What’s Wrong with the World

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It was satire five minutes ago...

...now it has come to pass:

The key moment of the Brendan Eich-out-at-Mozilla story comes in this interview with his long-time business partner Mitchell Baker. Upon learning that Eich gave $1,000 of his own money to the campaign for Proposition 8, Baker says:

“That was shocking to me, because I never saw any kind of behavior or attitude from him that was not in line with Mozilla’s values of inclusiveness,” she said, noting that there was a long and public community process about what to do about it in which Eich, then CTO, participated. “But I overestimated that experience.”

Here’s why this is important: Baker is saying that she never saw Eich acting badly, or exhibiting uncharitable or uncivil behavior. So the problem isn’t with how he comported himself. It’s with what he thought.

That bit of analysis comes from the always perceptive writer Jonathan Last over at his blog.

What's so scary about this whole incident is that I was writing a satire about this idea (i.e. that someone's thoughts about so-called same-sex "marriage" would be unacceptable to our liberal overlords) just a couple of months ago. Not so funny anymore. Mozilla has always been at war with Eastasia -- don't you think otherwise!

Comments (211)

Donating money to a political campaign is not "thought."

Aaron,

In a pedantic sense, you are of course, correct. On the other hand, the idea Mr. Last and I are trying to convey is that for the Left, certain political ideas and speech (expressed through normal political processes) are now seen as unacceptable. It doesn't matter how you otherwise conduct yourself in the public square -- if you express the idea that marriage should only be between a man and a woman you are a bigot and someone to be rejected from polite society.

It is ridiculous...and so are you.

What I am puzzled about is the lib-left's rather blatant - not to say downright in-your-face - abandonment of their own vaunted saying that "everyone has a right to their opinion" and free expression and on and on. Turns out, I guess, that you have a right to your opinion if it is outrageous, nutty, insane, or denigrates morality. But you don't have a right to your opinion if it is sane, sensible, rational, or upholds traditional morality.

Heads they win, tails we lose. But they aren't even being subtle about it.

I thank Aaron Gross for being our personal case in point of the openly totalitarian nature of the contemporary left, and of the "gay rights" movement in particular. I suppose they think they're very magnanimous, letting us think things in the quiet of our own minds, without their hounding us to the death.

Conor Friedersdorf wrote in the Atlantic, "It isn't difficult to see the wisdom in inculcating the norm that the political and the professional are separate realms, for following it makes so many people and institutions better off in a diverse, pluralistic society."

I think that's a good point. But it only makes sense as a principle if your support of the principle is viewpoint-neutral. In other words, if it's wrong for Mozilla stakeholders to pressure Brendan Eich to step down, it's also wrong for a school district to fire a teacher who appeared in pornographic videos on their own time prior to starting their job. It was wrong for a Subway sandwich restaurant to fire an employee who had appeared in porn on his own time.

If it's wrong for a private company like Mozilla to express concerns about whether Brendan Eich matches their mission, then it's also wrong for Holy Ghost Preparatory Academy to fire Michael Griffin for applying for a same-sex marriage license on his own time.

The problem with the Brendan Eich example is that, unlike the other examples, he wasn't technically fired; according to all news reports, he resigned. It is of course likely that his resignation was directly related to the criticism that his company received based on his political actions. This criticism was legal, of course--no one here is arguing that it shouldn't be.

Would you say, Jeffrey S., that you are advocating a culture where the political and the professional are separate, without regard to the specifics of what those politics actually are?

Before the deployment of the strategy outlined in "After the Ball", most of us did not discuss, and did not even think about what kind of sex our friends and colleagues might be engaging in or desiring or believing in. This had nothing to do with our social or professional or familial relationships. Neither did this enter into our regard or appreciation or love for others. Only now are individuals increasingly motivated to reveal their sexual practices and desires as an "identity", and thus demanding that we publicly identify ourselves as "believers" with regard to kinds of sexual activity. Our task now is to come up with appropriate symbols that we can sew onto our garments so that we can easily identify who is acceptable and who is untouchable. Now we must use utmost care when deciding who is safe to associate with.

Gotta love Phil's examples. Let's see: Donating to Prop. 8 is sorta like making porn movies.

(False analogy 1.)

Donating to Prop. 8 is sorta like violating the terms of a signed employment agreement with a religious employer.

(False analogy 2.)

And, gee, wasn't it Phil who was telling us a few weeks or a coupla months ago that there is no zero-sum game.

I coulda sworn.

And here comes case in point number umpteen that this is, indeed, a zero-sum game, that "tolerance" for the homosexual agenda means intolerance for anyone who doesn't 100% support it, and Phil is ready to step right up to the plate to tell us that we should regard Eich's treatment as just ducky unless we're willing to endorse not penalizing employees for making porn movies or for violating the express terms of their employment with an expressly Christian institution.

Lydia- religious schools reserve the legal right to fire employees for personal behavior outside the workplace.

So does every employer of an at-will employee. Do you really think Mozilla didn't retain the legal right to fire Eich?*

I did not interpret the original post to be about contract law. It appears to be a post about whether it is okay for employers to fire employees (or, for the job of an employee to be jeopardized) by opinions, beliefs, or actions that take place outside of the workplace that do not affect how the employee comports himself or herself inside the workplace.

If your point is that certain opinions are okay, and certain opinions are beyond the pale, great. That's what the people pressuring Mozilla to fire Eich thought, too. You agree with them in principle, but you disagree about which specific opinions are beyond the pale.

You are such a time-waster, Phil. You pretend to be stupider than you really are, because you are obviously _not_ stupid, and that wastes a lot of time. I have no idea what Mozilla retained the legal right to do. Arguably, if he was pressured to resign for his moral beliefs, and if he is religious (which I don't even know), and if these moral beliefs were part of his religious beliefs, he has a prima facie case for religious discrimination. So maybe what they did wasn't legal. He may not bother to sue, but he should at least get legal counsel on the question. My recollection is that a sportscaster who was fired for similar reasons (because before being hired he had expressed support in the course of an earlier political campaign for marriage) _has_ sued for religious discrimination.

Aside from that, there is a large difference between knowingly and openly engaging in behavior, subsequent to being employed, which you know clearly, blatantly, and expressly violates the behavioral contract you knowingly signed with a religious school, on the one hand, and having previously engaged in political action as a private individual which, it turns out, indicates opinions that your employer wants to fire you for when he finds out about those opinions. Punishing the latter by pressuring someone to resign requires a far more inquisitorial spirit and set of behaviors on the part of those seeking to get rid of the employee. The employee's doing the former is an act of thumbing his nose (to use a polite expression) at his employer and at the agreement he willingly signed in the first place to get the job. It's therefore rude, to say the least, and his losing his job subsequently scarcely deserves sympathy.

You probably understand all of that at some internal level. You're just pretending you don't in order to waste our time.

Lydia, I appreciate the faith in my not being stupid, even if it came in a dismissive reply.

I'm not trying to waste your time, though. I just think you have a very different argumentative style. I'm trying to outline some general principles on which we agree or disagree, and you have a tendency to want to discuss specific details. So, for example, I point out that religious schools reserve the right to fire employees for behavior outside the workplace, and you focus on behavior that specifically violates a contract of employment subsequent to being hired.

But that's a red herring, and you know it is. Because if I presented you with an example of speech that occurred prior to being hired, that wasn't specifically delineated in the contract of employment, you would find some other grounds to argue about that.

You do, in fact, support the right of employers to fire employees for behavior that takes place outside the workplace. For goodness' sake, you've written in the past that you don't think employers should have to hire people of a race that they don't like...why are you quibbling about the details of the example if the point is true?

If the Jeopardy category is: "Legal actions that take place outside the workplace that don't affect how you comport yourself inside the workplace," then that category is going to include things that you don't approve of. If someone is trying to make the point that people shouldn't be punished for the opinions that they hold, then the _specifics_ of those opinions don't matter. And if they do matter, then you agree, in principle, with the stakeholders of Mozilla. You don't get to have it both ways and pretend you're claiming the high ground by saying, "But my opinion is right!" because that's the whole point. Everyone believes that their opinion is right. That's why they think it's okay to punish people who believe differently: because those people are wrong, so those opinions don't deserve protection.

I also don't think that debating hypotheticals about whether Mozilla had a legal right or not is valuable. I assume that they had this legal right, but my feeling is that even if they had the legal right to fire Eich, they should not have done so.

(I'll give you another example of how I think that focusing on specifics waters down the value of the discussion: Mozilla didn't fire Eich. Eich resigned of his own free will. According to all newspaper accounts, Eich resigned. According to the article that Last quotes in the original post, not only did Eich participate in the process of discussing what to do about the fallout from his donation, he was not forced to resign by anyone at Mozilla. According to the only Mozilla employee I've talked to, it was "All Brendan." But that point doesn't seem to me to be germane to what Jeffrey S. is trying to discuss. The larger principle is the point: Eich is no longer CEO, because of his legal actions outside of the workplace.)

Phil, if you would stop confusing and equating "legal right to fire" with "due and proper right to act so", you would not be tilting at windmills, here. Jeff's description of the employer's action (to Aaron, above) were "seen as unacceptable" and "rejected from polite society". Those aren't the same as "firing said employee". Nor are they legal sorts of punishments, i.e. punishments at law. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Mozilla's actions, even to the extent of pulling out the magnifying glass for the CEO, and certainly for shining a spotlight on the situation, constitute actions that are harsh and unpleasant for an employee - even if they were to eventually decide "huh, we'll not bother to pursue this any farther" the actions would have made Eich uncomfortable to the point that he could have maintained a successful claim of harassment (hostile working environment) very easily indeed.

The fact that an action is legal doesn't mean it isn't an imposition on the person. If I run a market, and I walk up to a woman and say "I hate blond hair, I wish you would just leave" that is probably legal but certainly an unpleasant action to impose on someone.

Liberals are constantly harping about treating everyone equally and giving everyone the space to say whatever they think. In my outfit, they CLAIM that people should be able to say what they think without unpleasant response, but (as with Mozilla) what they mean is that unpleasant responses won't be tolerated for expressing opinions that denigrate sensible and traditional values, but expressing those very sensible and traditional values WILL be saddled with harsh responses. Even if not with firing.

Tony,

So,
1) The left, in spite of what they may claim, believes that certain opinions are beyond the pale.
2.) People on the left actively and openly criticize those who express opinions that are beyond the pale.
3.) This criticism is unpleasant for the people who express those opinions.

I think that it was wrong to call for a boycott of Mozilla. Would you agree?

Sage, you're wonderful. In a forum whose contributors insist that Words Have Meanings, I corrected an egregious political abuse of the English language, without commenting at all on the event being discussed. Now I exemplify totalitarian leftism.

You do, in fact, support the right of employers to fire employees for behavior that takes place outside the workplace.

Sure, I'll bite this bullet. Yes, you absolutely do. They did nothing illegal, or what I think SHOULD be illegal, by firing this guy.

BUT - you said:


1) The left, in spite of what they may claim, believes that certain opinions are beyond the pale.
2.) People on the left actively and openly criticize those who express opinions that are beyond the pale.
3.) This criticism is unpleasant for the people who express those opinions.

What's wrong is number three: They don't want to make it unpleasant for people who express those opinions, they want to silence those opinions completely, either through intimidation or criminalization.

Re: the original post

There is much truth to the saying "satire is dead".

Re: Phil's comments

Perhaps the most important issue here is not the question of whether or not an employer has the right to fire based on what happens outside the workplace.

Re: the left's ongoing campaign to silence ideas they have declared beyond the pale

The left would not be able to get away with this without the help of the right. Every time the left wins a battle on some issue, it declares opposition to its victory to be beyond the pale. Then, after a period of a few years, conservatives acknowledge the left's prohibition of such opposition, try to forget that they were themselves opposed to the left's position before the left's victory, and excommunicate from their ranks those who fail to go along with this. Today, the views William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, and James Burnham expressed about race, immigration, civil rights, the American South, apartheid, and South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s are considered unacceptable by the mainstream "conservatives". Those who still hold to these views are routinely purged. The same will eventually be true of those who uphold the traditional and common-sensical views about marriage that conservatives have been fighting for more recently. Unless, of course, the mainstream right develops a backbone and stops accepting the left's proclamations about what is beyond the pale.

I think that it was wrong to call for a boycott of Mozilla. Would you agree?

No. I would agree that it is probably impractical and therefore of little impact. I would not agree that it was wrong.

See, unlike the standard liberal, I believe that truth is real, and that some truth can be known, and that some of that truth resides in the moral sphere, and that some moral norms are knowable - indeed, many traditional moral standards are just those truths. As a result, I believe that people who publicly speak and act as if those moral norms are not real may, and sometimes should, be brought to heel by society. I don't think it is hypocritical for a conservative to give a nod of acceptance to a boycott that supports real moral norms, even if not everyone agrees with them.

What is funny is the flip side here: liberals apparently actually do agree with the notion that there are moral norms and therefore there are ideas "beyond the pale", in spite of saying they don't think that for 70 years. It's just that their primary norms are different ones: expressing ideas consistent with traditional values is not to be protected, but expressing ideas contradictory to traditional morals is to be protected. Or, to put it in a nutshell: the only moral norms are those that turn reality upside down.

I corrected an egregious political abuse of the English language, without commenting at all on the event being discussed.

Alright, Mr. Pedantic. Thank you for your chivalry in correcting Jon Last and Jeff's excess of language, by which they (like every other participant in this dispute) used Eich's financial support for traditional marriage as an abbreviation for certain beliefs or, indeed, thoughts concerning marriage. Far be it from anyone to associate contributions to Organizing for Action with assent in thought to President Obama's agenda, or donations to the DNC with assent to Democratic thinking. Curiously, since back when California took up Prop 8, in 2008, Barack Obama himself professed belief in traditional marriage, it would appear that donations to the predecessor of OfA in 2008 might be construed likewise as marriage crimethink; unless, that is, we should indeed discard the notion that contribution to a political campaign signifies the presence of political thought.

Meanwhile, Phil's syllogism lacked an important step in the train of logic. Call it 2(a):

People on the left in power actively and openly suppress the economic, political, and social liberty of those who express opinions that are beyond the pale.

Let's recall the various threats from elected liberals to drive Chick-Fi-La from their jurisdictions. Let's recall the numerous lawsuits of an extraordinarily petty nature, which attempted (successfully) to force people to take business they had declined. Let's recall the imperious decision out of Massachusetts over a decade ago, which with supreme arrogance pronounced any thought it favor of traditional marriage to arise out of a deep well of "invidious discrimination." For at least ten years the Left has made plain its intention to stand up and operate this Inquisition.

What's so scary about this whole incident is that I was writing a satire about this idea (i.e. that someone's thoughts about so-called same-sex "marriage" would be unacceptable to our liberal overlords) just a couple of months ago. Not so funny anymore. Mozilla has always been at war with Eastasia -- don't you think otherwise!

There's nothing scary and the fact that you find it scary is symptomatic of why conservatives are losing. Eich was the CEO. No corporation worth a damn would ever long tolerate that sort of public insubordination from its employees. Eich was so concerned about the feelings of those he might have offended that he couldn't bring himself to just fire the employees with cause and declare that anyone else who took to twitter to harass a Mozilla employee into resigning or termination would meet the same fate. That's what a real CEO would have done.

Just uninstalled Firefox and installed Opera. Runs nice so far.

Opera is now just a shell around the Blink rendering engine created by Google. Using Google products as an alternative to Firefox is, I think, a major mistake. It's trading upward on the scale of pro-homosexuality activism not just in terms of fervor, but in ability to spread the influence via money and political reach.

Switch back to Firefox and install NoScript. Getting NoScript working with the sites you like isn't that hard and it can hard block advertising in a way that no other plugin can. It'll also make your internet use safer because it blocks all JavaScript, Java, Flash, etc. until you say otherwise and is highly configurable.

Chrome is my recommendation. I switched to it long ago (after being a FF user for a long time) for reasons of speed and non-bugginess.

By the way, Phil is using "have a right" equivocally. What I have said in print is that I do not think racial non-discrimination laws and other non-discrimination laws have had overall good effects and also that federal laws of such a kind are unconstitutional. Therefore I would prefer that employers have the _legal_ prerogative to fire employees for a variety of reasons that are _actually_ wrong. It does not follow that I think an employer "has a right" to do so in the sense of, e.g., being above criticism for behaving in a jackbooted and disgusting fashion. Which is what Mozilla has done here. And if an employer simply said, "I hate black people and am not going to hire them," he would also be behaving disgustingly. And a boycott against such employers would be perfectly fine. Indeed, if effective, it would be a market-based response to bad employer behavior which would gladden my libertarian-sympathetic little heart. (I doubt that boycotts work very well usually, though.)

So, for the record, I have never argued nor said that there are no moral norms as regards hiring and firing.

Also, of course, Phil's whole "behavior outside of work" category is obviously ridiculously broad and unhelpful, as his own "make pornography movies" example showed.

For at least ten years the Left has made plain its intention to stand up and operate this Inquisition.

Exactly. And Phil stands there sharpening the ax right in front of our faces while brazenly telling us (in a previous thread) that the idea of a zero-sum game is an unfortunate invention over over-the-top conservatives and that most liberals are moderate on this issue and want a modus vivendi which those darned conservatives won't agree to.

We may not think he's dumb, but he sure acts like he thinks we are.

What I still haven't quite gotten over being astonished by is the lack of any sense of meta-perspective in these things by liberals. I still have this ideal of a sort of genteel liberal who personally thinks homosexual acts are fine but who doesn't start foaming at the mouth at anyone who disagrees with him. Such a person would of course acknowledge that there is nothing worthy of firing or driving to resignation about someone's contributing to the campaign for Prop. 8. He would say that he disagreed with Eich's making that contribution but that _of course_ doing so was not some kind of horrible act placing Eich "beyond the pale" of hiring. Such a person would say that such a response is wildly disproportionate and hysterical. He wouldn't need to invoke some extremely strong principle such as, "People should never be fired for what they do outside of work" and probably wouldn't assent to any such strong proposition, because counterexamples can always be found. He would just realize that _this_ did not count as grounds for wanting Eich out as CEO and striving to oust him. He would acknowledge that the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality and the nature of marriage are the kinds of issues for which at least a secular company that allegedly has a wide range of employees of all kinds, a company that makes no claim to a narrow religious commitment, that does not require employees to sign a statement of faith and behavior along ideological lines, should be able to tolerate divergent opinions. And he would think that it would be absurd for all the big companies in the country to become narrowly religious about the homosexual agenda. He would think that doing so would block a lot of good people out of jobs, people who would be good at the jobs, that doing so would create unnecessary anger, hysteria, bad feeling, and polarization in American society as a whole and would weaken the ability of the companies to concentrate on the quality of their product.

He would for all these reasons be really angry at Mozilla and wonder why the country seems to be going crazy.

This reasonable liberal used to exist. His kind just seems to be dying out nowadays.

The problem here is that insanity rules. They seem to want to deny Eich the right to participate in the political process. I thought that right was guaranteed to any adult who is not a convicted felon or incompetent. Inclusiveness, on the other hand, is a term which, taken to its extreme, as in this case, seems to even deny that there is a political process. Eich should sue Mozilla until it hurts, if he can.

The Chicken

Chrome is my recommendation. I switched to it long ago (after being a FF user for a long time) for reasons of speed and non-bugginess.

Firefox went through a rough period, but it's generally accepted these days that those times are over. In fact, a lot of geeks have switched back to Firefox from Chrome because the speed and stability delta is just not that substantial anymore.

There's an interesting discussion on slashdot about what may have been the real motivator. Mozilla derives upwards of 90% of its corporate revenue from its relationship with Google and Google is militantly pro-gay. This is why I said that if you are switching to Chrome or Opera you are actually making the situation worse since Google is unequivocally on the wrong side here whereas Mozilla's motives may be less transparent than they seem.

One of the concerns I have about conservatives switching to Chrome is that it will only reinforce Google's name, and with their name and wealth so strongly behind the wrong side that's a serious issue. If you are going to use Chrome, I would suggest installing this add-on so you can trick sites into thinking you're using Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera or Safari:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher-for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg?hl=en-US

(Sorry, didn't want to get kicked into moderation by posting two links)

A post of mine with two links just got sent into moderation.

(The link to a URL in your name is also counted, so the filter counted three.)

I wasn't being chivalrous, I was correcting the lie in Jonathan Last's remarks. It was political lying of the sort Orwell discussed in "Politics and the English Language." (Sage's use of the swear-word "totalitarian" is also an example of the bad-faith speech that Orwell was describing, like the swear-word "fascist" in his own time. That's even besides the fact that Sage described me, personally, as totalitarian, despite the fact that I happen to support Eich and, as I've said many times at this site, oppose same-sex marriage.)

And my correction of that lie was not pedantic, because the opposition to Eich was (ostensibly, at least) based on his donation to a political campaign - a public, political act. Last's lie was apparently intended to distract the reader from the publicity of that act.

No, Aaron, opposition to Eich was not based on the mere fact of his making a donation to a political campaign, but the precise recipient of that donation and, as any reading of all the myriad denunciations of Eich have made perfectly plain, the content of the thoughts and opinions which underlay this "public, political act" of his. It is not a lie to acknowledge what every single party to the dispute recognizes to be true, which is that Eich was hounded from his position because of his opinions, or at least because of what his opinions were at the time, and not because, per se, he made a political donation (which, by the way, is only a matter of public record because of an outrageous Californian statute that makes all such donations to political campaigns accessible to the public). Obviously his thoughts can only become to known if he engages in some act that makes them known, but then by your standard it would literally be impossible to punish a person for his thoughts unless and until we gain the power to read minds since, after all, neither speech nor voting nor anything other than thought literally is thought.

The totalitarian spirit underlying your objections here is plain: You would have it that so long as a person can be said to be punished for some external deed, then the contents of his mind are not implicated, no matter what the stated motive of his persecutors. Like Jeff said, you're just being ridiculous, particularly when you stoop to calling Jonathan Last an Orwellian liar for refusing to honor your absurd distinctions.

Mr. McLaughlin and Mr. Gross:

I humbly beg leave to suggest that your rhetoric is excessive in relation to your substantive disagreement.

Under Communist and Nazi regimes, people lived in fear that their casual comments to friends and neighbors would be reported to the authorities and, if they were out of accord with the regime's ideology, they could suffer greatly. This is what "thought-crime" refers to most unambiguously. There is a non-trivial difference between that and firing (or pressuring to resign) a CEO -- someone whose job involves representing the "face" of a company to outsiders -- because he engaged in a public, political act of supporting something that most of the company find offensive (however foolish and illiberal they are in doing so) -- an act whose publicity is the fault of a bad state law, not the fault of either of the principle parties here.

If the non-triviality of this distinction is not obvious, imagine that Eich had supported a truly despicable and obnoxious political cause, such as forced sterilization for "subhumans". If Mozilla had fired him for that, the terms "thought-crime" and "totalitarian" would seem out of place, wouldn't you agree? To be sure that sort of opinion is entirely different from the opinion he actually did express -- indeed typical liberals are totally crazy, even on their own terms, to think those opinions comparable. But the most heinous and the most sensible thoughts have this in common: they are both thoughts. And the term "thought-crime" ought to apply, or not apply, equally to repressive measures taken against either the best or the worst opinions.

So Mr. Gross has a point: is is, arguably, an unfair exaggeration to use the term "thought-crime" here.

On the other hand, our tradition of political liberty has long held there to be a close connection between freedom of thought and freedom of speech, and in particular freedom of political speech. And this is a particularly clear case in which the issue is precisely the content of his political opinions, a content not relevant in any way to Mozilla's raison d'etre as a secular business. There is undoubtedly a chilling effect going on here. It would be one thing if this were only an idiosyncratic act of a single company. But as anyone who has been paying attention knows, this is part of a larger cultural conflict in which the left seeks to make it standard practice for businesses to punish employees, if not for their privately held beliefs, then for any expression, not only in the workplace, but in the public forum, of opinions they deem outside the pale. This is undoubtedly an attempt to control thought. And I agree that it is evidence of what could be called a totalitarian trajectory, on the part of the left, when considered in this larger context. For there is here not only a significant difference but also a significant similarity between unambiguously totalitarian systems I mentioned above, and the world many on the left would like to see, in which anyone who publicly expresses an illicit opinion is in danger of loosing his livelihood.

So it would seem Mr. Gross is himself exaggerating when he uses the term "political lie" for what is, at worst, an exaggeration.

Nah, I don't buy all of this "on the one hand, but on the other hand" middle-man stuff. Look, Christopher McCartney, at how you yourself are forced to bob and weave. On the one hand, in your role as moderate, you tell Sage and others that "totalitarian" is an exaggeration. Then in the next paragraph you admit that the left has a "totalitarian trajectory." So I submit that your accusation of exaggeration is not well supported.

And I disagree that the term "thought-crime" should be applied "equally to repressive measures taken against either the best or the worst opinions." To see this, consider: The use of "virtual child pornography" can be called a crime of thought, because its making involves no actual abuse of real children, and its use is a deliberate act of thought or fantasy. Yet it is an entirely reasonable position that the making and use of such computer-generated material should be punishable by law. Since that is a reasonable position, it would be misleading to apply the implicitly critical term to such a law by saying that one is "punishing a thought-crime." Or again: Suppose that the thoughts in question are thoughts about how to commit an act of terrorism, and that what is punished is the set of thoughts that we call "planning such an act," as evidenced by, say, computer records and e-mails. In other words, the use of the term "thought-crime" implicitly includes the idea that the punishment is _unreasonable_ and that the behavior in question is not deserving of the punishment. There is going to be no getting away from substantive issues here into some value-neutral world in which we apply all terms equally regardless of the behavior (indicating thought) in question.

Thanks to all for the comments to date!

I've been busy/having fun away from the computer and I'm just catching up with all the commentary so far. Obviously, I want to thank my co-bloggers for defending my position so ably.

Working backwards, I think Mr. McCartney should be applauded for recognizing that "our tradition of political liberty has long held there to be a close connection between freedom of thought and freedom of speech, and in particular freedom of political speech" and therefore that this is "a particularly clear case in which the issue is precisely the content of his political opinions, a content not relevant in any way to Mozilla's raison d'etre as a secular business" (also the point Lydia makes in passing in her wise comment at 10:19 AM). I guess we should also be glad that there aren't gulags (yet!) for those of us who believe in traditional marriage. So point taken.

Back to Lydia's comment, which makes me think both of Mike T. (because I know he reads Vox Day) and our commenter Gerry Neal. Mike suggests that part of the problem in this situation is how Eich handled himself -- he should have vigorously defended himself and become a culture warrior (or at least more of a alpha male CEO)! Mr. Neal also reminds us of the American conservative movement's past and suggest that we are too quick to let the Left move the goal posts for us -- similar to Mike he wants us to vigorously fight the good fight and stop giving in to the Left.

First let me address Mike -- I don't think everyone out there is cut out to be a culture warrior and as Lydia suggests, this vision of a society that has companies ruthlessly weed out employees with non-conforming opinions seems like a recipe for disaster:

And he would think that it would be absurd for all the big companies [why not small companies as well?] in the country to become narrowly religious about the homosexual agenda. He would think that doing so would block a lot of good people out of jobs, people who would be good at the jobs, that doing so would create unnecessary anger, hysteria, bad feeling, and polarization in American society as a whole and would weaken the ability of the companies to concentrate on the quality of their product.

Finally, as for Mr. Neal's contention, I think we have to take each situation on a case by case basis -- show me the piece on "race, immigration, civil rights, the American South, apartheid, and South Africa" and then I'll give you my opinion. I suspect you are probably right; that there are specific things the authors you list said long ago that are denounced today by certain Republicans or mainstream conservatives that I would find respectable, but I doubt you would find everyone on this website doing the same as we tend to be a freethinking bunch who don't care much about how our liberal neighbors think about us!!! Lydia is already on record in this thread, and I would support her, questioning the constitutionality and wisdom of federal civil rights laws. Of course, as Rand Paul has discovered to his chagrin, if you are a politician and you do that our loud in America today, you'll have a mob howling for your head -- this is not healthy or intellectually sane for the health of our republic.

Jeff,

This isn't about being a culture warrior. It's about having enough balls to be a CEO. I'm not an "alpha" in most respects nor would I even pretend to be one. But if I were a CEO, you could make solid money betting that if I were in Eich's position I'd have fired all of those employees with cause for taking to twitter to demand my resignation over politics. That's how a CEO should handle such grossly insubordinate employees. That's not punishing them for having an opinion or even having one and publicly identifying with the company. It's punishing them for taking to the public to use public pressure to force a regime change at the company over minutia. As I said, I can think of no company I've ever even heard of where this would have been tolerated.

Whether you like it or not, a CEO has to have balls and be ready for a fight. In his position, Eich was like a general who was not ready for actually fighting with the enemy. That's simply not good for the company, and no employee should feel comfortable with such a manager regardless of how much they like his politics.

The original post and its defenders claimed that this particular event, the resignation of Eich, is already an instance of thought-control, which is an exaggeration. I said, in effect, we're not there yet, but that's the direction the left is taking us. Is that incoherent?

I'm firmly on the right here, and precisely because of that I want us not to weaken our case by overstating it. Reasonable people who are in the middle will notice how unapt the Orwellian terms are to this particular event and, when they see us applying them so unaptly, will be the more likely to dismiss our well-founded concerns regarding the leftist trajectory.

Nor am I a proponent of a "value neutral world" or even a value neutral public square. On the contrary, I believe that the state ought to privilege traditional morality, and to some degree enforce it. My point was much more narrow: the term "thought crime" is not such as to distinguish between good and bad opinions. And your examples do not show otherwise. "Thought crime" means making it criminal merely to hold an opinion. That's not what's going on in your examples. Now, if the state made it a crime _simply to believe_ that virtual child pornography is innocent, or _simply to believe_ that terrorist acts against the state are virtuous, that would deserve the label "thought-crime."

In the latter case, the connection I described before between thought and speech breaks down, since to express this opinion is to advocate for it, and advocating for acts of violence is something the state has a legitimate interest in repressing, but in the former case the connection holds: someone who attempts peacefully to persuade his fellow citizens that virtual child pornography is innocent should be legally permitted to do so. Nor should, say, an engineer loose his livelihood if he financially supports a group advocating that, since his holding that opinion is not relevant to his employment. Where it is relevant (CEO, grade-school teacher, etc.) that very relevance, not the mere badness of the opinion, is what makes it legitimate to fire him.

Nor should, say, an engineer loose his livelihood if he financially supports a group advocating that [virtual child pornography is innocent], since his holding that opinion is not relevant to his employment.

Actually, I don't agree.

Again, I think the term "thought-crime" does implicitly, and should, imply that the penalty is absurd relative to the action being punished, where "punished" includes private punishments such as loss of job. This will usually apply when the thought in question isn't really a big deal, whether wrong or right. It will especially apply when the thought is, in fact, true. It may also apply when the punishment is truly draconian and should be able to be seen to be so even by those who disagree with the thought.

In the case of someone's losing his job for having contributed to a campaign for a state amendment defining marriage as being between one man and one woman, the term "thought-crime," applied as a criticism of those enacting the punishment, fits aptly for all these reasons.

I'll bite the bullet and say that I don't believe firing somebody because of their beliefs on gay marriage, or because of political actions they took, should be illegal as long as it cuts both ways.

Thoughtcrime has an actual definition from 1984...

To even consider any thought not in line with the principles of Ingsoc. Doubting any of the principles of Ingsoc. All crimes begin with a thought. So, if you control thought, you can control crime. "Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death, Thoughtcrime is death.... The essential crime that contains all others in itself."

So Lydia is right that this is a thoughtcrime even if her definition is only partly compatible with the real definition for thoughtcrime.

And if we add that Ingsoc is crazy, not to say evil, and that it is therefore a really bad thing to treat it as a really bad thing to "consider any thought not in line with the principles of Ingsoc," which is of course what Orwell intended, then my definition is completely compatible.

If an anti-Semitic CEO or an anti-black CEO resigned following Jewish (or societal) or black (or societal) outrage, would this massive indignation over the stifling of free speech be occurring from us conservatives? Obviously not. Should it occur? I don't know.

For the record, I don't think there's any comparison between these and being anti-"gay marriage," because I don't think being anti-"gay marriage" collapses into being anti-gay. But some on the Left obviously (and erroneously) do, and in their eyes, the comparison is sound, the sacking of Eich is thereby natural, and the negative reactions from free speech advocates are unjustified. So, precisely how vile and nasty does someone's speech have to get before it becomes acceptable for "free speech" to be demoted from being the primary concern? Or should it always be the primary concern?

Jenni, it's a worthwhile question, but it's important to keep in mind the basic context here, which is a $1,000 donation to a ballot initiative that was successful. He never engaged in "vile and nasty" speech, or anything of the kind, so it's not clear that this incident has anything to do with the limits of free speech.

Anyway, if a CEO had made a contribution to an organization explicitly devoted to the annihilation of the Jews or what have you, that company would have a very real public relations problem on its hands and the force of public opinion could reasonably be regarded as a serious threat to the bottom line. Here we have somebody who holds a view that is entirely within the mainstream of American public opinion, not to mention the near-universal consensus of the entire human race from the dawn of time. So I don't accept that the left was behaving reasonably even on its own terms here, unless those terms have become very radical indeed, and there's little question that Mozilla itself had little legitimate cause, from a public relations standpoint, to do anything other than tell the left to go get stuffed.

And if we add that Ingsoc is crazy, not to say evil, and that it is therefore a really bad thing to treat it as a really bad thing to "consider any thought not in line with the principles of Ingsoc," which is of course what Orwell intended, then my definition is completely compatible.

It's not completely compatible because a thoughtcrime can only be that which is against the ruling orthodoxy. In fact thoughtcrime carries no objective content because the reason it is crimethink is due to the deviation from the ruling orthodoxy, not the content of the deviation.

See, I just don't understand why people say the kinds of things that Jenni raises in response to this. I really don't. I realize that may sound unkind or something, but why, why, why is this false dichotomy being foisted on us? "Either you think that no matter what anyone says or does on his free time, he should never be fired, or how can you criticize what the left did here?" I can criticize what the left did here because it's _nuts_. Totally over-the-top. See my above comment concerning a reasonable liberal. There is no need to get all tied up in knots about some extreme position to the effect that somebody could be going out on his free time and yelling at the top of his lungs, "All blacks should be annihilated," and his company can't fire him. Why should anyone think that there is? It's like some sort of odd disease among even some conservatives, that they think we can't criticize the insanity of the left unless we come up with some extremely implausible, broad-gauge Principle and take an oath to such a Principle. God forbid we should ask the left to exercise a little sense of perspective and common sense! No, no, we must accept the most radical leftist opinion of the historical position on marriage as tantamount to utterly vile, evil, and nasty speech and thought. Because, you know, it's what they think, and we couldn't expect them to think otherwise, could we?

Yes, we can, and we should.

Is that what Jenni is saying?

I see that confusion as lying behind every single instance where someone reads about this story and instantaneously starts worrying over the question, "[P]recisely how vile and nasty does someone's speech have to get before it becomes acceptable for "free speech" to be demoted from being the primary concern?"

Why are we dealing with bizarre hypotheticals instead of with the case before us? Why talk about "vile and nasty speech" when Eich didn't engage in anything remotely like vile and nasty speech? What are we thinking? It can only be because we think we conservatives cannot criticize Firefox unless we commit ourselves to some kind of extremely heavy "free speech principle," which is not in fact correct.

We're dealing with "bizarre hypotheticals" because conservatives refuse to give any principle by which we are to adjudicate between harmless and harmful speech. Eich didn't say anything particularly nasty, he just gave monetary support to keeping an entire class of people from engaging in a fundamental human right. The objection to that is that gay marriage isn't a fundamental right, but that's the point: liberals think it is. Anti-gay-marriage to liberals is by now akin to pro-segregation. Would you want a segregationist as CEO? If you think that's bizarre then you need to start paying attention.

The other issue is that conservatives come down frequently for employers to have a wide latitude, almost an absolute right, to fire anyone for any reason whatsoever. So it is treated (sometimes unfairly) with suspicion when they suddenly object to a specific instance of this.

Or put it differently: Why bring up "vile and nasty speech" at all? Well, the only reason I can think of is because we are not supposed to dismiss, as obviously childish and absurd, the extreme left's evaluation of Eich's contribution as being tantamount to "vile and nasty speech." But I say that we _should_ dismiss that as obviously childish and absurd and tell the left that we think they are behaving insanely and that they should grow up. Again, it is even possible for someone to think, wrongly, that homosexuals can be "married" without believing that everyone who disagrees with him is a vile bigot comparable to an advocate of genocide. If the left can't get real *at least to that extent*, we should dismiss them for the crazed ideologues they are being. But asking questions about "just how vile and nasty speech can get" before it warrants dismissal is taking the extreme, unreasonable left's viewpoint on Eich much too seriously. It's essentially relativizing this to viewpoint and asking us to put ourselves in "their shoes" and ask whether we would want to get someone fired who did something we thought as bad as what they think he did is. I think we should refuse to play that game in any way, shape, or form.

It is precisely that taking seriously that Jenni's comment does indicate. As she says herself...

But some on the Left obviously (and erroneously) do, and in their eyes, the comparison is sound, the sacking of Eich is thereby natural, and the negative reactions from free speech advocates are unjustified. So,

And I say, no. So, nothing. So, that group of "some on the left" are not just erroneous but infantile, crazed, out to lunch. If there are any marginally sane liberals left around they should tell them to make some minimal effort to re-enter the reality-based community.

Anti-gay-marriage to liberals is by now akin to pro-segregation.

Which it wasn't just an historical heartbeat ago. Remember? The current president, their darling, was anti-gay "marriage" as recently as 2008. No, sorry, things don't just "become" equivalent to being pro-segregation overnight like that. Again, I say, they need to grow up. They can't just say, "We've now decided this is tantamount to being pro-segregation, so now we're going to treat it as such, and we challenge you to tell us just how vile and nasty speech can get before it's okay to penalize it."

The other issue is that conservatives come down frequently for employers to have a wide latitude, almost an absolute right, to fire anyone for any reason whatsoever.

Aaaand, I call equivocation _again_ as between "legal right" and "moral right."

Plus, there's this: If indeed firing a person for supporting traditional marriage is plausibly religious discrimination (which it is), then it is de facto illegal. I have always said that

a) It would have been better if anti-discrimination laws had not been passed in the first place, even at the state level,

but that,

b) given that they are here, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with Christians asking that they be applied as written and that Christians be defended against obvious religious discrimination. If we do not do so, we let ourselves in for the worst of all possible situations, in which we cannot discriminate against Muslims or Wiccans qua Muslims or Wiccans (or atheists) and in favor of fellow Christians, but secularists can discriminate against us qua Christians with impunity.

I therefore support cases where Christians do sue where there is a plausible case of anti-Christian employment discrimination.

My position is a consistent one and is open for anyone else to take. That is _in addition to_ the distinction between a moral and a legal right.

For all these reasons, oppositions to Eich's treatment is entirely consistent for conservatives, including (which is not all conservatives in any event) those more libertarian-inclined who are not strong supporters of non-discrimination laws.

"n a pedantic sense, you are of course, correct. On the other hand, the idea Mr. Last and I are trying to convey is that for the Left, certain political ideas and speech (expressed through normal political processes) are now seen as unacceptable"


I imagine that you consider Neo-Nazi beliefs to be socially unacceptable, don't you? The real question is not whether there are some beliefs that are beyond the pale and therefore warrant social stigmatization, it is whether opposition to gay rights falls into that category.

" If there are any marginally sane liberals left around they should tell them to make some minimal effort to re-enter the reality-based community"


I feel the same way about all religious people. Let's just say that anyone that believes Jesus rose from the dead in ancient Palestine has no right to lecture other people about "the reality-based community." To me you are just as whacky as the Hot Topic goths that worship "the mother goddess."

As an evidentialist, I find that comment particularly silly, Dunsany. But let's please remember that we are talking about hiring and firing. I think people who believe in crystal power are pretty silly and, in that area, divorced from reality, but I can easily imagine hiring them. Moreover, they are doing a lot less harm to other people (as am I by believing that Jesus rose from the dead in ancient Palestine) than jack-booted nutcases demanding Eich's resignation because they think his contributing to Prop. 8 was a form of "vile and nasty speech."

So, nice attempt to evade telling your fellow leftists to get a life and stop harassing moral traditionalists, but no dice.

What are we thinking? It can only be because...
Why bring up "vile and nasty speech" at all? Well, the only reason I can think of is...

I'm going to go out on a limb and issue a mild rebuke to this style of argumentation, where you make stramineous conjectures about what your interlocutors "must be" thinking, and claim they are the "only reason you can think of." It's frankly not true that you can't think of anything more reasonable than "we are not supposed to dismiss, as obviously childish and absurd, the extreme left's evaluation of Eich's contribution as being tantamount to 'vile and nasty speech,'" and "Either you think that no matter what anyone says or does on his free time, he should never be fired, or how can you criticize what the left did here?" The way I know you can do better is that I myself brought up vile and nasty speech, giving an argument more reasonable than your conjectures, and you responded intelligently to it, indicating that you understood it.

Actually, Christopher, Jenni's comment was pretty clear. There is no need for me to engage in psycho-analysis. She's trying to be "reasonable" in some way by putting herself into the shoes of the leftists who are making this demand. Indeed, I quoted the relevant part of her comment in which she says that this is what it looks like "in their eyes." She is therefore _expressly_ taking seriously the way it looks "in their eyes." Matt is if possible even more explicit: This is how they look at it, so we have to deal with that on its own terms.

Now, I reject the leftists' demand that we treat their terms as reasonable. I consider that demand on their part to be a form of pretty blatant bullying. The leftists are saying that, even though they just dreamed up this moral equivalence, they can by fiat _make_ it so, and we have to take it seriously because this is how it is in their eyes. I'm encouraging fellow conservatives not to give in *in any way* to this bullying by saying, "This is how they now see it, so we have to start asking deep questions about 'just how vile speech' can get before being punished by loss of livelihood." I reject that argument, which is the _explicit_ argument of Jenni's comment, not some heavily inferred argument.

By the way, Christopher, our leftist commentator Phil has quite _explicitly_ made the false dichotomy "argument" which I bring up. He did it here. Just read the thread. He doesn't think it unreasonable, and of course doesn't acknowledge that it is a false dichotomy, though I argue that it is. This false dichotomy is indeed what we are being faced with.

~~Let's just say that anyone that believes Jesus rose from the dead in ancient Palestine has no right to lecture other people about "the reality-based community." To me you are just as whacky as the Hot Topic goths that worship "the mother goddess."~~

So Alvin Plantinga, Alasdair MacIntyre and David Bentley Hart are in the same boat as, say, Shirley Maclaine, Bob Moss and Starhawk?

Fascinating.

Also, Christopher McCartney, I think it should be pretty obvious, but I'll spell it out since it seems it is not obvious to you. When I asked why we are talking about vile and nasty speech, I was referring by "talking about" to the kind of thing said here by commentator Matt:


We're dealing with "bizarre hypotheticals" because conservatives refuse to give any principle by which we are to adjudicate between harmless and harmful speech. Eich didn't say anything particularly nasty, he just gave monetary support to keeping an entire class of people from engaging in a fundamental human right.

It would be pointless to try to deny that here, Matt is, just as I said, asking that we take seriously the left's evaluation of the issue (rather than dismissing it as absurd) and that we conservatives therefore come up with some broad-scale principle by which we identify and state that we believe in punishing vile speech and ideas, since the left thinks of Eich's ideas and contribution as supporting something vile and nasty.

Commentators Phil and Jenni, coming each from different political perspectives, have raised the same kind of issue and question.

That is what I meant by "talking about vile and nasty speech."

I assume that, by your own "more reasonable argument" you are referring to your comment at April 5 at 6:22. There you were bringing up genuinely vile and nasty speech and thought in order to quibble over the use of the term "thought crime." For what it's worth, I don't grant that your argument there was particularly more reasonable than the other argument I have been answering. In fact, I think it was quite weak and answered it at some length as such. However, it was a quibble over the term "thought-crime" rather than a challenge to conservatives (either from leftists or from fellow conservatives) to think deeply about "what we would do about vile and nasty speech," which is what my phrase "talking about vile and nasty speech" was chiefly referring to. Moreover, as I have pointed out, that challenge is not some uncharitable, psychologizing invention on my part but is in fact a *standard* response to the Eich situation, as can be seen in this very thread.

>As an evidentialist, I find that comment particularly silly, Dunsany.

Lydia, no true evidentalist and Bayesian would come to the conclusion that Jesus probably rose from the dead. The evidence simple is not there. The arguments I have seen you prensent both here and elsewhere are, shall we say, unconvincing. I won't accuse you of intellectual dishonest on your own blog, but I originally found this blog after listening to you on Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot and wanting to see if you really took what you were saying seriously.

>as am I by believing that Jesus rose from the dead in ancient Palestine

The problem is that your belief that Jesus rose from the dead leads you to support political policies. If Christians never tried to intervene in public life their belief would be harmless, but we both know we don't live in that world. You yourself are an outspoken critic of Islam, so you should be able to understand where I am coming from.

Dunsany, my own opinion is that my political positions are over-justified. Which is to say, there are plenty of reasons for supporting them which make no use of Christian propositions as premises, though Christianity provides _additional_ reasons for supporting them.

As you doubtless know, Dunsany, it was not possible to present anything like all of the detailed evidence for, say, the reliability of the Gospels in that interview on the Pale Blue Dot. I was discussing a set of interesting questions raised by the host of the show. In fact, I myself have come to know even more since that interview than I knew at the time. But to discuss that would be a threadjack here.

>

As you doubtless know, Dunsany, it was not possible to present anything like all of the detailed evidence for, say, the reliability of the Gospels in that interview on the Pale Blue Dot. I was discussing a set of interesting questions raised by the host of the show. In fact, I myself have come to know even more since that interview than I knew at the time. But to discuss that would be a threadjack here.


I agree, and I don't want to derail the thread. I looked into your article though, so I wasn't basing my opinion solely off that podcast. I'm not unfair, and if I really thought brief discussions like that could make a real difference I would have to concede that William Lane Craig has proven the existence of god numerous times.

I imagine that you consider Neo-Nazi beliefs to be socially unacceptable, don't you? The real question is not whether there are some beliefs that are beyond the pale and therefore warrant social stigmatization, it is whether opposition to gay rights falls into that category.

Even apart from the specific content of speech that qualifies as vile and harmful and SHOULD be beyond the pale and JUSTIFIES social disapproval by social stigma (or worse, in some cases), there is also a formal / procedural issue to this. Conservatives should be intensely aware of the dishonesty involved in the liberals declaring speech that was, only 8 years ago, so reasonable and even hum-drum that a majority of LIBERALS were fine with it, and only 3 years ago approximately 55% of the population was convinced is right, (not merely "not objectionable") and not even 1 year ago had 45% of the highest court in the land approve wholeheartedly, can in just a few months become (gasp!) "beyond the pale"! Not fit for polite company. Not even fit for a bar, unless you want to fight about it. That's just not how reality works. Society doesn't change its spots that fast. It isn't reasonable, it isn't true, it isn't conscionable to act as if such speech is beyond the pale. Part of what socially "beyond the pale" implies is, precisely, that it defies social mores that have been developed and in place for many years so as to bear on everyone equally.

But still MORE is it unreasonable to suggest now that speech given years ago while the it was still approved by the majority makes the person currently beyond the pale today. Ever hear of ex post facto punishments? It is just as bad when done informally through social stigma as when done formally through law.

It is all part of the totalitarian mindset (not formal totalitarianism) of liberalism which insists on pushing conformity to a perspective regardless of the constraints of reality, social or physical. (Of course, it adds insult to the injury to have liberals claim the mantle of tolerance and berate conservatives for intolerance while they are doing this.)

American communities differ quite a bit Tony. Eich works in Silicon Valley, and I assure you that among elite tech workers Prop 8 was beyond the pale when it was passed. Eich no doubt knew this, which is why he wrote a blog post after his involvement was originally revealed a long time ago. So if your standards are dependent on the community then what Eich did was unconscionable bigotry. The fact that he refused to "repent" and say he supports SSM is also relevant. You might forgive someone for something that happened in the past because they were caught up in the zeitgeist, but that doesn't really apply here.

That said, segregation had majority support right before the civil rights movement. That doesn't mean it was okay to defend it. The moral argument you are making simply does not work. For the record, I believe that men like William Buckley lost their credibility forever due to their support for segregation. The whole "wink wink let's pretend that never happened" attitude has always struck me as repulsive.

So if your standards are dependent on the community then what Eich did was unconscionable bigotry.

Tony is not, however, making standards "dependent on the community." He's just pointing out that there is a real hypocrisy involved in the left pretending that this kind of thing shifts on a dime like that, even socially, and then demanding that everyone shift as fast as they want to shift and consider "beyond the pale" what they say, now, is beyond the pale. This is what I meant by bullying. It really is a bullying and totalitarian spirit. If you can't see that, shrug, but it indeed is, and we should not hesitate to point it out.

Well, it looks like Gerry Neal's earlier comments are now directly relevant to this thread:

"For the record, I believe that men like William Buckley lost their credibility forever due to their support for segregation. The whole "wink wink let's pretend that never happened" attitude has always struck me as repulsive."

Of course, I totally and completely reject Dunsany's moral preening -- which is why I can admire both Buckley and someone like Robert E. Lee. "Shall Cromwell have a statue?"

I forget -- does the Left issue fatwas for those of us who admire Confederate generals?

that among elite tech workers Prop 8 was beyond the pale when it was passed.

Oddly, I suspect that when Eich recited the Pledge of Allegiance he probably didn't include the words "to Silicon Valley" at all. Just a guess.

which is why he wrote a blog post after his involvement was originally revealed a long time ago.

Yes, a long time ago, all the way back in 2012 when it became public. Such a long time ago, back before recorded history. Even before Obama's second term started!

So, let me get this straight: he did something in 2008, and it became public in 2012, public enough for Eich to have given blog posts on it, and in spite of knowing that, Mozilla, a Silicon Valley entity, gave him the CEO post. But at the same time, within that same Silicon Valley community what he did was beyond the pale and even Mozilla could not bear to have such a man at its helm. Which one am I supposed to believe - that the community that is Mozilla didn't think it was that big a deal so they were willing to make him CEO, or the community that is Silicon Valley DID think it was a big deal beyond the pale in 2012 and thus Mozilla (a part of the SV community) couldn't possibly want him as their CEO? Oh, wait, since Mozilla actually DID make him their CEO...

William Buckley can't seem to catch a break. The far right says he was bad for allegedly compromising too much with liberal positions on civil rights, the south, etc. The far left says he was bad for "supporting segregation." I have my own, entirely unrelated, differences of opinion with Buckley, but on these issues I'm beginning to think he must have done something right to be so universally disliked.

Many people at Mozilla did think it was a big deal Tony. You seem to think that average workers get to decide who becomes CEO, and that is not how it works. There was also opposition to his candidacy on the board, but that is another matter. As for why now, the problem is that being CEO is different from being a regular employee, even one as important as a CTO. The CEO is the face of the organization, and he is supposed to be its leader. Many people didn't want Eich as their leader because they find his views repulsive, and they do not want him to lead and represent them in the public sphere. If anything that just shows this outrage is overblown....average workers will probably be fine, it is elite men with ambition that have to worry about their views on gay marriage. I think that's appropriate.

>Oddly, I suspect that when Eich recited the Pledge of Allegiance he probably didn't include the words "to Silicon Valley" at all. Just a guess.


Who cares? He knew very well that his community did not approve of his actions, so your earlier argument doesn't work.

>Tony is not, however, making standards "dependent on the community." He's just pointing out that there is a real hypocrisy involved in the left pretending that this kind of thing shifts on a dime like that, even socially, and then demanding that everyone shift as fast as they want to shift and consider "beyond the pale" what they say, now, is beyond the pale. This is what I meant by bullying. It really is a bullying and totalitarian spirit. If you can't see that, shrug, but it indeed is, and we should not hesitate to point it out.


Public opinion can "shift on a dime" so his point is simply incorrect. Look at the way that the German people embraced the worst aspects of Nazism after Hitler came to power. There are other examples we could come up with, but that one is particularly instructive. Secondly, his community did not shift. It found Prop 8 repulsive when it was passed and still thinks of it the same way. I admire Eich's refusal to compromise his values to keep his job, but someone with his views isn't fit to be head of an organization like Mozilla. Those are the breaks.

Dunsany,

You say, "I admire Eich's refusal to compromise his values to keep his job, but someone with his views isn't fit to be head of an organization like Mozilla. Those are the breaks."

How far are you willing to draw the line down in the organization? You say earlier that "average workers will probably be fine"; but what if a LGBTQWRT programmer at Mozilla finds out that someone on their team donating money to Prop 8 and/or voted for Prop 8? What then, especially when they loudly complain that they don't feel safe anymore or that they are uncomfortable working with a "bigot"?! Should Mozilla extend their tolerance down to the traditional marriage computer programmer supporter or does that programmer now have to go? After all, their values just don't match up with Silicon Valley's values, right?

someone with his views isn't fit to be head of an organization like Mozilla.

Well, Dunsany, I refer you to my above comments. This viewpoint is just utterly nuts. Where, where are the reasonable liberals? I used to know a few. Did they just get dematerialized in the last ten years? Why is it now impossible to hold the traditional view of marriage without being deemed "unfit," whether to head an organization or for polite company or what-not? Frankly, this is what I call bullying. Especially the next line, "Those are the breaks."

The sentence "Those are the breaks" has a nice (by which I mean creepy) ambiguity as between "We have power, so we get to define the terms of all social interaction whether you like it or not, haha" and the more postmodern "We have power, so we really do get to *make it the case* that some things render you unfit."

The former makes the ad baculum particularly evident. The latter is just nonsense.

I used to love Firefox.

But I hate ideological groupthink.

So goodby Firefox...

But what are the alternatives?

Are there any that are any better?

Steve,

I can't speak to either of these solutions (at home I use Explorer! or Chrome) but Vox Day claims that Pale Moon or Epic Browser are both good. Apparently Pale Moon is built on a Firefox base so it "still reports itself to be Firefox to web sites by default. Fortunately, it is trivially simple to turn this off and cause the browser to correctly report itself as PaleMoon:

1.Create a new tab.
2.Type "about:config" into the Address Bar as if it were an internet site (URL).
3.Type "compatMode" into the Search box that will appear right below the Address Bar.
4.On the line general.useragent.compatMode.firefox there are three settings: user set, boolean, true. Click on "true" and it will change to false.
5.Close the tab."

Steve and Jeff, I posted this on VD's blog and it needs to be spread around to those switching to Pale Moon or still using Firefox:

Pale Moon doesn't seem to be getting updated as much as Firefox does, so here's how to use Firefox and stick it to Mozilla:

1. Install NoScript. It's a pain in the butt at first, but when you get used to it it's incredibly powerful for blocking arbitrary JavaScript that may be trying to spy on you or serve ads.

2. Install AdBlock Plus and do the following:
- Expand the menu on the Adblock Plus button and choose filter options.
- Find the option for enabling "non-intrusive ads" and deselect.
- Go to google.com and under that same button's menu, tell it to block ads on google.com

3. Change the default search engine to Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo. The top right text bar in firefox is the search bar. Click on the icon and you can change the default search engine.

These steps are important because Mozilla makes 90% of their revenue from ad revenue from searches they send to Google.

I'll reiterate what I said above that if you switch to Chrome from Firefox for political purposes, you are making a terrible mistake. Google is unequivocally worse on the gay rights issue than Mozilla.

>"We have power, so we get to define the terms of all social interaction whether you like it or not, haha"


I wouldn't add ha ha, but that is exactly what I mean. You don't have a moral right to have us treat your views like we respect them even when we don't. Why on Earth would you think that you did? At the end of the day your moral system is just incompatible with ours. You think homosexual behavior is morally wrong, and we don't. We don't think gays should have to be celibate and be unable to marry their parents, while you do. Your views are repulsive to many liberals, and that's just the way it is.


>What then, especially when they loudly complain that they don't feel safe anymore or that they are uncomfortable working with a "bigot"?! Should Mozilla extend their tolerance down to the traditional marriage computer programmer supporter or does that programmer now have to go? After all, their values just don't match up with Silicon Valley's values, right?

An average programmer? No. Still, it's something that should definitely be considered when it comes time to decide if that employee should be placed in a leadership role.

It must be nice to be one of the .00000000001% of people who have ever lived who are morally upright enough to enjoy consideration for any leadership role in Dusany's universe.

It must be nice to be one of the .00000000001% of people who have ever lived who are morally upright enough to enjoy consideration for any leadership role in Dusany's universe.

And you thought the 1% was a club that was too exclusive...

>It must be nice to be one of the .00000000001% of people who have ever lived who are morally upright enough to enjoy consideration for any leadership role in Dusany's universe.

Most of the people who have ever lived thought slavery, oppression of women, and many other nasty things were perfectly normal. Do you think that someone who openly supported slavery would be fit for leadership roles in American culture?

our leftist commentator Phil has quite _explicitly_ made the false dichotomy "argument" which I bring up. He did it here. Just read the thread. He doesn't think it unreasonable, and of course doesn't acknowledge that it is a false dichotomy, though I argue that it is.

I appreciate the shout-out, though I think of myself as only slightly leftist, in the greater scheme of things.

However, if you think I've presented you with a false dichotomy, I think you misunderstand me.

Let's take a look at what you appear to be arguing.

1. Eich made a donation to a political cause, and that political cause was not beyond the pale.
2. Therefore, Eich did not do anything wrong.
3. Many liberals and leftists do hold the belief that the political cause was beyond the pale.
4. They are wrong.
5. Therefore, they are engaging in thought-policing.
6. Thought-policing is inappropriate/wrong/bad.

In other words, the gist of what you're saying is that thought-policing is wrong when the thoughts are okay, but thought-policing is okay when the thoughts are genuinely bad.

If that's the principle you advocate--and it really seems to be--then you are creating tautologies. Liberal criticism is wrong because liberals are wrong. Conservative criticism is right because conservatives are right.

There's nothing wrong with having an opinion about the liberal view that SSM opposition is beyond the pale. But you and Jeffrey S. are going through some kind of charade where you pretend that there's something new to analyze in this example. The foundational premise (opposition to SSM is really awful) led to the action (I will take action to remove this man from his position at the company).

If you're not arguing that the action is wrong whether or not the foundational premise is correct, then the action is a red herring. All that liberals have to do to believe that the action is correct is believe the foundational premise. They do. You already know that they do. So why are you pretending to critique the action?

We're dealing with ideologically-driven derangement. It's a derangement that says believing in the ultimate end of Prop. 8, which was the maintenance of a status quo for the most fundamental of human relationships that has stood from the beginning of time, is as of yesterday afternoon so thoroughly abhorrent as to disqualify a person from any serious role in public life. It drives a person to take a position which says all his forebears, including almost certainly his own parents, were utterly execrable bigots (though he'll only suggest this in comboxes, and not over Thanksgiving dinner, to be sure). It is a derangement that denies its radicalism while justifying its own claim to authority in the morally solipsistic cloak that, "This is how it now seems to us, therefore, obey." And it is a derangement that will drive a person to claim that this Jacobin hatred of the moral norms of last Wednesday are all perfectly reasonable, and that this scorched-earth crusade to destroy personally any who oppose them at the ballot box (and remember, this is about someone's efforts at the ballot box) is a perfectly reasonable way to think and behave.

Most of the people who have ever lived thought slavery, oppression of women, and many other nasty things were perfectly normal. Do you think that someone who openly supported slavery would be fit for leadership roles in American culture?

You're only proving my point by making such an absurd and insulting comparison. Practically nobody who ever lived even thought of "gay marriage" as a coherent concept, and now it's the moral equivalent of wanting to enslave black people all over again? Now it is so self-evidently obligatory on a person to believe in the wonderfulness of marrying homosexuals that you think it is perfectly reasonable to expect other people to credit your wild moral outrage over it, to treat that outrage as perfectly reasonable?

I am under no obligation to treat such over-the-top questions seriously.

In other words, the gist of what you're saying is that thought-policing is wrong when the thoughts are okay, but thought-policing is okay when the thoughts are genuinely bad.

If that's the principle you advocate--and it really seems to be--then you are creating tautologies. Liberal criticism is wrong because liberals are wrong. Conservative criticism is right because conservatives are right.

This raises an interesting question for conservatives: how would you deal with someone who advocated that the US adopt laws treating homosexuals the way Uganda treats them? Being something of a free speech extremist, I would pass but I'd be curious to know where Lydia stands on someone who is significantly more aggressive on homosexuality than mere opposition to gay marriage.

Probably the most irritating thing about all this is the intellectual dishonesty of insisting that I treat as perfectly reasonable the suggestion that liberals, the poor dears, really do think President Obama was the moral equivalent of a slavery advocate as of a year ago. Suddenly it's incumbent on me to imagine that leftists really do, sincerely, believe that humanity's moral maturity can have progressed so far in a single year that Obama can be forgiven for publicly holding to a view that is now the equivalent Holocaust denial or whatever else? Or that it is fully reasonable for them merely to speak and behave as though that were the case?

I'm sorry, I don't buy it, and anybody trying to sell me on it is arguing in bad faith.

>You're only proving my point by making such an absurd and insulting comparison. Practically nobody who ever lived even thought of "gay marriage" as a coherent concept, and now it's the moral equivalent of wanting to enslave black people all over again? Now it is so self-evidently obligatory on a person to believe in the wonderfulness of marrying homosexuals that you think it is perfectly reasonable to expect other people to credit your wild moral outrage over it, to treat that outrage as perfectly reasonable?


That wasn't my point actually. My argument was that what "most of the people that ever lived" thought about an issue is irrelevant per se. It's a nice rhetorical line, but it completely fails as a philosophical argument.

This discussion is being waged at the totally wrong level. Whenever the secular left scores a victory--getting a conservative fired for defending traditional morality, overturning a law defending the traditional concept of marriage, etc.--the common refrain amongst too many of us is an appeal to liberal reasons against them. Thus the most recent case here is just more evidence of liberal "intolerance," "free speech" and "open and honesty inquiry" are our reasons for why creationist or design-based sciences should be permitted in public schools, and Paul's teachings on the role of women in church leadership are okay because in other ways early Christians had a progressive view of gender as compared to 1st century pagan Romans.

We often forget to defend our beliefs on their own grounds. People should not only be allowed to, but in fact have a duty to, defend the Christian view on homosexuality because it is the one true view. Creationist/design based sciences should be studied because they have some truths to offer us, as they give us knowledge about God as Creator that a purely materialist construct of biology cannot. And, like it or not, it is not the proper role for women to be preachers and church leaders (or civic leaders), as leadership is a masculine quality which is part of God's design.

In other words, defend truth for its own sake. Truth is exclusive. It divides. The Truth is exclusive. He is the only way to the Father.

So, wrapping this up, the proper response isn't to decry an unnamed cadre of homophiles for intolerance against traditionalists but Eich for cowardice. People will get away with what you let them, and resigning so pathetically just begets more of the same from the left. But we're all guilty of this. Why haven't gay-supporting groups been boycotted? Why haven't judges who strike down the will of the people and near-universal teachings on morality re: homosexuality been impeached? Why do liberal universities continue to get generous state funds via the most conservative of state legislatures? We need to quit patting ourselves on the back for discovering the obvious--that liberals don't value the tolerance they preach--and recognize when we don't do enough to defend and stand up for the truth we believe.

(Having said that I'd be remiss if I didn't thank WWWtW, Lydia, Sage, Paul, Jeff, et al. for your steadfast defense of the gospel. This site is one of the good ones, I'm just a bit disturbed by many of the defeatist comments on here.)

That wasn't my point actually. My argument was that what "most of the people that ever lived" thought about an issue is irrelevant per se. It's a nice rhetorical line, but it completely fails as a philosophical argument.

It was never offered as a philosophical argument. It is, however, perfectly relevant to the reasonableness of the left's behavior, which is the subject at hand. It's also relevant to the reasonableness of the assumption that the left is arguing in good faith when it says that personally destroying its political adversaries on this issue is a sincerely felt moral imperative for which conservatives ought to have sympathy and respect.

Probably the most irritating thing about all this is the intellectual dishonesty of insisting that I treat as perfectly reasonable the suggestion that liberals, the poor dears, really do think President Obama was the moral equivalent of a slavery advocate as of a year ago.

I think the mistake is believing that a person is either a Great Person or a Terrible Person, and that a person's greatness or terribleness insulate them from occasionally doing wrong or doing right. A corollary belief is that a person is either a bigot or a non-bigot, and I think that's where the notion that "calling something bigotry has a chilling effect on free speech!" comes from.

Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and there is physical evidence that he raped one of his slaves (at least according to a modern understanding of meaningful consent.) Thomas Jefferson probably didn't think of himself as a bigot, and he probably didn't think of himself as a rapist, and he probably didn't think of himself as a Terrible Person.

Thomas Jefferson is also dead. So he can't do anything about the beliefs that he held, or the actions he took, centuries ago.

It drives a person to take a position which says all his forebears, including almost certainly his own parents, were utterly execrable bigots

Was Thomas Jefferson an utterly execrable bigot? When a Great Person does a bad thing, does it make the bad thing okay?

(though he'll only suggest this in comboxes, and not over Thanksgiving dinner, to be sure).

You should really come to Thanksgiving dinner with my family sometime. Mom taught religion at a Catholic school, and I am the least liberal of my many siblings.

You seem to think that it is difficult for someone to think of their forebears as bigoted. Surely, you're aware that bigotry exists, and that people who hold bigoted beliefs sometimes have children? Let's take a political issue where you and I probably agree: within the past century, there were people in the U.S. who actually and openly believed and advocated that black people should go back to Africa (regardless of where they were born).

My grandfather believed that, and was happy to talk about it, and he continued to espouse that particular belief until he died. Was my grandfather a bigot? Yes, he was. Did I love him? Yes, I did. Was my grandfather fit for a major leadership role in a large company? No, absolutely not. Was he fit for political office? No, he wasn't. Did I still love him? Yes, I did.

Is it possible that my own parents hold bigoted beliefs? It certainly is.

Is it "deranged" to think that your own parents have bigoted beliefs? No, it isn't. It is the status quo for millions and millions of people, Sage. You and I may have different ideas about what constitutes bigotry, Sage, but if you agree that bigotry exists and that bigoted people can and do have children, then perhaps you can see that it isn't actually "deranged" to think of your parents as bigoted. Sometimes it's just accurate.

And, like it or not, it is not the proper role for women to be preachers and church leaders (or civic leaders), as leadership is a masculine quality which is part of God's design.

I think it's important, when arguing with someone who believes same-sex marriage should be legal, to bring this point up, loudly and often. It's important for you to make the point that your beliefs are holistic, not piecemeal, and it's important to have the courage to stand up and be willing to say things that you believe are true even if the listener doesn't want to hear them.

>>“It's like some sort of odd disease among even some conservatives, that they think we can't criticize the insanity of the left unless we come up with some extremely implausible, broad-gauge Principle and take an oath to such a Principle.”


I suppose my comment was horribly phrased, as Lydia took it to mean that I was doubting the lunacy of Eich’s sacking, which I do not. Eich’s sacking was transparent lunacy, and no number of theoretical questions arising in the course of contemplation will diminish that fact, similar in a way to how one can, in theory, doubt the external world and the existence of others, but psychologically most don’t doubt them in the slightest and are, in fact, incapable of doing so. So no, I don’t doubt or worry about the soundness of the criticism. It expresses truth. What I doubt and worry about is whether it, in its current and usual form, will get anywhere with those on the left. I doubt that it's good enough to effect change. Which brings up this:

>>“God forbid we should ask the left to exercise a little sense of perspective and common sense!”

This is too high a view of Leftists than I’m willing to espouse. Appeals to “perspective” and “common sense” might as well be put forward in front of the mullahs in Tehran. They’re too far gone. They’re akin to committed solipsists. How else can we explain these bizarre, self-satisfied anti-black and anti-Semitic comparisons? After gleeful and prolonged immersion in a twisted ideology, their common sense and soundness of intuition have gone out the window. What’s needed is an intervention, and if there’s any hope for one (that isn't supernatural in nature), it will be in the form of deep, concentrated arguments administered repeatedly and as civilly as possible, aimed at their confused roots and leaving them with little conceptual room to hide, not empty admonishments to “common sense.”

The blunt truth is that the average person will - when faced with a criticism/charge/insult leveled against one of his cherished beliefs - simply Google the issue, jump at the very first counter-criticism that appears to have a gloss of substance to it, and rest contentedly with it for the remainder of his days. This is multiply true of the wackos on the left. Hence we see the self-satisfied “anti-black/Semitic CEO” rejoinders to the conservative indignation, to which “get lost and get some sense, guy” isn’t going to rise above the level of futile gesture. In fact anything that isn't thorough isn't going to rise above that level. Back to Google they bounce to find more hiding space.


[To be honest, I am highly ignorant of the concrete details concerning the history and evolution of the gay movement over the last decade or so, and, though it wasn’t apparent, it was mostly in that spirit that I asked my question (thanks, Sage and Tony, for providing some of that background), not out of a feeling of being “bullied” or pressured "by the demands" of the liberal mob. Also, to clarify, I don’t think that all criticism needs to “get somewhere” to be legitimate and good - sometimes it’s enough for it to just exist.]


>>“She's trying to be "reasonable" in some way by putting herself into the shoes of the leftists who are making this demand. Indeed, I quoted the relevant part of her comment in which she says that this is what it looks like "in their eyes." She is therefore _expressly_ taking seriously the way it looks "in their eyes."
>>“Now, I reject the leftists' demand that we treat their terms as reasonable.”

Lydia, I don't get this. What is the harm in seriously trying to better understand the way the opposition thinks, no matter how confused or crazy they may be? It seems clear that the more a confusion is understood, the better it can be treated. That option doesn't suddenly becoming illegitimate or foolish merely because it coincides with what the psychotics are demanding. Further, I don’t see how striving for such an understanding must necessarily constitute an ill-thought, clumsy venture on our part in which we inadvertently concede that their terms and arguments are reasonable. They are unreasonable, but it's in our interests to understand them. William Lane Craig obviously thinks that Richard Dawkins and Co. are a profoundly unreasonable, dogmatic, bigoted bunch, but he and others have nevertheless waded through the confusions in The God Delusion and meticulously and so thoroughly picked them apart for the betterment of everyone invested in the God debate, including (former) New Atheists. I say light up the fly with the bazooka, and do it repeatedly.

You seem to think that it is difficult for someone to think of their forebears as bigoted.

No, for many people, it's all too easy, and in fact, probably more than a little satisfying. Pig-headed, arrogant, and self-righteous? Yes. But by no means difficult.

Was Thomas Jefferson an utterly execrable bigot?

No.

A corollary belief is that a person is either a bigot or a non-bigot, and I think that's where the notion that "calling something bigotry has a chilling effect on free speech!" comes from.

Nah, I'm going to go with a less high-concept theory of where that idea comes from. It comes from having been born into this world and walked it for five minutes. It comes from knowing that people's speech is chilled by the threat of being made into a pariah, especially since in liberal society there is literally nothing more devastating than to carry the label of "bigot." Your broad-minded interpretation of the world is, shall we say, peculiar to yourself. Accusations of bigotry not only chill speech, but are transparently intended to, since they're usually an attempt to destroy a person on the basis of his...speech.

Also, the idea that "a person either is a bigot or a non-bigot" comes entirely from liberals, and in particular their constantly throwing the word at anybody who disagrees with them on any subject on which they can make even the most distant and strained connection to race, religion, or homosexuals. This Manichean world of enlightened liberals on the one hand, and benighted bigots on the other, is the rhetorical setting that the left has created for us all. Or hadn't you noticed?

In any event, the point is just this: If the word "bigot" has now come to encompass even those people who think, or who have ever thought, that marriage is something to do with men and women, then the word is either without content, or it is a moral condemnation of the whole human race, a sort of vanity play for liberals who like to think they are the only non-bigots ever to walk the face of the earth. (Keeping in mind that for the liberal, being a bigot is, give or take, the absolute worst thing you can be.) If that belief doesn't strike you as wholly unreasonable, self-flattering, and a morbid comment the inflamed self regard of the people who hold it, then you're probably a liberal yourself.

Dunsany asks,

You don't have a moral right to have us treat your views like we respect them even when we don't. Why on Earth would you think that you did?

I wouldn't insist on "moral right," but why on earth would I think that liberals are deranged if they defend the beyond-the-paling of Eich? Should it really need to be said? Liberals used to understand that society and its members benefit when society has some flexibility in its joints, otherwise known as tolerance. This means that atheists and Christians can hire and work for each other, even when they each have some views on which they differ *very* strongly and which each doesn't respect from the other. The same for Protestants and Catholics and, it used to be, liberals and conservatives. That's called a pluralistic society, and it shouldn't be necessary to tout its advantages to self-styled liberals. Hiring conservatives who disagree with you about marriage, yes, even as CEOs (gasp) facilitates the free flow of talent, has economic benefits and benefits for getting the job done well, avoids harming people, avoids harming the dependents of the conservatives by cutting them out of work, helps to avoid Balkanization, rigidity, and ill-will in society, encourages the exchange of ideas, and so on and so forth. These are all things that just the other day liberals acted like they valued. Indeed, to this very day, on college campuses all over the country, students are being deliberately pressed to attend various sessions and classes to expose them to extremely leftist views in the name of these very advantages. But leftists now just can't for the life of them understand why conservatives would expect those who hold a traditional view of marriage to be considered "fit" to be hired as CEOs? What silliness.

Lydia, I think we're spitting into the wind on this one, but as usual you said in few words what I said in too many.

Phil thinks it's self-evident that his grandfather was an unfit man for a position of any status in this society because of a view that he held that conflicts with Phil's ideology. Meanwhile, I think that Muslims--who hold to a religion that I actually do believe is demonic in origin and is evil in itself--ought to be allowed to hold a job as a CEO or whatever else. Which of us is the wild-eyed ideologue?

When you're further around the ideological bend than Andrew Sullivan, who went as far as to quit pretending to be a conservative over DOMA, it's time to take a step back.

On that subject, Sullivan has gotten way too much credit for denouncing this jihad against Eich, since he's one of the godfathers of this insane notion that opposition to homosexual "marriage" is tantamount to being a segregationist. More than any other individual he is responsible for the strategic communications blitz that connects this issue with Black People in Selma Or Something, which worked to galvanize the left but also to make them utterly nuts on this issue. That is why they are constantly in shock that anybody dares disagree with this radical upending of a basic social institution--"I mean, didn't we win the fight for civil rights fifty years ago?", they think, when in fact 1) they just brought this up last week, and 2) it has jack-all to do with civil rights.

Lydia, I don't get this. What is the harm in seriously trying to better understand the way the opposition thinks, no matter how confused or crazy they may be? It seems clear that the more a confusion is understood, the better it can be treated.

Jenni, thanks for your clarifying comment. To clarify my own position, I'm not opposed to understanding our opposition but only to what seems to me to be giving them too much space or in any way, among ourselves even, *legitimizing* their position. Now, it seems to me that to some extent it does that for us to ask each other to develop some kind of large-scale Position concerning "vile and nasty speech" as part of our opposition to the Eich ousting. Such a position just is no necessary, nor even especially helpful, concomitant of our criticism of the left on the Eich ousting. And in fact, I'm strongly inclined to think that trying to develop a position only gets us too much "into the mindset" of the left on this and their crazy analogies. Since what Eich did isn't anything like their analogies, why do we, in criticizing them, have to develop a grand unified theory of how we would treat someone who was employed by one of us who had one of those other views which they, by crazy analogy, compare to Eich's?

Besides, grand unified theories are often not to be had. For example, suppose that you ran a small business in which you had employed old Mr. Smith for three decades. He's even in a leadership position in your business. One day you find out, completely outside of work, maybe through a comment Mr. Smith makes at a barbecue at his house, that old Mr. Smith is a bona fide racist. Do you fire him forthwith? I'd say it's by no means obvious that the answer must be, "Yes." One of the best English professors I ever had was, by his *own account*, a racist. I was glad he had tenure. And he was just as gentlemanly and excellent in his teaching of black students as of whites, despite his views. Were I running an opinion journal (for example) I probably wouldn't hire him knowing that up front. But these things just don't admit of simple formulas, even for opinions that I myself consider cringe-worthy, to put it mildly.

This is just one reason among many why conservatives shouldn't allow themselves to be backed into a corner and forced to give some kind of account: Okay, pony up. What do _you_ consider beyond the pale, and what should be done about it, and would you criticize a company if they fired somebody who held such-and-such a view. Etc., etc. Lay it all out, right here, right now, because *that's what we think*. I think we should refuse to play. Refusing to play that particular game doesn't mean not understanding the opposition. Not at all.

I think the mistake is believing that a person is either a Great Person or a Terrible Person, and that a person's greatness or terribleness insulate them from occasionally doing wrong or doing right. A corollary belief is that a person is either a bigot or a non-bigot, and I think that's where the notion that "calling something bigotry has a chilling effect on free speech!" comes from.

OK, Phil, it is possible to be bigoted on one point and still not a horrible person all around and not wholly bigoted. But where does Mozilla get off being more intolerant of one bit of (supposed) erroneous bigotry than even the liberal left is of the current POTUS? Just like Eich, in 2008 candidate Obama opposed SSM.

"I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage."

In 2014, to have opposed SSM in 2008 became an offensive, beyond the pale stance, according to liberals. Yet President Obama is MORE than acceptable as the "leader of the free world" but Eich is no longer fit to be the leader of Mozilla? That's straining credulity rather severely.

Oh, and GW, for Paul and Lydia and Jeff and Sage and myself, IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING that we oppose companies getting rid of CEOs (or employees) for holding traditional morality. It's not like we are *conceding* anything at all. What we are doing with posts like this is pointing out an additional reason to not accept what the libs are doing to our society, one more on top of all the other reasons we already had: they are folding away their notion of tolerance and becoming blatantly intolerant. We have made the case, at least a half-dozen times, that gay 'marriage' is not marriage and is wrong up one side and down the other. We have argued it from the Bible and from natural law and from social utility and from legal theory.

Tony, they knew he was lying then, and didn't care. Nobody thought for a minute that had anything to do with anything other than keeping black voters in line. So liberals have an "out," of sorts. It's one advantage of being completely unprincipled--you can always rediscover your principles whenever you need them.

Great comments Lydia, Tony and Sage! Also in response to GW, I just had to share this excellent post from Pastor Wilson:

http://dougwils.com/s7-engaging-the-culture/their-spindly-tower-of-temerity.html#more-106596

I don't always see eye to eye with Doug Wilson, but generally speaking, he is fighting the good fight and he passionately loves the Lord. I'm glad he's on our side ;-)

Phil thinks it's self-evident that his grandfather was an unfit man for a position of any status in this society because of a view that he held that conflicts with Phil's ideology. Meanwhile, I think that Muslims--who hold to a religion that I actually do believe is demonic in origin and is evil in itself--ought to be allowed to hold a job as a CEO or whatever else. Which of us is the wild-eyed ideologue?

Sage, my grandfather was an actual human being, and it's safe to say, I knew him reasonably well while you have never met him. Unless you are willing to say that every single Muslim, as well as every other human being on the planet is equally fit for a leadership role in a large company or political office, then maybe you shouldn't be second-guessing my assessment or implying that you're less of an ideologue.

OK, Phil, it is possible to be bigoted on one point and still not a horrible person all around and not wholly bigoted. But where does Mozilla get off being more intolerant of one bit of (supposed) erroneous bigotry than even the liberal left is of the current POTUS? Just like Eich, in 2008 candidate Obama opposed SSM.

Actually, in 2008 Barack Obama was vocally opposed to Proposition 8. There are certainly liberals who wished he would have been more vocal, but it's not quite accurate to conflate the two of them.

It is true that Barack Obama did not endorse legal SSM in 2008. The liberals (as well as libertarians and conservatives) who supported marriage equality at the time thought he was wrong then. His stance was widely criticized by liberals. (Do you really need examples of liberals criticizing the president's stance on SSM? I can provide them, if you don't believe me.)

In 2014, to have opposed SSM in 2008 became an offensive, beyond the pale stance, according to liberals.

I've been called a liberal here on this board, so perhaps I'll suffice as an example. I'm also a Californian. Do you really think my views on Proposition 8 have changed since 2008? I'll give you a hint: I supported full marriage equality for same-sex couples in 1994. Before that, I hadn't really thought much about it.

So, I think your characterization is a little inaccurate. Many of the people who thought anti-SSM political actions were beyond the pale in 2008 still hold those beliefs, and they have been joined by others. Some of the people who've joined them just didn't care one way or the other in 2008, some of them were too young for politics in 2008, and some of them have changed their minds. What feels to you like a "Whoa, where did this attitude come from all of a sudden?" appears to others to be case of, "All right. We're finally being heard."

That said, I don't support firing people (or trying to get them fired) for their political speech. I agree with Barry Deutsch at "Alas, a Blog." If we want a "free speech culture," we have to be willing to tolerate some unpopular viewpoints. However, criticism is also a form of speech. It's perfectly reasonable to criticize the speech of others, however.

Nah, I'm going to go with a less high-concept theory of where that idea comes from. It comes from having been born into this world and walked it for five minutes.

Sage, I don't think we can have a meaningful discussion of bigotry if you don't believe that it exists. You honestly think it's pigheaded, arrogant, and self-righteous to think of someone as bigoted?

Do you think that bigotry exists? Do you think that any human being is bigoted?

Phil, if you've concluded from what I wrote that I doubt whether bigotry exists, I just don't know what to say, except we're not likely to make any progress here. You keep circling around to this question of whether I think it's plausible that there are bigots, when I've never indicated that it's even a little doubtful that there are. You seem to have entirely misread what I was saying in that block quote. I honestly have no idea why you keep hounding me on this question, or what you're trying to prove by forcing me to acknowledge that some people are bigots.

As for Obama, his formal opposition to Prop 8 was a lawyerly bit of political positioning that enabled him to keep saying he opposed SSM, while not weakening his left flank. Meanwhile, Eich supported Prop 8, for reasons we don't really know. And that's the difference between being personally destroyed by the left, and being elected President by them? Sure. Sounds legit.

Look, if you really don't think Eich should've been hounded out of his job by the left, then stop trying to defend the motives and the supposed reasonableness of the people who did.

Sage, my grandfather was an actual human being, and it's safe to say, I knew him reasonably well while you have never met him. Unless you are willing to say that every single Muslim, as well as every other human being on the planet is equally fit for a leadership role in a large company or political office, then maybe you shouldn't be second-guessing my assessment or implying that you're less of an ideologue.

Obviously my point was that all else being equal, yes, a Muslim ought to be able to be a CEO. You brought your grandfather up as an example of a person unfit for leadership because of his non-liberal views. To my eye you were making it very plain that you thought he was unfit purely because his didn't agree with you on racial politics. If that's not true, then he was a bad example to use, and it's dirty pool to turn around and get your back up about your privileged position to make an assessment of his character. If it is true, then my point holds--I'm a heck of a lot more tolerant than you're willing to be when it comes to people who don't see the world as I do.

One other thing, on a side note:

I've been called a liberal here on this board...

What is it with liberals chafing at the label?

You honestly think it's pigheaded, arrogant, and self-righteous to think of someone as bigoted?

No, not unless that "somebody" encompasses every human being ever born into this world except for your self and the small cohort of Western leftists in 2014 who happen to agree with your extremely peculiar ideas about marriage.

I just don't know how to make myself any plainer.

No, not unless that "somebody" encompasses every human being ever born into this world except for your self and the small cohort of Western leftists in 2014 who happen to agree with your extremely peculiar ideas about marriage.

Okay, so... If someone believes that black people are inferior to white people, is that person bigoted?

Stop trying to lay s Socratic snare for me, Phil. It's established that the idea of contemporary Western leftists belonging to an historically enlightened super-elite contains no contradiction in itself. It's ridiculous in the extreme, considering there's no basis whatever for you to use the word "bigotry" in the current context, but not logically imposiible. Congratulations.

All of this talk about specific views and qualification for leadership strike me as the sort of bull#$%^ that is common among those who've never had to lead anything more complicated than their own lives. History is replete with examples of men with absolutely "horrible views" who were incredibly effective leaders. Mohammed and the early Caliphs were probably better organizers and leaders of men than most Silicon Valley executives. Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great and Qin Shi Huang were absolute exemplars of leadership compared to most of our politicians. If history teaches us anything, it's that while not all alpha male a#$holes make effective leaders, most effective leaders have at least a healthy dose of alpha male a#$hole in them.

Food for thought. If you were a 20 year old male drafted to fight a land war against China who would you rather have leading you. Patton or Sherman or a modern politically correct, diversity-loving, female-sensitive general?

Phil asks me a few questions:

In other words, the gist of what you're saying is that thought-policing is wrong when the thoughts are okay, but thought-policing is okay when the thoughts are genuinely bad.

If that's the principle you advocate--and it really seems to be--then you are creating tautologies. Liberal criticism is wrong because liberals are wrong. Conservative criticism is right because conservatives are right.

There's nothing wrong with having an opinion about the liberal view that SSM opposition is beyond the pale. But you and Jeffrey S. are going through some kind of charade where you pretend that there's something new to analyze in this example. The foundational premise (opposition to SSM is really awful) led to the action (I will take action to remove this man from his position at the company).

If you're not arguing that the action is wrong whether or not the foundational premise is correct, then the action is a red herring. All that liberals have to do to believe that the action is correct is believe the foundational premise. They do. You already know that they do. So why are you pretending to critique the action?

The answer ought to be obvious: Because there used to be liberals who, like all minimally reasonable people, had _gradations_ of "bad" and didn't keep lengthening their "beyond the pale" list every five minutes. And because liberals still claim to be all about "tolerance," but this action shows that they are so hyper-sensitive that they just can't _handle_ the idea of a CEO who supports traditional marriage. Look at Dunsany's comments on this very thread. To hear him talk, one would nearly think that all the employees of Firefox would get cooties from having Eich as a CEO.

*I* think Eich's "thoughts" in donating to Prop. 8 were *true*. But it ought to be possible to think they were *false* and even *badly false* while still not holding anything so manifestly stupid as that they "render him unfit" or being a CEO of Firefox. To hold *that* extreme meta-view is to have a really totalitarian spirit. And, yes, whether one has a really totalitarian spirit or not depends on part on *how far off* one's meta-views are from being right.

It isn't a trivial point, because it doesn't follow as the night the day from all of one's object-level views about political matters that this or that object-level view is *utterly horrible and vile* and thus that no CEO of a major company should ever be left in place if he holds it. In fact, we should keep our list of the latter pretty lean and light if we want to keep civility in society, keep talent moving about, keep focused on the job to be done, and so forth. It's one thing to disagree even strongly. I happen to believe in demonizing sometimes, but I think *even liberals* ought to be able to see that support for traditional marriage isn't in the same boat as, say, believing that it's okee dokee to have sex with little kids, or something like that, and that it shouldn't be on their "demonizing" list.

I know a man, one of my best friends, who is strongly anti-Catholic. The Anglican church I attend leans in a high-church direction, and he once asked me a few questions about what I think about Catholicism. He eventually, in the nicest way possible, said that he thinks Catholicism is "anathema." (That was the exact word.) Now, I think this counts as his thinking that Catholicism is "really awful," to use your words. He thinks it sends people to hell.

But to tell you the truth, I _cannot imagine_, after knowing him all these years, his trying to get Catholics black-listed from jobs or declaring them "unfit" to be the CEO of a large company. So, like any sane person, he has "really awful" and "really awful."

There's such a thing as a sense of perspective, and when it's lost, we get behavior that deserves to be called "jack-booted" and the creation of "thought-crime." Not for the trivial reason that some moral and political views are right and some are wrong, but for the more interesting reason (which makes totalitarianism so disturbing) that some people are so unable to countenance disagreement that they have to try to crush everybody who disagrees with them at the object level on a huge range of issues that goes far beyond anything minimally reasonable.

Notice, too, the reciprocity that arises here. When one knows that homosexual activists are all about trying to get social conservatives in trouble and make them lose their livelihoods (which becomes more obvious with each day that passes), this creates a *rational* ground for a conservative never to want to hire a homosexual and to have little to do with homosexuals as possible. How is one to know that this person, especially if he makes his homosexuality known, isn't looking out for ways to get his employer in some kind of trouble and ruin his business? The hatred toward traditionalists here, the persistent grievance-mongering, the spying, the malice, the black-listing, the pursuit, is huge. This creates a reciprocal desire, out of mere prudence, to avoid those engaging in it, who truly do deserve to be called "haters." And it creates distrust of those who bear other potentially relevant similarities to the haters and the hunters.

Thus is society fragmented even more than before.

Can you stop using the term thought police? In 1984 the thought police arrested and tortured people for thinking thoughts the party did not like, and what happened to Eich isn't even in the same universe.

>It was never offered as a philosophical argument. It is, however, perfectly relevant to the reasonableness of the left's behavior, which is the subject at hand. It's also relevant to the reasonableness of the assumption that the left is arguing in good faith when it says that personally destroying its political adversaries on this issue is a sincerely felt moral imperative for which conservatives ought to have sympathy and respect.

How reasonable it is to get Eich fired is the philosophical question that is in dispute.

This sort of liberal intolerance towards perceived "anti-progressive" ideas/speech should come as no real surprise to anyone right of center. It's all there in Marcuse, and as the ideas of New Left grew to be dominant in liberalism broadly understood, these repressive notions became part-and-parcel of the Left as a whole.

This is not to say that there are some on the Left who, while strongly disagreeing with conservatives on this particular issue, still believe in a robust enough understanding of free speech to defend conservatives' right to speak their minds. Unfortunately they are in the minority. The majority are more intolerant than they claim the Right to be, but they are either blind to it or just don't care -- Progress must march on!

In both England and Sweden people have been arrested and/or sentenced to jail time for thinking and daring to express thoughts the party does not like, on the very topic at issue here (homosexuality). Nor did I hear the left in the U.S. crying out against it. On the contrary, the left in the U.S. continually tries to push as hard as they can against the 1st amendment on this issue. Clearly there are plenty on the left worldwide who want people arrested for thinking the wrong thoughts on this issue, unless they stay very firmly indeed in the closet. Facing fines and criminal charges for "hate speech" against homosexuals is not just hypothetical. It has been real in multiple countries in the West for a long time. Must offenders be tortured as well before we get to use "thought police"?

And, yes, Eich's ouster is part of this very same totalitarian movement. It's just that in the U.S. we still have a 1st amendment. More, from the leftist perspective, is the pity.

I don't support hate crime legislation, but in most cases it doesn't come close to 1984 either. Using that sort of language with regard to Eich is completely absurd.

>And, yes, Eich's ouster is part of this very same totalitarian movemen

I declare that you are part of the "Christian movement" that lets children die from treatable illnesses due to religious dogma. Isn't this a fun game?

You advocate taking away the livelihood of those who hold the traditional view of marriage. That that is totalitarian in spirit would be evident to anyone, including someone who didn't hold the traditional view of marriage, not blinded by dogma.

Nice downplaying of the seriousness of arresting people for speech supporting traditional sexuality. You don't support arresting them, so you say, but your opposition is tepid, to say the least.

Dunsany,

You say, "Can you stop using the term thought police? In 1984 the thought police arrested and tortured people for thinking thoughts the party did not like, and what happened to Eich isn't even in the same universe."

First of all, the totalitarian impulse is alive and well in Communist China today (try protesting peacefully against the government there) and in most Islamic countries. Second of all, the whole point of satire is that it exposes the object of ridicule to the logical outcome of their worst impulses -- in the case of the Left and their newfound morality around fake homosexual "marriage", this entails something similar to Orwell's thought police. You are free, of course, to try your hand at satire with respect to religious conservatives and their fear of modern medicine -- the only problem is that there are no mainstream religious conservatives who have this fear so I'm not sure who you are aiming your satire at. Maybe certain Christian Scientists? I don't know enough about their beliefs or their numbers to worry much about them one way or another, but if you think this problem demands attention, then go for it!

I declare that you are part of the "Christian movement" that lets children die from treatable illnesses due to religious dogma. Isn't this a fun game?

That's an astonishingly lame-brained and inapt comparison, and you almost certainly know it.

>You advocate taking away the livelihood of those who hold the traditional view of marriage. That that is totalitarian in spirit would be evident to anyone, including someone who didn't hold the traditional view of marriage, not blinded by dogma.


Do you think Neo-Nazis should be able to head up major American corporations? Yes or no? As I said before, almost everyone recognizes that some beliefs are beyond the pale. There is noting totalitarian about that. Your actual view is that there is nothing wrong with homophobic bigotry. Trying to paint the tactics the left as using as illegitimate is easier than making a substantive case against gay right in the political realm because you know that liberals won't embrace your view of gay rights.

I like what Rod Dreher has been saying about this issue over at TAC. He calls it The Law of Merited Impossibility:

"The Law Of Merited Impossibility is an epistemological construct governing the paradoxical way overclass opinion makers frame the discourse about the clash between religious liberty and gay civil rights. It is best summed up by the phrase, “'It’s a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of gay rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.'”

The short version: It's not going happen, and when it does, you people will deserve it.

Remember all the assurances about how gays just wanted the same rights as straights, and that those who didn't agree with this would be left alone, etc. etc.

Well, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

Yeah, NM, I don't recall reading any fine print about people being driven from their jobs, denied promotions, or otherwise being read out of respectable society if it was ever found that they had histories of double-plus ungood voting records.

In fact, I remember a lot of the usual guffawing about right-wing paranoia.

Trying to paint the tactics the left as using as illegitimate is easier than making a substantive case against gay right in the political realm because you know that liberals won't embrace your view of gay rights.

And using loaded, question-begging language like "homophobic bigotry" to denounce the other side's substantive case is always easier than defending the left's scorched earth tactics, too.

Dunsany,

Like Lydia said earlier, we aren't going to play this game: "Do you think Neo-Nazis should be able to head up major American corporations? Yes or no?" That's not what this post and argument are about. If you don't understand this by now, reading through all these comments (100+) I suggest remedial education.

Also, no one here thinks "homophobic bigotry" is O.K. We aren't bigots, but we also don't accept your definition of bigotry. The one things you said that is true is that the left and right have a fundamental disagreement about the meaning of certain basic natural rights and what marriage means. Unfortunately, up till now in America we used to be able to disagree with liberals and go about our business without harassment -- things are changing and that's what this post is all about.

If you have an argument for us, please feel free to post another comment (at least a liberal like Phil generally tries to argue in good faith). If not, you can report us to Media Matters and be done with us.

Jeffrey, you can deny the relevance all you want, but that will not make your argument more convincing. If it is totalitarian to want a CEO to be ousted for private political behavior then you are a totalitarian for thinking that a Nazi CEO should be sacked. That logic is air tight as far as I'm concerned. I'm not saying you are equivalent to Nazis, only that the issue revolves around where the beliefs in question deserve to be ostracized. Arguing that these tactics are totalitarian is absurd.


>Also, no one here thinks "homophobic bigotry" is O.K. We aren't bigots, but we also don't accept your definition of bigotry.

That's the problem, and it's also why I can't present an "argument" that could convince you. We are operating in entirely different paradigms and our core beliefs are totally different. I am atheist and a secular humanist that attaches very little value to traditional moral ideas. You are a Christian that believes in the morality of the bible. There is no way for us to convince each other, and I don't buy the idea that we used to live in harmony or that our culture can remain neutral on these issues. That's revisionist history. Christians have forced their moral standards and norms on the rest of us for most of US history, which is why Christian holidays like Christmas are also federal holidays. That's why Christians got upset when people used Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas-Christians have privilege, and they do not even realize it. Gays used to be essentially forced into the closet due to intense public homophobia. Now the shoe is on the other foot and we are culturally dominant.


>And using loaded, question-begging language like "homophobic bigotry" to denounce the other side's substantive case is always easier than defending the left's scorched earth tactics, too.


Telling pro-choicers that they are baby killers is also emotionally charged. Do you think pro-lifers should stop doing it? Some issues are emotional and raw, and that can't be changed. Political debates do not occur in some dry academic space, they impact the lives of real people in tangible ways.

I'll let math guru Nate Silver provide the only relevant evidence to this case. For all the weeping about free speech, this was an employment decision and the culture of the private company determines that decision (Eich did technically resign but everyone knows he was under pressure to do so). In fact Lydia has gone on at some length about her beliefs of a private employer's prerogative in this regard and I would think she would consider it even more important when evaluating a high profile position like CEO.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-rare-are-anti-gay-marriage-donations-in-silicon-valley/

P.S. I kept on using Firefox even after I found out the horrific act Eich committed which ruined my faith in humanity.

Trying to paint the tactics the left as using as illegitimate is easier than making a substantive case against gay right in the political realm because you know that liberals won't embrace your view of gay rights.

Gee, how illegitimate can we get? How dare we talk about leftist jack-booted tactics and meta-beliefs about whether people should be fired? We're just supposed to talk about what Dunsany wants us to talk about. Or something. Dunsany, do you need it spelled out for you in words of one syllable? Yeah, it's easier. It should be easier, because sensible people are hesitant to designate large swathes of their fellow citizens as unfit for jobs and polite company. Sensible people understand the things I've said several times here in this very thread about the advantages to society of some measure of toleration and being willing to work even with people whose opinions one considers deeply misguided. Liberals ought to be capable of seeing that meta-point even if they disagree with us on the substantive issue. How many times does that need to be said?

We have made the substantive case as well, but we can also make the meta-case that liberals ought not to go this totalitarian route even given their own substantive (wrong) beliefs about the nature of human sexuality.

In fact Lydia has gone on at some length about her beliefs of a private employer's prerogative in this regard and I would think she would consider it even more important when evaluating a high profile position like CEO.

Boring, Step2. I already addressed that a couple of times in this very thread. Read through. I don't have time to read through and find the relevant comments. I believe there are at least two in which I say something relevant to your attempted ad hominem.

I wrote that for the benefit of Dunsany who may not be aware how frequently you advocate discriminating identity politics when it suits you.

Dunsany,

You might be Exhibit A of the change in the liberal mindset over the past 25 years or so -- and I think the key to understanding you is here:

"You are a Christian that believes in the morality of the bible. There is no way for us to convince each other, and I don't buy the idea that we used to live in harmony or that our culture can remain neutral on these issues. That's revisionist history. Christians have forced their moral standards and norms on the rest of us for most of US history, which is why Christian holidays like Christmas are also federal holidays."

First of all, my school forgot the history lesson on all the battles between the atheists/secular humanists in the U.S. and the Christians -- now that I think about it wasn't there one between the War of 1812 and the Civil War? Yes, I suppose all those conflicts between labor and capital, abolitionists and slave-owners, Catholics/immigrants and Protestants -- they all took a backseat to the great war of 1827 between the free-thinkers of Ohio and the Christian mob. Oh wait...I'm just making this stuff up...kind of like you?

Second of all, Christians believe the Truth of the Gospel is accessible to all -- you may remain unconvinced after Lydia demolishes a typical atheist rant but others will be persuaded and eventually the church will prevail.

Third of all, someone who gets an abortion kills a baby -- this is just a fact of life. I wouldn't call a "pro-choicer" a baby-killer myself, but I would try and convince them that by making abortion legal they are indirectly contributing to the killing of babies.

Finally, didn't I ask you to try and comment with an argument next time? Keep trying.

I never said atheists and Christians fought a war, I said that Christians had cultural privilege and "forced" their values on society using cultural pressure. In the past some sects of Christians fought it ought with other sects, but that does not prove that my point is incorrect. As a matter of fact, it is almost completely irrelevant.

>Second of all, Christians believe the Truth of the Gospel is accessible to all -- you may remain unconvinced after Lydia demolishes a typical atheist rant but others will be persuaded and eventually the church will prevail.

It's fine if you believe this, but it's completely delusional. The warm fuzzy feeling in your chest is not accessible to me and never will be, and it is that feeling which got you to remain a Christian. It has nothing to do with evidence or rationality. I'd also like to know what Lydia, a self-described evidentalist, thinks about your claim that the truth of the gospel is open to all.


>Third of all, someone who gets an abortion kills a baby -- this is just a fact of life. I wouldn't call a "pro-choicer" a baby-killer myself, but I would try and convince them that by making abortion legal they are indirectly contributing to the killing of babies.

This is also completely non-responsive to my point, which I am starting to think is your MO.

>? Yeah, it's easier. It should be easier, because sensible people are hesitant to designate large swathes of their fellow citizens as unfit for jobs and polite company


Suppose racial segregationists became a bare majority again, around 51% of the population. Would it still be okay for us to think they should not be allowed to head important organizations? My early point is that your arguments only makes sense rhetorically. The philosophical claim that we shouldn't ostracize beliefs that are popular is easily proven wrong by examples like this. It's just as silly as the idea that no belief should be ostracized at all.

Suppose Dunsany answered a detail of conversational query presented. Suppose Dunsany declined to threadjack. Suppose a question asked were deigned to be answered by Dunsany.

Now suppose Dunsany's comments to the contrary were summarily deleted.

I wrote that for the benefit of Dunsany who may not be aware how frequently you advocate discriminating identity politics when it suits you.

Since I talked about my views on that subject explicitly on this very thread, Step2, even at some length, that's really low. Not one of your better moments.

If it is totalitarian to want a CEO to be ousted for private political behavior then you are a totalitarian for thinking that a Nazi CEO should be sacked. That logic is air tight as far as I'm concerned.

This is the kind of silliness that is just too darned easy to knock down. Compare:

"If it is totalitarian to want a man to be arrested for criticizing the President's policies, then you are a totalitarian for thinking that a man should be arrested for propagating child pornography."

I mean, sheesh, this is Civil Liberties 101 stuff. Free Speech for Dummies. Dunsany's allegedly "airtight logic" is a simple false dilemma. It rests on the assumption that what counts as totalitarian is *either* content-neutral *or* must very closely track one's agreement or disagreement with the behavior or speech suppressed or punished. But on the contrary: I can easily utterly disagree, even strongly disagree, with the criticism of some President's policies (say, if I think he's an excellent President) while still thinking it totalitarian to arrest a man for publishing that criticism _and_ simultaneously think it is _not_ totalitarian to arrest a man for passing out child pornography. See how that works? The judgement that some punishment is totalitarian there does not merely closely track my own substantive beliefs (since I disagree with the criticism of the President but want it protected), but it isn't free speech absolutism either. The commitment to freedom need not be either content-neutral or applied only to one's own substantive positions .

I never said atheists and Christians fought a war, I said that Christians had cultural privilege and "forced" their values on society using cultural pressure.

By cultural privilege you mean the average American considered himself a Christian and Christianity was in some sense claimed by the overwhelming majority of the electorate. Such an overwhelming majority as has probably never been seen in the lifetime of most, if not all, of the people participating in this thread since that majority started to wane after WWII fairly rapidly. But such is "democracy."

Lydia, I’ll take one of your comments “explicitly on this very thread” and untangle it by adding the principle you left out. Say that your strongly anti-Catholic friend works in a field and location that is friendly to Catholics, even among the majority of non-Catholics who live and work there. Let’s also say that 85% of his coworkers and business associates have policy preferences that match those of Catholics which he disagrees with, for example he supports widespread access to birth control. If the board decides to appoint him to an executive position he is able to affect policy related to birth control by making final decisions about group insurance plans and so forth. Would you still think his policy views about contraception are inconsequential to his relationship with other companies in the field and his employees?

Step2,

*Sigh*

Has everyone on the Left lost the ability to make distinctions these days?

You say, "If the board decides to appoint him to an executive position he is able to affect policy related to birth control by making final decisions about group insurance plans and so forth. Would you still think his policy views about contraception are inconsequential to his relationship with other companies in the field and his employees?"

Right, but by all accounts Eich's views didn't impact his employees personal lives at their job -- Mozilla was not somehow a hostile place to be working for gays. In Lydia's example if the anti-Catholic man said he would respect the views concerning healthcare of his employees but outside of work lobbied the local legislature for "widespread access to birth control" for everyone (e.g. free condoms in school), then I'd say the situation would be comparable and I'd say he would be fine as CEO (assuming he was as qualified as someone like Eich was in his field).

I said nothing whatsoever about whether a person's views on a huge variety of topics that intersect with, contradict, coincide with, or whatever, Catholic teaching are "inconsequential" to the decisions he would make in a leadership role in a business. That's obviously silly. After all, a Catholic might be very friendly to immigration, and _that_ might affect business decisions. Or a Catholic might believe in the doctrine of the living wage, and _that_ might affect his business decisions. There are a gazillion ways in which one's moral views might be indirectly influenced by one's religious views and in which one's moral views might affect one's business decisions. It would be foolish to deny it. Obviously, I'd think some such influences good and some bad, depending on the specifics. What I said was that my friend is strongly anti-Catholic, thinks that Catholicism is really awful for doctrinal, religious reasons, but doesn't therefore think that Catholics should be blacklisted and hounded out of jobs just for being Catholic. In other words, he understands tolerance, unlike the leftists. I was pointing out that thinking something is "really awful" doesn't automatically mean thinking that everybody who belongs to that group should be hounded out of their high-level jobs. It still depends on what the "really awful" belief is and what category it falls into, etc., etc. That was the point I was making, not some stupid statement that a person's moral views (which might be influenced by his religious views) are always irrelevant to what he will do in the business world! What a bizarre way to twist what I said into something I never even came close to saying.

By the way, as it happens, my anti-Catholic friend is also anti-birth control.

Reality. It just doesn't sit down, shut up, and fit neatly into stereotypes. Inconvenient, that.

Yes, I know, Step2 was making a hypothetical, but the irony was too rich not to share.

It's ridiculous in the extreme, considering there's no basis whatever for you to use the word "bigotry" in the current context, but not logically imposiible. Congratulations.

Sage, I used the word "bigotry" in my comment because I was responding to you, and you used the word "bigots" first.

You wrote:

It drives a person to take a position which says all his forebears, including almost certainly his own parents, were utterly execrable bigots (though he'll only suggest this in comboxes, and not over Thanksgiving dinner, to be sure).

I am not trying to convince you that opposition to SSM is bigotry. Rather, I was responding to your statement that it somehow unusual or out-of-the-ordinary to regard one's forebears, or even one's own parents, as bigots.

My point was that even if we come up with a definition of bigotry that we both agree is reasonable, there are still going to be people who regard their forebears, including their own parents, as bigots, because those bigots will exist, and they will have the capacity to have children.

In other words, I wasn't arguing about same-sex marriage. I was just pointing out that lots of people do, in fact, regard their parents as bigots, because those parents probably are bigots. And if you agree that bigotry exists, then you can see that that's the case.

I understand that you think that regarding one's parents as bigots because because they oppose SSM is terrible/stupid/bad/etc. But that's not the argument with which I'm engaging.

And using loaded, question-begging language like "homophobic bigotry" to denounce the other side's substantive case

I just want to point out that, although I may disagree with you about many things, it makes me happy to see someone who understands the correct meaning of beggng the question. I have seen variations of that phrase misused a billion times in the past year. Figuratively--a billion times.

Lydia,

*I* think Eich's "thoughts" in donating to Prop. 8 were *true*. But it ought to be possible to think they were *false* and even *badly false* while still not holding anything so manifestly stupid as that they "render him unfit" or being a CEO of Firefox.

I'm not trying to persuade you that Eich's thoughts were false, but maybe there's some value to explaining why I think it's so easy for someone like me to consider them not just false but "beyond the pale."

I consider myself a moderate (hey Sage) because I think that there are liberal and leftist beliefs that are far, far more extreme than the views I hold. But I realize I'm more liberal and leftist than most of the people who write here, so if you want to think of me as a liberal, that's fine. I believe that a committed relationship between two lesbians or between two gay men is the analog to a committed relationship between a heterosexual man and woman.

I realize that you don't share this belief. I'm not trying to persuade you otherwise. I'm just pointing out what I believe, and insomuch as it is my belief, you should probably accept that what I say about my own belief is true.

I also believe that when a man and a man who are in a committed relationship choose to make a public and official legally binding civil commitment to each other by marrying, that it is exactly equal to a civil marriage between a man and a woman.

Again: not something we need to argue about unless you want to stop by my house for coffee and whiskey sometime.

I believe that there is a very real, and very important difference between holding, or even expressing, a belief about someone else's marriage and taking action against that marriage.

I believe you are very intelligent and capable of abstract thought, so that--even though you totally think that gay marriage is totally not legitimate--you can see that there is a difference between holding and expressing a belief about someone else's marriage and taking action against that marriage.

Consider the following two people:
1) Hansel, who says out loud to anyone who will listen, "I don't think that Lydia and her husband should be married. They are totally wrong for each other. That marriage is a sham."
2) Gretel, who spends $1000 to an organization that actively works to dissolve your marriage to your husband.

In that specific example, which has nothing to do with same-sex marriage, can you at least acknowledge that the actions of Hansel and the actions of Gretel are different? Or would you really maintain that they have each done exactly the same thing?

And, to reiterate for a millionth time--figuratively, a millionth--I am not trying to argue in this comment that SSM is legit. I am also not trying to argue that what Gretel did is beyond the pale. I am just arguing that what she did is not exactly equal to what Hansel did.

All of this tells me that I'm actually more libertarian, it seems, than many of the WWWtW guys.

Given that reading this site in some ways influenced me towards this point of view, I find that fascinating, though I must give most of the credit to Dr. Feser (who was, after all, a once upon a time contributor here).

...Not that I'm a libertarian, of course. I seem, though, to be one of few people here willing to bite the bullet and say that firing somebody for their beliefs about gay marriage, either way, should be allowed.

Not supported. Not encouraged. Not even tolerated, really (I have no problem, for example, with boycotts or even, for certain causes, campaigns for or against). I just support the legality of that action.

The key is consistency. If you can fire me for voting for prop 8, I can fire you for voting for Obama, a pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, and pro-forced contraception coverage President. That is a form of support for those views, and if I don't want somebody with those views working for me I shouldn't have to have people with those views working for me. Period.

Of course, if I understand the situation correctly, Eich was not fired but railroaded out of town. Nothing illegal, but certainly odious in the extreme.

Eich didn't do too great himself. I side, in a loose sense, with Vox when I say that he probably should have fired at least his most vocal dissenters and then made a statement affirming that he had no moral qualms about what he did and that it affected the effective running of his company in no way.

Conservatives would have rallied around him and he would have become something like a folk hero, a la the Duck Dynasty Patriarch. But like all who give in and appease the left he will merely be held in contempt, or pity, by everybody, liberal or conservative. All respect for him is gone.

I am not trying to convince you that opposition to SSM is bigotry.
In other words, I wasn't arguing about same-sex marriage.
I'm not trying to persuade you that Eich's thoughts were false, but maybe there's some value to explaining why I think it's so easy for someone like me to consider them not just false but "beyond the pale."
Consider the following two people: 1) Hansel, [. . .] 2) Gretel, [. . .]

In that specific example, [. . .] can you at least acknowledge that the actions of Hansel and the actions of Gretel are different? Or would you really maintain that they have each done exactly the same thing?

You know, Phil, it turns out to be quite easy to start one's own blog. Barriers to entry in this business are astonishingly low. Why, you can even proclaim your views in aggregated tweets:

http://t.co/wr2r6BN25E

But this is our blog and our comment threads; we are not obliged to follow every commenter down each particular rabbit-hole.

As for this ominous talk of "taking action against that marriage," it's a decidedly egregious exaggeration. Prop 8 would not have made any marriage illegal, as if the cops would march into chapels and shut down ceremonies. No recent statute or state constitutional amendment has actually proscribed gay marriage.

In any state in the union, in other words, any gay couple who finds a willing minister, magistrate, Elvis impersonator, etc., may marry. The ceremonies will not be impeded, lo, even unto Utah or deepest Mississippi. Firms and corporations that already endorse gay unions are not prevented from continuing in that policy by ballot measures rejecting gay marriage.

It is an inconvenient fact for even moderate liberals like Phil that there has already been far more coercion of conscience and "taking action against" opponents of gay marriage than there ever was against married gay people. The way these excitable folks talk, you'd think Prop 8 would have meant expulsion of gay couples from their homes, suppressive revisions of their property deeds and living wills.

But these laws do not of that. Not even close. What they do is merely announce the state's disinclination to endorse this particular innovation in marriage. That's what Eich donated to.

Lydia, step2 is just being honest. The idea that we should all pretend to think that Christians are being consistent when it comes to this stuff is absurd.


>I mean, sheesh, this is Civil Liberties 101 stuff. Free Speech for Dummies. Dunsany's allegedly "airtight logic" is a simple false dilemma. It rests on the assumption that what counts as totalitarian is *either* content-neutral *or* must very closely track one's agreement or disagreement with the behavior or speech suppressed or punished. But on the contrary: I can easily utterly disagree, even strongly disagree, with the criticism of some President's policies (say, if I think he's an excellent President) while still thinking it totalitarian to arrest a man for publishing that criticism _and_ simultaneously think it is _not_ totalitarian to arrest a man for passing out child pornography. See how that works? The judgement that some punishment is totalitarian there does not merely closely track my own substantive beliefs (since I disagree with the criticism of the President but want it protected), but it isn't free speech absolutism either. The commitment to freedom need not be either content-neutral or applied only to one's own substantive positions .

1. Define totalitarian for me please. I'd like to get a clear definition so that I can know why Eich's treatment qualifies and hounding a Neo-Nazi would not. I'm all ears.

2. The view that you are describing makes sense in the context of child pornography because we are dealing with an actual physical harm to another party-in this case children. It is not remotely analogous to the situation being described and honestly I do not understand your point. It seems like nonsense.

>Suppose Dunsany answered a detail of conversational query presented. Suppose Dunsany declined to threadjack. Suppose a question asked were deigned to be answered by Dunsany.


Suppose Paul J Cella or Jefferey S had the ability to formulate real argument. I'll give Lydia credit for making arguments and responding to the points people make. You and Jeffrey do neither.

Not that I'm a libertarian, of course. I seem, though, to be one of few people here willing to bite the bullet and say that firing somebody for their beliefs about gay marriage, either way, should be allowed.

MarcAnthony, that surprises me that you would say that. First of all, that question has scarcely been addressed in either the post or the discussion at all. Second of all, to the extent that it has been addressed, it was addressed by me at some length above in response to Matt and, IIRC, Phil. The response, which I'll now repeat, goes approximately like this:

--To my libertarian-sympathetic soul, it would be better if no laws, esp. no federal but also no state laws, existed requiring non-discrimination in hiring, including in religion If this were the case, there would be no _legal_ sanction that could be brought against Mozilla even if they outright fired Eich for his beliefs and even if these were religious beliefs.

--Even then, a boycott is a perfectly good libertarian tool of expressing disapproval, and since what Mozilla did was odious and jack-booted, if a boycott would work against them to punish them and make them rethink such treatment of conservative employees, so much the better.

--In the world we actually live in, it would be _worse_ for Christians to be forced to follow non-discrimination laws but for those laws to be applied in a blatantly inconsistent way so that, though it is facially illegal, the law enforcement mechanisms wink at blatant discrimination _against_ Christians while harshly enforcing the laws that prohibit Christian discrimination on religious grounds. That creates second-class citizen status for Christians and other traditional religious people and is the worst situation in the non-discrimination realm. Thus, even though I would prefer to see the playing field leveled by the repeal of employment non-discrimination laws, I support Christians who sue for clearly illegal discrimination against them for their beliefs. Hence, if Eich was Christian, this may have been illegal discrimination (as it was in the similar case of a Fox sportscaster, I believe, who actually was fired), and I support lawsuits in such cases to try to keep the system even somewhat more even-handed than it would otherwise be.

All of this, however, is consistent with saying that in some ideal marketplace, Mozilla would be legally allowed to fire Eich.

As far as I know, no one else on this thread has even addressed this issue, so I don't know why you think you are in a minority in your position.

The view that you are describing makes sense in the context of child pornography because we are dealing with an actual physical harm to another party-in this case children.

Wrong. It's also not totalitarian to punish its sale when it is "virtual."

My point is that a commitment to free speech need not, even in the context of actual laws and arrests, be either (on the one hand) content-neutral nor, on the other hand, trivially connected with one's views about object-level political and moral matters. One can argue for protecting and tolerating speech and behavior that endorses views one thinks "really awful" without adopting free speech absolutism of any kind. I've made this point many, many times already in this thread.

What does totalitarian mean? I'd like you to define that term for the purposes of this discussion.

>One can argue for protecting and tolerating speech and behavior that endorses views one thinks "really awful" without adopting free speech absolutism of any kind.

Right, but that was my point before. We disagree about whether the substantive nature of Eich's speech should be ostracized. None of the methods the Left is adopting qualify as totalitarian under the usual definition, they are the same methods we all use to socially punish ideas like Nazism. It all depends on how bad you think Eich's views are. That said, I really do not accept that child pornography is "just speech" considering that it involves the sexual abuse of children. I also think it's a mistake to classify what Eich did as speech considering that he was using money to support an anti-gay cause. Political speech that seeks to influence the way the power of the state is used isn't the same as the speech going on in a pub or something.

Phil, your example regarding Gretel sounds way too personally directed for it to be helpful here, like she's out to get me, personally. Which is almost impossible to picture in the political realm. So let's try to improve your example.

Suppose that some strict Catholic political group gets started. I'm sorry if this sounds like I'm in any way picking on Catholicism, but it will become evident in a moment why it is necessary for this example. I know of a Catholic blogger (this is a real blogger) who believes that no marriage is sacramentally valid if either party believes in _any_ exceptions to the injunction against divorce, which is to say if either party believes that divorce is ever metaphysically possible and justified, even if only for an extremely narrow set of exceptions as based on one fairly mainstream interpretation of Jesus' words on the subject in Matthew. Now, I'm not saying that that blogger wants to make his views part of civil law, but for the sake of the example, suppose that a Catholic political group gets started and states as one of its aims in its founding documents, publicly available, that it wants to bring civil marriage law in line with sacramental marriage, so that the government will not recognize anyone as married for legal purposes if a "showing" has been made that either of the people involved believed, at the time of the marriage, that there were _any_ legitimate grounds for divorce at all. And then some stuff about what the group envisages as the due process necessary for such a showing, who has standing to bring the accusation of nullity, and so forth.

I think that's a crazy position, but if I learned that some CEO had made a donation of $1000 to such a group, I would _not_ consider that to be grounds for saying that he is unfit to be a CEO. I would consider the group's position annoying and bizarre, but I would consider it part of the range of areas in which it is better for society for us to learn to tolerate and work with others despite our disagreements (see my _several_ comments to this effect above) rather than to make the fissures in society worse by trying to hound people out of jobs. Besides, if he's good at his job, it's good for whatever useful thing the company does for him to be in that position.

In general, I disagree with the sharpness and the emphasis you want to place on "thought" and "advocating those thoughts through political action and donations." You act like this is a big and heavy distinction; I don't think it matters that much. It is really, your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, an attempt to demonize thought and ideas and to frighten people into either changing their thoughts (for the convenience and safety of their lives in society) or keeping very quiet indeed. That message is being sent by punishing people for donating to a political cause that advocates those thoughts. Eich's ouster really does make other people in Mozilla, especially in management positions, justly fear that they will be fired if they simply let it be known that they _think_ as he did when he donated. And frankly, I think the people calling for his ouster wanted it that way. That is bound up with the entire concept of "beyond the pale," and you even see Dunsany on this thread using the term "ostracism." I know people personally who work for other tech companies or large companies who have these same fears, and I have to advise my own children as they grow up concerning their taking care in expressing their thoughts in these areas (e.g., having a public blog or a Facebook account that someone might read and "tell on them") as it relates to their own future employability.

Note that I am quite consistent on putting together thought and political donation. I'm consistent in both directions, both when I say someone should not be fired and when I say someone can justifiably be fired or not hired. For example, in the Netherlands there is (or was, maybe still is) a pro-pedophilia political party. I would have no trouble whatsoever with firing a CEO for donating to that party.

Okay, Dunsany, you're reading carelessly now. I responded _already_ to your statement about child pornography. And by the way, the SCOTUS (more is the pity) agrees with me that virtual child pornography is "speech," because they legalized it on those grounds.

And I've said again and again in this thread that "totalitarian" is _not_ a content-neutral term, does _not_ apply only to "methods," as you keep asserting it does, but is rightly used, inter alia, when the methods are used in a case where the meta-view about where they should be used is way, way off.

*Reads through thread*

The Masked Chicken at one point did indeed say he thought that Eich should sue until it hurts.

Maybe, though I think there are pretty much no grounds for it, to be honest. "People being mean" is more Eich's fault than anybody else's.

Oh, I know you'd support a boycott, that was just me making it clear.

In any event, perhaps I'm misunderstanding the discussion then, because it seems to me like it's predicated on the idea that it's okay to fire people for holding certain viewpoints but not okay to fire others for other viewpoints, since some things are simply objectively correct, whatever others think about them. Am I misunderstanding the scope here? That's fine if I am, I just want to make it clear.

I just want to point out that, although I may disagree with you about many things, it makes me happy to see someone who understands the correct meaning of beggng the question. I have seen variations of that phrase misused a billion times in the past year. Figuratively--a billion times.

Well, thanks. It's also nice that you don't say "literally" when you mean figuratively.

Recently I saw someone who had typed the phrase "blessing in the sky." The tears still burn.

Let me clarify - By "More Eich's fault than anybody else's", I meant his resignation. And even then I'm not even CLOSE to absolving anybody from any blame at all - quite the contrary, really.

In Lydia's example if the anti-Catholic man said he would respect the views concerning healthcare of his employees but outside of work lobbied the local legislature for "widespread access to birth control" for everyone (e.g. free condoms in school), then I'd say the situation would be comparable and I'd say he would be fine as CEO (assuming he was as qualified as someone like Eich was in his field).

Jeffrey, obviously the principle involved isn’t a litmus test issue for you, but being an extremely dominant belief in my example implies it will be for many in the community. I’d like to get Tony’s reaction to your counterexample before I continue because I think it would be an inviolable standard for him, especially for something that could be considered scandalous in the larger community and not only among Catholics.

Obviously, I'd think some such influences good and some bad, depending on the specifics.

Okay, looking at the specifics is what I was doing by narrowing it down to one specific belief about policy instead of a vague grouping of beliefs. Eich’s promotion led to a revolt among senior staff at the company and a major negative publicity campaign launched by a different tech company who wasn’t a competitor. His donation had been public knowledge for two years but there were only a few complaints on Twitter about it when it first came out, so what changed? His previous job had no influence over policy related to this issue but his new job easily could and on top of that, as CEO one of his many roles is to be a public spokesperson and promoter of that company’s values, which he didn’t share with the majority of people within the company nor with the broader industry. So his promotion was an instant liability for them and they decided it wasn’t worth it.

What I said was that my friend is strongly anti-Catholic, thinks that Catholicism is really awful for doctrinal, religious reasons, but doesn't therefore think that Catholics should be blacklisted and hounded out of jobs just for being Catholic.

At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if your friend is in total agreement with Catholics on all moral and practical policy issues and his mild dislike stems from some obscure trivia 500+ years old. :)

In other words, he understands tolerance, unlike the leftists.

No, he only understands nurturing a grudge.

Yes, I know, Step2 was making a hypothetical, but the irony was too rich not to share.

The real irony is that I think Eich's ousting was a mistake in the broad political sense, but things escalated so quickly and the people he worked with had so little trust in him that his departure was inevitable. In my view this is just a tempest in a teapot and the only way to make sense of it is to look inside the teapot.

For leftists, Step2, tolerance is nurturing a grudge.

>Okay, Dunsany, you're reading carelessly now. I responded _already_ to your statement about child pornography. And by the way, the SCOTUS (more is the pity) agrees with me that virtual child pornography is "speech," because they legalized it on those grounds.

I don't care about SCOTUS when it comes to actual moral questions. It's made up of ideologues and buffoons.

>And I've said again and again in this thread that "totalitarian" is _not_ a content-neutral term, does _not_ apply only to "methods," as you keep asserting it does, but is rightly used, inter alia, when the methods are used in a case where the meta-view about where they should be used is way, way off.

Perhaps I could evaluate this claim if you would define totalitarian.

Paul,
That was a funny rejoinder. I used to have an amazing quote about grudges but I can't find it at the moment. Instead I found this gem through Google:
A world class grudge is carefully nurtured and watered and fed, and, like exhibition livestock, shown off at every available opportunity. Around here a grudge can be passed down from generation to generation as a family heirloom, long after the initial reasons for conflict, as well as the combatants, have gently decomposed back into the soil. There is some world class grudge holding in these parts. I’ve got two mortal enemies myself. - Helen Chappell

In any event, perhaps I'm misunderstanding the discussion then, because it seems to me like it's predicated on the idea that it's okay to fire people for holding certain viewpoints but not okay to fire others for other viewpoints, since some things are simply objectively correct, whatever others think about them. Am I misunderstanding the scope here? That's fine if I am, I just want to make it clear.

Well, first of all, MarcAnthony, it's very important to distinguish "should be allowed to" from "is okay." There are tons of things that one should be allowed to do, in the sense of not being legally punished, but that are not okay.

Second, no, pretty much all of my comments are saying that objective correctness is *not at all* the only or even the main test of whether it's okay to fire somebody for their opinions. There is the further question of what kind of opinions those are and whether they are such as to deserve firing, blacklisting, ostracism. Lots of *incorrect* views don't fall into that category. Hence all my talk about keeping the "beyond the pale" list short, being willing to work with people you disagree with, and so forth. That's been sort of the burden of my song throughout this thread. It's not okay to fire people, at least not from companies and organizations that are not _expressly_ religious or existing chiefly for some _express_ ideological purpose, for some viewpoints because, right or wrong, they are the kind of viewpoints on the kind of subjects on which society will be better off and we will all be better off if we tolerate differences of opinion. I've given quite a few examples. I just recently gave Phil an elaborate example involving somebody who contributes to a political organization seeking legally to delegitimize marriages involving partners who think divorce is ever allowed. Such an effort is objectively *incorrect*, but I think it would be high-handed and intolerant (meaning that as a criticism) to fire somebody for belonging and contributing to a group seeking to do it. Many, many other examples could be given of religious and political opinions that are objectively incorrect but that we need to be able to handle differences of opinion on. We will do a lot of harm and end up behaving in a totalitarian fashion if we put large numbers of these views on a list that "renders one unfit to be a CEO" or what-not.

Step2, if you think that anti-Catholics who believe Catholic doctrine is taking people to hell are merely nurturing a mild dislike of Catholicism based on obscure trivia 500+ years old, you at a minimum don't understand how they think. Sending people to hell by teaching false doctrine is a big deal among Christians on both sides of the aisle.

Lydia,

This is wise:

"Many, many other examples could be given of religious and political opinions that are objectively incorrect but that we need to be able to handle differences of opinion on. We will do a lot of harm and end up behaving in a totalitarian fashion if we put large numbers of these views on a list that "renders one unfit to be a CEO" or what-not."

That's what I was trying to do with my example as well of the Catholic Protestant birth-control loving CEO who lives in a Catholic community. I also think this is why we have a First Amendment and why we conceive of "behaving in a totalitarian fashion" even when we aren't living in a totalitarian state, acknowledge the legality of Eich's firing, etc.

The issue, as you've said one-hundred different ways now, is that society is better off when "we tolerate differences of opinion" and the list of opinions which must not be tolerated is small indeed. In this whole discussion, it is the liberals who have become the philistines:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/375217/future-philistine-kevin-d-williamson

But this is our blog and our comment threads; we are not obliged to follow every commenter down each particular rabbit-hole.

It's not really clear what this comment of yours is directed at. Have I implied that if someone doesn't respond to one of my comments they must be wrong? I write about things that I think are interesting to write about, and I respond to other people's writing when I think there's something interesting to respond to. I assume that others do the same.

I'm sorry if I've been rude to you or your co-bloggers.

As for this ominous talk of "taking action against that marriage," it's a decidedly egregious exaggeration. Prop 8 would not have made any marriage illegal, as if the cops would march into chapels and shut down ceremonies. No recent statute or state constitutional amendment has actually proscribed gay marriage.

With all due respect, Paul, what you have written here is meaningless claptrap. I am aware that Proposition 8 dissolved only the legal incidents of civil marriage, and did not in fact expel gay people from their homes. You're aware of that, too, as is every other person writing here. You know darn well what it means to dissolve a civil marriage, and so do I. Your feigning that this is thus trivial is dishonest.

If dissolving the legal incidents of civil marriage is unimportant, then social conservatives could divorce their spouses to prove it.

You are conflating a civil marriage with a wedding ceremony. You know better.

Phil, your example regarding Gretel sounds way too personally directed for it to be helpful here, like she's out to get me, personally. Which is almost impossible to picture in the political realm. So let's try to improve your example.

Lydia,
The point of my example was not to say, "Hey, here is a situation that is absolutely identical to SSM." The point of my example was to say, "Hey, here is a distinction between a thought that a person holds, and an action that they take against a marriage."

You are under no obligation to answer (hey Paul!), but your unwillingness to respond to the point unless you get to redefine the terms is pretty telling, isn't it? Gay couples didn't get to redefine the terms of Prop 8 during the campaign. They had to deal with it as it was presented.

I think that's a crazy position, but if I learned that some CEO had made a donation of $1000 to such a group, I would _not_ consider that to be grounds for saying that he is unfit to be a CEO.

It's a tough call. I don't believe in firing a person for their politics, but if that person were the CEO of my company, I might question her judgment.

But your analogy fails because it's not personal enough. Your hypothetical person espouses a position that, in theory, would affect all couples equally. All couples could be subject to the vagaries of such a law. Proposition 8 impacted only same-sex couples, and not mixed-sex couples.

So your critique--"it's way too personally directed"--is important. When the political is personal, one receives the messages differently than when it's impersonal.

By this metric, for sure, a woman who donates $1000 to dissolve Lydia's civil marriage is far more personal than Prop 8. But Prop 8 is far more personal than your example.

the law enforcement mechanisms wink at blatant discrimination _against_ Christians while harshly enforcing the laws that prohibit Christian discrimination on religious grounds. That creates second-class citizen status for Christians and other traditional religious people and is the worst situation in the non-discrimination realm. Thus, even though I would prefer to see the playing field leveled by the repeal of employment non-discrimination laws, I support Christians who sue for clearly illegal discrimination against them for their beliefs. Hence, if Eich was Christian, this may have been illegal discrimination

There is no question at all that if the tables were wholly reversed - say, if Eich were gay and belonged to a religion that required its members to be gay (sort of like modern Albingensians?), and if Prop 8 were to require the state to treat this religion as a religion - the pressure brought to bear on Eich because of his support for prop 8 would most certainly have constituted religious discrimination according to all recent rulings.

Of course it should be legal to fire people - even for things that aren't really firing offenses. Doing so should also subject the company to the possibility of social consequences for doing something unreasonable. This country is a hodge-podge of unreason on civil behavior, because the courts have been badly run for 65 years, and the legislatures have been unwilling to correct them.

By "More Eich's fault than anybody else's", I meant his resignation. And even then I'm not even CLOSE to absolving anybody from any blame at all - quite the contrary, really.

Yeah, I think Eich could have been far more constructive about the issue than what he did. He really could have.

I believe that a committed relationship between two lesbians or between two gay men is the analog to a committed relationship between a heterosexual man and woman.

Phil, do you believe the "analogy" holds in every respect, or just in some respects.

If you are reasonable, you will say "some but not all". Of course, different groups may think differently about how _important_ are the ways in which they are NOT analogous. So, here's my follow-up question: which group gets to decide whether the ways they are not analogous are "important" or "not important" for society? And why do they get their views to be reflected in laws, and not the other?

Your hypothetical person espouses a position that, in theory, would affect all couples equally. All couples could be subject to the vagaries of such a law.

Not at all. Actually, Phil, I was trying pretty hard to make it a fairly offensive example, at least to a Protestant. Maybe you're just not tuned into these Protestant-Catholic nuances of dogma on marriage. Catholic couples who had gone through a highly traditional pre-marital preparation would be far less likely to be affected by such an ordinance, because at least in theory they would have assented to a "no exceptions" doctrine. The blogger I mentioned thinks that presumptively most Protestant marriages are invalid because the relevant passage in Matthew tends to be interpreted by Protestants as allowing at least a narrow set of circumstances (especially adultery) in which divorce is allowed, but the Catholic interpretation of that passage is different. The actual enforcement of such a law would definitely not affect all couples equally, and my intention was to envisage a proposal that some marriages be put under more doubt and scrutiny than others because of their background circumstances. It would be highly doctrinally sensitive to the religious and other contractual circumstances in which they undertook their marriages.

Anyway, your idea that Prop. 8 is better analogized to a kind of marital bill of attainder against named couples is just silly.

The point of my example was to say, "Hey, here is a distinction between a thought that a person holds, and an action that they take against a marriage."

Phil, you are trying to construct an important difference between just wanting the gay agenda not to succeed in re-defining legal marriage, and doing something about that wanting overtly. While it is obvious that there ARE differences, it is a lot less obvious that the differences you are pulling out for view are important the way you think they are.

One can talk about 10,000 gradations that lie in between wanting there to be no SSM legally recognized 'marriages,' and (to pick the absolute other extreme end of the field) going around killing every gay 'married' couple you can find, using every law-enforcement tool known to man. Quietly cancelling your subscriptions to magazines that promote it, without saying why. Talking about how SSM will change culture for the worse, without saying outright "It's wrong." And on and on, to public speaking out against SSM, publicly proposing laws that outlaw it as a legal option, and then into publicly calling for pogroms and so on.

One can easily see that there is a rather significant gulf between, for example, being the one to initiate a referendum against legal recognition, (or to be on the campaign committee to get it adopted and do public speaking), and either voting for it or paying money into the campaign coffers. Differences? For one, people who donate less-than-enormous amounts of money to a campaign don't really expect their name to bandied about in public as a supporter - it's just not what you plan on seeing. Another indicator of difference: federal civil servants are not allowed to work for partisan campaigns, but they are allowed to donate money to partisan campaigns. There is no presumptive public recognition that springs out of donating, rather the opposite. If you had to weigh whether donating money was considered a public act versus a private act - in terms of general expectations - it would be the latter, as would voting on the referendum would also be more 'in private'.

Would you suggest that VOTING for Prop 8 is just as offensive and beyond the pale as paying 1,000 to the campaign? If so, you are basically saying that because of the rightness of the SSM cause, any form of opposition is not just wrong but wrong to a degree justifying public reprisals.

There are all sorts of laws proposed in state houses every year that attempt to contract and diminish the basic right to homeschool - with a fairly obvious intent in the long run to abolish it (like it is already outlawed in Sweden and Germany). I think most of these attempts are wrongheaded in very significant ways, and some of them are in effect just as immoral and offensive to my view of right behavior in the world as laws against SSM are to gays. I don't go around saying these legislators ought to be hounded out of their jobs (well, yes, out of their legislative office - by vote - but that's not their livelihood). Yes, I urge voting against such laws, because that's a fair forum for attacking these ideas, not bludgeoning their "true believers" with economic and social ruin.

While it is obvious that there ARE differences, it is a lot less obvious that the differences you are pulling out for view are important the way you think they are.

Tony, I think that's perhaps because you weren't paying attention the examples that I was putting forward.

I'm not comparing a person who believes that SSM should be illegal to a person who donates money to make SSM illegal to a person who votes to make SSM illegal.

Holding a belief about SSM and holding a belief about the legality of SSM are two entirely different things.

Fully legal SSM is the neutral, moderate, middle-ground position. That's my position. Taking any action to prevent these marriages is beyond the pale.

If you believe that same-sex couples ought not get married, or if your personal belief is that those marriages are invalid, that's a belief.

Similarly, if you believe that interracial couples ought not get married, that's a belief.

But if you try to actually prevent interracial couples from marrying, or trying to prevent same-sex couples from marrying, then you've gone far, far beyond holding a belief about those relationships.

Can you see how that's the case? I, for example, don't believe that Christianity is a true religion. I also don't believe that Judaism or Islam are true religions.

But if I were the grand supreme ruler of this country, and my word were law, I still wouldn't ban Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam.

I may hold a belief about the validity of those religions, but I don't hold the belief that anyone--including me--has the right to prevent the religions from existing, or from holding worship services, or from holding their own marriage ceremonies, etc.

A Muslim might believe that it's a sin to eat pork, but that is a very different belief from believing that pork should be banned so that no one can eat it. Etc.

Fully legal SSM is the neutral, moderate, middle-ground position. That's my position. Taking any action to prevent these marriages is beyond the pale.

That's your opinion, but it's an opinion that doesn't hold water. Nor is it an unbiased opinion of where the "neutral" position is.

Can you see how that's the case? I, for example, don't believe that Christianity is a true religion. I also don't believe that Judaism or Islam are true religions.

But if I were the grand supreme ruler of this country, and my word were law, I still wouldn't ban Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam.

Phil, we've HAD that argument here at WWWtW. Fully neutral is this: if you want an SSM marriage, you can go find a priestess or minister who who you like who is willing to do SSM ceremonies, and get "married". That's society not interfering. That's society not taking a stand on it.

What is not neutral is society saying "this here ceremony shall henceforth mean that we shall grant the following privileges, which are privileges not granted to every citizen just for being a citizen: the marital deduction on taxes, the automatic status of tenancy by the entirety in owning a home, etc. etc. etc. on to 1100 different provision in law." That's a picture of society taking a positive stand on the matter.

What you want is for society to take a positive stand that SSM is to be granted full recognition as marriage for scads of socially-granted benefits and privileges. Sorry, but that's not "the new neutral".

But if you try to actually prevent interracial couples from marrying,

We have also had this discussion already. Even in the pre-Roman days, into the Roman days and beyond, marriage was understood as real when it was between whites and blacks. They may have frowned on it as wrong, but they didn't say it didn't even constitute marriage. There are theoretical reasons for saying "you shouldn't get married" even though the event, if it happens, really is a marriage - like first cousins marrying, for example.

You know, you should ask yourself a question: are you willing to maintain the current law that brother and sister cannot marry? I can guarantee that law will be challenged soon, in the VERY SAME WAY and with the VERY SAME ARGUMENTS that have been made for SSM and that you are making. "You wouldn't try to prevent intra-family couples from getting married, just because of an accident of birth, would you...?"

It doesn't matter whether YOU WANT the neutral position to be drawn at X, Y, or Z line, that's still just an opinion about the nature of our society, and that opinion collides head on into opposed opinions about where the neutral line is. You cannot just by fiat decide where the line shall be. The people in favor of legally recognized SSM are in favor of changing the location of the line, not of maintaining it where it was.

And, just for the record, while I agree with you that people who think interracial marriage should not be legal, AND WHO ACT ON that thinking by trying to get the laws changed, are whacky and laughably wrong and should not succeed. And I would HELP to make them not succeed. But that's not the same thing as hounding them out of society for trying to turn their vision of right into the legal standard through the legal means available to them. That's called intolerance, and we don't levy it on everyone we think is whacky and laughably wrong, even when they are wrong in really serious ways.

Opposition to legalized gay 'marriage' is not actually beyond the pale of polite society and rational behavior. It's that simple.

~~I can guarantee that law will be challenged soon, in the VERY SAME WAY and with the VERY SAME ARGUMENTS that have been made for SSM and that you are making. "You wouldn't try to prevent intra-family couples from getting married, just because of an accident of birth, would you...?"~~

This is Santorum's argument, which was widely misunderstood and maligned, then dismissed as an invalid slippery-slope argument. Which, of course, to anyone paying attention, it isn't.

"It doesn't matter whether YOU WANT the neutral position to be drawn at X, Y, or Z line, that's still just an opinion about the nature of our society, and that opinion collides head on into opposed opinions about where the neutral line is."

Exactly. Liberals should be aware that there's always a group more liberal than them, and that if this group's views gain ascendancy then THEY become the intolerant regressives. That Phil's group wants to draw the line "here" means precisely nothing in the grand scheme of things, and assurances that things will proceed this far and no further are thus completely empty.

Phil, I will just await your response to Tony, since his excellent remarks are my thoughts as well. But I will add that I did not say Prop 8 was trivial. I objected to the exaggerated language, in very common use these days, which has implications stretching back to Civil Rights, batons, dogs, water cannons, dragooned into rhetorical service to legalize gay marriage. Tony's point about statutory restriction of homeschoolers is on point: are you prepared to acknowledge that those efforts too, in your logic, are assaults upon a legal right? And that supporters of those restrictions are beyond the pale?

Liberals should be aware that there's always a group more liberal than them, and that if this group's views gain ascendancy then THEY become the intolerant regressives.

They really don't care. The children of the revolution never do, which is why they're always lunch.

I can remember one passionate SSM advocate on television who, when confronted with the question of how her definition of marriage excluded polygamists, and why in the world it should on her logic, could only respond pitifully, "Because I don't approve of that." Her microphone must have cut off before she could say "yet." More's the pity for her since, presumably, some day she'll be deemed unfit for an upwardly mobile position in society.

I was rather intrigued to read an Andrew Sullivan post recently in which he pointed out that a lot of aggressive homosexuals used to oppose homosexual "marriage," apparently (if I was understanding correctly) because they believed that it made their relationships too bourgeois and assimilated their way of being to straight norms. Something like that. I wonder if, if they have not changed their minds, they are also unfit for a CEO position. Now that would be a real Californian dilemma.

The entire idea that limits on marriage are, by definition, an assault on someone's already-existing marriage, can be seen to be silly if we consider all the other limits. This isn't so much a matter of saying that homosexual "marriage" is the same as marrying someone underage or sibling marriage or whatever as just pointing out that limits on marriage aren't attacks on so-and-so's marriage. For many reasons. For one thing, limits are, pace Phil, of general application, not "against" named people. Second, the whole question is whether these other "marriages" exist, and it's begging that metaphysical question, and in many jurisdictions (including CA at an earlier prior) begging that legal question, to say that one is seeking to dissolve existing marriages by limiting marriage to one man and one woman. And so forth. Hence: A limitation of marriage law to non-siblings isn't "seeking to dissolve the marriage of Jane and Bob (who happen to be brother and sister)." They don't have a marriage in the first place, and the law prohibits the state from recognizing all sibling marriages. It isn't directed personally at Jane and Bob just on the grounds that, as it happens, they have sexual feelings for one another, psychologically think of themselves as married, etc. Even if we imagine that Jane and Bob went to some other country where sibling marriages are recognized and got a marriage license, it would be absurd to say that the laws in all 50 states of the U.S. are "trying to dissolve their marriage" merely by not recognizing that foreign marriage license. And the same if some one state did start recognizing sibling marriages. We can run this same point for "marriages" among three men, a Muslim man's second and third simultaneous "marriage," and so forth. To say that laws that define marriage in such a way that, gasp, it doesn't happen to include the relationship between A and B are "attempts to dissolve A's and B's marriage" is just absurd every way from zero.

For one thing, limits are, pace Phil, of general application, not "against" named people. Second, the whole question is whether these other "marriages" exist, and it's begging that metaphysical question, and in many jurisdictions (including CA at an earlier prior) begging that legal question, to say that one is seeking to dissolve existing marriages by limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

The argument is necessarily about tautologies. Which means it's largely going to be won on whose tautology is favored by the available evidence of what marriage is really about.

It seems obvious that the weight of that evidence entirely on the side of traditionalists. Human beings created the civil institutions that surround marriage with absolutely no thought of homosexual sodomy, because they apparently had no positive reason whatsoever to consider homosexual sodomy relevant to questions of marriage. That this is true in literally every single society, ever, ever, ever, is strongly suggestive that putting it all down to some kind of unspoken personal hatred of homosexuals is self-evidently ridiculous.

That human beings have a positive interest in building up the institution of marriage is evident by the fact that they have always done so, and it is vanishingly improbable that every human society, even those who never had the remotest affiliation or connections with one another, have all engaged in what is really a massive headache and inconvenience in exactly the same fashion for no reason whatsoever. That none of them ever explicitly justified the "exclusion" of homosexual unions from the institution is strong evidence that marriage has something essentially to do with the birds and the bees.

So the ridiculous question "Why not homosexual marriage" is easily answered by coming at the controversy from exactly the opposite direction, the direction of first principles, which asks instead, "Why marriage at all?" Asking that question gets us to answers like the care of children the channeling of male-female carnal desire into safer and more socially productive forms, the mitigation of sexual jealousy and the violence that attends to it, the assurance to men that the children they raise are their own, etc., etc., etc., All of these sorts of reasons are explanations for the existence of marriage that actually "fit the facts" of marriage as we have inherited it in a way that a definition that encompassed homosexual unions never could.

And once we acknowledge the sociological, positive reasons for marriage, it becomes obvious that the wholly ideological and abstract re-conceptualization of it that the left has engaged in has absolutely nothing to do with its essential nature as a social construct, and is utterly divorced from any considerations of history or experience. It's easy to conclude that if marriage was by its essential nature a thing that included homosexual unions, the likelihood that human beings would have bothered with it all these millennia is basically zero. That's why the whole thing looks an awful lot like an attempt to destroy marriage by redefining it in such a way that it loses any sociological justification whatsoever.

That that re-definition might be said to flow logically from certain liberal principles only serves to throw doubt on the soundness of those principles, and therefore on liberalism in general. In short, homosexual "marriage" is liberalism's reductio ad absurdum, and of course the liberal has the option to embrace the reductio, but no moral right to disparage those who won't go blindly along. Put another way, just deciding that you're going to redefine an institution's essential nature is one thing, but putting the refusal to do so down to "bigotry" is just idiotic, as if the whole of human social interaction justified itself in relation to novelties that exist in Phil's head.

And note that not one ounce of that reasoning is "religious."

>econd, the whole question is whether these other "marriages" exist, and it's begging that metaphysical question,

>And note that not one ounce of that reasoning is "religious."


One seriously doubts that your metaphysical conception of what marriage is ontologically is unrelated to you religion. I suppose you could make a natural law argument and say we all just know that is what marriage, but I don't "just know" that marriage is between one and one women and neither did any of the cultures that practiced polygamy. Speaking for myself, I don't believe that there is any sort of platonic form of marriage. Marriage is a legal and social institution that we can change for virtually any reason we want. I reject the idea that this argument is about "tautologies" because it seems like you are using that to mean that both sides are trying to figure out what "real" marriage is. I don't believe in "real" marriage so this is not applicable to me.

>That human beings have a positive interest in building up the institution of marriage is evident by the fact that they have always done so, and it is vanishingly improbable that every human society, even those who never had the remotest affiliation or connections with one another, have all engaged in what is really a massive headache and inconvenience in exactly the same fashion for no reason whatsoever.


Some cultures had polygamy, some didn't. Some engaged in bridal rape, and some didn't. Some had dowries, and some didn't. Saying that they all built up marriage in the same way is factually in correct. In any case, your argument is fundamentally regardless of whether your premises are true because it is based on the idea the fact that most humans did something means it was correct. Do you think that slavery and having sex with very young girls is "objectively" wrong? Most human cultures did those things. If your argument is that their actions can guide us to some sort of metaphysical truth about the proper nature of human social arrangements then on what grounds do you reject slavery? Your argument is just bad.

Notice that Dunsany's "most cultures have done things that are bad" argument would seem to imply that marriage throughout history has been bad. Because a man and a man weren't regarded as married? Because a man and a woman getting married was a positive evil, like child molestation? Because what?

Sage made a positive point: That society has always had an apparent positive _interest_ in building up and promoting male-female marriage. This brings out Dunsany's fangs and claws all at once when he implies that recognizing male-female marriage is in itself a _bad thing_ like enslaving people and having sex with young girls.

Notice the tension here with, "We're not against marriage, we just want it expanded" and "How is homosexual marriage going to hurt you?" What we're seeing in this last comment is either sheer carelessness and haste (which perhaps would be the charitable interpretation) or outright hostility to heterosexual marriage.

To which this link is perhaps relevant.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/04/09/bait-and-switch-how-same-sex-marriage-ends-marriage-and-family-autonomy/

Dusany, you offer a weak response that rests on a complete misconstrual of my point. When I say that all societies have practiced marriage int he same way, the obvious reading of my point is that they have all practiced it as a heterosexual union. I once heard a very, very dim anthropology teacher trot out this pathetic rejoinder that marriage "has actually been highly variable" because of polygamy, which makes it disappointing coming from you too. Of course customs vary from place to place, but so what? Because military customs vary from place to place, that suddenly means that it's rational to insist that by "military" we might also mean "Civil War re-enactment"?

In fact, the high variation of customs, to include even polygamy, child marriages, arranged marriages, etc., only serves to bolster my point. If marriage is such a malleable thing that one could consider practically any sexual union a "marriage," then it is an even more astonishing point that nobody ever even considered homosexual marriages the remotest possibility. It calls out all the more for some explanation. What we have is thousands upon thousands of variations on heterosexual unions and only on heterosexual unions. The only rational conclusion is that marriage is oriented to some extremely fundamental and important goods, in a way that simply has nothing to do with homosexuals and everything to do with the birds and the bees.

The entire point of my comment is that if the argument rests on just whose tautology has the more rational basis, it is obvious that what marriage just means is a union of a man and a woman. Even polygamists do not consider the multiple women who are married to a single man to be married to one another.

I don't believe in "real" marriage

Yes, precisely, meaning you have absolutely no right or basis to call a person a bigot, to affect moral outrage at the person who disagrees, or to read him out of polite society if his private definition of marriage does not comport with whatever yours happens to be on this day of the week. If you cannot even say that marriage qua marriage has any stable meaning, then you have no logical basis for insisting on your own permutation over anyone else's. I've offered a hermeneutic, at least, of arriving at what marriage is all about, and why it is so remarkably consistent on the basic, relevant point under discussion. That's what a person who is actually interested in rational persuasion does.

And since the only reason you even know the word "marriage" is because billions of people have already defined it in advance, then just who in the hell are you to compare their conception of it--which, again, is oriented toward achieving some positive good for society--to slave-holding, when you confess that there is nothing "real" (i.e, founded in reality) about your peculiar construction? How is using the weight of universal human history and experience as a basis for defining marriage more narrow-minded than using some petty left-wing ideological syllogism?

And since you admit you're ready to define it any way that is convenient for the moment, you also demonstrate my point that for the left, this is really all about defining marriage and family out of existence, by making those concepts so elastic that they become incomprehensible. And yet liberals will always ask how my marriage will be affected, if once we accept this notion that the concept is infinitely malleable! At the rate you're working, my daughters won't be able to enter into a marriage that has the coherence and the legal force of a Little Orphan Annie Secret Society membership.

In short, this is about making a word mean whatever you want it to mean, then ruthlessly enforcing that definition as if it were handed down on stone tablets from Mt. Sinai, anathematizing dissenters using the most incendiary language possible (I'll have to do a word count on this thread for "slavery"). It so happens that this was precisely Ingsoc's method for making a concept unthinkable, and therefore making it vanish from the earth. So it turns out that Jeffery's invocation of Orwell wasn't that far off the mark after all.

Or, to quote another riff on the same subject:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master..."

And because it is impossible to come to any agreement on such a fundamental issue when there is literally no common basis for rational discussion--because one side has rejected the notion that a word as commonplace and universal as "marriage" can contain any stable content--then all that remains to that party is to rule by force and fear. Thus, the Two Minutes Hate of Brendan Eich.

The prosecution rests.

Well, that all may very well be true, but that doesn't mean I have to believe it.

(NM)

Incidentally, one scrap of evidence in favor of the claim that this is about abolishing civil marriage altogether: The rapidly growing number of people who look at the whole controversy and, intuiting that this re-conceptualization of civil marriage calls its entire justification into existence, have begun calling for government to "get out of the marriage business." Libertarians and left-liberals alike have begun insisting that because marriage doesn't any longer mean anything, the answer to my original question, "Why do we have marriage" really ought to be, "Good question. We shouldn't."

Even many self-described conservatives, having been disarmed and deprived of the moral language necessary to defend civil marriage by the endlessly employed bludgeon of bogus "civil rights," and having no taste for a fight with an increasingly authoritarian left, are fast abandoning ship and embracing the idea that civil marriage needs to just go away. And that was always the point.

I predict that homosexuals, seeing that their "marriages" aren't oriented toward the achievement of anything other than the political humiliation of conservatives and the stoking of their own vanity, won't long embrace its existence either.

Nice one, NM.

I don't believe that there is any sort of platonic form of marriage. Marriage is a legal and social institution that we can change for virtually any reason we want.

Observe that Dunsany, like so many on the Left, eschews even the most minimal internal consistency here. We're assured that marriage can be changed for "any reason we want," but those who support statutory or constitutional changes to affirm tradition marriage are denounced as bigots. So obviously certain changes are not tolerable according to Dunsany; some are altogether intolerable. Which means that there are limits to this institution, and these arise from an image or ideal about what marriage is.

All of which is to say that Dunsany is either lying when he says "I don't believe in real marriage," or he does not understand what those words mean.

What it means, Paul, is that when he says gay "marriage," he might just as well say gay "snurffle McDorfen goofen," because to his mind it has pretty much the same relation to the logos.

I think when Dunsany says we can change the definition of marriage for "whatever reason we want" he means that there's nothing in the nature of what marriage "really" is that puts any kind of restriction at all on how we define marriage. That's not to say there mightn't be other principles that would restrict how we ought to define it. Whether he can support his preferred principles without a surreptitious appeal to the nature of marriage is a further question.

But main topic here is whether it is illiberal to treat acts of mild political opposition to this redefinition of marriage as so far beyond the pale as to place them beyond the protection of freedom-of-speech. And the only argument I see on this thread that seriously tries to make that case is Phil's (April 10, 2014 12:06 AM), and that case relies fundamentally on the premise that "a committed relationship between two lesbians or between two gay men is the analog to a committed relationship between a heterosexual man and woman," where by "committed" I take it he means the full commitment involved in marriage, which is the only sort relevant. And by "analogous," he must mean more than that they are analogous somehow-or-other (as Tony's response indicates); he must mean that they are analogous in all relevant respects. And this is why, when he speaks of the state's recognition of such relationships he says, "when a man and a man who are in a committed relationship choose to make a public and official legally binding civil commitment to each other by marrying, that it is exactly equal to a civil marriage between a man and a woman."

Now if there is no fact of the matter as to what marriage really is, then there is no answer to the question of whether the homosexual committed relationship really is the same as heterosexual marriage, and thus no grounds for regarding it as "opposition to their marriage." Suppose, for example that Bill and Sue are brother and sister, they live together, and they wish to adopt a child. Now if there's no fact of the matter as to whether marriage entails a sexual relationship, then they should be able to have the state recognize their relationship as a marriage, and anyone who politically opposes the state recognizing their relationship as a marriage is "taking action against their marriage," right? Well, no. That way of characterizing political opposition to a given extension of the definition of marriage has rational appeal only if those relationships really are marriages. Otherwise there's no civil rights issue here, and Eich's actions aren't even seriously objectionable, let alone beyond the protection of free speech principles.

In short, for a liberal who believes that homosexual "marriages" really are marriages, it's understandable why he would find political opposition to this offensive. But, the claim that they really are marriages is, to put it mildly, difficult to support. On the other hand, if there is no fact of the matter as to what marriage really is (a dubious claim, given the universality of the institution across all human cultures), then while there might be prudential reasons for extending the definition to Tom & Jim's relationship, but not to Bill & Sue's, there's no grounds for taking offense at those who evaluate the prudential reasoning differently.

I was just independently thinking about the tension between Phil's and Dunsany's approaches here, to which Christopher McCartney draws attention. Dunsany's openly nominalist approach will not support Phil's anguished "How would you feel if someone were trying to dissolve your marriage" rhetoric.

Now, Dunsany and Phil are two different people and are allowed to disagree with one another, without charge of inconsistency to either. But it is simply a fact that the left in general uses either of these rhetorical and argumentative approaches as it suits them, which is indeed inconsistent.

> think when Dunsany says we can change the definition of marriage for "whatever reason we want" he means that there's nothing in the nature of what marriage "really" is that puts any kind of restriction at all on how we define marriage.


This is exactly correct. I think Sage is wrong to say that I am attacking the nature of his marriage because I don't believe that there is such a thing. That has nothing to do with whether I think there are ethical reasons to recognize gay marriage. They're separate issues.
@lydia

>Sage made a positive point: That society has always had an apparent positive _interest_ in building up and promoting male-female marriage. This brings out Dunsany's fangs and claws all at once when he implies that recognizing male-female marriage is in itself a _bad thing_ like enslaving people and having sex with young girls.

That wasn't really what I was trying to say. I was attacking his method because it seemed like he was arguing that we could figure out what marriage "really" is by looking at what people in the past is. Even if we granted that marriage has some of Platonic existence that would be a deeply controversial claim.

@sage

>Yes, precisely, meaning you have absolutely no right or basis to call a person a bigot, to affect moral outrage at the person who disagrees, or to read him out of polite society if his private definition of marriage does not comport with whatever yours happens to be on this day of the week. If you cannot even say that marriage qua marriage has any stable meaning, then you have no logical basis for insisting on your own permutation over anyone else's. I've offered a hermeneutic, at least, of arriving at what marriage is all about, and why it is so remarkably consistent on the basic, relevant point under discussion. That's what a person who is actually interested in rational persuasion does.


I don't think that I need to embrace any form Platonism to have a consistent view of how we should define marriage legally. That's doesn't follow.

>I was just independently thinking about the tension between Phil's and Dunsany's approaches here, to which Christopher McCartney draws attention. Dunsany's openly nominalist approach will not support Phil's anguished "How would you feel if someone were trying to dissolve your marriage" rhetoric.

I also think it's worth pointing out that rejecting the idea that there is no Platonic form of marriage isn't necessarily linked to nomninalism. I might think Christians are wrong to say that there is a Platonic form of marriage while also believing that other abstract entities exist. In any case, I do not understand why my argument is in tension with Phil's. Marriage exists as a legal and social institution, and asking people how they would feel if their marriages weren't recognized by the state is a fair question. Marriage is a social institution as well as a legal institution.

You keep using the phrase "Platonic form" as though you believe that somebody here has argued from the standpoint of Platonism. Rejecting extreme nominalism doesn't entail embracing the existence of Platonic forms.

Inigo Montoya, call your office. Sheesh.

More revealing 'wisdom' from Dunsany:

"Marriage exists as a legal and social institution, and asking people how they would feel if their marriages weren't recognized by the state is a fair question."

Note the appeal to feelings -- I get this a lot from liberals -- if someone, somewhere has their feelings hurt then the state must act! This is, of course, both philosophical and political nonsense; but it seems to be a common rallying cry for liberals everywhere -- 'what about my feelings, man!'

>You keep using the phrase "Platonic form" as though you believe that somebody here has argued from the standpoint of Platonism. Rejecting extreme nominalism doesn't entail embracing the existence of Platonic forms.


That's a very substantive rebuttal Sage. People don't always use the term Platonism to mean that "you believe in the theory of forms" they use it to collectively refer to those sorts of views. I wasn't trying to say that there can't be different kinds of theories about abstract objects, and any attempt to claim that I was is going to make you sound more absurd that you already do. In any case, I have to meet someone so I'll leave you to come up with a way to justify the ontological existence of "marriage" as more than a legal and social institution without using religion. Good luck.

Dunsany:

I suppose you could make a natural law argument and say we all just know that is what marriage, but I don't "just know" that marriage is between one and one women and neither did any of the cultures that practiced polygamy. Speaking for myself, I don't believe that there is any sort of platonic form of marriage.

Dunce (may I call you Dunce, my good fellow? "Dunsany" seems too formal, somehow.) There is no need at all to "suppose" a natural law argument, the natural law argument HAS been made, in these pages, frequently. It has also been made in more thorough form elsewhere. One (but only one) of the supports for the natural law position on marriage works with looking at the way different cultures harbor likenesses and similarities. Using "what other cultures have done" is not the complete argument, not even close.

As usual with liberals, you seem to want to go on forevermore with the notion that there is no underpinning to "what marriage is" beyond "what society chooses to make of it". That position is intellectually incoherent, has been shown to be so repeatedly. The liberal stance is the argumentative equivalent of a 4-year old putting his fingers in his ears yelling out "nyah nyah nyah I can't hear you" to the arguments.

Note the appeal to feelings -- I get this a lot from liberals -- if someone, somewhere has their feelings hurt then the state must act! This is, of course, both philosophical and political nonsense; but it seems to be a common rallying cry for liberals everywhere -- 'what about my feelings, man!'

Exactly, Jeff, which is why Phil's way of putting it sounds so much more rhetorically heart-wrenching. Phil _assumes_ in his rhetoric that a _real_ marriage exists and then says, "How would you feel if someone were trying to get your marriage _dissolved_?" It's a lot less punchy to say, "Hey, I don't believe that there is any real thing such as marriage. We can define it however we want. But wouldn't you feel bad if you had all the same subjective feelings you have towards your spouse but the state didn't call it 'marriage'?" It is much more of an attempt to steal a rhetorical edge to imply that there _is_ such a thing as marriage, that homosexuals who have certain feelings towards one another _have_ that thing, and that others are trying to _dissolve_ a real status already in existence. Dunsany's proposed language bears the weak, relativistic, whiny nature of the argument on its face.

I have to meet someone so I'll leave you to come up with a way to justify the ontological existence of "marriage" as more than a legal and social institution

There is a stolen base embedded here, an unspoken premise which points up the kind of slippery question-begging your side has insisted upon throughout the entire debate. That premise is, "Anything which we might call 'a social legal institution' has no stable meaning, and can be made to mean whatever we want." But that is precisely the point at issue. I never denied that marriage is a social and legal institution, and in fact explicitly acknowledged that fact. But there's nothing in that that implies adherence to nominalism, much less requires it.

I know that you very, very much want this to be about my religion, so that you might more easily dismiss my definition of marriage as peculiar to myself and the Catholic Church. Your reasons for that are obvious. You hate my religion, for one thing, but it's also a rhetorical tactic designed to put defenders of traditional marriage on the wrong side of the Establishment Clause. But the simple fact is that my definition of marriage does not depend on my religion, as should be obvious by the fact that it is the universal definition ever held by people of any religion, or no religion, in any time and at any place. It is a virtual certainty that Bertrand Russel thought of marriage "as a social and legal institution" in just the same way as I do. Is that because of his deep, and legendary, commitment to the Christian faith?

What a joke.

The only rational conclusion is that marriage is oriented to some extremely fundamental and important goods, in a way that simply has nothing to do with homosexuals and everything to do with the birds and the bees.

I agree that marriage is often oriented towards having a family but of course not exclusively so. Otherwise society would have strong reasons for banning post-menopausal women from marrying, which we don't because we recognize that loving and intimate companionship is a valuable good for people regardless of whether they can or do procreate.

“Why marriage at all?" Asking that question gets us to answers like the care of children the channeling of male-female carnal desire into safer and more socially productive forms, the mitigation of sexual jealousy and the violence that attends to it, the assurance to men that the children they raise are their own, etc., etc., etc..

Historically, marriage as a legal institution has been about property rights and forging and strengthening political alliances. Obviously procreation can be instrumental towards those ends but isn't a requirement. Connected to this historical viewpoint is that in the few times and places when sibling marriage was permitted, it was mostly among nobility because marrying below one's social rank was considered disgraceful and if the only marriage prospect of equivalent status was a sibling that became an acceptable choice. Channeling carnal desire of whatever orientation is important to society, hence the historical acceptance of prostitution and concubines. Preventing a class of people from socially recognized unions is more likely to make sexual jealousy untamed and chaotic. As Jay Leno snarkily put it, “If you want gays to stop having sex, let them get married.” If a gay couple does choose to start a family they are no less a real family in my view than a hetero couple with stepchildren or adopted children.

Historically, marriage as a legal institution has been about property rights and forging and strengthening political alliances. Obviously procreation can be instrumental towards those ends but isn't a requirement.

Step2, this is an very incomplete, rather distorted view of the "historical" picture. Most families throughout most of history didn't have a political worry for which marriage was a solution - that's for princes and lords, not for peasants. As to the other, you get the order exactly backwards: the reason property concerns are a FAMILY matter instead of a personal matter is the long-range good of children, not for the mere sake of amassing property. Marriage is FIRST on account of children, and it is because society observes this predecessor reality that society recognizes the need to regulate it and makes laws officially countenancing legal effects of marriage into areas of property and other matters. Legal recognition comes after the fact to the prior reality. It isn't because the state makes laws to allow a married couple to live together and pool their resources that the couple live together in a unified household, it is because married couples live together that society recognizes the unified property of a household as an integrated reality. It isn't because the state gives a license to a couple to be parents that they bring children into the world, it is because married couples bring children into the world that the state recognizes them legally as being parents and thus having parental rights. The parental rights precede the social (and legal) recognition thereof.

And of necessity the state choosing to extend a legally recognized status as "parents" to a gay couple who receive children from other parents is a state of affairs that goes outside of the original meaning of parenthood (i.e. bringing their children into the world). It cannot possibly be "just exactly like" what society has always meant by the legal status of parenthood, because it is impossible for adoptive parenthood to be anything but a later adaptation upon the primary parenthood by which the children come to be.

Obviously procreation can be instrumental towards those ends but isn't a requirement.

Nothing is obvious about the notion that procreation is a derivative, optional aspect to what marriage is for. That some marriages do not result in children is irrelevant. As an analogy: dogs are 4-legged critters, even the ones that lose a leg in an accident or are born with 3 legs in a birth defect.

As to marriage after child-bearing years: first, there are cases of having a child in what normally would have been after child-bearing years, such as with Abraham and Sara, and then there are cases of having a child in what appeared to be after the child-bearing years, such as a friend of mine who had a child at age 52, more than 8 years after the previous child. A couple who is psychologically open to the gift of children doesn't close off this openness on account of age.

Interestingly, in Christian societies it has been considered to be somewhat unseemly, or even downright lacking in virtue, for truly elderly people to get married for the first time. There is an implicit comprehension, there, that marriage's relationship to children isn't merely incidental to the unitive aspect of marriage. Which points to the really essential point I would make: we believe that the underlying, fundamental aspect of human nature that points us to marriage is an integrated reality, so that the unitive aspect of marital love for the sake of the other (expressed in physical union) is tied intimately to love of new persons who may come out of the union of two in one flesh. The part of human nature served by the unitive aspect is part and parcel with the part of human nature that is served by loving the fruit of the physical union. The total gift of self to the spouse includes within it the promise, the commitment, to love any child of that love, and that this commitment itself is perfective of the love of the spouse: the love of the early spring blossom cannot be a full love without the readiness to love also the autumn fruit to which the spring blossom points of its very nature (even blossoms which happen not to become fruit).

Various non-Christian societies may not always have been clear on the entirety of this underlying reality, due to the clouding of the truth as an effect of sin, but they nonetheless grasped aspects of it. To say that they reflected this reality only partly doesn't disprove the reality, it only proves that societies have been imperfect - hardly a new thought. Just as the fact that there were societies which limited the master's authority over slaves isn't a disproof of the reality that human dignity inheres in all humans, but shows that these societies grasped part of the reality without grasping the whole of it. So polygamy is allowed in societies that recognize part of the truth of marriage, but not all of it. This does not imply that the part they recognize is arbitrary, nor that the part they recognize is the entirety of the truth about what marriage is.

>Note the appeal to feelings -- I get this a lot from liberals -- if someone, somewhere has their feelings hurt then the state must act! This is, of course, both philosophical and political nonsense; but it seems to be a common rallying cry for liberals everywhere -- 'what about my feelings, man!'

Tony, my view is that morality comes from moral intuitions or "feelings" that people have.I reject the existence of objective morality or metaphysical laws governing marriage, etc. So when you say that I'm only appealing to the way people feel about this I don't see that as a problem. I don't think that there is anything else to appeal to, which is at the heart of my disagreement with Sage.

>I know that you very, very much want this to be about my religion, so that you might more easily dismiss my definition of marriage as peculiar to myself and the Catholic Church. Your reasons for that are obvious. You hate my religion, for one thing, but it's also a rhetorical tactic designed to put defenders of traditional marriage on the wrong side of the Establishment Clause. But the simple fact is that my definition of marriage does not depend on my religion, as should be obvious by the fact that it is the universal definition ever held by people of any religion, or no religion, in any time and at any place. It is a virtual certainty that Bertrand Russel thought of marriage "as a social and legal institution" in just the same way as I do. Is that because of his deep, and legendary, commitment to the Christian faith?

As pointed out in my previous post, it is not true that all human cultures had the same definition of marriage. The fact that so many human civilizations considered polygamy legitimate is enough to completely rebut that claim without even getting into issues like dowry, consent, property, and so on. If you wish to argue that there is a "true" from of marriage and that "true" marriage is the only kind that the law should recognize you are going to need to make some sort of real argument. Your "people in the past did X" argument is a complete non-sequitur and substantively false.

Let me explain why Sage's historical argument makes no sense even if you believe in natural law and objective morality. Sage probably thinks that there are things that are objectively evil. Actions that fall into that category are intrinsically wrong regardless of what people think about them or they behave. I imagine that Sage and most other Christians will want to claim that slavery, genocide, and the oppression of women all fall into that category. If it were true that we could determine substantive metaphysical truths about the way humans are supposed to behave and organize our society by examining the past then how could you ever argue that those things are objectively wrong? Slavery has been practiced by almost every human culture that ever existed, as has racism and female oppression. Does that mean that we can conclude that it is objectively right to own slaves or force women to be subservient to men? Most of you will want to say no. The reason for that is that there is no necessary connection between what is objectively right or true and what people believe or do. That is exactly what is supposed to make something "objective." So when Sage says that his definition of marriage is justified by human history that's just a non-squitur. His argument is based on fundamentally fallacious reasoning. In order to claim that we can determine such truths from human behavior you would have to posit that people have some faculty that allows them to figure out what the truth is, and I don't really think Sage could defend the existence of such a faculty using a philosophical argument. Calvin and Plantinga's sensus divinitatis may exist, but you are not going to be able to justify its existence with a neutral non-Christian argument.

It cannot possibly be "just exactly like" what society has always meant by the legal status of parenthood, because it is impossible for adoptive parenthood to be anything but a later adaptation upon the primary parenthood by which the children come to be.

If you are willing to claim adoptive parents and stepparents have no legal rights compared to the biological parents you will be consistent.

Nothing is obvious about the notion that procreation is a derivative, optional aspect to what marriage is for.

Although I am claiming procreation is optional I am not saying it doesn’t enhance marriage, only that it isn’t essential to it.

Interestingly, in Christian societies it has been considered to be somewhat unseemly, or even downright lacking in virtue, for truly elderly people to get married for the first time.

I didn't specify it had to be the first time; a post-menopausal woman could be widowed or divorced.

Which points to the really essential point I would make: we believe that the underlying, fundamental aspect of human nature that points us to marriage is an integrated reality, so that the unitive aspect of marital love for the sake of the other (expressed in physical union) is tied intimately to love of new persons who may come out of the union of two in one flesh.

This is all fine and good, poetic even, but my point is that there are no meaningful restrictions on heterosexual marriages that fall drastically short of this ideal and therefore it is disingenuous to hold the ideal as demonstrative against homosexual couples.

If it were true that we could determine substantive metaphysical truths about the way humans are supposed to behave and organize our society by examining the past...So when Sage says that his definition of marriage is justified by human history that's just a non-squitur. His argument is based on fundamentally fallacious reasoning.

See, this is how we know Dunce is a poor reader:

One (but only one) of the supports for the natural law position on marriage works with looking at the way different cultures harbor likenesses and similarities.
To say that they reflected this reality only partly doesn't disprove the reality, it only proves that societies have been imperfect - hardly a new thought. Just as the fact that there were societies which limited the master's authority over slaves isn't a disproof of the reality that human dignity inheres in all humans, but shows that these societies grasped part of the reality without grasping the whole of it. So polygamy is allowed in societies that recognize part of the truth of marriage, but not all of it.

The Philosophy 101 response to Dunce: Nobody would claim that "we could determine substantive metaphysical truths about the way humans are supposed to behave and organize our society SOLELY by examining the past..."

Notice that word "solely"? It carries a lot of weight here. The position of natural law - indeed the position of all moderate realist thought like Aristotelian Thomism - is that in addition to observing the way humans have behaved in the past we also have to apply filters like *WHY* do they act that way - what do THEY SAY about why they behave that way. And filter out inconsistencies and so on (a lot like scientists do about experience, too) - i.e. it takes real mental work to get there. That's why some people won't go through the steps and see if they agree or disagree with the result on a principled basis.

Tony, my view is that morality comes from moral intuitions or "feelings" that people have.I reject the existence of objective morality or metaphysical laws governing marriage, etc.

Although it is true that I (and Sage, and others) believe there is an objective moral law, I wasn't actually using that in my argument. I was using the fact that there is something that PRECEDES social rules (and laws) about marriage, that is more fundamental than the rules and laws. Even your moral intuition can be something that precedes social rules. If there is something that is UNIVERSAL about these moral intuitions, then that something (even if not objective) would make social rules that fly in the face of that universal moral sense to be bad rules.

Be that as it may, if you feel that moral intuitions are the basis of the right way society's lawmaking is to be structured, and I believe that objective moral principles are the right way society's lawmaking is to structured, whose approach shall be forced to give way to the other? Neither is content neutral. To pretend yours is content neutral just is to impose your view on me in structuring society.

>The Philosophy 101 response to Dunce: Nobody would claim that "we could determine substantive metaphysical truths about the way humans are supposed to behave and organize our society SOLELY by examining the past.


There's no logical connection between the two at all unless you posit the existence of a faculty that allows humans to sense the truth and inspires them to act on it. Saying that you also consider other factors doesn't mean that that there is a logical reason to suppose that is the case. So you're sort of just avoiding my argument rather than actually addressing.


>Notice that word "solely"? It carries a lot of weight here. The position of natural law - indeed the position of all moderate realist thought like Aristotelian Thomism

That's fine, but why would I care about Thomism? It might be internally coherent, but that's true of all sorts of absurd ideologies. I reject the existence of god and don't care if your theology can justify Sage's argument. Plantinga might think that the holy spirit reveals the truth to him, but to me he is no different from lots of other people with imaginary friends.

>Although it is true that I (and Sage, and others) believe there is an objective moral law, I wasn't actually using that in my argument. I was using the fact that there is something that PRECEDES social rules (and laws) about marriage, that is more fundamental than the rules and laws. Even your moral intuition can be something that precedes social rules. If there is something that is UNIVERSAL about these moral intuitions, then that something (even if not objective) would make social rules that fly in the face of that universal moral sense to be bad rules.


Why? I'm not sure why the fact that most people have an intuition about how to organize society means that organizing society that way is a good idea. Additionally, if morality is objective then there is no reason to draw a sharp distinction between it and this SOMETHING by which I assume you mean some sort of metaphysical property that humans sense.

If you are willing to claim adoptive parents and stepparents have no legal rights compared to the biological parents you will be consistent.

Step2, you seem to have misconstrued my point. I was saying that the legal status we ascribe to adoptive parents and stepparents is one that logically comes after our recognizing that status as already existing in marriages. I wasn't saying that they "have no legal rights compared to biological parents" - that would be ridiculous on its face. Nor is my position, that they do have legal rights, in any sense inconsistent with rights that precede legal recognition.

Although I am claiming procreation is optional I am not saying it doesn’t enhance marriage, only that it isn’t essential to it.

True, but your claim just simply ignores my argument that the procreative aspect is not incidental to the other things that are essential to marriage. You don't answer the argument at all.

I didn't specify it had to be the first time; a post-menopausal woman could be widowed or divorced... but my point is that there are no meaningful restrictions on heterosexual marriages that fall drastically short of this ideal

Your counter-position seems to be entirely legal, which is more of a "this is how we are doing things" rather than a "this is how we ought to be doing things" position. Such a position cannot successfully counter a claim that we shouldn't be doing things the way we are doing them right now either.

there are no meaningful restrictions on heterosexual marriages that fall drastically short of this ideal and therefore it is disingenuous to hold the ideal as demonstrative against homosexual couples.

I am having trouble seeing what you actually mean here, but I will take a stab at interpreting it: there are no meaningful legal restrictions on heterosexual marriage that require of such marriages that they fit that "poetic" model of marriage, so there shouldn't be any legal restrictions on homosexual 'marriage' which fails to satisfy that model either.

I dispute this, on 2 points. First, the legal restriction that marriage be between a man and a women JUST IS such a meaningful restriction that marriage fit that model. It IS an expression of society that what it recognizes in marriage is a something related to procreation, even if not a strict one-to-one relation. There are other aspects of the legal stance of marriage that are still reflections of the pro-creative connection: the legally presumptive fatherhood of the male to whom the mother is married during pregnancy is one.

Secondly, the progressive (but as yet incomplete) falling away of society from the Christian model that all sexual acts be (a) within marriage, and (b) open to life, and (c) an expression of faithful, permanent love of spouse and child, that was universal in Christian sects before 1930, is not somehow a valid legal argument that we ought to continue falling away from that ideal still further. That we have been inconsistent with our cultural heritage isn't a per se argument that we have functionally (and ought to legally) jettison our heritage in its entirety.

The reason for that is that there is no necessary connection between what is objectively right or true and what people believe or do.
There's no logical connection between the two at all

Anybody else notice the slide here? "No necessary connection" is much, much weaker than "no logical [by which Dunsany must mean no evidentially relevant] connection at all."

True, but your claim just simply ignores my argument that the procreative aspect is not incidental to the other things that are essential to marriage. You don't answer the argument at all.

Being a parent doesn’t require being married and vice versa. It is obvious by extension procreation is not essential to marriage.

Your counter-position seems to be entirely legal, which is more of a "this is how we are doing things" rather than a "this is how we ought to be doing things" position.

Your “ought” depends on an idealized version of the past when it was the reality of the past the led to the present.

First, the legal restriction that marriage be between a man and a women JUST IS such a meaningful restriction that marriage fit that model.

Fitting a model isn’t meaningful if the model allows such glaring exceptions.

There's no logical connection between the two at all unless you posit the existence of a faculty that allows humans to sense the truth

Perhaps your comment could have been saved from outright nonsense (or pointless circularity) if you had made it "unless you posit or it can be established on rational grounds the existence of a faculty that allows humans to grasp the truth..."

Fortunately for all those who are realists, THERE IS such a faculty, and THERE IS a reasoned argument for its existence and its ability to allow man to grasp truth. Your assumption that what we are doing is merely "positing" the point is of course one of the defects of ignorant new atheism.

Saying that you also consider other factors doesn't mean that that there is a logical reason to suppose that is the case. So you're sort of just avoiding my argument rather than actually addressing.

Saying that I am a contributor here at W4 doesn't mean that there is logical reason to suppose that is the case, I suppose. Oh, wait, it DOES mean that, as long as you take that comment together with any number of other plain and evident and commonly agreed facts, such as that none of the other contributors dispute the claim, or that my name is under the list of authors, etc. Yes, then IT IS a logical reason to suppose the case.

According to Dunce, the only way one can provide a "logical reason" for anything that involves moral truth is at one and the same time to provide the truth, the metaphysical arguments in favor of reality and truth, the psychological foundation for the existence of mind and the physical / philosophical reasons why mind can grasp truth, the existence of God, the nature of man, the nature of objective moral truths, and the existence of conscience. All at once. For if any of these are missing, the rest are "without logical reason".

That's fine, but why would I care about Thomism?

Another failure to grasp the nature of my comment. You should have asked: why should I care about moderate realism (of which Thomism is one variety)? And the answer is quite simple: it claims to have rationally argued for objective moral truth, not just "supposed" that it exists, or just "invented a story" using it. Now, maybe moderate realism is also WRONG. But dismissing it as an absurd ideology without even knowing that it makes a rational claim is just goofy nonsense.

Why? I'm not sure why the fact that most people have an intuition about how to organize society means that organizing society that way is a good idea. Additionally, if morality is objective then there is no reason to draw a sharp distinction between it and this SOMETHING by which I assume you mean some sort of metaphysical property that humans sense.

What you assume has nothing to do with my point. Even if we DON'T assume any metaphysical property, if there is a universal moral intuition, then trying to re-organize society to thumb its nose at that intuition is just a nonsensical thing to do. If moral intuitions can _precede_ what society does in law, then shoving laws around to make changes without accommodating the intuitions as they stand before you muck them up with the laws is basically to say "moral intuitions" matter no more than mere preference of pineapple over banana yogurt. I.E., they aren't really "moral intuitions" so much as goofy superstition or personal taste, and saying "I believe in moral intuition" is basically a smokescreen for saying I don't believe in morality at all, only personal preference: "I feel killing is wrong" means nothing more than "I don't like the idea of killing people."


>Fortunately for all those who are realists, THERE IS such a faculty, and THERE IS a reasoned argument for its existence and its ability to allow man to grasp truth. Your assumption that what we are doing is merely "positing" the point is of course one of the defects of ignorant new atheism.

Feel free to make such an argument using non-religious justifications.

>According to Dunce, the only way one can provide a "logical reason" for anything that involves moral truth is at one and the same time to provide the truth, the metaphysical arguments in favor of reality and truth, the psychological foundation for the existence of mind and the physical / philosophical reasons why mind can grasp truth, the existence of God, the nature of man, the nature of objective moral truths, and the existence of conscience. All at once. For if any of these are missing, the rest are "without logical reason".

I'll settle for any argument that explains why the past behavior of human being with regard to marriage was guided by such a faculty. It is the crux of Sage's entire argument, and without what he is saying is nonsensical. He seems to understand that he needs to make a non-religious argument to avoid establishment clause problems, and I agree with him. If you can't justify opposition to gay marriage without referencing your religious views then broader society should dismiss your arguments.

>Another failure to grasp the nature of my comment. You should have asked: why should I care about moderate realism (of which Thomism is one variety)? And the answer is quite simple: it claims to have rationally argued for objective moral truth, not just "supposed" that it exists, or just "invented a story" using it. Now, maybe moderate realism is also WRONG. But dismissing it as an absurd ideology without even knowing that it makes a rational claim is just goofy nonsense

I know a lot of arguments for objective morality. Which ones do you think apply here? Seriously, I'd like to know.

> if there is a universal moral intuition, then trying to re-organize society to thumb its nose at that intuition is just a nonsensical thing to do.

A majority of Americans lack this "universal moral intuitions" so I suggest you rethink your theory.


>If moral intuitions can _precede_ what society does in law, then shoving laws around to make changes without accommodating the intuitions as they stand before you muck them up with the laws is basically to say "moral intuitions" matter no more than mere preference of pineapple over banana yogurt. I.E., they aren't really "moral intuitions" so much as goofy superstition or personal taste, and saying "I believe in moral intuition" is basically a smokescreen for saying I don't believe in morality at all, only personal preference: "I feel killing is wrong" means nothing more than "I don't like the idea of killing people."

I think what you are saying here is itself subjective. The idea that morality being subjective means that our moral intuitions don't matter than our preferences for yogurt over pudding is itself a subjective judgement being made about what the subjectivity of morality implies.

Feel free to make such an argument using non-religious justifications.

That's easy: Aritstotle's "Physics" Book 1 and 2, and the first part of 3, his "On the Soul", and his "Nicomachean Ethics". None of that relies on God or religion in any way.

I'll settle for any argument that explains why the past behavior of human being with regard to marriage was guided by such a faculty.

If, as I think, Aristotle's "De Anima" successfully identifies what kind of faculty the intellect is, then everything that is subject to man choosing behavior is a reflection of man's capacity to know. Just as every shot a basketball player takes is a reflection of the faculty of sight. The fact that some shots miss the basket doesn't prove there is no such thing as sight.

What is not neutral is society saying "this here ceremony shall henceforth mean that we shall grant the following privileges, which are privileges not granted to every citizen just for being a citizen: the marital deduction on taxes, the automatic status of tenancy by the entirety in owning a home, etc. etc. etc. on to 1100 different provision in law." That's a picture of society taking a positive stand on the matter.

I interpret this to mean that you are well aware that there are a number of rights and privileges that can only be granted to couples by the state, and that people who claimed, "Gay couples can get all of the rights of marriage by contracting for them, there's no need to call it 'marriage'!" were in fact, quite wrong.


We have also had this discussion already.

It seems that you took issue with the way that I explained my own position, but ignored the point that I was making. You might disagree with me when I say that people who oppose legal SSM are the exact moral equivalent of people who oppose legal interracial marriage--it's pretty clear that you do. Your disagreement doesn't sway me; as you've written, we've all heard the arguments before.

My point was that there is a difference between holding an opinion about a marriage and taking action against that marriage. To understand this point, doesn't matter whether you feel the opinions are equally valid, or whether you feel that one opinion is reasonable and one is not.

You seem to be saying that if Person A believes in her heart that same-sex marriage is not valid, but is willing to allow other people to decide whether they want to enter into same-sex marriages and Person B actively tries to prevent same-sex couples from getting legally married, that neither of those people is doing something wrong. In other words, it appears that your view is that it is licit to disapprove of SSM and it is also licit to take action to prevent legal SSM.

You're entitled to your opinion about whether each person is in the right, but it is reasonable to acknowledge that Person A and Person B aren't doing exactly the same thing.

But the simple fact is that my definition of marriage does not depend on my religion, as should be obvious by the fact that it is the universal definition ever held by people of any religion, or no religion, in any time and at any place.

Sage, based on this statement, would you agree that if I can find one group of people (of any religion, any time, and any place) who indeed consider same-sex marriages to be part of the definition of marriage, that you will admit you are wrong and you will subsequently support SSM?

I suspect you won't accept that logic, because you know already that your statement was hyperbole. Would you say that is a fair assessment of your claim here?


But I will add that I did not say Prop 8 was trivial. I objected to the exaggerated language, in very common use these days, which has implications stretching back to Civil Rights, batons, dogs, water cannons, dragooned into rhetorical service to legalize gay marriage.

Paul, you're aware, aren't you, that gay people were, in fact, arrested just for being gay during the time period that you're referring to as "Civil Rights?" You're aware that gay men and women were beaten by police on many occasions, right? You're aware that homosexual men could be legally castrated by the state in the gosh-darn liberal state of California as recently as the 1970s? That's actually after what most people think of when they think of the Civil Rights era.

While I'm sure you're also aware that sodomy was a crime in many states until the 2000s--this century--perhaps you were unaware that during the 20th century, some cities made it a crime to serve alcohol to a homosexual? That people were singled out not just for acts, but for being homosexual? That cities banned homosexuals from gathering?

If you really think that the gay rights movement has misappropriated the language of civil rights, may I respectfully suggest that you are wrong?

Tony's point about statutory restriction of homeschoolers is on point: are you prepared to acknowledge that those efforts too, in your logic, are assaults upon a legal right? And that supporters of those restrictions are beyond the pale?

Certainly, I think that people have a right to homeschool their children if they can provide them with a reasonable education. My experience with homeschooled children is that their educations tend to surpass those of their peers in public and private schools. And, contrary to popular belief, most homeschooled children that I've known or taught were socially well-adjusted and got along well with their peers and co-workers.

I've already said that I don't think a person should be fired for having opposed SSM, and I also don't think that they should be hounded out of a job. I agree with Barry Deutsch at Alas, a Blog, if you'd like to read a well-written liberal criticism of the treatment of Brendan Eich. Although the issue is not as discriminatory, I also don't think someone should be hounded out of a job for trying to restrict homeschooling. Do you?

I interpret this to mean that you are well aware that there are a number of rights and privileges that can only be granted to couples by the state, and that people who claimed, "Gay couples can get all of the rights of marriage by contracting for them, there's no need to call it 'marriage'!" were in fact, quite wrong.

Well, since I am not one those who insisted that they "can get all of the privileges" of marriage without actually marrying, that doesn't bother me. Obviously, the marital deduction is only for married couples. (I have insisted that gay people could get married even while the law didn't allow for same-sex marriage, because they can marry persons of the opposite sex (just like everyone else can), someone in my office was in such a marriage. But that's a different issue.) Some of the privileges of marriage constitute automatic assumptions for which non-automatic methods are available, such as filling out forms for medical power of attorney instead of the automatic assumption that a spouse can act for you. I think, though, that this notional objection to gay marriage is closer to "gays can get all of the legal privileges of marriage, without actually being "married", THAT ACTUALLY DON'T HAVE ANY RELATIONSHIP TO PROCREATION, (even indirect relationships)." That, at least, is probably closer to true but may not be completely true either. In any case, I don't much care about the claim, because I don't think that people who aren't married should actually expect or claim a right to all the privileges of marriage, if those privileges are rationally related to marriage and not just "gimmes".

My point was that there is a difference between holding an opinion about a marriage and taking action against that marriage. To understand this point, doesn't matter whether you feel the opinions are equally valid, or whether you feel that one opinion is reasonable and one is not.

Well, that's fun. You seem to hold a liberal view of civil rights, especially the kinds of rights protected by the first Amendment, of a lot more restricted form than most liberals did until, oh, 10 years ago. But you seem to be narrow in how that gets applied. Or something. I mean, there are people who tried to claim that the first amendment really meant "It's OK for you to believe religiously (or politically) whatever you want, but when you (pick one) try to actually act that way in public, or proselytize, or actually act counter to reasonable laws based on such beliefs, well, that's not what the first amendment was meant to protect. See, it's one thing to believe it, it's another to act on it."

Sure those are different. In fact, my own belief of the VALID limitations in this area are based on Dignitatis Humanae and prior Catholic teaching on religious freedom, which does in fact permit the state to distinguish between belief (which is in the interior forum) and action (which is in the exterior forum). But it still doesn't permit the state to interfere with such action just because your actions are not consistent with the (barely) majority view. So, interestingly enough, even though the (archaic and repressive) Catholic Church would agree with you on the difference between belief and action, it STILL would disagree with you on the application (even if the belief in question were, for example, a directly religious belief contrary to the majority in a Catholic country).

In reality, there in NO COMPLETELY SOUND way to decide between the kinds of actions (inconsistent with majority view) that will be tolerated and the kinds of actions (also inconsistent) that shall not be tolerated, without applying reason to them, and that is also "content neutral". There is no such thing. The reason so applied simply MUST decide on higher and lower goods to be pursued, and it is impossible that these be content neutral. There is no content neutral view of the right ordering of the goods of society. Hence, no matter what, such a choice (whether to tolerate or not) is ALWAYS a choice about the right ordering of competing goods. It is inevitable that when society rightly comes to a decision that it cannot tolerate X contrary course of action that interferes with higher goods, the people who want X to be allowed feel their view is reasonable and society's is not. So, the fact that some people feel their view's reasonableness is being set aside is nothing new - all societies do that whenever they make rules. It is impossible to have rules without ruling that some things will not be tolerated.

You seem to be saying that if Person A believes in her heart that same-sex marriage is not valid, but is willing to allow other people to decide whether they want to enter into same-sex marriages and Person B actively tries to prevent same-sex couples from getting legally married, that neither of those people is doing something wrong. In other words, it appears that your view is that it is licit to disapprove of SSM and it is also licit to take action to prevent legal SSM.

Of course it is true that if SSM is an inherently "evil thing" then doing things to make SSM not legally approved as a distinctly "right thing" is morally licit, and OUGHT TO BE socially licit and would be in any society but a gravely immoral one. Of course it is. That just goes without saying - it't not even controversial. And it's not the issue here. No person with an ounce of moral sense thinks the state ought to go around giving positive approval to inherently evil acts - at most it can not directly disapprove of such evil acts. And if a state would be an immoral state to grant such approval, then every person with any capacity to help change things should do his part to change it. If such actions attempting to change it are "not socially tolerated" this can only be a description of a state whose sensibilities are disordered to the point where right-thinking citizens SHOULD ignore them and actively seek to reverse them. But almost everyone agrees with that.

You're entitled to your opinion about whether each person is in the right, but it is reasonable to acknowledge that Person A and Person B aren't doing exactly the same thing.

Ah, but am I entitled to not be hounded out of polite society for holding such a view?

Of course I acknowledge that Person A and Person B aren't doing exactly the same thing. So does virtually everyone else. The conservative point here is that Person B is doing something that does not deserve being hounded out of polite society for, and until about 4 years ago few liberals would have thought otherwise.

You also seem to be conflating "people have chosen to not tolerate X" with "X is properly not to be tolerated."

> if there is a universal moral intuition, then trying to re-organize society to thumb its nose at that intuition is just a nonsensical thing to do.

A majority of Americans lack this "universal moral intuitions" so I suggest you rethink your theory.

Wow. I half expected this illogic, but it still amazes me. I claim: A implies B, and B implies C, therefore A implies C. You say "I deny A holds, so you need to re-think your theory that A implies C."

YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW what specific moral propositions I was thinking of, if any. I made a generic comment about IF there were one (or some).

But just to get your shorts knotted further, how about this one: Killing sane, competent, healthy, innocent adults for a matter of minor convenience is wrong. Or another: marriage is about being together in some sense, so for a "couple" who have never communicated with each other, have never been together, and never expect to be together, and don't plan on attempting to be together, there is something wrong with saying their situation would be "marriage." Even if the king puts forth a declaration "K is married to L" because he wants to.

There ARE very, very widely held intuitions about marriage.

So now you are just asserting that 1. Aristotle was right and 2. he supports your theory. I think our conversation is over, you've stopped being substantive and are hysterically ranting about abortion and pretending like your argument about moral intuitions wasn't about gay marriage. We're done here.

So now you are just asserting that 1. Aristotle was right and 2. he supports your theory.
Sometimes I wonder if everybody is reading the same thing. It reminds me of the old poem about the blind men and the elephant, each of them absolutely convinced they were touching something totally different when in reality it was just one elephant.
So now you are XXXX asserting that 1. Aristotle was right and 2. he supports your theory.

Correct. I am asserting that an extended argument of Aristotle's, made in a couple of hundred pages of text, constitutes a rational (non-religious) argument that the intellect is such a faculty of apprehension and that because of man's capacity to know, certain kinds of behaviors are known to be disordered for human beings.

I am asserting that Aristotle supports my theory, because my theory is, precisely, Aristotelian.

I am asserting that the extended argument, covering a couple hundred pages, cannot be made in a blog box, and imagining that someone could or should do so is infantile.

I am telling you precisely where to find the argument that you asked for, knowing full well that any reasoning person would be able to understand such a reference. That you cannot grasp it is not a surprise.

Tony: Killing sane, competent, healthy, innocent adults for a matter of minor convenience is wrong.

Dunce:

and are hysterically ranting about abortion

I am also asserting that characterizing the killing of sane, competent, healthy, innocent adults as being *abortion* is...gee, I don't have a word for it. Somebody help me out: what's an English word that means "even STUPIDER than infantile, and implies refusal to even read or consider the meaning of words as written"? Well, whatever it is, Dunce, you are being even stupider than merely infantile.

There ought to be a law forbidding the possibility that minds like this escaping school would be under the impression they are "educated." A person capable of being this stupid ought to AT LEAST KNOW, because they have been told over and over until it sinks in, that they are stupid. Anything else is educational malpractice of the worst sort.

Sometimes I wonder if everybody is reading the same thing. It reminds me of the old poem about the blind men and the elephant

Well, yes, like that. Especially if one of the two first walks out of the area, walks into the crocodile cage with a raw beef roast, pokes his eyes out, and then feels around for the elephant.

Or another: marriage is about being together in some sense, so for a "couple" who have never communicated with each other, have never been together, and never expect to be together, and don't plan on attempting to be together, there is something wrong with saying their situation would be "marriage." Even if the king puts forth a declaration "K is married to L" because he wants to.

The weird thing about your list is that for arranged marriages the first half was sometimes true, and for the second half if marriage is all about procreation the male could just donate his sperm and they would never have to see each other to be married.

Also, I don't grant that being removed from a CEO position is the same as being hounded out of polite society. I fully expect Eich to find another job in another company, assuming he wants one, perhaps in a different industry and far away from Silicon Valley.

Also, I don't grant that being removed from a CEO position is the same as being hounded out of polite society. I fully expect Eich to find another job in another company, assuming he wants one, perhaps in a different industry and far away from Silicon Valley.

But the reason he was removed from the CEO position was a lesser form of being hounded from polite society as it had nothing to do with his actual job qualifications. The only realistic reason why the latter portion of your assertion is true is that those who caused his ouster don't have the reach to go beyond that point because there is literally nothing about their behavior that suggests they would have stopped there. The only way to conclude otherwise is simply to creatively read between the lines.

if marriage is all about procreation

Sure, that's a fair summary of Tony's remarks. Spot on, Step2. (Then again, it is entirely possible that you are ignorant of the rich literature addressing the unitive and procreative aspects of marriage. If so, here is a very engaging young man's investigation of it: http://youngevangelicalandcatholic.blogspot.fr/2013/05/finding-life-part-1-asking-question.html)

Dunce really has tapped out the old Keg of Dullness here. Several times he demands a "nonreligious justification" for moral reasoning, and then when Tony obliges, even helpfully providing citations in Aristotle's works (which could be found and perused instantly via Google), he dismisses the whole thing as a cheap appeal to authority.

But of course, any careful reader can observe that Tony did not appeal to authority; he supplied the argument demanded by adducing one of the most fundamental expositions of it.

The good thing is this, that Dunce says the conversation is over and he's done here.

Especially if one of the two first walks out of the area, walks into the crocodile cage with a raw beef roast, pokes his eyes out, and then feels around for the elephant.

Ha! You'd think the elephant would be dangerous enough...

perhaps in a different industry and far away from Silicon Valley.

Gosh, I never thought of it that way. Just a flesh wound. After all, who doesn't want to be forced to abandon his life's work and move far away from everything he's ever done and everything he knows, and made a villain and an object of hatred among the people with whom he's spent his career?

You're right. We conservatives overreact to every little thing.

The weird thing about your list is that for arranged marriages the first half was sometimes true, and for the second half if marriage is all about procreation the male could just donate his sperm and they would never have to see each other to be married.

Oh, come off it, Step2, that's hopelessly obtuse reductionism even for a liberal. "Well, when we cut him up to find his "life", we couldn't find anything of the sort in his top half, nor in his bottom half, so I conclude that he couldn't possibly have been alive. Sure isn't now." Yeah, and sending sperm by FedEx has the same meaning as the conjugal act, too.

You know, I myself have talked about arranged marriages here and there in these pages, so it isn't like I was going to forget about the possibility in identifying my universally held moral intuition. And that example still holds: there is no people or culture in which they consider something that looks like what I described to be marriage, because every single people and culture thinks marriage implies some sort of life together, in some respect. Every form of arranged marriage I have ever heard of has it.

After all, who doesn't want to be forced to abandon his life's work and move far away from everything he's ever done and everything he knows, and made a villain and an object of hatred among the people with whom he's spent his career?

Anyone who knows how to avoid controversial issues like the land mines they are and certainly someone who never donates to single issue ballot initiatives rather than political candidates or political parties which provides more ideological cover. Oh wait, that was a rhetorical question...I have no sympathy for any CEO now or ever.

Yeah, and sending sperm by FedEx has the same meaning as the conjugal act, too.

One of my female coworkers refers to her ex-husband as "the sperm donor", so it depends on the context I guess.

One of my female coworkers refers to her ex-husband as "the sperm donor", so it depends on the context I guess.

As it is being used as a term of derision, that example seems to prove the point.

Marriage isn't all about procreation, but that's a defining part of it. In fact, the liberal endorsed case against incestuous marriage is entirely based on procreation being a significant enough consequence of marriage that an incestuous married couple can be reasonably expected to have children.

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