White 18-year-old walks up and down city streets with a loaded shotgun.
Result: is approached and questioned by police, refuses to show ID to prove that he’s carrying legally, lives to make a total dick of himself on the evening news.
Black 12-year-old plays with toy gun in a park.
Result: shot dead by police 2 seconds after they arrive by car on the scene.
I’ve been trying, through hypotheticals, to explain some of my frustration with the Hobby Lobby decision. Luckily today’s WestClip brought a real-life example from D. Colo.
Hobby Lobby meet Jah Frederick Nathaniel Mason, III.
Hobby Lobby’s objection to contraception is that some contraception is really abortion which contravened the religious beliefs of their executives.
[T]he company’s mission, as they see it, is to “operate in a professional environment founded upon the highest ethical, moral, and Christian principles.” The company’s “Vision and Values Statements” affirms that [the company] endeavors to “ensur[e] a reasonable profit in [a] manner that reflects [the executives’] Christian heritage.” It is therefore “against [their] moral conviction to be involved in the termination of human life” after conception, which they believe is a “sin against God to which they are held accountable.” The [executives] have accordingly excluded from the group-health-insurance plan they offer to their employees certain contraceptive methods that they consider to be abortifacients.…[They object to the ACA because] it requires them to provide health-insurance coverage for four FDA-approved contraceptives that may operate after the fertilization of an egg.These include two forms of emergency contraception commonly called “morning after” pills and two types of intrauterine devices.
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751, 2764-65 (2014) (internal citations omitted). The problem with this is — whatever their faith* — they got the science wrong. The measures that the ACA covers — and that the executives fear — are not, in fact, abortifacients. As an L.A. Times article summarizes — quoting the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — neither IUDs nor “morning after pills” cause abortions.
So the “beliefs” of a legal fiction (the corporate entity) based on a scientific fallacy entitled the company to opt out of a law of general application.
OK, then. Let’s see how this works in practice for a real live human being with religious beliefs he is seeking to enforce in court. Take it away, Jah Frederick Nathaniel Mason, III:
Mr. Mason asserts nine claims based on his belief that the use of satanic imagery on the seals of government justifies his driving without a license because the seal on Colorado drivers’ licenses displays satanic images. He also apparently believes that, by following his religious beliefs in not carrying a driver’s license, he should not be charged with traffic offenses as a result.…[In addition], [h]e is suing the meter agent for issuing a ticket for a missing front license plate and calling the police, who had his car towed, despite his explanation that he considered himself to be a “religious sovereign and had conscientious objections to the image of mountains on the Colorado plates as they violate God’s commands.”
Mason v. Clear Creek Cnty. Sheriff, 2014 WL 4099326, at *2, *5 (D. Colo. Aug. 20, 2014). Sounds reasonable. Just about as scientific as the Hobby Lobby execs’ beliefs, and what’s the big deal of one guy driving without a license or license plate. Not even close to the burden on society of permitting a corporation to exclude coverage of an entire set of benefits for its entire female workforce.
Plaintiff cannot argue there is no legitimate governmental interest in requiring license plates on cars. Mr. Mason’s religious beliefs—whatever they may be—do not excuse him from complying with the State’s requirement that he display license plates attached to his car. See Colo.Rev.Stat. § 42–3–202(1)(a) (license plates to be attached to the front and rear of a vehicle); see also Colo.Rev.Stat. § 42–1–101 (licenses for drivers required). The requirement for attached license plates is valid and neutral—all Colorado drivers are required to have license plates on their cars. . . . Mr. Mason’s claims asserted against the unnamed Denver parking management meter agent will be dismissed as legally frivolous.
Mason, 2014 WL 4099326, at *5. He not only loses a case at least as well-grounded in religion and reality as Hobby Lobby, his case is deemed frivolous.
Given that the Supreme Court had already decided that individuals did not have the right to smoke peyote** or opt out of the social security system*** based on sincerely held religious beliefs, the sad take-away from Hobby Lobby is that legally-fictitious corporations in fact have greater rights of religious freedom that individual believers.
* Many have pointed out that, at the same time that Hobby Lobby was touting its Christian business principles in refusing to participate in a broad health insurance program that, based on the private decisions of insureds and their doctors, may result in use of contraception that Hobby Lobby believes to be — but in point of scientific fact is not — abortion, it is engaging in a wide variety of un-Christian business activities, including investing in companies that produce the type of contraceptive devices that it refuses to cover and purchasing massive quantities of cheap crap from China, which not only supports fairly un-Christian labor practices, but actively encourages actual — rather than imagined — abortion. This would be like an inmate insisting on a kosher diet while ordering sliced ham from the commissary.
** Employment Div., Dept. of Human Resources of Ore. v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).
*** United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. 252 (1982).
And we want to make pejorative, exclusionary and — in Singer’s case — homicidal* decisions based on our superior knowledge of your inner state.
I had just written my random thoughts on the importance of trans* [**], Autistic and other former others rejecting the default setting, and my view that this made it easier for all of us “to be who we are and find or create our own cubbyhole, or none, or multiple,” when the New Yorker published “What is a Woman?” by Michelle Goldberg, an article describing the anti-trans* faction of “radical feminism” called, variously, Radfems or — more pejoratively but accurately — “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (“TERFs”).
But what truly reminded me of Peter Singer was the TERFs’ certainty that they know the inner life of trans women and trans men. One Sheila Jeffreys has written a book, “Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism,” in which she proclaims her knowledge of and judgment on the inner life of trans men and trans women by seeing them entirely through the political prism of male-dominated society. A man, per Jeffreys, can never appropriate the experience of being a woman. Accordingly, Jeffreys “insists on using male pronouns to refer to trans women and female ones to refer to trans men.” To her, trans men are simply trying to “raise their status in a sexist system” while trans women, well, “when trans women ask to be accepted as women they’re seeking to have an erotic fixation indulged,” or — according to the psychology professor on whose work she relies — trans women have “‘autogynephilia,’ meaning sexual arousal at the thought of oneself as female.”
So Jeffreys and other TERFs — cis women all — have decided that they know the inner life of trans people better than trans people themselves do, and not only pontificate about this in writing, but ultimately reject trans women as women, refuse to use their preferred pronouns, and in some cases exclude them from women-only spaces.
This is rank Singerism. Peter Singer is a Princeton professor who believes that, well, I’ll let Harriet McBryde Johnson describe it:
Applying the basic assumptions of preference utilitarianism, he spins out his bone-chilling argument for letting parents kill disabled babies and replace them with nondisabled babies who have a greater chance at happiness. It is all about allowing as many individuals as possible to fulfill as many of their preferences as possible.
In other words, privileged white male Princeton professor asserts that he knows with such certainty the inner life of people with disabilities that he advocates killing them as infants. To me, Singerism means making policy — usually negative — based on the facially impossible premise that you can know and pass judgment on someone else’s inner life. Singer can never know how happy any particular person is or will be, much less disabled infants he’s never met. Jeffreys and the TERFs have no idea how trans women experience their lives and their identities.
Where the fuck do they get off deciding to kill, insult, and exclude people based on these arrogant and patently impossible judgments?
Jeffreys claims that cases of “regret” — people who have physically transitioned and later regretted the move — “undermine[ ] the idea that there exists a particular kind of person who is genuinely and essentially transgender and can be identified accurately by psychiatrists.” Well, it might undermine that idea for the person experiencing regret but how it undermines the self-knowledge — often hard-won — of everyone who has ever transitioned is hard to see. More Singerism.
The New Yorker article describes one TERF group, Deep Green Resistance, as holding the view that “a person born with male privilege can no more shed it through surgery than a white person can claim an African-American identity simply by darkening his or her skin.” I suppose that may mark the far outer boundaries of my “Free to Be You and Me” approach to identity, that is, that we should credit people with knowing themselves and defer to the identity each asserts. Could a white person declare himself black in the same way a person born with female parts can declare himself to be male? [2024 note: this was a year before Rachel Dolezal caught everyone’s attention.] Can I decide to be disabled without actually having a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities? When does the assertion of identity become appropriation? I think we avoid Singerism by saying (1) we don’t know; and (2) we have no business killing, insulting, or excluding people based even on identities that push the boundaries of credibility.
It is reassuring that TERFs find themselves marginalized in feminist and academic circles, though frustrating that Singer is not similarly ostracized. It is apparently more acceptable to mainstream academia to advocate killing disabled infants than it is to advocate excluding trans women from all-female music festivals.***
I conclude with this quote from the New Yorker article:
Older feminists . . . can find themselves experiencing ideological whiplash. Sara St. Martin Lynne, a forty-year-old . . .
Hold on! “Older” and “forty-year-old” do not go together! But assuming that “older feminist” would accurately describe this 54-year-old, I experience no whiplash, but only a deepening appreciation for each way we let people be themselves, and each mind-opening step we take away from the default setting.
Update: Here is an excellent response to the New Yorker article, in Bitch magazine.**** TERF War: The New Yorker’s One-Sided Article Undermines Transgender Identity by Leela Ginelle. Lots of good points about the the TERF problem, though I disagree that the original article undermined transgender identity. I thought it was fair, and that the TERFs were portrayed as the narrow-minded troglodytes that they are.
Update 2: Julia Serano, who is mentioned in Goldberg’s article, has an informative rebuttal in The Advocate. Here is my comment:
This is an excellent rebuttal to the New Yorker piece, but reading this & the rebuttal in Bitch made me wonder whether we read the same original article. First, though, I agree that Julia Serano has every right to feel personally pissed. But while Goldberg clearly skates over the surface of a complex issue, and probably did sensationalize the feminist catfight angle, I thought the TERFs came off in her article as deeply misguided, insular, and hateful. Specifically the reference to “autogynophilia” seemed to me like a self-evidently hysterical use of scientific-sounding Greek word roots to disguise abject quackery. All that said, Serano’s response adds a great deal of useful detail; would be great if The New Yorker published it.
*******
* I was going to say “life-threatening” but Singer doesn’t just want to threaten the lives of disabled infants, he wants to permit people to kill them. Let’s call it what it is.
** “Trans*” is a way of indicating a wide variety of trans ways of being. As Slate explains, “the asterisk stems from common computing usage wherein it represents a wildcard—any number of other characters attached to the original prefix.”
This can get confusing here, in light of the fact that the ThoughtSnax Style Manual calls for asterisks for footnotes. We’ll muddle through.
*** The article noted that violence and threats have been directed toward TERFs, which is of course deeply offensive and wrong . . . except the graffiti “Real Women have Dicks,” which is just the sort of smartass, mind-opening civil disobedience I love.
**** Of course I read Bitch Magazine — it’s my trade publication!
The residents of Indian Village are fighting mad about the potential location of a group home for mentally ill youth in southwest Louisiana’s Allen parish.
“We don’t have a problem helping people,” said 57-year-old resident Beth Courville. “We are a Christian community, a hard-working community.”
“Our fear is fear itself. We don’t know what’s going to be in our backyard,” said Courville. “We would like to stop this nightmare from happening to another community.”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Many Obamacare Critics, Including Koch Brothers, Accepted Its Subsidies.
File under “R” for Republican Hypocrisy, though by now you may need a larger filing cabinet.
I continue to wonder what their plan is for people who are not millionaires. The free market will magically deliver cancer treatment at the local Wal-Mart?
Clearly they (Kochs; Republicans in general) are not opposed to Obamacare purely on principle, because of course they’d never accept subsidies, right? What does that leave? The pure political battle, in which they attack a policy that has provided insurance coverage — and related benefits like health, peace of mind, and the ability to leave an old job or start a new business — to millions of their fellow Americans simply to win the football game that is modern American politics.
This was, in fact, the theory of leading Republican pontificator William Kristol in 1993: no negotiation; no compromise; no health care plan. Let’s not figure out how to help people (i.e. govern); just kill it in an attempt to harm the other team.
So to my various conservative friends & family members who are likely to unleash the hounds in the comments — what’s the plan? How are we going to pay for cancer treatments for minimum-wage workers? How are we going to delink work and health care so that people — even those with pre-existing conditions — can have the freedom we hope all Americans have to innovate, to leave old jobs and start new businesses?
What is the plan?
Fox Freaks Out Over CVS Ending Sales Of Tobacco | Blog | Media Matters for America.
On Fox’s The Real Story, host Gretchen Carlson approached the CVS decision with suspicion and a remarkably uninformed premise, asking, “Is it OK legally … to restrict tobacco availability in a private store like this?” She questioned her guests as to whether they would continue shopping at CVS and observed that, “For people who smoke, you know, they have a right to buy cigarettes. It’s not illegal.”
So a private company makes a business decision that liberals — and specifically President Obama — think is a good idea, and suddenly it’s not clear to Fox News whether it’s OK. What’s the alternative: requiring CVS to sell its quota of tobacco to meet the current five-year plan?
The GOP is supposed to be the party of private enterprise. Then CVS makes an inventory decision, or Costco makes a salary decision, or Coca-Cola makes a marketing decision, or Obamacare makes it easier to quit your job and start a new small business (or stay home with your kids), and the right rejects these monumentally pro-business moves for the simple reason that the left likes them.
Today’s Republican party is not the party of private enterprise. It’s the party of anger. Knee-jerk anger. I guess its chances of long-term success depend not so much on policies or demographics, but on the ability to sustain content-free anger.
Conservative Author Dinesh D’Souza Charged With Campaign Finance Fraud.
Liberals of my age (53) have been listening to this guy make an ass of himself in the name of conservatism since we were all in college — though thank God not the same one — at the same time. As a founder of the Dartmouth Review, his idea of a good time was to do courageous things like support apartheid, defend the school’s use of a native American mascot, and publish an article in faux “ebonics” to make fun of affirmative action.
This led to a predictable career on the conservative gravy train/welfare line, working for the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, and publishing an absurdly inflammatory anti-Obama screed. From Wikipedia, as I had no idea just how out there he had become, we learn that in his book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, he wrote that:
The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11 … the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the non-profit sector and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.
But my favs are quotes like this:
In Letters to a Young Conservative, written as an introduction to conservative ideas for youth, D’Souza argues that it is a blend of classical liberalism and ancient virtue, in particular, “the belief that there are moral standards in the universe and that living up to them is the best way to have a full and happy life.”
Because in the article where Talking Points Memo reports D’Souza’s indictment, we also learn this:
Federal Election Commission records show D’Souza, his one-time wife and a woman he once described as his fiancee all donated to Long’s campaign. (In October 2012, D’Souza said he and his wife filed for divorce after he admitted he was dating the other woman.)
Living up to those universal moral standards, are we?
I was also strangely gratified to learn that his first wife was named “Dixie.” Seriously, if you wrote a novel about an arrogant college conservative, your editor would not let you name his wife “Dixie.”
“Brit Hume and Bill O’Reilly Think America’s Too ‘Feminized’ to Appreciate Chris Christie.” Hume:
I have to say that in this sort of feminized atmosphere in which we exist today, guys who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct and are kind of old-fashioned tough guys run some risks.
This only works if “masculine” means “childish, lying, grudge-carrying asshole” and “feminized” means “acting like a decent, grown-up human being.” Given what we know about Christie’s behavior, Hume’s declaration can only be read as an insult to men, something I would not have thought I’d hear at Fox News.
I keep meaning to write a long, interconnected, analytical post about how annoyed I get with the concept that Times Are Bad Now, Not Like the Olden Days. My theory is that the Olden Days were good and bad in many and varying ways, just as our present times are good and bad in many and varying ways, and all of this for the simple reason that we’re talking about the history of human beings, a notoriously brilliant, stupid, open-minded, prejudiced, generous, stubborn, violent, peaceful, and above all self-centered species.
But another signal trait of our species is procrastination — think any other species would have survived, evolutionarily speaking, if they procrastinated like we do? “I’ll worry about gathering acorns later.” etc. — so of course I have never gotten around to writing that definitive, all-encompassing psycho-history-of-the-human-race post. So I thought I’d start a new category — #thereneverwasagoldenage — and just add examples as I find them.
Today’s example: there never was a golden age of lawyerly civility. Every time some lawyer does something buttheaded these days, you hear the unison tsking of mainstream tongues about how it didn’t used to be like that, when we could settle a case over a G&T at the club instead of having to fight about depositions and interrogatories and (big, privileged, sigh) metadata. Herewith, an example of legal argumentation in the good ol’ days of mid-1960s Mississippi. First, the background of the case:
[P]etitioners and other Negro and white Episcopal clergymen undertook a ‘prayer pilgrimage’ in 1961 from New Orleans to Detroit. The purpose of the pilgrimage was to visit church institutions and other places in the North and South to promote racial equality and integration, and, finally, to report to a church convention in Detroit. Letters from the leader of the group to its members indicate that the clergymen intended from the beginning to go to Jackson and attempt to use segregated facilities at the bus terminal there, and that they fully expected to be arrested for doing so. The group made plans based on the assumption that they would be arrested if they attempted peacefully to exercise their right as interstate travelers to use the waiting rooms and other facilities at the bus terminal, and the letters discussed arrangements for bail and other matters relevant to arrests.
Pierson v. Ray, 386 U.S. 547, 552 (1967). The point of the case is that the clergymen had standing to challenge segregation despite the fact that they did so knowing they were going to be arrested. But here is an example of just how civil it was in court in the olden days:
the Court of Appeals reversed and remanded for a new trial on the . . . claim against the police officers because defense counsel had been allowed to cross-examine the ministers on various irrelevant and prejudicial matters, particularly including an alleged convergence of their views on racial justice with those of the Communist Party.
Id. at 551. Something (one small example among many) to think about next time some old fart lawyer (in whose ranks I now count myself) tries to explain how much better it used to be.
You know, the one that said that rich dudes who withhold their religious-oriented charitable donations to bribe the previously-infallible pope to get him to stop hurting rich people’s feelings will inherit the earth?
Billionaire Home Depot founder Ken Langone has a warning for Pope Francis.
A major Republican donor, Langone told CNBC in a story published online Monday that wealthy people such as himself might stop giving to charity if the Pope continues to make statements criticizing capitalism and income inequality.
Guess the eye of the needle was larger than originally thought.
Thought Snax 