How to build a straw man

AJ Antonin Scalia official portrait.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

If you want to see a very good example of a straw man argument, I suggest you read Daniel Fisher's attempt to take down AJ Antonin Scalia's dissent in United States v. Windsor, posted in Forbes. It's witty, light reading and betrays very little grasp of Scalia's argument or his judicial philosophy. In fact, it demonstrates just about everything that's wrong with the media and political discourse today.

Here is my best attempt to reconstruct the steps Fisher took to write his article:

1. Skim through Scalia's dissent, pulling out of it some juicy quotes on the fly. This isn't hard to do, because Scalia's writing is eminently readable, remarkably free of legal jargon and obscure polysyllabic words.
2. Go back to Scalia's dissent in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and do the same thing. This is a longer process, because it actually involves three separate cases that were combined, and covers four different aspects of a very long Act.
3. Convert judicial restraint from a general approach to an absolute principle.
4. Write your post, making sure you keep it within Forbes' word limit.

Step 3 is where the shape of the scarecrow is put together. The transformation is something like the conversion of William of Ockham's "law of parsimony" into "Ockham's razor": A principle that merely admonishes one not to introduce unnecessary elements into an explanation somehow became a reductive, misleading idea that true explanations are always — or at least usually — simpler than untrue explanations.

Thank God for the First Amendment!

While you're getting prepared for the annual 4th of July festivities, you might spend a little time on your knees praying the Litany for Liberty, one of the prayer resources being offered by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops for The Fortnight for Freedom. They also offer another prayer that's being printed on the back of prayer cards, the front of which will have a picture of Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States. The same prayer is also offered on the back of cards bearing Our Lady of Guadalupe (Patroness of the Americas and of the unborn) and St. Thomas More (Patron of Religious Freedom).

As I've written before, the point of the First Amendment is to protect the right of the people to have a voice in their governance. That's why we find the "establishment clause" paired with the "free exercise clause", and why we find them included with the rights of speech, the press, peacable assembly and petition. Just now, though, we find the freedom of religion threatened both directly and indirectly — directly through enforcement of the HHS mandate, indirectly by a possible declaration by SCOTUS that neither Congress nor the several states may defend marriage as an essentially heterosexual institution.

Setting a new low in the pro-abortion fight

The Media Research Center's Brad Wilmouth brings us this desperate attempt to pass off anti-white bigotry as political analysis:

On Saturday's Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC, substitute anchor Ari Melber hosted a panel of liberals fretting over Republican efforts to restrict abortion, with one guest even theorizing that Republicans are motivated by a racist desire to prevent white women from having abortions as a way of "reproducing whiteness, white supremacy, white privilege."

Melber seemed quite accepting of University of Pennsylvania Assistant Professor Salamisha Tillet's preposterous idea of pro-lifers being motivated by racism as he responded:

And you're talking not only then about a potentially religious view about life, [How unreasonable! How crass! To think that someone might let religion influence their view about life!] you're talking about social control. [What's the difference between a lawful, well-ordered society and social control? I guess it's who's writing the laws.] I mean, that goes to some of these programs that are different than just necessarily a position that people disagree with. They also say, no, we need to go into the doctor's room, we need to tell women under threat of, as I mentioned, criminalization of their doctor's conduct [Scandal! Who could reasonably consider a doctor to be a criminal?] or as a prerequisite to doing anything, how they should analyze their medical care, whether to have an ultrasound. Do you think that is a piece of it, too, the social control, Raul?

Without noting that a disproportionately large percentage of women who have abortions are minorities, Assistant Professor Tillet theorized that Republicans are in a "panic" because of the growing number of minorities and characterized "women of color" as being "caught in the fray" when Republicans try to restrict abortion. Tillet:

Well, I think, the Census just released data, so part of it is the changing racial demographics in the United States. For the first time in American history, children born under the age of five are racial, the majority of them are racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S.

So I think that there's a kind of moral panic, a fear of the end of whiteness that we've been seeing a long time in that I think, you know, Obama's ascension as President kind of symbolizes to a certain degree. And so I think this is one response to that sense that there's a decreasing white majority in the country and that women's bodies and white women's bodies in particular are obviously a crucial way of reproducing whiteness, white supremacy, white privilege. And so I think it's just a kind of clamping down on women's bodies, in particular white women's bodies, even though women of color are really caught in the fray.

In other words, it's all about forcing white women to breed so we can make up for the immigration of black and brown people. Not the most efficient way to maintain supremacy, is it? This isn't the most idiotic theory I've ever heard.

On second thought, yes it is.

Happy Father's Day!

SSgt. Franklin E. Layne, USAF(Ret.) (1928-2002)

Not "Happy Sperm Donor Day". Not "Happy Mom's Boyfriend/Girlfriend Day". Happy Father's Day. And a great big "thank you" to all the men who step up, show up and participate in bringing up their children rather than just writing a check every so often — you guys rock!

The right to keep and bear children

In 1968, an ecologist named Garrett Hardin wrote an article for Science magazine titled “The Tragedy of the Commons”. A utilitarian and Malthusian, Hardin argued that the modern welfare state made it possible for people to gain the advantages of large families while socializing their costs. Therefore, the solution to overpopulation must be based in part on “relinquishing the freedom to breed”.

Forty-five years later, Peter Singer — also a utilitarian and Malthusian — essentially repeated the “tragedy of the commons” argument at the Women Deliver Conference in Kuala Lumpur. Ironically, given his hero status among progressives and the venue at which he was speaking, Singer began to speak of “reproductive rights” as though they would very soon be a thing of the past and that the nations would soon need to force contraception and abortion upon the unwilling.

It’s possible of course, that we give women reproductive choices, that we meet the unmet need for contraception but that we find that the number of children that women choose to have is still such that population continues to rise in a way that causes environmental problems. … [We] need to consider whether we can talk about trying to reduce population growth and whether that’s compatible with the very reasonable concerns people have about women’s right to control their life decisions and their reproduction.

 If it weren’t for his invocation of climate change, Singer’s faith in the population bomb would make him look like the last man on earth still concerned about the Y2K demon. In fact, to certain of the attendees, Singer appeared to embody the old colonial fear of brown people. Said Kavita Ramdas of the Ford Foundation in New Delhi, “We have been there before. ... We have seen forced sterilizations. We have seen the fears that the West has of brown people overrunning the world. We are tired of being slaves to colonial masters.”

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

In Memoriam: Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, Ph.D. (1928-2013)

I might have drifted completely away from religion between my 21st and 41st birthdays except for two writers. C. S. Lewis kept me a Christian. Father Andrew M. Greeley kept me a Catholic.

I was twenty-five when I read How to Save the Catholic Church, which Fr. Greeley co-wrote with his sister, theologian Mary Greeley Durkin. Over the next fifteen years, I read quite a few of his books, at first only his non-fiction, then his fiction. Two books in particular I recommend for Catholic apologists: The Catholic Myth, an exploration of the Church through Fr. Greeley's model of the analogical imagination, and Faithful Attraction, a study of marriage and the factors that help make it work. Although as I reverted back to full communion with the Church I came to disagree with certain of Fr. Greeley's positions, I also knew that, in many respects, he and Dr. George Weigel had more points in common than many people would think (including them).

Undue diligence at the IRS

If the IRS had been more politically savvy, the agents in charge would have thrown in some "balance" keywords as well — words like "Occupy" or "99 Percent." But those balance keywords wouldn't have mattered, because the Occupy movement wasn't setting up hundreds of new 501(c)(4)s. But we don't have a particularly savvy IRS, and so we're left with this bumbling scandal.

—David Karpf, "'IRS-gate' as Conservative Political Correctness", Huffington Post, 5/15/13

Initially, the bulk of this [political] money [streaming through non-profit entities] came from groups that tilted right. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but the plaintiffs in Citizens United wanted to run a pay-per-view movie critical of Hillary Clinton, then the front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Today, left-leaning groups are just about caught up, and the new left- and right-leaning voices in federal elections are approaching parity with each other.

—David Morrison, "The Real Scandal Behind 'IRS-gate'", Crain's Chicago Business, 5/16/13

Okay, guys, you may want to get your stories straight with each other. 

Both Karpf and Morrison are agreed in principle, though: There's nothing really wrong with the IRS digging into the motives and personalities behind non-profits; they just goofed by biasing their efforts towards conservative groups. Karpf, as HuffPo's puppet academic, seemingly believes that the sole liberal group warranting such attention is the Occupy movement; there are, in his world, no liberal 501(c)(4) organizations. But if there were, he theoretically grants that they too should have been scrutinized. 

The idea that the scrutiny itself might be objectionable they both wave away as conservative opportunism masking as principle. The point of the Citizens United case is that corporations, associations and unions also have the right to participate in the public forum via the First Amendment. Morrison finds political figures such as Karl Rove attempting to influence elections outrageous, while Karpf objects to wealthy people having a voice in the public square (did I mention he was writing in HuffPo?). Silly me, I tend to think of such things as part of the baggage of democracy and the First Amendment. After all, astroturfing is what put our current Glorious Leader in office. Sauce for the goose.

What do these young French Catholics want?

Protesters at a March '13 Paris anti-SSM demonstration.
(© 2013 Jean-François Gornet)

Much to the surprise of everyone, the strongest, most vocal resistance to same-sex marriage comes from the people of France. Once storied for their sexual laissez-faire, and reputed to be one of the most thoroughly secularized cultures on the planet, more and more French people are discovering that they're still Catholic after all these years.

Of course, it can't come as a bigger surprise to anyone other than the rest of the French population. Christine Pedotti, editor-in-chief of the pro-SSM magazine Témoignage chrétien ("Christian Testimony"), remarked to Marie Lemmonier of Le nouvel observateur ("The New Observer"), "It is a real groundswell ... These young conservative activists obey the Church hierarchy and are addicted to family values and genuflecting. This is the new face of the Church." 

And it's a face she and other progressives don't like:

According to Pedotti, the uncertainty of today's society makes Catholics "crave for authority." [Ah, here comes the psychobabble.] They love — sometimes even idolize — the pope, and hate the 1968 generation, which they consider as the root of all even, the people who are responsible for the Church’s decline. 

"They have made obedience to the Church the most important aspect of their faith, which can sometimes prove counter-intuitive when they fail to follow the strict commandments of the institution. They would rather be in the wrong than challenge the rules," Pedotti explains.

"When you have no backbone anymore, you need to have a body armor. It's like the ‘lobster complex’ coined by French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto to describe the transitional period that teenagers go through, where they act like a lobster, which sheds its outer shell and hides while waiting for the new shell to grow," explains Nicolas de Brémond d'Ars, priest and psychologist. He finds it regrettable that among the adepts of this new trend, the more progressive young Catholics do not have their say. [Mais naturellement ... why would one expect to hear "progressive" voices in a conservative movement? Would you expect to hear an apologia for Obamacare at the next C-PAC convention?]

Ah, I see. This new wave of conservative French kids don't have the backbone to ... cave in and go along with the rest of European society? They're lobsters forming body armor because they blindly follow Pope Francis rather than blindly follow Nicolas Sarkozy? (Have we really, really established as a fact that they're following anyone "blindly"?)

The man (or woman) who isn’t there

It’s never too early in life to treat your children like mushrooms. Or to give them the suspicion that you live in a world only tangentially connected with theirs.

That, apparently, is the operating theory behind Cory Silverberg’s picture book What Makes a Baby (Seven Stories Press, $16.95), reviewed with implausible enthusiasm by Noah Berlatsky in The Atlantic. According to Berlatsky:

Silverberg’s goals here are very deliberate and (in the reader’s guide) carefully spelled out. He wants to include all children, regardless of whether they have a mommy and daddy who had sex, or adopted them, or whether they have two mommies, or two daddies, or (as Silverberg mentioned in the guide) a trans daddy who gave birth to them, or any of a myriad of other possibilities. The book, then, tries not to impose one truth, but rather to open up possibilities and conversations.

Null hypothesis: Silverberg is being (somewhat) honest — he wants to make his book accessible to as many children as possible, including those raised by same-sex couples and transsexuals. Hey — more kids, more royalties; not every author of children’s books is as wildly successful as was Dr. Seuss.

However, as Berlatsky tells it, Silverberg is so determinedly inclusive in his treatment of sex that “the book doesn’t even mention the word ‘mommy’ or ‘daddy’.” Sperm and egg meet in a uterus that doesn’t apparently belong to anyone, through some unspecified means (here’s looking at you, IVF babies!); what connection they have to the colorful blobs, drawn by Fiona Smyth, that represent people is never quite nailed down. You might as well say nothing as be so thoroughly ambiguous.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

Another bad case of conservative foot-in-mouth disease

Thomas Sowell, in The American Spectator, asks the question, "Is Thinking Obsolete?"

Judging from the cover, I'd have to say, "Yes." At least the editor abandoned thought who let the title of the article about Sarah Palin make it to press.

The piece is about Gov. Palin's success at getting conservative politicians elected. I'm not a fan, but I understand that plenty of neo-conservatives and Tea Party types are, so I imagine that her voice has helped bring some votes to the booths. No quarrel there.

So they could have titled it, "Sarah Palin's Success". Or "Sarah Palin, Power Broker". Or any number of other string of words that didn't involve a double entendre that will have people, male and female, red and blue, sniggering like 14-year-old boys watching a blue movie. "Yeah, ol' Palin's got a really impressive rack ... of successes. Heh, heh, heh."

There's no winning on this one. Whether it was intentional or not, women on both sides of the political spectrum will be annoyed and insulted, and feminists of the Sandra Flake variety will find in it confirmation that conservatives are misogynists trying to keep women down.

Is there some sort of sensitivity training that conservatives can go to without drinking the progressivist Kool-Aid?