Positive Liberty

Speaking of promising political careers, I give you 13 year old Ralph Hardy who ordered a duplicate credit card on his father’s account and used it for a $30,000 spree with friends that ended in a Texas hotel room with $1000 hookers playing Halo on XBox.

What separates Ralph and his friends from your run-of-the-mill juvenile thieves, you ask? When the prostitutes balked because he and his friends seemed so young, they told the women they were “people of restricted growth” and that refusing them would be illegal discrimination against the disabled!

I am in awe.

You can always count on WorldNetDaily to express such an unreal understanding on homosexuality. WND produces two articles about an antigay administrator at the University of Toledo who was suspended for writing an antigay column. Time permits me to discuss only a few points.

First, whatever the legal or constitutional issues involved (whether this is a private school not bound by the First Amendment or a state school that is), it was lame to punish this woman for writing the column. There is plenty wrong with what this woman wrote; and the best way to counter that is to criticize her with more speech, exactly what I’m doing.

Here is one of the offending paragraphs, illustrating her poor argumentation:

“As a black woman who happens to be an alumnus of the University of Toledo’s Graduate School, an employee and business owner, I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are ‘civil rights victims.’ Here’s why. I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a black woman. I am genetically and biologically a black woman and very pleased to be so as my Creator intended. Daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle evidenced by the growing population of PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex Gays) and Exodus International just to name a few.

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This guy is turning out to be almost as bad as Paul Cameron. For those who don’t know, he is a “Concerned Woman For America” who used to work in the insurance industry until he got fired for writing antigay columns on his own time, off work, which although the decision to fire him was perfectly legal, it was also, in my opinion, a lame thing for his bosses to do.

He now works as a professional antigay activist at Concerned Women For America.

Ed Brayton has the goods on one antigay article from WorldNetDaily which quotes Barber. The article is entitled Lesbian demands control over Christian’s daughter, which should tell you all you need to know about it. Now Barber pens his own article for WND entitled Surgeon General’s Warning: Gay sex kills where he goes off the deep end. He thinks he’s informing WorldNetDaily readers of “Just the facts, Ma’am” and proclaims “[i]t’s time to shatter the silence with truth.” Well, he should know that informed readers like yours truly, Ed Brayton and others read WorldNetDaily and expose the lies and distortions that alas are often contained therein. The following is Barber’s lie: Continue Reading »

From Brayton and Pam’s House Blend. Brian Blair is running for local government in Florida and objects to the Day of Silence. All of that gay-baiting done by his arch nemesis the Iron Sheik must have finally got to him. Also notice how the Sheik endorses the view of homosexuality seen in Middle Eastern and Latin regions that only the “bottom” or man who plays the feminine role in a gay sexual encounter is really gay. Sheik himself seems perfectly comfortably in playing the role of the “top” while still seeing himself as a real heterosexual man.

Hat Tip Andrew Sullivan. From here.

Shihe Fu estimates that a rise of one percentage point in the proportion of same-sex couples living in an area raises median house prices by 9 per cent even 10 years later, controlling for some obvious other things.

This suggests that gays improve neighbourhoods; they don’t just choose to live in nicer places.

This could be because gays higher disposable incomes (they don’t have kids) attracts better shops and restaurants. Or it could be that gays’ better aesthetic appreciation enables them to spot attractive but under-priced areas, and to care more about urban regeneration.

This is something I’ve noticed in my anecdotal observations. Though, sometimes it’s hard, when dealing with a complicated reality like sexual orientation/”the gay community” to get anecdotes to translate into good statistics. It looks like there are some stats out there that confirm common sense observations. Gays, on average (again — lots of notable exceptions to the rule) do tend to have higher rates of artistic talent or as the post notes “aesthetic appreciation.” There is something to the “Queer Eye,” stereotype. And a capitalist, market system seems to value those disproportionate talents such that gays, as a group, don’t seem to be economically impoverished. But, again, this shouldn’t be counter intuitive if one rejects the simplistic leftist economic notion that discrimination = collective economic impoverishment. Jewish people have suffered terrible Antisemitism in America and abroad, yet still have flourished economically in spite of it. Ditto with gays.

More importantly this shows that homosexuality is actually good for civilization. There are some behaviors that are destructive of civilization and homosexuality (its behavioral elements; homosexuality has both orientation and behavioral elements) is not one of them. Certain types of risky promiscuous sex are dangerous and not good for one’s health — like smoking. But smoking doesn’t destroy civilization. Some types of behaviors are bad for civilization — for instance out of wedlock births by minor teens whose circumstance prevents them from finishing their education. Go and look at the housing prices/levels of civilization in those neighborhoods. And compare and contrast that with gay friendly neighborhoods and you see the polar opposite.

With an extra helping of schadenfreude. And a side order of irony, too. TheSmokingGun has the dirt. You know you want to see it.

Tomorrow: Nothing but economic history, I promise. Dry. As. Dust. I promise. But today: Whores!

John Corvino pens the perfect answer to the ex-gay movement.

Mark Olson has some very interesting comments on my post “Marriage Against the State.” His first point is as follows:

Marriage has been, historically and socially perhaps even “humanly”, been regarded as more than a contractual matter. A sacramental, liturgical, and eternal significance has almost universally been attached to this event. The phrase, of “pledging our troth before man and God”, is common because it is …, well, common. Marriage (first marriages at least) makes sense as celebration and virtually all cultures that aspect is there in abundance. There is also universally a religious aspect. At the very least, shared liturgical praxis is a to touch the sacred. Charles Taylor in A Secular Age begins by looking at the word “secular”. “Secular” comes from the Latin, saeculum, meaning a period of time. A liturgical rite, in a primal fashion, is a denial of time. It is meant to forge a connection with all the other rites that are the same. The Eucharist for example is a forging of a connection with the first Eucharist during that passover night almost 2000 years ago and every other Eucharist performed everywhere else since then. Marriage ceremonies are the same, a denial of time. This connection between the lover’s bound in marriage and eternity is almost as universal.

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I’m expanding on, and clarifying, a comment I made below. The thesis: Marriage is in many ways a defense against the state. Marriage is many different things, but in a whole set of ways, it is an approach toward a more limited and more tractable form of government. Marriage — “state-sanctioned” marriage — is a defense of the home against the bureaucracy.

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Frank Kameny is the godfather of gay rights activism. He is also a fervent atheist. He’s not an atheist activist ala Dawkins, Dennett, Harris et al., but could be. I sometimes correspond with him via email and I sent him my post to which he has (in his words “hastily”) responded. I remember Kameny coined the phrase “gay is Godly,” and thought perhaps, though an atheist, he might support pro-gay theism. But, his emails explain what he intended. Here they are: Continue Reading »

Last week, Jason Kuznicki wrote what was, IMHO, a very important blog post titled, “Maryland: What if Marriage Were Strictly Religious?”

I’m surprised and disappointed that it didn’t receive more comments.

State legislator, Jamie Raskin’s idea, that marriages should be performed by church and government should only participate in civil unions, is, at first glance, radical. But the more you think about it, the more sense it makes.

But it should be particularly intriguing to the thoughtful people who read this blog.

I see in it a middle ground solution that soothes a culture war problem. So why only one comment about Raskin’s proposal?

HERE’S MY COMMENT

I don’t support the government’s involvement in marriage. And while I don’t agree with everything Matt Trewhella says in his pamphlet, 5 Reasons Why Christians Should Not Obtain a State Marriage License, I certainly find it compelling.

The marriages of the nation’s Founding Fathers were recorded in the family Bible — no license required.

Government involvement in marriage had its origins in the colonial period — in the form of anti-miscegenation laws. In other words, racism was the genesis.

It’s time to end this unholy marriage between holy matrimony and the State. Why should a civil government be able to “license” any form of private association between individuals?

Trewhella writes, Continue Reading »

Ed Brayton points to a long post by this blogger about atheism and homosexuality which he terms staggeringly stupid. Aside from being long winded (I sometimes suffer from this problem), and though I disagree with much of its content, I don’t think it deserves the harsh criticism Brayton leveled. However, what the blogger used many words to argue can be summed up in this pithy passage from a comment he made on the post:

My point is not that atheism is inherently hostile to gays - it’s that it ultimately offers no protection because of its rejection of objective morality in favour of subjectivism or societal or evolutionary explanations. The problem with these is that ultimately, if society is the ground of morality, then it’s no more objective than personal opinion. As for evolutionary explanations, they don’t justify morality. There is a difference between what occurs in nature, and what is morally permissible.

I might flip this around with the converse: Continue Reading »

This seems to me like a great idea:

What if “marriage” was strictly religious?

That’s the question being posed by Maryland state senator, Jamie Raskin. In an effort to thwart the arguments of those opposed to same sex marriage, which are based on religious values, same sex marriage advocates in Maryland are employing a new tactic to obtain parity between the legal rights afforded to straight married couples and their unable-to-get-married LGBTQ counterparts.

The proposal would put all couples, regardless of sexual orientation on equal footing in what would be called a “valid domestic partnership” in the state’s family law code.

What lawmakers are hoping to do with such an initiative is to completely discount the religious arguments against equal marriage. If a state can’t grant a “marriage” but only a secular union, and only churches, synagogues and mosques can perform actual “marriages” then there should be no conflict.

If opposition to same-sex marriage is purely a religious issue, then we face one of two alternatives:

1. The opposition is irrelevant to public policy, because religions disagree on whether same-sex couples should marry. The state must be neutral toward all religions, so the state should treat these marriages equally.

2. Arguably, the state should not be dealing in “marriages” at all.

I’ve inclined toward the former, since a single term may have a valid civil sense and also a religious one. “Offices,” “oaths,” and “courts” are all found in both church and state, for example, and no one complains that the one somehow interferes with the other.

Also, many functions of state-sanctioned marriage are justifiable even under a fairly minimal state. Not all, but definitely some: Designating a presumptive heir, for instance, is a common-sense measure to help protect property rights that also minimizes paperwork. This is exactly what marriage does, among other things.

But the second tack, refraining from using the word “marriage” at all, makes a good sense as well: The legal relationships of the thing the state calls marriage are simply that — legal relationships. Atheists and agnostics can have them too, as can the profoundly irreligious, and even Satanists.

There’s nothing at all religious about state marriage, and, to make an analogy, calling the legal contract “marriage” may make as little sense (or as much) as calling naturalization “baptism.” It might just be needlessly confusing and upsetting. It’s not to me, but it clearly is to some, and it’s important to get the terms right as well as the substance, isn’t it?

So… Giving the word “marriage” back to churches, communities, and families seems only reasonable. The legal relationships can be called something else.

It’s nothing else but amusing to see Phyllis Schlafly rant against the Supreme Court opinions protecting pornography. I find it amusing beyond belief that these stuffy old men, Supreme Court Justices, in order to determine whether pornography is protected speech, had to watch the videos in order to answer the legal question. Heh.

Economists Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh recently made available for comment a working paper entitled An Empirical Analysis of Street-Level Prostitution. Fair’s fair. Levitt and Venkatesh stress that the paper is tentative and incomplete and therefore any and all findings, let alone any interpretations or reports by economics dimwits like me, should be viewed with some caution and skepticism. Still, the paper is well worth a read and, caveats noted, I’ll just mention a few of its more interesting points:

Perhaps most important from a social policy / public health perspective is that their findings conflict with earlier studies that had found a substantial price premium for unprotected (i.e., condomless) intercourse. The authors here “find a small price premium associated with unprotected sex, and condoms are used only 25 percent of the time.” In fact, their data suggests that the average unprotected sex premium is only $2. More specifically, they report:

For oral sex a condom reduces the price by $2. For vaginal sex that number rises to $5.53 (a 7.5 percent increase over the average price using a condom) and for anal sex the gap is $12.61 (or 13.6 percent of the average price with a condom).

Second, the sort of pimp / prostitute relationship they study appears quite contrary to the traditional stereotype and much closer to the agent-manager / talent model. According to their findings, it would appear that availing oneself of the, um, services of a pimp would be in the prostitute’s economic interests. For example, “prostitutes who do not work with pimps (and thus are working the streets), roughly three percent of all their tricks are freebies given to police.” It was my understanding, based on years of research including hundreds of movies, television shows and pulp novels, that the majority of street prostitutes were also being “run” by pimps, so I’m a bit skeptical here. After all, would Hollywood lie to us?

Third, and speaking as a white guy here, I’m shocked, shocked to read that Chicago prostitutes discriminate on the basis of race, charging white tricks more, and that they even “change the structure of the bargaining when the customer is not black.” So far, no comment from the Ron Paul campaign on this last finding, but I haven’t received the latest newsletter yet, so….

(Hat Tip to Reason’s Radley Balko.)