservatives wanted to conserve the Democrat way of thinking and living. That was never even close to reality.

So, here we are, decades later, and the lie is bigger. Now, at a time when most Americans don’t even understand the mindset of a racist, and have never felt that way in their lives, have never treated different races with disdain—those people are being told they’re guilty of systemic racism.

What are the protests saying, then? That we should stop being white, or Hispanic, or Asian, because blacks need to be knelt down to? If that isn’t it, what is the message of the protest?

Houston Chronicle May 31, 2020

I’ve seen a number of people reference other protests—implying that this is just an escalation, because we didn’t listen before. Such a message covers the full front page of yesterday’s Houston Chronicle Sports section. Colin Kaepernick protested by refusing to stand for the National Anthem, and that offended us. “If only we had heard his message!” people say.

We did hear him. It wasn’t his method of protest that offended us. It was the lie of his message—that America is an evil, systemically racist country—this from a millionaire black man playing a ball game for a living, and not playing it spectacularly well enough to merit his hiring amid the bad media he brought on.

Black Live Matter protested. And when people of goodwill answered, “Yes, your lives do matter to us. All lives matter,” those people got shouted down with, “No! You’re not hearing us. Black lives matter!”

What is that supposed to mean? That our lives don’t matter because we don’t have the right skin color?

Their protests were related to the Ferguson incident, which wasn’t a case of racist police brutality; it was a case of a black thug attacking a police officer who defended himself; even black eyewitnesses testified of that. Still the protesters shouted the lie that the perpetrator had held his hands up and called don’t shoot and was just gunned down. When it was proven that didn’t happen, the protesters insisted, “It’s still symbolic of the systemic problem.” Then where is your real evidence?

I assert that there isn’t a systemic racist problem going on in America, particularly toward blacks. Black radio host Larry Elder has the stats. Such as today, when he pointed out that police are 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black man than the other way around. That studies that set out to prove racist police brutality found instead that, surprisingly, blacks are less likely to be harmed, because every officer is hyper-aware of the media ramifications of an error.

Elder recites the evidence often. So does black commentator Candace Owens. When they provide data, they’re called traitors. Sometimes they’re even called white supremacists, which is more than a little ironic. They get called these things because their experience and the data they provide does not coincide with the going narrative that there’s systemic racism in America. But those calling them those names don’t provide data; they only cite isolated incidents—which we all agree, when they actually happen, are injustices, and we all agree that justice should be done.

So, where is the evidence of this systemic, widespread problem that is making them so angry?

I’m not saying they don’t really feel what they’re feeling. I believe they do.

Steve Locke, who tells his story
of being detained because black
image from here

I read a story over the weekend, from an incident several years ago, that tells what they’re feeling better than most. It’s the experience of a black man, a college teacher in Massachusetts, who was heading to get a burrito for lunch before going to teach a class. Police pulled him over and questioned him, and then detained him. He fit the description, they said, of a black man, his approximate size, wearing a knit cap and a puffy coat, who had just robbed a nearby business. His jacket (a designer brand, and not a parka) didn’t look very puffy. He was wearing a lanyard showing his ID at the university. Everything he said checked out. He remained calm and respectful. Nevertheless, the police kept him, didn’t believe him, and were considering taking him to be identified by the victim. Fortunately, a detective arrived, saw that his story checked out. The new officer on the scene ran through the details and let him go.

This teacher had felt endangered. He believed it was because he was black. Literally, it was, because the actual perpetrator had been black. That is an unfortunate reality for blacks; they have a particular attribute that looks like the people who are doing an outsized proportion of the criminal activity. That’s a problem caused by those criminals, not generally by the police. But you can see how an officer—even a black officer—could come to be suspicious of people who, in their experience, so often turn out to be the bad guys.

I have sympathy for that teacher. It’s an upsetting thing to happen to a decent person. What could he have done to prevent it? Nothing. He even knew to handle the situation in a way that prevented escalation.

What could the police have done? Detected truth more accurately. Seriously. The detective who arrived later on the scene could tell almost instantly that this wasn’t the bad guy; this was a college professor, and his story rang true. Why didn’t the first officers see that? I don’t know. Maybe they need better training. Maybe they need more experience—combining more seasoned officers with newer ones until they learn? Maybe there’s something else.

But what I see is not racism, but police officers checking out someone who partly matched a not very detailed description of a criminal, a man who had the bad luck of being at the wrong place at that moment. That’s a very different thing from, “He’s black, so we’ve got it in for him. Let’s get him.”

No one’s arguing that racism never happens. Unfortunately, it does. The vast majority of Americans are not only not racist; they’re disgusted by actual racism.

We hear the peaceful protests. The message is, “We’re upset because of racism.” Yes. We understand.

It is similar to people who are afraid of the coronavirus. This fear is intensified for someone whose experience is that it has killed or severely affected someone close to them. So they insist on things that do not help fight coronavirus: economic collapse, wearing of facemasks alone outdoors, contact tracing at a point when prevalence is so widespread that such practices guarantee practically permanent loss of freedom. Yes, we understand you’re scared. The best solution is not to end society as we know it until every case of the virus in the world is gone; the best solution is for you to get a better understanding of the situation so you get over the fear. Then we can all cautiously get on with our lives with that new awareness.

We stopped being racist so long ago that most of us Americans have lived our entire lives without a racist heart. What more can we do? The best solution is not for all races to bow down to blacks in abject humiliation and repentance; that would be a lie coming from people who did not do anything wrong.

Protesters are saying this should never have happened. The people they’re protesting to? They agree. The message has been heard. The wheels of justice are underway. If you value civilization, it’s time to go home and watch the process play out.

Ah, but there’s the issue. People who do not value civilization are using this moment for their own nefarious purposes.

Protests are acceptable—even when their message is wrong, a lie, or misguided. Wrongness in a protest message has more to do with emotion overriding reason than it has to do with moral wrongness. So we value their right to express their views in peaceful protest.

Riots are not protests. Riots are evil acts of violence. They are literally anti-civilization; they are savage. They destroy property. They harm people—usually innocent people, sometimes even the demographic of people the protests were stated to support. And sometimes they take lives.

Rioters are criminals. Sometimes they get away with their crimes by overwhelming the law enforcement resources. That is intentional.

Some riots grow naturally out of crowd emotion. Mob mentality. Those are always bad.

The riots we’re seeing now are even worse; they are unnatural. They are instigated. They are planned. They are funded.

We don’t know all the details yet. And who knows whether the stories we’re seeing will turn out to be true.

Antifa is involved. US Attorney General Barr has identified them as the organizers of looting and mob violence across the country. And President Trump is right to label them a domestic terrorist organization. 

There’s a collection of photos from various cities, where people have noticed pallets of bricks showing up, mysteriously overnight, where there is no construction going on. They have cones placed around them. They’re staged strategically to be available—for throwing by rioting thugs. One instruction included a suburban neighborhood, miles from downtown, with the intention of making the previously safe feel unsafe.

Bricks pre-staged for rioting, image found here

Minneapolis, where the incident took place, and possibly Houston, where George Floyd was from, were not surprising locations. But these things are happening in cities all over the country. What is the message when thugs deface the Lincoln Memorial, where MLK gave his historic speech in the fight for Civil Rights? There is no connection between the damage caused by the evil rioters and the anti-racist message of peaceful protesters.

Anarchist rebels tend to make a common mistake—that once they set things in motion, people will rise up and join them.

What we need to have happen is the arrest and prosecution of each and every perpetrator of the crimes involved in rioting—violence, property damage, theft, assault, murder. Cleanse our free society of those who are actively working to oppress destroy our way of life so that they can get us vulnerable enough to easily oppress.

I believe the numbers of actual believers in the anarchist Antifa worldview are small. People of goodwill do not join such savages.

A community near Minneapolis held a food drive
to help victims of the riots. Image from here.

One good sign is that people showing up in the mornings—to clean up the damage. Pick up debris. Wash off graffiti. Repair what they can. That is what good people do: the exact opposite of the evildoers.

Here are eight examples of good things that have happened. 

Here’s a story of people in Minneapolis bringing groceries to the aid of victims of the riots.

Here is George Floyd’s brother calling for peace. 

What we need is overwhelming civilization to wash away the savagery. Let’s pray we can do it.

Fourteenth Amendment and Marriage, Part I

We’re within a month of hearing oral arguments before the Supreme Court regarding the question of re-defining marriage. On April 28, SCOTUS will be interested in arguments on two questions, related to several consolidated cases:

US Supreme Court
official photo, found on Wikipedia

1.      Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?

2.      Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?

So our first step ought to be to look at the Fourteenth Amendment. It has five sections; Section 1 is the relevant one. It reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The Fourteenth Amendment passed in 1868, as part of Reconstruction, after the Civil War and the freeing of slaves. The purpose was to make sure that newly freed slaves would receive full citizenship rights throughout the United States, disallowing particularly the southern former slave states from abrogating the rights to vote, own land, own businesses, and otherwise fully participate as citizens equal before the law.

There were nevertheless “Jim Crow” laws relegating anyone with “black” appearance or known blood relation to second-class status in many southern states. Those were wrong, and took the mainly non-southern, Republican support in hand with Martin Luther King and other southern blacks to push through Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, a full century after the passing of the Amendment XIV.

Neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Civil Rights movement would have been necessary if we had had a people committed from the beginning to the radical but self-evident truth that “all men are created equal,” as we declared in our Declaration of Independence. But, since it took a while to get a critical mass of racially neutral people, we had to restate the self-evident.

You may have noticed that the Fourteenth Amendment does not say, “All States shall be required to re-define marriage to include couples of the same sex.” What is being argued is that “couples” are being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation—and therefore the longstanding definition of marriage used in civilizations through the millennia of recorded history must be declared null and void and replaced with something new and more inclusive.

So first we need to ask, do all “couples” (or couplings, or joinings together) merit the same inalienable rights as individuals? And second, what new definition of marriage would be suggested to lead us further into civilization?

Are all couples (or combinations of two or more) created equal? Existing marriage laws say no. A couple eligible for marriage, traditionally and in written law, has been a man and a woman, of marriageable age or of an age that parental consent can be given lawfully (differing state to state), not too closely related (differing state to state), not married to any other person.

While that last one has differed from culture to culture, with some cultures allowing one man to marry more than one woman, each such marriage is between the man and the singular woman. And such marriages have never been allowed without full knowledge of the other marriages—marriage to another without knowledge is a deceit prosecuted as bigamy—nor have such marriages ever been legal in one of the United States. (Utah outlawed plural marriage in 1890, six years prior to gaining statehood.)

So, the standard definition of marriage has always required an eligible man and woman, joining together exclusively in a contract intended for life, consummated with a particular sex act that can lead to offspring—and offspring are a social good that society is interested in.

Marriage predates this nation’s laws, and any others’. Because it is a contract, we ask for enforcement and mediation, as we do for other contracts. As in any contract, terms have specific legal definitions. The purpose of the national DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), signed by Pres. Clinton 1996, was to reinforce the definition that was commonly in use, to say that in contracts involving the Federal Government (some thousands at the time) would define marriage as between one man and one woman—as all the states up to that time did, with a temporary blip from Hawaii that was almost immediately reverted to the standard definition. But in 2013, the Supreme Court ruled (erroneously, in my opinion) that DOMA was unconstitutional because it had no rational basis except to discriminate.

DOMA did not discriminate; it reasonably defined a legal term commonly in use. But the ruling essentially made it so that there would be no definition of marriage in US law code; such definitions would come from whatever the states of particular citizens defined the term as.

It could be significant in the current cases that SCOTUS has already ruled that the federal government has no business either defining the term or forcing a federal government definition on the states.

The cases before the court now are related to federal circuit courts that have ruled that states do not have the right to define marriage—unless they change their definition to include same-sex couples. In other words, the courts have deemed it discriminatory for states to care about the forming of families as the best place for children to be raised by their mother and father in a permanent relationship. These courts have decided that states shouldn’t care about children, about permanence, about exclusivity, or even about the gender between those involved in producing children . But they think it is rational to force states to ignore all those things and define marriage as any sexual relationship between any two people who choose to announce their coupleness for the time being, whether or not it is exclusive or permanent, and with the certain knowledge that it cannot produce children, not for lack of fertility, but because of human biology.

The Fourteenth Amendment does require that the laws apply to all citizens equally. Persons with same-sex attraction are treated no differently under traditional marriage laws. There has never been a “ban” against homosexuals who choose to follow the law and marry. They can marry a person of the opposite sex, who is of age, who is not a close relative, who is not already married to someone else—the same as the rest of us. There is no discrimination.

When they want to “marry” someone who does not fit the requirements, they are requiring special treatment. They are claiming it is discrimination if all of society does not submit to changing the definition especially for them. How is their request different from someone who wants to marry someone who is already married? It’s love, they say. That’s what marriage is about! How can you be so cruel as to say no to people who love each other just because one of them (or both) is already married to someone else?

That won’t happen, you say? But it has. Have you heard the term “throuple”? It’s a “marriage” in which the number is not limited to two. Three homosexual men were “married” as a throuple in Thailand on Valentine’s Day. Not here, so not a worry? But it already happened here. In Massachusetts in August 2013. Two of the lesbian women were legally “married” two and a half years earlier. (Massachusetts was the first US state to recognize same-sex “marriage,” in 2004, when the state court imposed it.) Massachusetts does not recognize this new "marriage" form but will refrain from prosecution unless state benefits (taxes filed jointly, for example) are sought by the third woman. But this throuple had additional paperwork drawn up by a lawyer to equally divide their property, and one of them has since given birth to a child fathered by an anonymous sperm donor.

If a state cannot define the terms used in the contract, then it cannot be allowed to limit the number. It cannot limit the genetic relationship of the participants (i.e., you couldn’t prohibit a brother and sister from marrying). It might not be able to prohibit underage marriages. The Court would be saying you can’t discriminate against any persons who want to declare that their sexual relationship is a marriage. The definition would be new, unlimited, untried, and amorphous enough to be essentially meaningless.

So, the answer to SCOTUS’s first question should be no; the Fourteenth Amendment does not require the redefinition of marriage to suit the desires of people who do not meet the requirements of the contract.

That’s enough for one day. We’ll save the second question before the Court for Part II.

Measuring Mitt Part IV

Here’s what we’ve covered while measuring Mitt Romney so far:

·        Part I identified the main general arguments against Romney (but didn’t actually cover them yet—the rest of the post briefly covered Huntsman).

·        Part II looked at the problem of believing the media and opponent stories, with examples of their inaccuracies.

·        Part III looked at character issues, where even enemies have to admit Romney is exemplary.

Today and tomorrow I’d like to cover two more topics: the flip-flopping accusation and Romneycare.

Flip-Flopping and Other Distortions

The flip-flopping argument itself got traction back in the 2004 election. It was used—accurately—on John Kerry, who proudly proclaimed, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." There was a long list of Kerry waffles. He tried to appeal to both sides of various issues, managing to appeal to neither side.

So when the flip-flopping charge was brought against Romney, people thought they knew what that meant—it meant an unprincipled politician who would say anything to any audience and not even bother to keep track of his viewpoints.

Romney and Kerry are from the same state, but they’re very different people. As far as I can tell, every flip-flopping charge, as well as other differences from conservatives, stems from the previous presidential race. No one claims any change from the conservative positions Romney took then. He has been consistently supporting and expressing conservative ideas since his last candidacy, and he was recognized as the conservative among top contenders McCain and Huckabee at that time. So let’s look at some of those specific accusations, made mainly by the McCain campaign in 2007, and what was true.

·        In 2005 Romney supported McCain’s immigration bill as “reasonable” but then opposed it in 2007. In actuality Romney clearly rejected the 2005 bill. Romney remained steadfast in his anti-immigration policy, even when various bills in Congress changed.

·        Governor Romney failed to support Bush’s tax cuts. In reality, at the time he was asked, he was involved in trying to pass a state budget through a liberal legislature that would cut taxes and spending to bring the state back into the black from drowning deficits; at that time, under those pressures, he said he was focusing on the state and staying out of the national political debate. It would be quite a stretch to suggest, however, that staying out meant he was against cutting taxes—the very thing he was accomplishing at the state level against all odds. He remains consistent on this issue, and now that he is involved in the national debate, he is very much in favor of extending those very same Bush tax cuts.

·        Taxes went up under Romney in Massachusetts. Not true. Romney cut state taxes; cities raised taxes, as is their prerogative, whether wise or stupid.

·        Fees went up, and fees are essentially taxes. Not really. Fees cover costs for a special good or service, so they affect only those using the good or service. Fees went up not because Romney raised them, but because he reduced taxpayer subsidies of fees, so that those costs would be borne by the beneficiaries of the goods or services.

·        Illegal aliens were given sanctuary under Romney’s governorship. Not exactly. Certain cities granted sanctuary status on a city level, outside Romney’s influence. A state legislature could act to punish cities for failing to uphold immigration laws, but Massachusetts’s legislature was 85% Democrat, so they had no intention of acting to correct cities on that issue.

·        Romney claimed to be for gay rights and then stood against gay marriage. Not exactly a flip flop. When asked in 1994 whether homosexuals should have the same rights as other citizens—to work, to have access to courts, to be as free from harassment and harm as any citizen—then he said yes, they should have those rights. When, during his tenure as governor, a rogue court decided to “find” a “right” to redefine marriage so that it no longer meant one man and one woman who would engage in the act that could result in procreation and who would commit to a permanent and exclusive bond (an interest of the state as a whole)—then he fought against giving homosexuals that special power over the rest of us. He remains firm on that issue and has testified of the need for a national solution (constitutional amendment and upholding the DOMA law) so that such contracts made in one state will not impose the change in marriage definition on all other states. While it is no longer possible to use the phrase “I support gay rights” to mean supporting their citizenship rights rather than their radical agenda, when he said it in 1994, people knew what he meant. And his stance hasn’t changed. It is essentially the same stance I hold.

·        Romney is against capital punishment. Not true. Massachusetts has no death penalty, but Romney pressed to institute it.

·        Romney was against the NRA and then joined. Hmm. Not exactly. Romney has always been in favor of 2^nd Amendment rights, and although he has never been in lock step with every NRA policy, he has signed on as a member. The main discrepancy is probably on waiting periods; he favored them and then opposed them. But that is because of a change in technology, not policy. Romney favors background checks, so that guns aren’t given to criminals and terrorists. It used to be that a background check took a few days—thus the waiting period. Now that technology makes them almost instantaneous, Romney is against the waiting period.

·        Romney lied about his father marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. Actually, George Romney did participate in King marches. And the elder Romney, former Governor of Michigan and one-time presidential candidate, personally led a march of 10,000. MLK, who was a Republican, spoke in favor of George Romney’s presidential run. It is possibly worth noting that it was Republicans who pushed for civil rights legislation in the 1960s; it was “conservative” Democrats (i.e., in favor of conserving their status quo) who opposed civil rights legislation.

·        Romney provided $50 co-pays for abortions in his Massachusetts healthcare bill. No. The abortion co-pay was not part of the bill, but was later court mandated. When Romney speaks of the importance of choosing strict constructionist judges, rather than activist judges, he speaks from experience with them.[1]

The point of today's post is that, now that it's 2011, maybe it's time to stop allowing the McCain campaign (or any other of Romney's enemies and opponents) to define Mitt Romney.

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[1] I have paraphrased and added my commentary, but this list comes from a post by Ryan Larsen, January 31, 2008, 7:50 AM, from www.redcounty.com/orange-county/2008/01/california-debate-mccain-remin/, no longer available online.