Legislating Morality Part I

This is Political Sphere. Mrs.Spherical Model is out of town and has asked that I guest post for her. I have been working on this series in my spare time, as was mentioned in a recent post. I have split up the series into three parts. Today exposes a fatal flaw in United States v. Windsor. Part II will discuss the history of decisions which led to Windsor. And Part III will discuss flaws with Windsor's precursor, Lawrence v. Texas.

United States v. Windsor and the Congressional Power to Define Terms

“In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretations of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife.” 1 U.S.C. § 7.

The case of United States v. Windsor was an interesting attack on the right of Congress to define terms and to legislate morality. I have often heard the argument that a person should not legislate morals on others. But “morality” is simply a doctrine or system of moral conduct, and “moral” is defined as of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior. So, if a system of laws punishes or encourages different types of behavior, then that system of laws is legislated morality, whether it is legislating thou shalt not murder or requiring that all fast food restaurants post calorie counts on their menus. Because the United States is a representative democracy, that set of legislated morality, then, is meant to represent society’s moral ideals as codified by our elected representatives. Therefore, it is beyond argument that a society must legislate morality, or it falls into anarchy.

This brings us to the erroneous logic in Windsor. According to the opinion in Windsor, the history leading to the passage of DOMA was that, while no state in the union accepted such a definition at the time DOMA was passed, Hawaii was considering allowing people of the same gender to be married under state law. To protect states that did not accept this definition as morally acceptable, the Republican Congress passed DOMA which was then signed by Democratic President Clinton. DOMA allowed for states to determine the definition of marriage within their borders, and allowing the state to limit acceptance of marriages performed in other jurisdictions to those between one male and one female, the commonly accepted definition for “hundreds,” if not thousands, of years. Further, because it was the universally recognized definition, instead of addressing the definition in every act ever passed by the United States Congress separately, DOMA included a blanket definition limiting the definition of “married couple” to that of the traditionally, universally accepted definition, and defining spouse as a member of a married couple of the opposite sex.

The majority in Windsor recognizes the United States Congress has the power to define terms as used in statutes, citing that the court had accepted this in regards to marriage just this term in Hillman v. Maretta. Indeed, it is well-established that a statutory definition supersedes the common meaning of the term when applied to the law. For example, if Congress passed a statute defining “fish” as a young goat, then, for the purposes of the law, any time the term “fish” came up it would in fact be referring to a young goat and not apply to a creature with gills that swims in the water, as the dictionary defines the term. How then did the court determine that it was unconstitutional for the Congress to do something that settled law allows Congress to do?

The answer to that question comes from the majority’s reliance on previous erroneous opinions, specifically Lawrence v. Texas, as well as an incorrect statement that while “Marriage laws vary in some respects from State to State... these rules are in every event consistent within each State.” I say this is an incorrect statement, because the statement directly contradicts what the majority opinion previously noted. In addition to the citation of Hillman v. Maretta, the court observes that other statutes (8 U.S.C. § 1186a(b)(1) and 42 U.S.C. § 1382c(d)(2)) define marriages and spouses regardless of the State’s view on the marriage for the purpose of federal laws.

While this contradiction undercuts any validity of the majority opinion, more dangerous reasoning comes from the statement “The differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects, see Lawrence, 539 U.S. 558.” Of course Lawrence v. Texas is the landmark case which ruled that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional, overturning Bowers v. Hardwick. Because this blog is already way over a decent word count for a blog, I will leave the discussion of Lawrence for later.

Common Core for Babies

When I write about local issues, it is with the hope that it will help not only local friends, but people wherever they’re reading. So today’s post is about a proposition that is likely to be on the Harris County ballot this off-year November election. But it is also about how the enemy is going about separating parents from the teaching of their children.

This is Texas, where Governor Perry refused federal money for implementing Common Core, the curriculum (no—not a “curriculum,” but simply basic standards, they claim—that just happen to dictate what will be taught in each classroom, on each specific day, in a specified manner; why would you call that curriculum?) that happened to promote a worldview that is in conflict with capitalism, US Constitutional freedom, God-given natural rights, freedom of religion, and probably anything else in conflict with the worldview of most parents.

This is Texas, where the state legislature, led by my State Senator Dan Patrick and others, succeeded in getting rid of CSCOPE, which was a Texas-created (supposedly) version of Common Core, that again wasn’t really “curriculum,” because it was all online, but it also promoted the Common Core worldview indoctrination.

The enemy, however, is relentless.  Now we’re looking at what you could probably call Common Core for Babies. A renamed ACORN group, Collaborative for Children (with ties to George Soros and a long line of Obama minions), has created a corporation in Harris County for the purpose of placing Common Core materials in daycare centers. This organization is Harris County School Readiness Corporation, with a program called Choice Partners. [My notes were insufficient on the status and connection of all the entities. I reserve the right to edit if I learn more later.]

The way they’re going about it is to get tax money, funneled through the Harris County Department of Education, and then offer it to daycares, aiming first at low-income areas that are most likely to be vulnerable to offers of free stuff. The exchange would go something like this:

Listen, we’ll pay your employees for you. You’ll no longer need to worry about meeting payroll, so you’ll be able to concentrate on taking care of children, which is your real passion. We’ll also help pay for equipment and supplies. Did we mention, we’ll even go into the homes of the children and offer guidance to those families? No, this won’t cost you anything. Really. All we ask is that you use our program, teach the things we provide in the way we require. Think about it. It’s for the Children.

It’s always for the children. Right.

I first learned about this issue in June. Colleen Vera wrote about it in her blog, Texas Trash Talk.  Her piece is full of information and connections. But at that time the “to do” part was simply to call legislators during the special session to see if they could find a way to act on it. So I saved the information but didn’t pass it along.

Two months later the threat grows. Here’s the update. Harris County Department of Education (HCDE) has up to now discussed the many known flaws of the program but nevertheless voted 6-1 in favor—so far only to gather more information and decide later.

Meanwhile Collaborative for Children (the ACORN remake) has been gathering signatures to request placing a proposition on the ballot to fund the program. The wording will be called something like a “penny tax.” The phrase “equalization tax” might also appear, because that is what the funding of HCDE is called. Currently this equalization tax is a 2/3 penny tax per $100 of property value, which translates to about $14 million a year. [HCDE educates no one; the independent school districts do that. There are only two counties in the state still with school boards, and money that goes to them is money that could otherwise go directly to the school districts. Dallas County at least uses their county department of education money for transportation, which seems reasonable. But Harris County uses it for various interfering, moneymaking programs. It should not exist. Rep. Debbie Riddle put forth a bill to eliminate the two CDEs during the last legislative session, but it didn’t get out of committee. We’ll have to deal with the corruption of HCDE another day.] An additional penny more than doubles the current amount. Some estimates project that this “insignificant” additional penny tax will take something like $45 million out of the economy [Houston Chronicle says $25 million, so I may have heard wrong while taking notes], pretty much for the sole purpose of indoctrinating our very young children in ways we have boldly rejected—twice.

Kay Smith, HCDE trustee
at Cypress Tea Party meeting

Kay Smith, the lone HCDE vote against, spoke at our local Tea Party meeting this past Saturday, which is how this issue got my attention again. (She also provided info to Colleen Vera for her article in June.) She needs help if there’s any hope of stopping this Common Core infiltration. The next HCDE vote will take place next Tuesday, August 20, 1:00 PM (address is 6300 Irvington Blvd., Houston, TX, 77022—it’s in the Reagan Building, where HCDE is housed, with the meeting taking place in their board room on the fourth floor, in case you are local and available to attend).

August 20^th, the day of the vote to place the proposition on the county ballot, is also the deadline for collecting signatures for the petition. True the Vote has offered help in verifying signatures, as they did for Wisconsin’s recall back in 2012. But it’s not possible to verify on the very day the signatures are turned in, before the vote in the 1:00 meeting. I don’t know whether attending the meeting to speak against the proposition will help, but it can’t hurt.

County Judge Ed Emmett was apprised of the problem (all counties in Texas are led by an elected judge, so Judge Emmett is actually an elected official over a constituency that is maybe only smaller than New York City and Los Angeles). Just one of the legal questions is about putting a proposition on the ballot to direct school money to a private entity. He went to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to rule on whether the proposition can be placed on the ballot. AG Abbott would not rule; he said it would need to be ruled on by the county attorney. I think he’s legally correct on that. Unfortunately, the Harris County Attorney is Vince Ryan, a Democrat; he has already said he would allow placement on the ballot with a rather flippant, “Let them sue us later.”

I asked Kay Smith whether anyone was considering such a lawsuit, as a backup, in case we can’t persuade the HCDE board to vote against. She said it would be a very expensive ordeal. The opposition has big money behind it, leading back even to George Soros money. So it would be nice if there were some willing patriot out there willing to take it on, but she doesn’t know of anyone.

When I talked this over with my son Political Sphere, who is beginning to think like a lawyer, he said the lawsuit would be expensive to take all the way to the end. But what you really need is just a suit to be filed, so that you can ask for an injunction to prevent the proposition from appearing on the ballot until the questions of legality are answered. Even if it were to delay only a few months, that would avoid this year’s low-voter-turnout off-year election, and would give more time to get the word out. Getting the word out on CSCOPE brought its removal pretty quickly. And since lawsuits tend to go on for at least a year, maybe two, we might even avoid another election cycle. And maybe with the serious legal questions being brought to light, HCDE would then vote to change their minds and remove it from the ballot.

Still, as Kay Smith said, it would take a willing patriot out there, with at least some money resources, to take it on.

Why should we be so concerned about an issue that only affects some low-income daycares? Because that is not the end; that is only the foot in the door. The plan is to expand the daycare program statewide. And of course that’s not all. If they’ve been consistently teaching children up to age 4, why not add in pre-K kids? And if you include pre-K kids, why not kindergarteners? And after that, since kids are now used to this “standard” up to age 6 or so, why not extend that through elementary schools? And once you’ve had kids accustomed to the same thing for all their school lives, why not expand to middle schools and then high schools?

Oh, and by the way, since “standardization” is “for the children,” it wouldn’t be “fair” for any children to be left out. So they would push to have all Texas students meet the “standards,” even though that might mean forcing homeschools and private schools to use it. And if compliance is too difficult, then maybe we’d just need to eliminate homeschools, and maybe private schools too. For the children!

Does this seem farfetched? Remember that this administration’s DOJ went out of its way to overturn asylum for the Romeike family, from Germany, for no better reason than they wanted it on record that they supported Germany’s policy of preventing homeschooling and standardizing all the education in the country—because this administration believes parents do not have a natural right to make decisions about the education and upbringing of their children.

They want control. And, as Lenin said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Of course they want control over the ideas being taught to children, to perpetuate their control over additional generations. Tyrannists always want that.

What can we do?

·         Attend Tuesday’s HCDE meeting and make your opinion known.

·         If it gets on the ballot (a 99% probability, according to Kay Smith), then get the word out to everyone you know, so they know this tiny off-year election is extremely important.

·         If you have connections to resources, file a lawsuit regarding the illegalities of placing this particular proposition on the ballot.

·         If it ends up on the ballot, vote against it, and take your friends to vote with you.

·         If you’re in another place, expect this to be coming to you, and do all you can to fight it. The names change from place to place, so be aware and vigilant. Even if your locale has rejected Common Core in any form, this daycare version is a new backdoor approach to watch for.

More Conservative Thinking

Today is the second post linking to some favorite articles available at The Imaginative Conservative, an online place with some deeply philosophical discussions about conservatism. Friday’s post represented some of the writings of Russell Kirk, who influenced the creators of this site. Today I’m highlighting a few pieces I’ve had fun reading lately. (Yes, I already know that I define “fun” and “light summer reading” in my own unusual way.) I hope you will enjoy them too. 

What Is This Think Called Justice? by Bruce Frohnen.    Much of this piece skewers John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, written 40 years ago or more, including his “life is like cake” analogy. (I was not aware of this before reading the article, so no prerequisites required.)  I highlighted a number of quotable parts of this, so that it started looking more highlighted than not. In essence, law is the morality of the people codified; if you can’t legislate even basic morality, you can’t have law. Here are just a couple of favorite paragraphs:

Philosophy—the love of wisdom—for well over a century has meant the “rational” study of basic questions about how we know things.  Not that those questions are unimportant, but they have been reduced to the “analytic” study of the definitions of particular words.  So the “philosophy” of law has become little more than the “unpacking” of the meanings of particular words (like “law”) related to, well, law. 

The problem with jurisprudence comes from its very origins, and so seems insoluble.  Those origins lay in the desire among lawyers to lay claim to a “science” all their own.  That is, legal academics have wanted to claim that law, like any other social institution, is “worthy” of being studied as a thing in itself, like politics or economics.  And in a sense these lawyers are right, for the law is like politics and economics in that the attempt to study it in isolation results in a fundamentally skewed understanding of law (or politics, or economics).  For all of these aspects of public life are rooted in and aim at the human good.  And, as in politics and economics, the modern, “rational” trend is to ignore this existential fact, leaving the nature of that good and its importance in determining the proper shape and limits of law undefined and unexamined, but still present as largely unexamined assumptions. 

Aristotle and Plato
image found here

The Road to Same-Sex Marriage Was Paved by Rousseau, by Robert R. Reilly.   I read this in late July, when I was writing about the Supreme Court, with just a little about the Windsor ruling (July 15, 17, and 19).  I have written in the past about Ultimate Good, ( also here) and the philosophy of that world view. And I’ve written pretty extensively about the need to protect and reaffirm marriage and family. (See my Defense of Marriage collection.)  But I was pleased with how well this piece connects the dots between the basic underlying philosophy needed to protect marriage. It’s not so much a discussion of same-sex “marriage” as it is a lesson in philosophy of the diametrically opposed sides. I like how this compares and contrasts. (It’s the kind of essay students would do well to read and examine the structure before writing their assigned compare/contrast essay.) I’ve struggled to pull out quotes from this one, because it is a good, cohesive whole. Nevertheless, here’s a sampling:

Aristotle taught that the essence or nature of a thing is what makes it what it is, and why it is not something else. This is not a tautology. As an acorn develops into an oak tree, there is no point along its trajectory of growth that it will turn into a giraffe or something other than an oak. That is because it has the nature of an oak tree. By natural law, in terms of living things, we mean the principle of development which makes it what it is and, given the proper conditions, what it will become when it fulfills itself or reaches its end. For Aristotle, “Nature ever seeks an end.” This end state is its telos, its purpose or the reason for which it is. In non-human creation this design is manifested through either instinct or physical law. Every living thing has a telos toward which it purposefully moves. In plants or animals, this involves no self-conscious volition. In man, it does.

     Anything that operates contrary to this principle in a thing is unnatural to it. By unnatural, we mean something that works against what a thing would become were it to operate according to its principle of development. For instance, an acorn will grow into an oak unless its roots are poisoned by highly acidic water. One would say that the acidic water is unnatural to the oak or against its “goodness.”

*****

Contra Aristotle, Rousseau asserted that man by nature was not a social, political animal endowed with reason. Unlike Aristotle, Rousseau does not begin with the family, but with an isolated individual in the state of nature, where the pure “sentiment of his own existence” was such that “one suffices to oneself, like God.” Nature becomes a secular substitute for the Garden of Eden. Yet this self-satisfied god was asocial, amoral and pre-rational. His couplings with women were random and formed no lasting attachment. The family was not natural to him. 

The Question of Purpose, by Stratford Caldecott.   This one, again, requires a shift of brain to philosophical thinking. Much of it is about the state of education. He concludes with this uncomfortable summary:

Our modern curriculum is fragmented or shattered into a thousand glittering shards. The secret of their unity lies in the Logos that is the principle of unity both for the world and for the human person – for the breaking of the curriculum reflects the brokenness of the person who is the very subject of education itself. 

Homesick in the Cosmos, by C. R. Wiley.  Cosmos, he reminds us, means order. The post-modern creation story takes God (a designer) out of the picture and insists that everything is random:

We are told that if we just look at things dispassionately we will see that the universe is not designed.  Instead we will see that we, along with everything else, are the flotsam and jetsam of a tremendous explosion.  The order we perceive, if that is the right word for it, is just a loss of momentum and a balancing of forces following that explosion.

He makes the point that this atheistic belief in random chaos is a religious belief, and it’s harder to believe than any other culture’s creation story, since it belies the order we see around us. Making the universe from whole cloth, as if making a machine, without feelings or morals, is a harmful, dehumanizing belief.

Explaining the title, he says this:

Once upon a time people lived in households.  They built them, husbanded the resources sheltered in them, and dwelled in them.  (The word “husband” means “house-bound.”)  Today we are houseless—oh, we have places where we sleep and recreate when we have the time—but we no longer live in houses. This is one reason we no longer feel at home is the cosmos—our homes no longer function as households.  The reverse is also the case, one reason we no longer think of our homes the way people once did is because we no longer think of the cosmos as a household.  The notion that the cosmos could be a household seems absurd to modern people.  This, I am convinced, is one reason why our lives seem absurd.    

All of these pieces take some brain exercise. But it is with exercise that we build strength. Worth reading.

 

Conservative Thinking

When I find things to read that stick with me, things I want to have access to later to reread or get quotes, I often save a copy in my personal files. Lately a number of those “keepers” happened to come from a source that I’m only just becoming familiar with. The site is TheImaginativeConservative.org. I referred to one of their pieces in Wednesday’s blog.

So I started looking more at this source, TIC for short. Several of the first contributors listed are affiliated with Hillsdale College, which does some heroic work in sharing the concepts and philosophies that led to our Constitution. But other names are from various other places, though more college professors than other walks of life. I can’t say I agree with everything I’ve read from their site, but I think there’s definitely enough good there to pay attention. Sometimes the topics refer back and forth between the writings of various philosophers, and I don’t qualify as fully well-read with all those names. But sometimes these are clues to what I should go read. There have been a couple of mentions that the writers are all Christian, so I think that may be part of their worldview as well. At one point I thought they might be libertarian and secularist; but the more I read, the more I find that to be simply an error on my part.

Russell Kirk
photo from Wikipedia

TIC became on online newsletter in 2010, started by Winston Elliott III, who became president of the Free Enterprise Institute in 1992. He was greatly influenced by the conservative writings of Russell Kirk. The site states the mission this way:

Dr. [Russell] Kirk’s work informs the mission of The Imaginative Conservative, which is to be a forum for those who seek the True, the Good and the Beautiful. We address culture, liberal learning, politics, political economy, literature, the arts and the American Republic in the tradition of Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Wilhelm Roepke, Robert Nisbet, M.E. Bradford, Christopher Dawson and other leaders of Imaginative Conservatism.

The headings of categories on their site include books (reviews of books), conservatism, Russell Kirk, politics, culture, American Republic, liberal learning (in the sense of freedom and open-mindedness, or classical liberal thought, not the redefined word used the past century), economics, and bookstore. There categories fit relatively well with mine: political sphere, economic sphere, and culture/civilization sphere. Some things cross over enough (like education, for example) that they fit partially under all, which you would expect when the three spheres interrelate and spatially overlie each other.

A number of pieces written by Russell Kirk are included on the site.

The Essence of Conservatism, by Russell Kirk.   Just last post I was searching for ways to define and thereby differentiate conservatism and libertarianism. This definition of conservatism is a good addition to the conversation:

A conservative is not, by definition, a selfish or a stupid person; instead, he is a person who believes there is something in our life worth saving. Conservatism, indeed, is a word with an old and honorable meaning—but a meaning almost forgotten by Americans until recent years. Abraham Lincoln wished to be known as a conservative. “What is conservatism?” he said. “Is it not preference for the old and tried, over the new and untried?” It is that; and it is also a body of ethical and social beliefs. The word “liberalism,” however, has been in favor among us for two or three decades. Even nowadays, though there are a good many conservatives in both national and state politics, in neither major party do many leading politicians describe themselves as “conservatives.” Paradoxically, the people of the United States became the chief conservative nation of the world at the very time when they had ceased to call themselves conservatives at home.

Ten Conservative Principles, by Russell Kirk   This one also adds body to the definition. If you're wondering whether you align with conservatism, his ten principles might help with your introspection.

There are some other TIC pieces, by other writers, I’d like to recommend for your summer reading pleasure. But, to give myself room to comment, I think I’ll save those until the next post.

Libertarians on the Sphere

I’ve noticed something of a name-calling rift recently between people who are really pretty close to agreement: general conservatives and libertarians. It seems more worthwhile to work on repair there than on the huge chasm between conservatives and tyrannists (liberals/progressives/statists).

Let’s start with definitions, because that might provide some stitches to the wound right there.

·        Conservatives believe in conserving and protecting the natural God-given rights, and believe the US Constitution, as written and understood at the time of the founding, is well-suited to provide those protections.

·        Conservatives believe the person best suited to deciding how wealth should be spent is the person who earned it. While there will be inevitable inequities and poor, free-choice charity is better than statist coercion to see to people’s needs. (I think this is also a pretty good statement of libertarian belief.)

·        Conservatives believe in supporting the values and institutions that have led to civilization in the past, and are necessary for civilization: a religious people (because God granted the rights we enjoy), who live basic rules of decency, such as the Ten Commandments, in order to live in harmony with others; and support of strong traditional families (married mother and father raising their own children) so that the necessary values of civilization will be passed from one generation to the next. 

·        Libertarians believe that all decisions about how a life should be lived should be decided by the individual, as long as the person’s behavior doesn’t interfere with or harm others.

I should be able to come up with more that this single principle for libertarianism, but, as often happens, it’s difficult from the outside. I am a conservative. While I enjoy conversations with libertarians and find a great deal of common ground, I don’t find their single principle philosophy sufficient.

A couple of days ago I read a long piece (linked at The Imaginative Conservative, by Nathan Schlueter, associate professor of philosophy at Hillsdale College) listing several basic libertarian statements, and then carefully debunking them from the conservative position. It is worth reading. Here are a few of the statements it deals with:

·        Only individuals exist; therefore there is no such thing as a “common good.”

·        The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

·        Virtue cannot be coerced; therefore government should not legislate morality.

·        The only alternative to libertarianism is totalitarianism.

I like the response to the question of the purpose of law, because all law identifies what society views as appropriate or not:

The law, both by prohibition and by silence, is a powerful signal of acceptable behavior, and thus a powerful influence on character. When the behavior in question involves moral norms that are consequential for the rest of society, it is a proper object of law.

You can’t have civilization, which requires strongly supporting the family, if you have no way of disapproving of sex for sale, for example. You can’t protect personal freedom if you have no way of disapproving of the sale of mind-altering addictive drugs, which result in loss of personal choice and lead to harm of the individual and often to a fair amount of collateral damage.

Back in May 2011 I wrote about why I’m not quite a libertarian. And I described it in relation to the Spherical Model. Libertarians often coincide with conservatives, because it is so often the case that the appropriate level of interest is the most local: individual and family. (Libertarians might or might not include family as qualifying in their philosophy.) So often the problems with government and society are caused by usurpation by an entity too far removed from the most local interest.

But it’s the assumption that the dichotomy is between libertarianism and totalitarianism that causes problems. It shows that libertarians, even when their behavior and outcome put them in the freedom zone, get there sort of accidentally. Like tyrannists, they can only visualize the southern hemisphere. They don’t even know that there’s a freedom zone up there in the northern hemisphere.

I haven’t shown this visually on the sphere before, so I’m giving that a try today with my whiteboard (where is a computer graphic designer when you need one?) The drawing is the basic Spherical Model. Southward is toward tyranny, controlled economy, and savagery; northward is toward freedom, free enterprise, and civilization. North is good; south is bad. But longitude depends on the appropriate level of interest. The range is from individual/family (most local) on the most westward side of the globe, moving (either left or right) to the other side of the sphere with world interests as the far eastward extreme (not visible on this diagram, because we can only see a hemisphere at a time). The range spreads out from individual/family, to community, to county or area, to state or province, to nation, to continent or region, to world.

In principle, according to the Spherical Model, the most local interest that can handle an issue should handle it. Since this often means individual and family, there’s a natural agreement with libertarians. Libertarians, philosophically (but not practically, if you actually talk it out) don’t believe in the value of any affiliation beyond the individual. So they don’t really value community, state, or national governments—even though they do concede that there needs to be law to protect people from those who would do them harm.

In the diagram, there’s a narrow range (in red) at or around the individual longitude line, going all the way from the north pole to the south. In the northern hemisphere, conservatives spend a lot of time in that same zone, pulling always more local, since there has been so much usurpation by less local entities. But for conservatives, the goal is to remain upward in the freedom/free-enterprise/civilization zone—whether or not that requires only family control, or whether the state or nation is the most appropriate placement (for border security, for example). While it’s hard to come up with interests beyond the purview of the nation, and even more unlikely to see the need for an international entity with power beyond suggestion, conservatives do embrace the entire freedom zone.

Libertarians, meanwhile, limit their vision to that long, narrow strip of the sphere, and only enjoy true freedom, prosperity, and civilization when they happen to coincide with conservatives on specific issues—often the economic issues. But it tends to be on the issues of civilization where the rift appears. They may be right that people can’t be coerced to be virtuous, but the law does serve the purpose of providing expectations, so even the naturally unvirtuous have an incentive to behave virtuously. Then the virtuous-by-choice are not forced to live in—and accept as normal—an uncivilized society.

The debate is valuable. Many conservatives don’t well articulate the principles of conservatism either, or even recognize the underlying philosophy. It strengthens us all to be able to talk through our views, and find the areas of agreement—and maybe persuade libertarian individuals to add conservative principles to their too-limited worldview. With a lot of well-meaning, thinking people who value freedom, we can gain strength together.

Floating vs. Flailing

In the summer I swim at the neighborhood pool for exercise. This is Houston; you’re going to be drenched whatever exercise you do, so it might as well be in a pool, where it’s at least cooler. I am not a strong swimmer; I never really got down the breathing rhythm. I need to breathe whenever I’m out of air, without needing to turn my head and wait for pouring water to get out of the way before I gasp. So, I mostly do a slow slow breaststroke with head up out of the water, or sidestroke (I know no one else does that, but I learned it back in the day as a precursor to learning lifesaving, which I fortunately haven’t had to use, because I need a lot more training for that). After I do a certain number of laps, I go into the deep end and tread water for a while. This is aerobic exercise for me, even if it’s never going to earn me any kind of award. I enjoy the sort of zen-like, meditative quality of it, now that I’m going to the pool without wild children.

I do have a special swimming talent—I can float. I mean, all I need to do is lie back and maybe occasionally move a foot or hand. It’s almost embarrassing how easy it is to float—I don’t even need an inflatable anything. I don’t actually do it very much, since I’m swimming in public.

I used to believe this was just a matter of learning well from the technique-minded Swedish lady who taught us kids swimming every summer for probably a decade when I was a kid. “You are such a beautiful swimmer,” she kept saying in her lovely accent, even though I spent the first summer clinging to the side with one hand and holding my nose with the other. And it took several years to build up courage to dive (I practiced in a basement spare bedroom, jumping from a chest of drawers onto the bed—don’t tell my mom.) My son Political Sphere managed these skills easily at age two with water wings, and didn’t need the flotation devices much beyond that. I had way too much fear in my way.

But my breaststroke became smooth, and actually was kind of beautiful in a very non-competitive kind of way. And I could float, even as a skinny child. At my age now, it looks like I have the advantage of a buoyant type. But that doesn’t explain why Mr. Spherical Model has never been able to float, either as a skinny kid, or as a more substantial very big man. In fact, no one in the family can just lie back and float effortlessly like I do. It still could be partly technique (I think they just allow too much bending in the middle, which leads to sinking). But without knowing the reasons, it seems like I have something of a special power.

At church Sunday a man in our congregation was talking about faith. He is a faithful person, has been all his life. But for him it is a matter of hard swimming to stay afloat, while for his wife it seems like effortless floating. When he feels that panicky feeling like he could be sinking, he talks with her, sees the ease of her powerful, calm faith, and is buoyed up.

I was reminded of a line from The Other Side of Heaven. It’s a memoir of John H. Groberg as a Mormon missionary to Tonga in the1950s. (It was made into a rather sweet little movie some years ago, with Christopher Gorham as Elder Groberg, and Anne Hathaway as the girl writing to him from back home.) In the opening chapter he tells of being shipwrecked between islands, which required some hours of swimming to shore. He says, “I have heard it said that sometimes the lord calms the storm, and sometimes He lets the storm rage and calms His child.”

Movie cover from here

My floating ability would help me survive longer on an open sea than without it, but there’s also a great benefit from strong, effective strokes in the right direction. The difficulty, then, is knowing the right direction.

So, I’m thinking of this metaphorically, the ability to float rather than flail, and also the ability to swim hard effective strokes rather than flail, and even flailing enough to keep a head up long enough for relief to come. Life presents so many ways these ideas could be applied. Let me use just one today, related to these Spherical Model ideas.

I think of my ability to float as similar to understanding with calmness what the principles are that lead to thriving—in civilization, economic prosperity, and political freedom. For some reason I can make the connections and see the overall vision and connections. Instead of near drowning in the raging ocean of life in this world, I’m floating in the “calm lagoon” on the shores of the “idyllic island” of human happiness people are looking for. It’s a matter of doing the right things in the right place.

There are others who, in their strength, swim strongly from one point to another, looking for the idyllic island shore. They use a lot of energy ending up on jutting rocks where there’s no safety or permanent respite from the raging sea. I have known some of these swimmers. They’re often young, often intellectual. But they won’t abide some simple direction like, “Straighten and arch your back, and otherwise relax and let the waves carry you to shore.” Or, in this case, “Grant government only limited powers to protect God-given rights; expect to solve economic problems with effective work combined with philanthropy; and live the Ten Commandments, and pass along morality through the family.” They reply, “Too simple. That can't be it. I’ll just keep swimming and looking.” At every jutting rock they stop and yell out, “I’ve found it; you should come here,” and then they dive back in and search some more.

Others, without either the calmness to live the “floating” principles or the strength to direct themselves through trial and error, simply flail and hope for a rescuer before they go under. I've known those as well.

For those of us who are enjoying the cool calm water of the “lagoon,” and the warm sand of the “idyllic island” shore, the challenge is to get the word out to those who are madly swimming through the surf in the wrong direction, or who are flailing around directionless. We need to put up more guiding lights upon the shore.

Kleptomania Analogy

In Wednesday’s post we were talking about analogies that show the absurdity of claiming behavioral urges make a person “be” something, which leads to the assumption that the behavior should be accepted, even honored, so as not to offend the person. In passing I mentioned a piece I’d written some years ago, and I’m sharing that today. 

I wrote this in 2008, and shared it with people who were working on the Prop 8 campaign in California. But to my knowledge it was used as background, not published, so I hadn’t included it in my recent Defense of Marriage collection. The full piece begins with several paragraphs identifying the unique benefits of marriage to society: This covenant values exclusivity (so that inheritance rights are meaningful, and sexually transmitted diseases are not a threat), possibility of offspring, and permanence (so that offspring have a stable home in which to be raised). Despite Kennedy’s opinion in the Supreme Court ruling in Windsor a month ago that no one can have a rational reason for the traditional definition of marriage, these benefits are real, well documented and mounting in social science, and exemplified in some six millennia of human history.  

I have covered these reasons elsewhere in my writings, so for today I’ll mostly just include the analogy portion of the piece, meant to illustrate what happened 40 years ago to set in motion the propaganda that has been trying to control what the public “knows,” which doesn’t happen to be true.

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Alternative Reality

Homosexuals are not prohibited from marrying a person of the opposite sex who is not a close relative, who is of legal age, and who is not already married to another person—the same criteria required of heterosexuals. 

But they can’t marry the person they would choose! Neither can heterosexuals who would choose someone too closely related, too young, or currently married, limitations that are intended to make marriage relationships most likely to be valuable to society rather than detrimental. So what homosexuals are saying, really, is that they want a change in the law to accommodate their particular desires, without showing that their relationship choices will be of value to society. 

If they were to get what they want, then society is deprived of a way to encourage permanent, faithful opposite-sex parents to maintain stable families in which to raise offspring—a way it has had for six thousand-plus years. And their reason for depriving society is just because they claim it’s unfair to them not to get their way. 

Their main argument presupposes that homosexuality is an innate quality, like race, inborn and immutable. But common sense tells us that behavior does not qualify as an inborn immutable quality; behavior is what we do, by choice (even if there doesn’t seem to be a lot of choice because the urge is strong, just as it is for a child rapist/murderer, which is, by the way, just another sexual orientation among a couple dozen). 

So how did we as a society come to believe that homosexuality was a trait, innate and unchangeable? By scientific study and discovery? Overwhelming evidence? Not exactly. 

To show you how it happened, it might help to look at an allegorical situation, a story: 

Once upon a time, in the early 1970s, there were certain members of the governing body of the American Psychiatric Association who had traits not common to the population at large. They had an alternative view of ownership, which led them, at times, to see the belongings of other people as their own. Previously among their colleagues there had been a term for this condition: kleptomania. It was considered a mental disorder that could be treated. There were studies about the condition, and new treatments being tried, to alter what was viewed as an unwanted, undesirable behavior problem. 

But these particular alternative-ownership perceivers didn’t think their problem should be treated. They liked perceiving other people’s belongings as their own. To them, it wasn’t harmful or undesirable. And they didn’t think it should be viewed as undesirable to their colleagues. Over several years, they combined together to build their political authority in the professional organization; also, they organized pressure groups from outside the organization to help them lobby. And they were able to proclaim that kleptomania was not a behavioral disorder. It was an inborn trait, a different ownership orientation, and was as valid as any other ownership orientation. It should not be treated. Studies should no longer be done in order to discover causes and cures.  

Instead, society should be persuaded to accept the differently ownership oriented. Anyone who refused to agree would be labeled kleptophobic. Presentations would be given in schools—first colleges, then high schools, and eventually elementary schools, to indoctrinate the public to accept this new view of kleptomania. Illustrated books would be written for school children: Mommy Found Yet Another Pair of Shoes, and You Might Be Differently Ownership Oriented; You Won’t Know until You Try. Laws were put before legislative bodies to declare it a crime to discriminate against someone just because they might be differently ownership oriented. Despite heavy lobbying against it from the greedy retail industry, many places did pass the legislation. Television began to put more and more differently ownership oriented persons in their programming, and began to portray them not as the butt of jokes, but as positive role models that simply suffered misunderstanding from a bigoted public. 

A few kleptomaniacs (pardon me, differently ownership oriented individuals) continued to seek treatment, although treatment was no longer sanctioned. They claimed the lifestyle made them suffer guilt, for taking things that didn’t belong to them. And it undermined trust, so that their relationships weren’t as intimate and lasting as they hoped for. And, despite the insistence that their behavioral urges were an innate trait, many were able to leave the lifestyle. Thousands, in fact. They were able to stop taking things that didn’t belong to them. Many were very nearly able to completely overcome the urge to take things. And these former kleptomaniacs held conferences to tell people there was hope for them, if they also wanted to change. But the supporters of the differently ownership oriented rallied against them, and often the six sign-holding protestors would be featured in news stories where the 2,000 conference goers’ views would not be considered newsworthy. 

[Forty] years of kleptomania acceptance indoctrination netted some results. It became popular for the elite to support the differently ownership oriented. It became shameful to say, in public, that you didn’t like it when differently ownership oriented people took your belongings. People publicly viewed kleptomania with acceptance, and many even encouraged the uncertainly oriented to give it a try.  

But the additional acceptance, for some reason, didn’t seem to benefit civilization.  

Traces of old paradigms remained. Still, people weren’t more likely to invite the differently ownership oriented to socialize with them in their homes. And there continued a serious prejudice against them in the retail workplace and among certain traditionalist religions which clung to the Ten Commandments as if they still mattered. Also, people tended to hold on more tightly than ever to their personal belongings when in public where they might unknowingly come in contact with the differently ownership oriented. People are, after all, naturally bigoted and hard to change. 

OK, so kleptomania didn’t get taken from the long (and almost inexhaustible) list of treatable behavioral problems. But in 1973 homosexuality did.[1] There were at that time some 600 ongoing studies into causes and treatments. There were thousands of people who had been successfully treated. But because of the political pressure from some few homosexual activists in the leadership of the American Psychological Association along with a few well-funded pressure groups, studies and treatments were axed.  

Those seeking treatment were turned away or told that “treatment” meant “accepting yourself as you are.”[2] Those who have found treatment despite its scarcity have a relatively high success rate, particularly when religion is a factor in the treatment (reference).  

But society is told this behavior problem is an innate immutable trait. Society has been lied to. 

Should society, based on the political pressure of a few behaviorally warped psychiatrists, throw out the institution of marriage in favor of honoring a behavior that does not benefit society and arguably harms the individual as well? No, it should not. 

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[1] A thorough retelling of the sequence of events is covered in Destructive Trends in MentalHealth, by Rogers H. Wright and Nicholas A. Cummings; see the chapter on this subject by William T. O'Donohue and Christine E. Caselles.

Also, United Families International includes this information in their Family Issues Guide—Sexual Orientation, p. 9:

Myth:  Homosexual behavior should be considered normal as a result of the decision made by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1973 which removed homosexuality from its list of “disorders.”

Reality:  The decision to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) was made after APA leaders and members had endured several years of intense political pressure and disruptive lobbying efforts by militant homosexual activist groups. (Ronald Bayer, “Homosexuality and American Psychiatry:  The Politics of Diagnosis,” Princeton University Press, 1987.)  Homosexual activist groups pressured APA committees to remove homosexuality from the APA’s approved list of disorders. In spite of the long documented history showing that therapists have helped homosexual clients reduce and change their homosexual tendencies, professionals who persist in viewing and treating homosexuality as a changeable condition are labeled unenlightened, prejudiced, homophobic, and unethical. There is currently a movement within the APA to normalize pedophilia that appears to be following the same path to legitimization as homosexuality. See Fast Facts and Commentary #1-66, 90-97.

 

[2] In addition, there is pressure against psychology students to even question the dogma. A good illustration is a seven-part piece in 2007 by Mike Adams, “Of Mice and Mormons,” about a family therapy master’s degree student who asked his program supervisor where to refer a client who was asking for help with unwanted same-sex attraction; for asking the question, the student was persecuted: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII.