Monthly Archives: January 2006

How Gay Marriage Is Like Rock And Roll

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Civil unions are like the prizes they hand out at the very end of an elementary school contest of skill. All the winners get books, crayons, or other cool trinkets and then the teacher says, “Because all the rest of you did such good jobs, I’ve got packets of Pop Rocks for everyone.” Those kids know they’re still on the margins and that the candy is a consolation at best but, hey, when there’s nothing else, you might as well enjoy it—and see if the legend about eating the stuff and drinking soda carries any weight.

In recent weeks, I’ve stumbled into a rather heavy share of debates about legalizing gay marriage. I’m used to the bigots who tell us God hates the gays because they’re yucky, but a new stance has been rearing its equally disheveled head. In fact, scratch that. This argument is way worse than the bigots. At least those guys come right out and say it. They don’t like gay people and don’t want to do anything that might encourage gays to consider life a wonderful gift full of opportunities instead of a journey to suffer through until hellfire and damnation. But the intolerant tolerance view of the new crowd is completely without sense—and honesty.

Here’s the typical argument I’ve been hearing. A man and a man are free to enter into union. They can get all the benefits of marriage from a legal standpoint, too: tax filing, visitation rights, inheritance, and so on. Perhaps they’re even allowed to adopt children. But we won’t call it marriage. Maybe “domestic partnership” will do. Because marriage is a sacred vow between a man and a woman. Or a man and a lifelong sequence of women. Or one woman and man after man after man since, surely, somewhere there has to be a Mr. Right. Marriage they all can have, but it’s just not for the gays. Near as I can tell, this has to do with marriage traditionally occurring under a church roof—or a chupah, if you happen to find yourself sitting through that Super Bowl of ceremonies, the old school Jewish wedding.

We’ll ignore that marriage came about as a legal notion to defend property rights and inheritance. It originally had nothing to do with love or the sanctity of one man and one woman. Speaking of which, that monogamy thing is more than a little out of the ordinary, too, when you consider that for most of the world, the man doesn’t limit himself to a single wife but gathers up as many as his social standing—and stamina—will allow. The Christian view of marriage is in the minority, to say the least.

That’s where rock and roll comes in. You see, to the person using the “you can do whatever, just don’t call it marriage” argument, the government should only allow two people to marry if the arrangement meets the criteria for the term as understood by a shrinking portion of the population. These people certainly were in the mainstream in the past and may still be now, but they won’t be for long. As it turns out, teenagers are smart about one thing: in increasing numbers, they recognize that marriage is ideally about two people who deeply love each other entering into a life long commitment. If they happen to be two men or two women, so what? It’s the love and the bond that count.

But let’s get back to rock.

To demonstrate the point promised in the title, let me give the same argument again but, this time, I’ll switch the terminology and focus. If you hang out with enough music lovers, you always find that one guy. He’s the dude with concert shirts older than your parents who spends most evenings either rocking out to his collection of, well, rock, or telling other people they ought to be doing the same. Get him drunk and he’ll start spewing the refrain we’ve all heard before: “Rock and roll ended with Jimi Hendrix (or whatever band the guy is totally into). He died in ‘70 and rock died with him. Everything since is crap and it’s not just crap. It’s sellout, corporate, stupid people crap.” You then give him some line about how maybe this band, the one that just released that amazing album not two months ago, surely they’re rock and roll? But, no, it’s not the same thing. And, what’s more, he’s taking his beer and going home because to even call that stuff rock is to offend him straight through to his cockles.

He’s got his own idea of what rock and roll music is and he just can’t imagine that anyone else would think differently. If they do, there’s something wrong, and taking his beer and going home—or getting the government to pass a law about it—is the only solution he can imagine. Fortunately, not many of us take people like that seriously, nor should we. They can sulk in their dens until Jimi Hendrix is born again and the rest of the world will move on.

Homosexuality is well along the road to acceptance—and marriage is a crucial and inevitable part of that. So let’s all enjoy our new music and our new culture and realize that there will always be some who are simply and profoundly bothered by change.

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Not Since Jim Crow: The Racism of Affirmative Action

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With Executive Order 11246, President Lyndon Johnson established affirmative action by mandating that federal contractors “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” That was 1965. Over the next forty years, civil rights organizations and the Supreme Court did everything they could to bend affirmative action into the polar opposite of Johnson’s intent and, in so doing, created the most sweeping and damaging example of institutionalized racism since Jim Crow.

This essay seeks to demonstrate how affirmative action, far from being a program of anti-racism and liberal ideals, is in fact deeply racist in its underlying values. In an effort to maintain clarity in light of complex issues, I will focus exclusively on how the topic applies to African Americans, though that is by no means the only group afflicted by affirmative action. Blacks are the most frequently referenced when the topic is discussed, however, and the effects of the policy on them are the starkest.

Before I can begin, it is necessary to define a number of terms, as my argument depends greatly on exact definitions of racism, affirmative action, black failure, and discrimination.

The Defining of Terms

For purposes of this essay, I define racism as the belief in the biological inferiority of a racial group. In common parlance, the term is often applied much more broadly, covering everything from the repercussions of the War on Drugs to the possession of a deep dislike for mexican food. I will not argue against such uses of the term—though I do think they are wrongful applications. Instead, it is good enough for use in this essay to say that belief in the biological inferiority of a racial group is a sufficient, if not necessary, condition for racism.

Because affirmative action is applied to combat discrimination, a definition of that term is required as well. Discrimination is defined as the presence of unequal representation for a given group. So long as that inequality exists, discrimination is assumed to exist. While some may argue against this definition and use one that is broader, unequal representation is the de facto sign of discrimination at work and is always assumed, by those who advocate affirmative action, to be the result of discrimination. Thus, in the case of my argument, unequal representation and discrimination can be seen as synonymous.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, affirmative action takes the form of lower standards for entrance—whether into college or the job pool—for members of certain “underprivileged” groups. Through lowering standards, proponents of the policy hope to increase the particular group’s representation by making it easier for members to gain admittance. Note that this is very different from a quota system in that no hard numbers of necessary members is set. In this essay, I will be focusing exclusively on the lower standards form of affirmative action, though my arguments apply equally well, I believe, to other forms.

The result of discrimination is failure, namely the failure to succeed in proportional number to other racial, ethnic, or gender categories. Affirmative action’s goal is to compensate for or do away with failure on the part of the underprivileged group. To illustrate, I will deal only with black failure, as blacks are the primarily targeted group. Black failure, then, is the lack of achievement, educationally and economically, on the part of blacks when compared to other racial groups.
Thus there is a simple causal relationship that forms the ideological basis for affirmative action: Racism causes discrimination, resulting in black failure, which is solved through the application of affirmative action.

Affirmative Action = Racism

It is now relatively easy to see how a racist view of African Americans sits at the heart of affirmative action. Black failure must be seen as some form of inferiority if the goal of affirmative action is to fix it. After all, if there wasn’t something wrong with the current performance of blacks, something not as good as the performance of other racial groups, there would be no need for a policy to improve that performance. This gets us to the “inferiority” half of my definition of racism. All that is needed now is to show how the inferiority is seen by the policy’s proponents as biological.

Biological inferiority can be found in that affirmative action zeros in on race as the single relevant criteria for the lowering of standards. As such, it considers black failure only as a possible result of race. This discounts other circumstances such as socioeconomic status since it treats middle-class, suburban blacks and poor, inner city blacks identically. Because race is biological, the affirmative action advocate’s quite explicit equation of blackness with failure and inadequacy is clearly racist by the definition given earlier.

Or, to put it another way, affirmative action seeks to combat black failure, which it sees as caused by discrimination, by lowering standards for entrance by blacks into desirable positions. Because the only thing all blacks have in common is race and because the only criteria affirmative action uses for its application is race, affirmative action equates failure—a form of inferiority in regard to those who don’t fail—with blackness. And blackness/race is only genetic, meaning affirmative action sees something inferior about black genetics, which meets my sufficient condition for racism.

Objections & Refutations

The single cogent objection to my argument I can imagine is with my assertion that the only thing all blacks share is blackness/genetics. A second, minor objection about my focus on blacks could be raised, but it is exceedingly weak. The former objection goes as follows: While it is true that all blacks share genetics, it is also true that all blacks share in suffering from discrimination, both historically and currently. As such, black failure is not a result of blackness, but rather of the discrimination directed at that blackness by non-blacks.

There are two responses to this, both strong but one with a wider reach than the other. The first, more narrow response is that it is simply absurd to believe that all blacks have suffered from significant enough discrimination to result in black failure. Finding even one black person who has succeeded means that discrimination is either (a) not universal or (b) not the only cause of black failure. And, obviously, there are countless black people who have succeeded spectacularly, whether financially like athletes or musicians, or educationally and intellectually, such as the African American scholar, Thomas Sowell.

The second response comes from the discussion of how discrimination manifests, specifically that it does so through disproportional representation. I argue that if this is to be used to judge whether affirmative action needs to be applied, then it must also be applied for other under-represented groups, such as men as public school teachers or women as auto mechanics; or even whites in university admissions in California or Washington, where, in the latter, they account for 78.9% of the general population but only 53.9% of the incoming UW freshman—and this in a system without racial preferences. Because the proponent of affirmative action is unlikely to extend the program to include these groups, there must be something other than discrimination/disproportional representation that sets blacks apart. And, once again, that can only be race/genetics. Hence, we are back to affirmative action being a racist policy.

The second objection is that I only deal with blacks in this essay, while affirmative action is often applied to other groups such as women and hispanics and, therefore, it cannot be racist because women and hispanics don’t share black genetics. This is quite easy to deal with by stating that multiple groups receiving affirmative action does not demonstrate the lack of racism with the policy but, instead, that the policy views women and hispanics as genetically deficient, as well.

Conclusion

Even if affirmative action is racist, even if it presupposes that blacks are biologically inferior to other racial groups, a case might be made for its continuation if the program resulted in helping African Americans. While a discussion of the empirical outcomes of the policy is beyond the narrow scope of this essay, the damage is well documented.

Why, then, does this policy continue to enjoy such widespread support? Clearly those advocating it do not think of themselves as racist. Rather, they see their actions as important elements in the fight against racism. And, because they have defined racism into a hidden menace, one that causes discrimination even when those doing the discriminating are now aware of their own “racist” attitudes, affirmative action can continue to exist in a wholly non-falsifiable. fashion. They can always fall back on unconscious racism being the cause of black failure, even if similar failure is displayed by other, non-black groups. In this sense, affirmative action and it’s battle cry of more diversity, can continue, immune to criticism.

It is my hope that the argument in this essay cuts to the very heart of the assumptions behind affirmative action. Only by demonstrating conclusively that the proponent of affirmative action is just as racist, if not more so, than any hiring committees or admissions boards, can the harmful policy be halted or reversed.

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Abandoning Superstition: Why I Don't Believe In God

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If you take a look at the history of ideas from the Enlightenment onward, an unmistakable trend is the steady abandonment of superstition. Weather patterns aren’t caused by raucous spirits. Diseases aren’t the work of angry spouses and their witch doctor friends. We break it to children in sympathetic voices that Santa Claus doesn’t wiggle down chimneys and the Tooth Fairy doesn’t break into bedrooms at night. Few of us care if a black cat meanders across the sidewalk in front of us or if the big exam falls on Friday the 13th. On the whole, then, we’re a reasonable bunch. So why do so many of us persist in believing in what the biologist, Richard Dawkins, has called “an imaginary friend who listens to your thoughts, listens to your prayers, comforts you, consoles you, gives you life after death, [and] can give you advice?”

It’s that sort of god I’m talking about. The personal one, the big guy who hangs out in heaven, watches everything you do, and adds spice to your life when you need it. This is the god the muscled man at the gym was talking about last week when I overheard him explaining to a woman about how his life had been so terrible lately. The thing was, he said, he knew he was going to get through it because “the good Lord never gives you more than you can handle.” So not only do Americans believe in this all powerful imaginary friend, but they’re also convinced he’s the one making their spouses leave, their backs give out, and their children use drugs. That god, the omniscient player of the Sims, is the concept I have so much trouble believing.

It’s important, before going too much further, to lay out rather exactly the point I’m trying to make. Namely, I want to claim that I don’t believe in God, and neither should you. This is quite different from asserting the non-existence of God. To say “there is no God” is a fool’s utterance. How would we know? If God can do everything people say he can, I bet he’d be pretty good at hiding, too. We can’t look everywhere for him and there’s a good chance we wouldn’t even know if we’d found him. In this sense, God is like a ghost. I don’t believe in ghosts but I can’t say with total certainty that they don’t exist.

The reason I don’t believe in God is because I’ve never found a convincing reason to do so. Every argument made to me has fallen prey to counter examples, alternate constructions, and problems of logic. What I’m going to do in this essay is run through one of the more frequent positive arguments for God I’ve heard and show why it shouldn’t convince anybody that he’s up there watching over us.

That most common of arguments goes like this: “I don’t need evidence for the existence of God. I have faith.” That’s a terrible reason for believing anything and I’m going to explain why, but let me first take a couple of steps back and introduce the topic of Phenomenal Conservatism. See, for philosophers, knowledge is a sticky concept. If you don’t believe me, grab an introduction to epistemology textbook and prepare the have your simplest assumptions thoroughly rocked. The issue Phenomenal Conservatism want to solve is the problem of justified belief. When are we justified in believing something? Justified means roughly that it is acceptable to believe it. So if I’m standing in front of a table with a cougar sitting in the middle of it and I turn to you and say, “I believe there’s a bullfrog on that table,” you could rightly question my justification for that belief. The trouble is most knowledge stems from our senses and those can be deceived. The most recognizable form of this argument is the brain in a vat thought experiment, which was the basis of the central conceit of the Matrix movies.

Phenomenal Conservatism jumps into this fray by providing the following basis for justification.

  1. If it seems to me that P
  2. and there are no defeaters for P
  3. then I am justified in believing P

What I want to argue is that the faith argument is a specific form of Phenomenal Conservatism and, therefore, collapses when facing the arguments traditionally used against its parent.

So what’s wrong with Phenomenal Conservatism? Well, think about it for a moment. If you follow through on the logic, you’ll see that it can be used to justify belief in pretty much anything. For sample, let’s say I believe in unicorns. Am I justified in do so? It does seem to me that unicorns exist. And there clearly aren’t any defeaters for this position. After all, nobody has conclusively disproved the wonderful tales of brilliant and beautiful horses frolicking in the woods, somehow managing not to get the the narwhal tusks sticking out of their heads caught on every low branch.

And there lies the problem. Phenomenal Conservatism, as a criteria for justification, is way too powerful. It’s the reverse scorched earth approach to epistemology. Don’t want to risk throwing out beliefs that are justified? Then just go out and justify everything. This sort of thinking isn’t only sloppy–it can be quite dangerous.

For example, consider the following situation proposed by the philosopher, Michael Tooley. Let’s say I believe there is a supreme being who has the power to put me up in a nice loft in downtown Paradise after I die. He’ll give me wine and women and all the sitcoms on TV won’t have laugh tracks. Sounds like a good deal, right? There’s a catch, of course. You see, to land this righteous, posthumous pad, I have to go out and kill people who don’t believe in my omnipotent patron. If I don’t slaughter at least twenty heathens by the time I kick the bucket, I’m going to some place far worse than Paradise.

It certainly could seem to someone that the above is the case. And there aren’t any defeaters. How could there be? This makes the above belief justified according to Phenomenal Conservatism. But we don’t want that. We’ve had enough people killed by lunatics who hold fast to similar beliefs to make it more than worth our time to show how they are in fact not justified in flying planes into buildings and chopping the heads off of Wall Street Journal reporters.

So Phenomenal Conservatism isn’t good enough. It’s too easy to justify even the most erroneous and idiotic beliefs. Now think about the argument from faith for a moment. Isn’t it more or less the same thing? I have faith in God which means it seems to me that God exists. Furthermore, nobody has disproved the existence of God. Therefore I’m justified in believing in God. End of debate. Let’s all send our money to the 700 Club.

Wanting to believe something isn’t a good enough reason for actually believing it. I want to believe I will win the Powerball lottery next week without even having to buy a ticket. Maybe such a belief is fine because it’s rather innocuous. The trouble starts when I act upon that belief. I throw away all my existing furniture because, you know, I’ll have way better stuff next week. Who needs a Sears bought sofa when you’ll be able to afford the entire Ethan Allen store in seven days?

Or maybe I believe that good Christians can cure their cancer through prayer. I tell all the men in my congregation who are being slowly killed by tumors in their prostates to stop writing checks to doctors and, instead, write them to the 700 Club. And all you women with breast cancer? You ought to do the same. After all, Jesus healed those lepers. And, dammit, I’ve got faith he’ll do the same for you.

Belief in God is a big deal. It makes people radically change the way they live. It informs their sense of morality, for better or, just as often, for worse. And when faith in involved, there isn’t any way to question the justification for hatred of gays, the slaughter of non-Muslims, or terrible gospel rock.

I don’t believe in God because I don’t have a reason to. I understand how life can evolve without divine guidance. I don’t feel a need to hold fast to the idea that my consciousness will continue after I die. I have a firm grasp of the secular grounding of morals. I don’t need Dawkins’ imaginary friend.

In short, I don’t believe in the supernatural because it all strikes me as more than a little made up. Without hard evidence to the contrary, I don’t see how any reasonable person can think that this last weekend celebrated the birth of a guy who literally raised the dead, turned water to wine, magically healed the sick, and, if he’d had half a mind to, probably could’ve shriveled penises with the best of those crazy African witch doctors we’re always reading about in the international editions.

I mean, if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

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How The Minimum Wage Hurts The Poor

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I can’t remember the last time I heard someone other than an economist speak sensibly about the minimum wage. Here is the ultimate “You can all have everything you want without any consequences” political promise. You’re poor? Well, us powerful guys and gals in Congress are going to snap our fingers and give you all a raise. Then you can be part of the American dream.

Of course it doesn’t work. While those poor folks are standing behind the podium, looking photogenic as their Representative or Senator talks about how, if reelected, he’ll see to it that every last one of these downtrodden souls can afford not only an HDTV but also a Harvard Education for their children, the sad truth is they’re being screwed. That’s the dirty secret of feel good minimum wage boosting proposals: the people they’re intended to help are those they hurt most.

It ought to be easy to figure see why. Let’s say I run a small business. Now, like all the other moderately successful entrepreneurs out there, my profit margins are paper thin. If I run a grocery store, for example, it’s likely I take home a penny for every dollar of food sold. And a big chunk of the 99 cent per dollar expenses is wages. In this small store, I employ twenty people. Most of them are teenagers working evenings and weekends so they can afford to stay on top of the Playstation and Xbox arms race they routinely engage in with their peers. But a few, the ones who work during the day when everyone else is at school, are actually poor. They’re doing everything they can to support themselves on wages I give them.

Then a new guy comes into office. He’s going to help these employees of mine and he’s going to do it by forcing me to pay them not $5.15 but $6.15 every hour. Suddenly, by political magic, they’ll be able to afford the extra baby formula. Which is all well an good if that’s actually what happens. But sadly, many these hard workers, instead of getting an extra buck an hour, will soon be making nothing. I’ll have to let them go.

Maybe I’ll fire because I’m a mean capitalist and there’s nothing I like better than stomping the poor under my thousand dollar boots, but that’s rather unlikely. Instead what happens–and it’s what any freshman economics major couldn’t told that politician would happen–is that I just can’t afford to keep them all around. To keep the math behind this unfortunate forcing of my hand simple, let’s say my store is only open one hour a day and, during that hour, all twenty of my workers are punched in. At $5.15 an hour, my total payroll expense is $103 daily. Thanks to this new legislation, however, it’s jumped to $123. Twenty bucks more. Where’s that money going to come from? The thing is, the politician doesn’t care. He’s done his part in forcing me to give my workers “what they deserve.” His hands are clean and he walks away to solve more problems in equally mislead fashion.

But I’ve got to figure out how to get an extra twenty dollars. I could sell more food but, hey, if it were that easy, chances are I’d have been doing it long ago. I might dock my own pay but it’s a good bet that wouldn’t come close to covering the difference. Maybe I’ll jack up the prices on my food–except, as the economists say, demand curves aren’t vertical. If the price goes up, the amount of food I’ll sell will drop. My only remaining option is to let people go. Four of them, in fact. So while sixteen of my original twenty workers are taking home the extra dollar, four of them are filing for unemployment. At least the politician kept his office so he can continue to help the poor.

The hurt caused by minimum wage laws doesn’t end there, however. While we can measure the number of jobs lost when wages are forced to increase (20% loss in the case of my hypothetical grocery store), there is no way to get an accurate count of the jobs not created in the first place. It could’ve been that, in just a couple of months, if business had continued to grow, I would’ve stuck an ad in the paper and hired five more grocery store clerks. Thanks to the minimum wage hike, I fired four instead. Because those five jobs never existed to begin with, they don’t count as a loss.

Proponents of minimum wages usually j”ump in right about now with, “But we’re only talking five or six or seven dollars an hour. Surely American businesses can afford that.” I guess I’d rather leave it up to the businesses themselves to determine what they’re capable of paying. They surely know more about their daily cash flow than any law maker. F.A. Hayek demonstrated the truth of that knowledge disparity half a century ago. And if it’s true that the minimum wage helps the poor, why stop comfortably below the ten dollar mark? How about twenty dollars an hour? That’d be a living wage. Clearly very few people would be employed if that were the baseline wage. Even the most big hearted minimum wage supporter can see that. But, then, what makes him or her think slightly lower wages are any different. The minimum wage costs jobs and it does so primarily by driving our poorest and most unskilled out of the workforce.

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