via positiva

A little over a year ago, I posted a frustrated plea to social and religious conservatives: work with me, I'm trying to help you. For years I've insisted that snarky inversion -- "That guy's so adamant that homosexuality is wrong, he must be closeted!" -- is just wrong-headed and lazy. I'm a big believer in good-faith arguments and logical thinking when it comes to important issues, you know? A few years ago, social conservatives started making that really difficult.

It seems like we're watching gay sex scandals unfold with conservatives on a biweekly basis at this point; Gay hookers and meth? Check. Trying to pick up guys in a public bathroom? Check. Offering sex to black men because they're big and scary and black? Check. Getting your subordinates drunk and trying to give them blowjobs while they're passed out? Sweet Jesus, check. The list just keeps going, and last week another one hit the wires.

[Berkeley CA], after providing free berthing for a Sea Scouts boat for 60 years, said in 1998 that a Boy Scout policy barring gay scouts and atheists violated Berkeley’s rules against discrimination. The city said the Scouts would have to leave the berth or pay $500 a month rent.

Eugene A. Evans, 64, a retired high school teacher and for 35 years leader of the Berkeley Sea Scouts, sued for discrimination and for violating the Scouts’ First Amendment rights. The California Supreme Court ruled in favor of Berkeley.

[This week], Mr. Evans was arrested at his home in nearby Kensington on Tuesday after investigators identified four youths, ages 13 to 17, who said they had been sexually abused by him.

Congratulations, social conservatives. You've made a logical fallacy true. In the face of overwhelming evidence, I withdraw the position that I've held for years and admit the truth. The easiest way to spot a closeted gay S&M furry pedophile is to ask, "Did they vote against Gay rights, or do they regularly talk about homosexuality being a sin?" If the answer is yes, hide your pets: God only knows what they do when you're not looking.

"That preacher keeps talking about how homosexuality is wrong -- he's probably closeted." I've always found that kind of reasoning annoying. It's no different, really, than the "Atheists wouldn't be annoyed by religion if they didn't secretly know we're right" meme trotted out by embryonic apologists. It presumes that any speaker's strong expression of belief is secretly motivated by a guilty secret. It's a silly, circular trap that's fun for rhetorical jabs but useless for real thought.

But seriously, Conservatives have been making this WAY harder than they should be these days. Between Congressman Foley and Evangelical WunderPastor Ted Haggard, the data points are starting to accumulate. You're not helping me with this 'opposing stupid rhetorical tricks' campaign I'm on. It's like trying to explain the problems with straw-man attacks only to have the other debate participant admit, "Well, actually I DO eat puppies, and my plans WOULD lead to the destruction of life as we know it..."

So, if you're going to fight against gay marriage day in and day out, y'know... Please try to avoid the hot man lovin'. Work with me, Conservatives. Please?

A friend of mine -- someone I do respect and enjoy talking with on many subjects -- is also pretty conservative. In an attempt to counteract some of the jouyous liberal celebration regarding Scooter Libby's downfall, he posted a link to an article about The Untold Story of Judith Miller and Joe Wilson. It contained a giggle-inducing number of basic factual errors, but aside from that it trotted out the old accusation the the CIA has been 'out to get the President' since day one.

Using the CIA as an institutional fall-guy has been popular over the last couple of years. If you'll remember, when everyone realized that Iraq had no WMD's and was a complete non-threat to the US, much was made of Bad Intelligence Data From The CIA. "We were just going on what we were told" was the excuse du jour, before 'We were just trying to bring democracy all along' became the popular spin.

To those who had been following the build-up to war and investigating the intelligence from day one, this line was hilarious. Clearly, though, some people don't get the joke. For them, I've provided this helpful chart.

How Dangerous Was Iraq?

1. How Dangerous Iraq Really Was
2. How Dangerous the CIA Said Iraq Was
3. How Dangerous the White House Said Iraq Was

Look closely at it and ponder it for a moment. Iraq was a complete military non-threat. It wasn't even a paper tiger -- it was a paper badger. The White House, though, thought it was super-duper holy bejeebus let's blow stuff up dangerous. This was the argument favored by Sadaam, of course, who had a vested interest in telling everyone he was supremely dangerous.

The CIA, though, disagreed. The CIA is charged, mind you, with finding out stuff -- not acting as the White House's marketing agency. They still over-estimated the danger posed by Sadaam and Iraq, but based on what they knew they insisted the situation was nowhere near as dire as the White House insisted it was. In response, the White House pretty much stopped listening to the CIA and started generating its own intelligence data from sources that confirmed its view of things.

When the dust finally settled and it turned out that Sadaam was a threat to his own people and no one else (like the vast majority of dictators currently in power around the world), the CIA took the blame. Because, y'know, they overestimated how dangerous he was.

How does this relate to the Joe Wilson case and our favorite piece of partisan hackery? Joe Wilson went to Niger to investigate claims that Sadaam was buying uranium there. The White House was using these claims to help prove that Iraq was dangerous. The CIA was skeptical, and had told the White House as much -- they sent someone to investigate further and determined that it was, in fact, a baseless story. They were right.

If that's what the writer calls a "covert operation" conducted against President Bush, perhaps the CIA was a bit too easy on him.

CBS News correspondent Gloria Borger reports that Michael Brown, who recently resigned as the head of the FEMA, has been rehired by the agency as a consultant to evaluate it's response following Hurricane Katrina.

I don't think anything else need be said. Is it Dilbert? Is it The Daily Show? Is it The Onion? I just can't decide.

EDIT: More articles have been popping up. Apparently he's on board, with full pay, until sometime in October. Until then, he'll be helping Congress evaluate the Katrina failures. Apparently, he's said he "should have asked the military for help sooner." Seems to me that a more serious problem was old-fashioned ignorance of the magnitude of the disaster while it was happening.

Is 'If only the military had been there sooner' going to be the new talking point to hammer from every angle? We'll see.

Amusing trivia: the pledge of allegiance was written in the 1890s by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist who was forced out of his Baptist congegation for preachin' liberal views. The pledge was published in a Readers-Digest style magazine at the time. As a member of the National Education Association, he used the pledge in a school flag-raising ceremony on Columbus Day, 1892. In the wake of the Civil War, it was an expression of unity and purpose. At that time, it read:

"I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

In the 1920s, The American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution held Flag Conferences, and officially declared that the pledge had to be changed to use the words 'The flag of the United States Of America' instead of 'my flag.' Bellamy opposed the change, but the change became commonplace. He died about a decade later.

In the 1940s, Congress officially recognized the Pledge, but the Supreme Court immediately ruled that students could not be forced to recite it. In 1954, the Knights of Columbus vigorously lobbied Congress to add the phrase 'Under God' to the pledge, as a means of differentiating us from Godless communists. Congress officially changed the pledge.

The pledge has changed over time. It was originally an organic expression of patriotism by one man -- ironically, one who would've likely been called Very Unpatriotic had he lived to see the 1950s.

America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.

Harpers has a fascinating article on America's uniquely Christian Culture, discussing the core religious tension at the heart of our country's social engine. Seventy-five percent of the population, for example, mistakenly attributes Ben Franklin's proverb "God helps those who help themselves" to the Bible, even though it directly contradicts other Scriptural principles. Metafilter has a discussion gearing up on the article, but it's likely to devolve into "religion: pros and cons" within a few hours.

Meanwhile, over on Kierkegaard Lips, my friend Rachel is grappling with some genuinely profound questions about faith and love.

...I got to thinking about how hard it is to love. How hard it is for me to even think about loving my dad. How hard it is to love people that I think are stupid and mean, or on the other hand those who try too hard to flaunt their giant pulsating brains filled with logic and graphs and boxes and charts. I spoke with a few people lately who told me that their own faith is based largely in logic, and that the more "spiritual" aspect of their faith is virtually non-existant. Sometimes I feel like I have the opposite mentality; my faith largely supported by my dreams, visions, and strange conceptual leaps that I make between Biblical idealogy and manic delusional thought processes based in my own excessive existentialism...

I wonder if she might be talking around the edges of this great divide between our stated 'religion culture' and the way we as Americans tend to think and live and truly believe. But then, it's not just a head versus heart issue -- most Americans are as confused about the logical theology as they are about the 'heart' of Christianity. I've been pondering the country's Revivalist history for a while, partially inspired by Catherine's research about Emily Dickinson. I wonder if these sorts of cracks and inconsistencies in the American religious experience are part of our heritage as much as the First and Second Amendments, etc.

Thanks to Substitute for finding this story before I did. It reduced both of us to baffled, boggling silence.

For centuries, the argument in favor of laissez-faire capitalism has been simple. If you step back and let businesses pursue profit without restraint, legitimate needs and desires will be taken care of in an efficient manner. Moral concerns, the argument went, were better handled by consumers voting with dollars than governments coercing with legislation.

While I have my issues with that presupposition (see earlier posts about The Miracle Of The Market and the language of economics), it has given rise to some innovative approaches to social activism. The Social Investment Forum, SocialFunds.com, and other similar projects play by the rules of the free market, investing money in corporations that don't abuse the environment or exploit their workers. In that way, they're putting a dollar value -- their own money -- on those positive business practices.

Sounds cool, right? Putting moral value into The Market as something with economic weight? Bzzzzzt. According to Steven Milloy, a FoxNews and New York Sun columnist, they're bad people trying to weaken businesses. In order to combat those nasty, nasty investors who let moral responsibility get in the way of stock returns, he's founding a new mutual fund to counter Socially Responsible Investing.

Conrad posted a choice quote from the Wall Street Journal's article:

Founded by Steven Milloy, a columnist for FoxNews.com and The New York Sun, the fund aims to get good returns for investors while - in his words - evening the score with leftist forces that are chipping away at business. Culprits include corporate management, mutual funds and other groups that promote so-called corporate social responsibility.

"Businesses are being pressured by radical politicized left-wing activists to do things not in the best interest of the whole free-enterprise system," said Milloy, also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and publisher of junkscience.com, a commentary site that bears the motto: "All the junk that's fit to debunk." "We want to be a counterforce to the activists," Milloy added.

So, let's revisit. When people decide what to invest in based on moral principle, they're bad. Because if a corporation is doing something legal to make a profit, that's good. But if people try to change laws to keep corporations from doing things they think are wrong, that's bad. Because if people really thought the things were bad, they would vote with their dollars. But if they vote with their dollars, that's bad. So, to stop them, Milloy and his friends will invest in companies that do bad things. And that's good.

Got it.