Positive Liberty

Good for Poland. I wish there were more such trials. Many, many more.

Jonathan Rauch gives what I think is the strongest case for being pro-gay marriage, but against polygamy. Now, this isn’t to say that government shouldn’t recognize polygamous marriages. Perhaps competing interests, like the freedom of adults to enter into whatever consensual contractual arrangements they wish, should trump the concerns that Rauch raises. (See my past post on the issue.)

However, Rauch’s argument does put to rest the claim advanced by Stanley Kurtz et al. that “if we recognize gay marriage, we have no logical grounds for saying no to polygamy.” Wrong, legalized polygamy raises a whole set of concerns not implicated by gay marriage.

If you’re near a newsstand in the next month, grab a copy of Smithsonian magazine and check out the photograph on pp. 56-57. It’s the most astonishing photo I’ve seen of the devastation wrought by the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906. Unfortunately, it’s not posted online—but the article is.

Update: Oh, wait! Here it is…along with some other equally awesome photos.

A very nice commentary from Mark Brnovich at the Goldwater Institute.

Some brief reactions to Kuznicki’s thoughts on immigration.

Continue Reading »

It seems Sandefur and I have some disagreements on immigration. I’m not entirely clear on how deep they go, so I’m offering some clarifications.

Continue Reading »

In Utah, small businesses beg to differ with a bigoted local government:

Signs began popping up in store windows this week in Kanab, Utah proclaiming ”Everyone welcome here!” in a desperate move to avoid a threatened gay boycott. Some businesses went so far as putting small rainbow flag stickers on their front doors.

Dozens of business owners in the small southern Utah community are trying all they can to distance themselves from a proclamation by the city council that Kanab supports the “natural family” consisting of a working husband, a stay-at-home wife and a “full quiver of children.”

The measure was passed by the council in January angering gays in the state and prompting LGBT groups to consider calling a boycott.

Good for them.

Oh, and I’m still grinning about that “full quiver of children” thing. Yes, I know it’s in the Bible — but see, atheist children come in broods.

I’m sad to say that Professor Bernard Siegan, one of the most important figures in economic liberty law, author of Economic Liberties And The Constitution and other important books, died on Monday. He was 82.

Prof. Siegan’s importance to the development of libertarianism and the law is evident from these tributes from two of my PLF colleagues.

Continue Reading »

Dan Weintraub has the scoop on eminent domain reform on the 2006 California ballot.

The illegal immigration problem is so severe in Southern California that it is difficult for people elsewhere in the country, including even Northern Californians, to really understand what’s going on. Whole areas of Southern California are now virtually Mexico. The population of illegal immigrants is enormous, and climbing steadily, at the rates of at least hundreds per day.

Continue Reading »

Yet another example of caving in to threats of violence from Islamic radicals:

Borders and Waldenbooks stores will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.

I’m beginning to think that many Americans don’t really believe in free speech, and we know that the rest of the world doesn’t care much about it. They believe in free speech as long as it’s convenient or as long as it doesn’t offend a protected group. There are people who want to destroy our right to speak out on anything that offends them and they are willing to kill and maim to make sure that happens. If our response to those threats is to shut down our own right to do so, then their goal is achieved without firing a shot. We simply can’t let that happen. Our freedom is too important and it cannot be negotiable.

The solution is not to refuse to publish the caricatures, it is to publish them everywhere so there’s no one to target. That’s why I published them here, with my full and real name exposed along with them. And I am appalled that a bookstore – a business that relies completely on the right to free expression for their very existence – would cave in and refuse to even stock a magazine that contains the caricatures.

I’ve returned from a fantastic vacation, which included a brief stop in Orange County where I gave a speech…in my pajamas.

In an eye-opening post about the hidden history of comic books, Rob MacDougall writes the following of DC Comics co-founder Harry Donnenfeld and his sordid past:

The trucks that carried Donnenfeld’s “spicies” [sexually explicit pulp magazines] also distributed Margaret Sanger’s (then illegal) birth control, Al Smith’s campaign literature, and Frank Costello’s mob liquor. [Donnenfeld's] Eastern News handled Hugo Gernsback’s “scientifiction” stories and Bernarr MacFadden’s body-building magazines, each a parent to Superman and the superhero in their own way. I like that notion a lot — the alt-dot-culture of the 1920s and 1930s, a crucible of cheap magazines and disreputable ideas — and I wish I knew of more good writing on the area. If you haven’t noticed, I’m very fond of unexpected historical connections, especially when they reach into the weirder corners of Americana.

Continue Reading »

An oldie but a goodie, from Reason’s archives (h/t Virginia Postrel):

They were out there six days, huddling under the tarp to shield themselves from the maddening sun, clinging desperately to the raft as summer storms sent waves crashing overhead. Always they were scanning the horizon, hoping for the first flickering glimpse of the Florida coastline.

Continue Reading »

It doesn’t seem as though France has much of an economic future if this type of thing continues. They have to transition away from a system of guaranteed tenure for all workers and towards an American employment-at-will like rule if they want to compete in the global economy.

Future predictions are something that I don’t often engaged in — because so many people get it wrong. There is talk about “the Euro” beating the dollar for ultimate future global economic hegemony. Well, the only way that that’s going to happen is if their economy can compete with ours. And the only way Europe can compete with America, in the long term, is if their economy further deregulates (and if they cut their top marginal tax rates) — at least deregulates to America’s level of economic flexibility (which is far from ideal laissez faire capitalism; but relatively speaking, it’s better in America than most if not all of Western Europe, save for maybe Switzerland).

But…if this type of nonsense continues in France and other parts of Western Europe, I’d put my eggs in the dollar’s basket.

After spending much of her life chasing the academic dream, Rebecca Steinitz is giving it up:

We academics are deeply invested in our own significance. We were the smartest ones in the class. We believe the life of the mind is sacred and we are living it. Our ideas are our selves. When we come up against biased tenure committees or uncongenial locations or grinding teaching loads, we convince ourselves that this is the price we must pay for the greatness we are meant to achieve, and we suck it up, complaining all the way.

I do know happy academics of my generation. Some are wildly successful, living out the myth. Others have found niches in which they can happily do work that satisfies them, giving up the myth. But too many of us hang onto the myth and let go of satisfaction.

When people say I’m a brave role model, I have to laugh. I don’t feel very brave. Mainly I feel shell-shocked. Giving up the security of tenure and remaking one’s life at 41 is hard, so hard that sometimes I ask myself why I’m doing it. Is it an act of hubris, based on the continuing belief that I am great and only need to find the arena in which my greatness will be appreciated, or is it an act of submission, acquiescing to my own ordinariness? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that no longer an academic, I’m a lot happier.

I have to say I identify with her, at least to the extent that someone just out of graduate school can. Yes, she wants out; yes, I want in. Still I identify.

First, it seems decreasingly accurate to say that I’m an academic. True, I have a new upcoming peer-reviewed article, a book chapter with a scholarly press under contract, and several offers to speak at major upcoming meetings (only some of which I can afford to hon0r in the pay-your-own-way world of humanities conferences).

Still, though, I’m not working at a university, and I miss it like I can’t believe. I’m the kid with his nose pressed up against the storefront window. Yet a bit of me understands that yes, this is a dream, and that no, dreams don’t always work out the way you planned them.

Already, many and perhaps even most in my cohort have found jobs and are well on their way to tenure. Having been through the academic job search twice — both times unsuccessfully — it’s hard not to be a bit dispirited. Though it may only date from this past September, the degree in my hand isn’t getting any younger, and I am keenly aware that every day not spent teaching or in the archives will count against me with many institutions.

Will I be happier here? Or there? At a nonprofit? In the federal government? As a stay-at-home dad? As an academic — if I’m lucky? I’ve been hoping for the latter for so long that it’s almost impossible for me to evaluate the other possibilities anymore. I’ve considered all of them, and I trust myself on none of them. Which leaves me with the dream, frigtheningly unfulfilled as it is.

But as I like to quote, happiness is a long patience. I wish you well, Rebecca.

A couple of people over the last few days have emailed me links to articles about whether Justice Scalia should recuse himself from today’s Hamdan case (a case involving whether detainess at Gitmo must be given civil trials in American courts) because of his recent remarks indicating how he would vote in the case. Newsweek reports the facts:

During an unpublicized March 8 talk at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, Scalia dismissed the idea that the detainees have rights under the U.S. Constitution or international conventions, adding he was “astounded” at the “hypocritical” reaction in Europe to Gitmo. “War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts,” he says on a tape of the talk reviewed by NEWSWEEK. “Give me a break.” Challenged by one audience member about whether the Gitmo detainees don’t have protections under the Geneva or human-rights conventions, Scalia shot back: “If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I’m not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it’s crazy.”

Here he essentially declared how he would vote in the case before ever hearing it, prompting many people to call on him to recuse himself from the case. Since Chief Justice Roberts is already recused because he ruled on the same case on the DC Court of Appeals, that would leave only 7 justices to rule in the case, including the 4 most liberal justices. My initial reaction to it may have been all wrong. In fact, here is what I wrote to Jay from Ocellated.com:
Continue Reading »

Over the weekend I bought Michael and Jana Novak’s Washington’s God and have thumbed through a little of it. (I also bought Yes – Songs from Tsongas – 35th Anniversary Concert). Though I’ve studied, in detail, Washington’s religious beliefs, I’m sure the book will inform me of things about which previously I had not known.

But let me make a prediction: Whatever the conclusions the Novak’s draw, the book will not demonstrate that Washington was an orthodox Trinitarian Christian; rather the facts will support Gregg Frazer’s thesis that Washington was a Theistic Rationalist and his religious beliefs were more or less the same as Jefferson’s, Franklin’s, Adams’s, and Madison’s.

The book aptly demonstrates that Washington believed in a warm intervening Providence (hence he wasn’t a strict Deist). But that is a tenet of theistic rationalism. The theistic rationalists were also theological Unitarians. And indeed, we get no evidence that Washington believed in the Trinity. In fact, Washington never referred to God in Trinitarian terms, and virtually never mentioned the words “Jesus Christ.”

The only record of Washington mentioning the words “Jesus Christ” was in a Speech to the Delaware Chiefs given in 1779 where he stated

Brothers: I am glad you have brought three of the Children of your principal Chiefs to be educated with us. I am sure Congress will open the Arms of love to them, and will look upon them as their own Children, and will have them educated accordingly. This is a great mark of your confidence and of your desire to preserve the friendship between the Two Nations to the end of time, and to become One people with your Brethen of the United States. My ears hear with pleasure the other matters you mention. Congress will be glad to hear them too. You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are. Congress will do every thing they can to assist you in this wise intention; and to tie the knot of friendship and union so fast, that nothing shall ever be able to loose it.

This seems to be pretty reasonable practical advice given to Indians for assimilating into the culture where the Christian religion was dominant.

Finally, on Novak’s website he has a long quote from the eminent historian Gordon Wood, who, more or less, reads the facts the Novak’s uncover in the same way that I do: Washington believed in a warm Providence, so he wasn’t a “strict” Deist, but wasn’t an orthodox Trinitarian Christian either. Wood writes:

I don’t think in Washington’s case that he held back anything. I think he just naturally lacked, what I would call, a religious sensibility, except that he did believe in God and, as Michael says, in Providence and the interposition of this God, but he was not what we call an evangelical Christian. He certainly rarely ever used the name of Jesus in any of his writings. So it’s hard to see him as an evangelical or even a deeply religious person in the usual Christian sense. But nonetheless, he is religious; there is no secular mind there.”

I was going to save this John Adams quotation for a later time, but since Andrew Sullivan has taken to defending the rights of atheists and invoking the Founders to boot, I figured I’d feature John Adams’s thoughts on the matter (taken from James H. Hutson’s book of quotations on the Founders and religion).

“Government has no Right to hurt a hair of the head of an Atheist for his Opinions. Let him have a care of his Practices.”

John Adams to John Quincy Adams, June 16, 1816. Adams Papers (microfilm), reel 432, Library of Congress; as seen in Hutson, p. 20.

This is important to note: The Founders largely followed Locke whose teachings on religious liberty were revolutionary for their time. However, for our time, Locke may not seem so liberal. He wouldn’t extend (at least not in his textual arguments) religious rights to atheists or Catholics. Yet, our Locke imbibed Founders took Locke’s principles to their logical conclusion and did believe in extending the full rights of conscience to atheists, polytheists, heretics and infidels. Or in Jefferson’s words, “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.”

Alan Keyes has a column at the Worldnutdaily about the Afghani man targeted for the death penalty for converting to Christianity. It sounds very much like something I might write on the subject of liberty and the need to protect it not only from dictators but from democratic majorities as well. I’ll put a long quote from his column and my reaction below the fold:
Continue Reading »