So What Gives? (About Tolerance)

Of course individual rights are not self-evident. Only in the individualist paradigm. The acceptance of homosexuality might be seen as an indirect consequence of different phenomena; overpopulation, for example. But if it indeed indicates a strengthening of individualism and further weakening of collectivism, it doesn’t seem like a good sign for this species.

I don’t know anything about Spinoza. The bad sign for all the species is human unsustainable production and causing of climate change and extinctions. This does require a collective effort to remedy. I don’t particularly see what it has to do with sexual orientation though or why gay people should be defined as individualist etc

“He was so small that he could not reach up to the branches of the tree, and he was wandering all round it, crying bitterly. The poor tree was still quite covered with frost and snow, and the North Wind was blowing and roaring above it. ‘Climb up! little boy,’ said the Tree, and it bent its branches down as low as it could; but the little boy was too tiny.

And the Giant’s heart melted as he looked out. ‘How selfish I have been!’ he said; ‘now I know why the Spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children’s playground for ever and ever.’ He was really very sorry for what he had done.”

Ever since agriculture replaced hunter-gathering, collectivism has been the norm. But, although punctuated by revolutions, that collectivism has usually worked in favour of the minority of society: the Leviathans, their agents and acolytes. What can be more collectivist than an economy based on slave plantations?

The existence, maybe even the concept, of private property is collectivist. In an individualist jungle, the only thing you own is your body and your genes (until someone eats you): everything else you have to fight to gain or to keep. Any kind of private property requires social organisation and collective protection of that that right/privilege by legal recognition and enforcement.

So individual rights are not incompatible with collectivism: they involve collective acceptance and enforcement of a different kind of power structure, such as that, for example, desired by the Levellers in Cromwell’s army.

“Suppose I think X should regarded as a basic right (for all humans or all Americans, take your pick), such that deprivation of X would constitute a gross and manifest injustice.”

I think the problem is the rights to freedom of conscience, religion, thought etc are (philosophically, historically, legally) a lot more basic than the right to marry. Homosexuality as a concept is a little over a century old, the idea of a consititutional right to marry is a product of the 60s, the idea of equal dignity as applying to romantic relationships is a bit of a new one too. All these things may be wonderful innovations, but they do upset the older way of thinking about things.

In Texas, we see what what happens when religious traditionalists assume power and dominance… http://bit.ly/1rUXbgQ

Quite frightening.

TL but R. :-) Am I oversimplifying? Spinoza, Locke … isn’t it about Mill? Whenever I read conservatives on SSM I conclude that their beef is all about rejecting the harm principle. Or they mistakenly think revulsion = harm. Nobody is hurting anybody else by marrying (romantic rivals aside). (I realize some conservatives insist SSM harms kids, but set that BS aside, as Linker rightly does.) A third party’s personal objection has no standing. The liberal objection to the conservative objection has standing because it protects people from real harm. Liberal revulsion toward conservative intolerance is a fact, but it is neither here nor there, since the liberal political position respects the harm principle. Period. Isn’t all the rest just tribalism and exegesis?

I really liked this piece John. I am now awaiting the usual suspects who will show up to defend the poor and oppressed bigots.

/Hi Roy!

re 4:
I expressed my point unclearly. It is not that you are “arguing the epistemological illegitimacy of any arguments against rights” but that the argument appears to lead to the conclusion that a rejection of rights is immoral and that those who reject rights are bad people. In other words, a range of otherwise reasonable epistemological or metaphysical opinions will be outside the pale.
Thinking something is a right does not require or even imply that one thinks the right is self-evident or self-evidently a right. Do you intend to rule out consequentialist and contractarian theories? Maybe I am misreading you, and the post is more in the way of sociological essay?

I agree with Lynne, and along with that, the bit in the OP about “pariah” only really holds if there’s no difference between being considered morally wrong by a subgroup of society and being excluded from “Society.” The bigot wants to legislate his feelings for everyone, and assumes his wishes hold for everyone, so he believes everyone wants to legislate their feelings too. I think this is becuase if they didn’t agree with him, then he would have to consider that he might be wrong. But even assuming he has a sincere (religious) belief that he has to want to legislate his feelings for everyone. Why does he get a free pass simply by saying “it’s my religion”? Doesn’t he even have to explain what it is about his religion that makes him believe it? He thinks he doesn’t, and I think this is because he’s missing something important about why he’s being asked for his reasons.

Having given MPAVictoria time to appear in this thread and use it again, I am now free to steal that comment from Henry’s piece on bigotry.

“Everything about this post is 100% right and 0% wrong.”

One problem is that Linker’s argument is a little like those fish who have a central core of territory they’ll defend aggressively, attacking any other fish who tries to invade that space, and a wider diameter of space they permit other fish to swim through. The effect is that some people get to claim the right of recognition and others don’t, but not only that, some people don’t really get to claim the right of recognition, at least in theory, but in practice nobody else is allowed to press claims against them. So there are people who get to feel all put-upon because their beliefs are no better than anybody else’s, but Linker is there to defend them and make sure they’re treated with deference. So he’s going to argue that the little circle of aggressive defense ought to be defined with a larger diameter, and he’s going to blame the other fish for not making their free-swimming circles smaller so his can have more breathing room.

When they say, all’s fair in love and war, we’re going to argue for enlarging our diameters too, he switches his argument, and now he’s complaining that the circles should stay where they were. But also he wants to pretend his fish always had larger circles than the other fish did.

Anyway, I know I can’t convince you, but I feel that you’re so invested in the supremacy of the concept of individual rights that you view traditionalists, nationalists, and other non-liberal kinds as incomprehensible, irrational, and evil. But it doesn’t have to be this way

I think you are so invested in homophobia that you think linking homosexuality with anti-collectivism will grant you immunity against being called out as a prick.

Might not toleration be usefully considered in relation to the establishment of the ideology of Lockean liberty in Virginia as discussed by Edmund Morgan? Something along the lines that: as the enclosure and institutionalization of what in the old country had been the turbulent lower orders as slaves made it economically feasible, intellectually credible, and politically advantageous to practice equality among themselves and to militate for “universal” liberty; so might toleration be conceived as a mode of this liberty.

In other words, I suspect that “tolerance” as we have used it in the United States might be involved in a kind of tautology: tolerance could be adduced as a civic virtue because it was already (at one time) demanded by a particular form of social life, one founded on and sustained by intolerance. (The actually intolerable are always conveniently out of frame, but always provide a bedrock and impetus of unity among the happy few… and so on.)

If any of this speculation panned out, and maybe even if not, I might poke a bit at the possibility that American toleration is a manifestation of that imperiously optimistic monism from which Berlin claims Machiavelli woke us:

…namely that somewhere in the past or the future, in this world or the next, in the church or the laboratory, in the speculations of the metaphysician or the findings of the social scientist, or in the uncorrupted heart of the simple good man, there is to be found the final solution of the question of how men should live. If this is false (and if more than one equally valid answer to the question can be returned, then it is false) the idea of the sole true, objective, universal human ideal crumbles. The very search for it becomes not merely Utopian in practice, but conceptually incoherent.

“The system worked! This would be a surprise to literally no one who actually recognized that liberals do have moral values that they are committed to and judge the actions of others on the basis of whether or not they align with those values. ”

Well said.

@MDH
Well I can’t really claim that one as mine but I agree that it fits with J.Q’s post so I am glad you used it.

Athens and Jerusalem

Look, our guy, Socrates, never had the misfortune of having a church founded to distort his sayings unto the nth generation. Wasn’t in the DNA? Who knows, but for whatever reason, philosophy has never been propagated into the future as an organized movement.

Jesus wasn’t so lucky. Whatever the original teachings, however 180deg contrary to those views anything like a church is, avid church-building is what the Gospels wrought. And in a contest for institutional survival in our very sinful world, survival of the fittest dictates that the churches that make it through the centuries are the ones committed to power and the propagation of power into the future. The Good are the people who are in power, if only social power, respected and envied by all. Or at least the Good are the people who ought to be so honored. Sinners are the opposite, the bottom of the social hierarchy, or at least they should be disrespected and looked down upon.

This is simply what churches are, or at least the ones that survive. Someone like Linker, who chose Jerusalem because it fit what he is, cannot be brought over by argument. Gays have to be tolerated, in his view, and the church people who won’t tolerate their existence and grant them a place in society are simply wrong. God made all of us, each in his or her place, and it is against God to deny gays their place. But gays can’t have recognition. We can never forget, we can never let them forget, their place, which is to be either magdalens who acknowledge their depravity, or unrepentant sinners. Linker is all for tolerating gays as magdalens (And maybe, if it were politically feasible, in a better climate of opinion, he would be for something like employment in Magdalene Society charities and industries as the proper place in society for gays), but the very suggestion that they should be “recognized”, considered on an equal and level footing with the Good, is monstrous.

What you’re asking Linker to do is accept the position of magdalen for himself. He can’t acknowledge that it’s wrong to deny gays recognition, to stop at letting them sin in private without the social status of marriage, without seeing that as a sin that puts him at the low status of someone whose place in society is to admit his sin. This really is a zero-sum game. In his mind, either there’s nothing sinful about being gay, and he’s the magdalen, or being gay is sinful and the gays are magdalens. There really is no room for any sort of middle way. And he is not about to accept the position of moral leper.

Just because you and I don’t see this as any sort of zero sum game does not do Linker any good at all. He can’t accept our intellectual frame that he is and has been simply mistaken about gays, and he among us who is without mistake (“mistake”, by the way, is what hamartia is, not “sin”) let him cast the first stone. The point seems obvious to us, but he reads the numerous parables to that effect in the Book he imagines he serves, and the point simply rolls off his back.

Ironically enough, our guy actually did write that the philosophers should be the top of the social hierarchy, while Jesus thought the place of the holy was to wash the feet of lepers. Our guy was only kidding, of course, and nobody likes an ironist.

The point of liberal society is to permit differences of opinion to exist in society. Religious freedom protects the Quaker from taking up arms against fascism, the Orthodox Jew from removing his kippa when entering court, the Voodoo practitioners from getting arrested for slaughtering chickens. Surely it can be extended to protect a photographer from being forced to take photographs they disagree with.

Furthermore, having norms that one’s opinion in public life is no business of one’s employer is a good thing. Were to press Princeton to fire Singer, even though we regard his ideas as abhorrent, we would step into dangerous ground. Play the ball, not the man. The rule that says one can be fired for political donations that aren’t liked strikes both ways.

“poor and oppressed bigots”

Such people do exist – in the 1970s I encountered some at university: in this case confused products of the English public school system and/or childhood religious indoctrination.

A side comment on Brendan Eich.

The US is one of the few developed countries where it is entirely legal (for private employers) to fire workers on the basis of their private political opinions. So, anyone who wants to object to Eich’s firing must either present it as a high-profile example of what’s wrong with the doctrine of “employment at will”, or argue that Eich’s particular opinions deserve a specially protected status, not available to political opinions in general.

Sure, religion is irrational. Mind, it’s hardly the only species of irrationality, but it is one. and it can, notoriously, lead to people choosing adherence to it over reason, or even the preservation of their own lives.

“If you start letting belief trump the law, letting religion trump finding of fact, pretty soon you’ve got sectarian warfare.”

But, if you let the scope of law expand to encompass everything, you’ve got war, again. Because all sorts of people draw all sorts of irrational lines, not just religious people, (Though they’re famous for that.) and the more places government is determined to go, the more lines it crosses. The more toes it steps on.

Honestly, if I have to chose between an irrational institution like religion, that at least knows it’s place, and an institution, call it whatever, (The cult of the state, maybe?), that combines a belief that everything it it’s business with a bloody determination that its orders must always be followed, I’ll pick religion. Because the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door may be annoying, but they don’t kick it down in the middle of the night, and toss in grenades.

“I’m rational, and you’re not, so you’d better follow my orders, or it will be your fault I have to kill you!” is a sect we’re familiar with from the 20th century. It has a justifiably poor reputation. Let’s not rationalize reviving it.

“But, if you let the scope of law expand to encompass everything, you’ve got war, again. ”

Yet no one is proposing that. The question is not whether the scope of law should include everything, it is whether the scope of law should include everyone; whether some people should be exempt from obeying a law on the basis of their religious views. The law doesn’t constrain what you may believe, it constrains what you may within some reasonable bounds.

“But, if you let the scope of law expand to encompass everything, you’ve got war, again.”

This is completely backwards. People resort to the law as an alternative to settling their conflicts through force. Where the law cannot expand, people rely on force and war.

Hobby Lobby is a good example of that. They insist that the government can’t stop them from stopping their employees from using their health insurance to obtain objectionable birth control. A lot of people object to their objections, and call for a boycott in response.

So now we have Hobby Lobby coercing its employees, and everyone else trying to coerce Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby wants to police the medical coverage it’s employees get, which means employees have to care about their employer’s religion, and everyone who wants employees to be able to make their own choices has to care about the religion of everyone they buy anything from. In short, because of Hobby Lobby, everyone’s religion has become everyone’s business, and we’re stuck dividing ourselves into two parallel economies, if not entire societies, along political/religious lines.

On the other hand, if the insurance Hobby Lobby purchases is subject to the same regulations that everyone’s insurance is, then nobody has to care what the other guy believes, and everyone can just live their own lives.

You point out that liberal tolerance obligates us to allow people to make claims that “x is wrong because y, no nobody should think x.” You also say (if I am reading you right) that such a claim is no different from 2+2=5, and that “drawing a conclusion is no, per se, a coercive act.”

I agree with all that, on the face of it, but I think there’s more to it. Mill’s harm principle in his On Liberty:

“The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

That is, the only purpose for which power can be exercised, individually or collectively,via physical force or the moral coercion of public opinion, is to prevent harm.

Clearly proponents of gay marriage think this business about orientation-therapy, bullying, denial of service etc. is harmful in many ways. But, I think, its also clear that those with religious beliefs against marriage don’t see themselves as doing harm (saving souls and all or god-punishes-you-because-he-loves-you are professed motives). Furthermore the “marriage is a religious sacrament with a procreative purpose” folks aren’t likely to see “cultural practice x is done for these reasons, it shouldn’t be done for any other” statements as particularly harmful, or the actions which such beliefs lead to, like voting certain ways. Exclusion is also not always seen as harmful.

I think such people are wrong, I find them difficult to countenance, and when you’re donating to an organization which doesn’t just push for a traditional view of marriage on the legal side, but also contributes to a culture of demonizing homosexuals and doing their own bit of moral coercion, you can’t call yourself liberal in this sense.

But when person A thinks what B does is morally noxious, and acts in a way he thinks is improving B, while B thinks A is eccentric and causing more harm than good, I don’t know where a judgment like (these sorts) of religious freedom advocates aren’t very tolerant came come in. Both sides can agree that coercion of any kind is not allowed except to prevent harm, but if they disagree on whether harm is even occurring? I can’t even imagine the problems that arise if an “erring conscience binds,” as Aquinas (iirc) said.

In the end, I think something is wrong if you don’t see the harm such judgments can cause. But when the other party has certain beliefs, from whatever source, and they are sincerely held, you can’t expect them to act as if their beliefs don’t exist – however wrong, or harmful you think they are; its unethical to demand someone ignore their own sense of right and wrong and to follow yours. The best you can do is persuade people – and I mean persuade in a deliberative sense, not like with what happened to Brendan Eisch. (Oh, I see you’ve said something similar in a response in the comment section, so maybe we don’t disagree here)

(wow this is really long, sorry about that)

Re 29:

The following are two pieces are the part that I was concerned about, and may be misreading.

“Suppose I think X should regarded as a basic right (for all humans or all Americans, take your pick), such that deprivation of X would constitute a gross and manifest injustice. You think the opposite. Here we get a somewhat paradoxical result. You can presumably be quite tolerant of me. (People get these funny ideas that there are all these rights, which there aren’t! Silly people, but we tolerate them!) But it is harder for me to be tolerant of you. Because, after all, I think you are 1) fighting for an injustice that 2) all reasonable people should be able to see is an injustice. That’s hard to excuse. So if I win, and everyone else pretty much agrees with me, so you are odd man out, you are going to be surrounded by people who think you are a morally bad person. Even though your moral worth, or lack thereof, wasn’t really the issue.”

“if you are arguing that X is a basic right, deprivation of which would be a gross infringement of dignity, then you are pretty much bound to regard whoever takes the other side as a moral jerk. This seems like a violation of the norm that you shouldn’t call someone a jerk just because she disagrees with you. But it isn’t. It’s the only consistent view to take. (That doesn’t mean you are bound to send your opponent to a re-education camp for jerks, be it noted.)”

The argument seems to be that belief that A is a basic right entails that I should also believe that denial of A (or denial of A as a basic right) is immoral and renders me a morally bad person. But then if I think that ‘basic rights’ is a fiction, I am a morally bad person. That strikes me as a conclusion to be resisted. But assuming the argument, why would one who thought A was a basic right not also think that it is error, moral error, to permit me to teach my children what I believe about A; and also believe that education and (and related socialization) should not also teach that A is a basic right. They may be willing to leave me to my moral depravity, but why would they leave my children to moral depravity?

Maybe the argument plugs into a larger set of arguments that dissolve these concerns, or they are misconceived independently.

The second, and final point – this is too long already and it is on a topic somewhat different from the rest of the comments – is that there seems to be movement making a wrong claim about rights to a wrong claim about rights is immoral.

“Presented in the abstract, the notion that a person could be forced to resign from an organisation they helped to found, after doing more than almost anyone to promote that organisation’s aims and values, because of a private political donation, would seem troubling.”

There isn’t a single thing known as “the abstract” to look at, there is only one set of details you chose to abstract away, and another set that you didn’t. Here’s another way to abstract it–should an organization be required to accept as its top leader someone whose values are, in part, at odds with the official, stated values of that organization? Should employees be required or otherwise pressured to keep working under a leader when that leader donates to political campaigns attacking them? That seems to be the logical conclusion of the people objecting to Brendan Eich’s treatment. After all, Eich wasn’t fired, he resigned because he thought his presence was dividing Mozilla. So the only way Eich would have stayed in place is if everyone who was complaining was somehow made to shut up.

Furthermore, how far are you willing to take your abstraction? Like, if a CEO donates to a neo-nazi group, we’re required to keep them around?

“Which you may be fine with, but the difference between liberal and libertarian rests in part on the liberal’s support for positive liberties such as the right to participate meaningfully in political discourse without being punished for it.”

Once you start talking about positive liberty, I don’t think it makes sense to abstract away Eich’s status and power within the organization. There’s a huge difference between the positive liberty of an assembly line worker who’s threatened with termination for making the wrong political donation and a would-be CEO who’s offered a different C-level position. Not to mention that there is something of a zero-sum game between the positive liberties of the CEO and that of all the people working underneath him.

“I think we’re allowed to object to things even if they’re legal (so long as we’re consistent, and would complain about other politically-motivated firings/enforced resignations).”

I can’t speak for JQ, but my objection on this count is that without an explicit law, any proposed norm along these lines will only be upheld inconsistently and unfairly. If Brendan Eich kept his job, the only norm that would have been upheld is that if the FOX News outrage machine kicks into gear in favor of a CEO keeping his job, that CEO keeps his job.

“Religion knows its place Brett @48? Really?”

Religion “that knows it’s place”, is what I said. Some religions don’t, of course, know their place. Some of them can be as stubborn as government about not knowing it.

“This is completely backwards. People resort to the law as an alternative to settling their conflicts through force. Where the law cannot expand, people rely on force and war.”

Law is not an alternative to settling conflicts through force. Law is a particular way of settling conflicts through force. If you think not, take exception to the way any particular conflict has been settled, and see if you don’t get force in response.

Further, most disagreements are not conflicts. I like chocolate, you like butterscotch, we do not have a “conflict” until somebody insists we both eat the same flavor of ice cream. Expanding law tends to transform disagreements into conflicts, because the government is really lousy at letting different people have different things.

” Thus a baker who doesn’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding may simply refuse to do so. That is entirely legal, afaik.”

Unless the law starts defining everything as “an accommodation”, which is the trend.

A couple of points:

1. JH sayeth “It would be kind of funny to give a conscience exception only to atheists on the ground that they are the exceptional ones. Not that I think that would make sense either!” One of my arguments during the deabte on Arizona’s noxious SB 1062 was that it discriminated against me, an atheist, by not giving me the right to discriminate that it gave to all religious folks.

2. I’ll confess to being mildly amused by the fact that someone claiming to be Maggie Gallagher shows up on the thread – and gets completely ignored. Let’s hope that irrelevance is the ultimate fate of all such.

>>
Federal civil rights law in the U.S. requires a private hotel or restaurant operator to serve anyone who can pay (as a way of barring discrimination in ‘public accommodations’ on the basis of race, sex, religion etc.), but as far as I’m aware (and I could be wrong) there is no law requiring someone who provides services that are not “accommodations” — i.e., a baker, accountant, lawyer, private tutor, whatever — to accept the business of anyone who can pay.
<<

Under the original Civil Rights Act of 1964, public accommodations were defined in a way that did not include services. This covered discrimination against folks on the basis of race, national origin, or gender. The disabilities act had an expanded definition of public accommodations that included service providers. Thus, a doctor is prohibited by the ADA for discrimination against the disabled but not by the 1964 act involving race, national origin, or gender. But there is no general non-discrimination principle.

Plume, you’re right about homosexuality as one of tons of abominations in the OT, but Paul, who (probably not even) arguably is much more influential on the origins of Christianity than the figure of Christ, is pretty clear in Romans about it too. But then again in Ephesians he tells wives to be subject to their husbands. So much of what conservative/fundamentalists push is pretty clearly there in the text (and in the original koine, which I have read). What you have to say is that he was just wrong on so much and/or a function of his time and culture. Paul told slaves to be obedient after all, and I don’t anyone today would try and push that.

What to say, what to say, when I’m already 10,000th in line to read him the riot act?

I think Wittgenstein had some good advice (end of the Tractatus).

Everyone says Linker is smart, but I only ever hear of him when he’s being a tool.

“Depriving gay people of their equality and dignity…”

This is a good point but distinct from your rights argument. I think generally Catholics often word things for human dignity rather than human rights. Also dignity claims probably accord better with the desire for recognition that the OP mentioned, whereas rights claims probably accord better with the wish to be extended tolerance, to my mind at least.

an irrational institution like religion, that at least knows it’s place

Religion “that knows it’s place”, is what I said.

Are you being funny, or do you not realize that comma changes the meaning of your words?

Law is not an alternative to settling conflicts through force. Law is a particular way of settling conflicts through force. If you think not, take exception to the way any particular conflict has been settled, and see if you don’t get force in response.

No. Law is backed by force, but that doesn’t mean it is force. If you still think so, try to win a court case by demonstrating for the court that you can shoot better than your adversary and see how that changes the judge’s ruling.

The U.S. military has the biggest guns. The military doesn’t always like the President. The U.S. military, usually, does what the President says anyway. When generals for the U.S. military “win” a political conflict with the President, it’s usually not because they’re they’re the ones closest to the biggest guns (though, they are), but because the likely voters or Congress respect them. (I’m not saying they should, I’m saying they do.) If law was just a way of “settling conflicts through force”, then generals would win every political conflict as long as they could keep the loyalty of their subordinates. But that’s exactly what WOULD happen if the law disappeared tomorrow–none of the guns possessed by the police or military would disappear, those holding onto them would try to grab as much power as they could. In the absence of law, we would be ruled by whoever could capture the personal loyalty of the people with the guns.

Further, most disagreements are not conflicts. I like chocolate, you like butterscotch, we do not have a “conflict” until somebody insists we both eat the same flavor of ice cream. Expanding law tends to transform disagreements into conflicts, because the government is really lousy at letting different people have different things.

Hobby Lobby is really lousy at letting women have different things.

There are two omnipresent things that are really good at turning disagreements into conflicts: Scarcity and Religion. Both of these are not only capable of creating violent conflicts in the absence of law. In fact, they create even MORE conflicts in the absence of law than they do under law.

Possibly the only utility of Scientology is in arguments like the religion part of John’s post. Scientology is stupid, but it’s putatively a religion, so we tolerate it. When we think of what bare tolerance looks like, that’s a good example. We would not expect a cake shop to tell his customers to get out because they’re Scientologists, even tho he probably thinks they’re idiots.

Five members of the Supreme Court would never dream of holding in so many words that a LRH-following employer is burdened by his employees’ using insurance to pay for mental-health treatment. (How district judges are going to work their way out of that … idk.)

“Now that we’re done with word games, why don’t you propose a framework which can be used to permit religious exceptions to law without leading to consequences even you’d find objectionable?”

I personally don’t advocate religious exceptions to law. I advocate that law leave us free enough that no religious practice it would be even remotely sensible to tolerate NEEDS an exception. You don’t, for instance, need a religious exception for sacramental wine, if you don’t have prohibition. You don’t need a religious exception for peyote, if you don’t have a war on drugs. But you’re not going to grant a religious exception to murder laws to a modern revival of Thugee. And we shouldn’t be giving Scientology an exception from laws against extortion and blackmail, whether or not you take that racket seriously as a religion.

I don’t want freedom of religion, I want freedom sufficient that we don’t NEED freedom of religion.

Few governments would permit that degree of freedom, but many governments make exceptions for apparently sincere religious beliefs. Why?

Because religion is one of the few things in society that can motivate significant numbers of people to resist government, forcing the government to deploy really significant levels of violence to overcome. (Maybe more violence than it has the stomach to deploy.) So, unless a government wants a reputation for being murderous, it cuts religion some slack.

I think it’s important for people who find religious exceptions to generally applicable laws to understand that motivation. You ARE going to have such exceptions, or you’re going to be getting violent on a regular basis, against people who you’ll have a really difficult time arguing are causing enough harm to warrant the violence.

Perhaps that’s why the rest of us aren’t free: We’re not devoted enough to freedom to require the government to publicly murder us, and take a PR hit in doing so….

MPAVictoria: I recommend not reading him.

I don’t want freedom of religion, I want freedom sufficient that we don’t NEED freedom of religion.

Yeah, we get it, you want freedom sufficient that religions and employers can coerce whoever they want.

@49 Are you saying that while firing people for their political views is legal (in the US), it is always wrong, or that there is something special about the Eich case? And if it’s always wrong, why should it be legal?

Abbe: when did a state assert a power to forbid it? Canon law governed marriages right up to modern times.

For that matter, your argument proves too much. Where was the right to free speech 200 years ago?

81: Internet trolls, unlike their common relatives, require a save vs charm (wisdom bonus applies), or else one feels impelled to read and rebut. (With a Leomund’s Lamentable Belaborment effect, tho you get another save.) Since they regenerate at a rate of 3 comments per refutation, they can never be outreasoned, only blocked or, if you make your save, ignored.

If you’re looking for a substitute for Maggie Gallagher, there’s always Rod Dreher.

90: Linker sounds a lot like Dreher.

A pattern I have noticed in US history is that weaker or minority groups tend to make arguments based on basic moral principles (fairness, human dignity, freedom of conscience, etc.), while stronger groups often use arguments based on tradition, established usage, the idea that the law must apply equally to all, etc. You see it in the arguments of dissenters against the religious establishment in the early 18th century; in abolitionist literature; in the Civil Rights movement of the 20th century, and again in feminist and LGBT rhetoric. I think that this is at least partly because the only arguments available to the weaker groups are arguments from these basic principles.

But an interesting thing happens if the weaker group wins the argument, at least if it wins without the kind of violence that can lead to each side dehumanizing the other and engaging in endless vendetta. If the weaker group prevails on its argument, they face certain constraints on their future actions. They cannot simply morph into the oppressors without losing the reputation for righteousness that brought them to this point. Furthermore, they have often changed the public discourse in such a way that they cannot simply change places with their erstwhile oppressors.

Thus you see that when the final state establishment of religion failed in (iirc) 1831, the dissenters did not try to resurrect it. There has been (despite occasional complaints on the rights) a tendency for black elected leaders to avoid even the appearance of favoring their own communities over the general welfare.

This doesn’t mean that the people who lose the argument don’t feel ill-treated, because they do. (And I think you’re right that it stings more because in losing, they also appear immoral.) But it seems to me that this kind of public argument is not exactly a zero-sum game; instead, it is on the whole a good force in public life because the boundaries of public concern and identification are expanded by the process.

There’s also an interesting thing going on in recent times, where some religions have become more tolerant and so on, with resistance to change coming from related denominations or from within the same religion. For example, a lot of Dreher’s columns lash out at forms of Christianity he finds objectionable and blames for all sorts of bad things going on. Others regular slag ecumenical bodies, which they seem to consider invasions from the blatantly secular world. Others, though, may prefer to lash out at “liberals” and “secular humanists” rather than at those within the religion, like the preacher who visited last month and really ticked people off. But there’s not a lot actual secularists can do about that.

For values of “coerce” so low as to be absurd. Hobby Lobby is “coercing” its employees not to use Plan B, by paying them in fungible wages

No, by interfering with the health insurance benefits that the employee earned. The employer is intruding on the doctor/patient relationship by forcing the employee to use benefits the employee earned according to the employer’s religion. I say, those are the employee’s health benefits and the employee’s doctor, therefore none of the employer’s business.

Hobby Lobby was NOT content to just pay fungible wages. The ACA was perfectly happy to let Hobby Lobby just forgo giving benefits and pay additional wages, as well as the associated penalty. That wasn’t good enough for Hobby Lobby, because it doesn’t give them sufficient opportunity to interfere in other people’s lives.

And, of course, the “freedom” you promised @78 (that I responded to @82) goes way beyond what Hobby Lobby gets away with today. Why not just have the employees sign a contract that they won’t use birth control at all? Or get blood transfusions. Or, heck, why not demand employees convert to your religion and political party? That’s the private life of power for you, or as you call it, “freedom”.

“The point that human adult sociality without marriage is felt to lack a very basic component still stands. Since the ‘it’ we have been talking about is this, your claim that ‘it’ is a recent invention – marriage, the institution, in its various forms – is obviously false. People have been getting married for thousands of years. Nor do you yourself believe otherwise, I presume.”

John @ 93. I never said the institution of marriage was a recent invention. I’m talking about a right to marry. (If you review your post, you explicitly mention a ‘right to marry’ and claim it as a basic right).

Of course people always married. Just because girls were contacted over at 12 to forge alliances between feudal lords doesn’t mean they had freedom or a right to marry. There have historically been all sorts of laws preventing freedom of marriage (feudal, or canon, or state licencing, or eugenic). So I don’t feel this right has existed in fact or law the way matrimony has.

What’s also interesting is that some rights like freedom of speech were not often observed, but were often claimed in various declarations of rights. The right to marry doesn’t seem to have appeared in these declarations or even to have been asserted by people seeking changes in marriage law until recently, after it was incorporated in the UDHR because of the dislike of eugenics. So I do wonder if it is as basic as you say.

If you want to say plighting one’s troth or exchanging marriage vows is a contract (I’m not absolutely certain it’s an exact fit myself but I haven’t looked into it) – I suppose you could make the case – but even if something is a contract it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is a right. Also the laws of marriage were set up in part to regulate marriage – you can’t take two wives or two husbands, or in the past if the father says he will pay a dowry then he is obligated to. Shakespeare was a witness in the English French Church court in a case about his wig maker landlord not paying the agreed upon dowry- Shakespeare was said to encourage the match but he said he couldn’t really remember the figure involved in dowry negotiations.

Some one above brought up Romeo and Juliet – this is a good example of people in society and within families having different ideas about what obligations attend in marriage. we could translate the plot into the circumstances of a same sex couple who want to marry but are forbidden – the people against the marriage would be like the warring families.

> I don’t understand what answer you’re looking for here or the purpose of it.

Inability-to-understand is a very good sign that you’re making a mistake, btw. If it’s an error the other party is making you’ll be able to see it, “oh, no, you’re thinking X but actually here it’s Y because Z”, but your own errors are invisible to you. Or you wouldn’t have made them, see.

If you’re running into people saying things such that you can’t think of a perspective that they fit in, it’s very good odds — not certainty, but very good odds — that the problem is with you and your understanding of what perspectives are possible.

[if you know things that they don’t, then the things they know will be a proper subset of the things you know and everything within that subset will be comprehensible. Incomplete, from your perspective, but comprehensible. Only if a conclusion is based on things you don’t know is there any possibility that you won’t understand it. Obviously, a lot of what passes for knowledge is in fact error, but in general “more knowledge” is “more accurate knowledge”, and that and the above mean that by-and-large incomprehension is a sign of your own shortcomings and thus error.]

NMissC, who is a lawyer, says @64 that the 1964 Civil Rights Act bans discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of race, national origin, or gender. JHW @91 says it covers race, color, national origin, and religion, but not gender. I don’t know whether JHW is a lawyer, but one of you is wrong, which means I might have to actually look up the statute (which is a PITA).

#104 Collin Street

[if you know things that they don’t, then the things they know will be a proper subset of the things you know and everything within that subset will be comprehensible. Incomplete, from your perspective, but comprehensible. Only if a conclusion is based on things you don’t know is there any possibility that you won’t understand it. Obviously, a lot of what passes for knowledge is in fact error, but in general “more knowledge” is “more accurate knowledge”, and that and the above mean that by-and-large incomprehension is a sign of your own shortcomings and thus error.]

This turns into a Bayesian thing.

Yes, if what they know is a proper subset of what you know, and you know why they’re wrong, then it follows that you know why they’re wrong. (But it might turn out that what they know is not in fact a proper subset of what you know. You might understand a fallacy which gets their result, and they might know something true which also gets that result. It’s only when they explain their reasoning and you see it’s the fallacy you already know that you can be sure their reasoning is wrong. And it’s still possible that your reasoning is also wrong and they are right for the wrong reasons.)

But as you say, when they make arguments you can’t understand some of the time it will be because they know things that you don’t — which are things which are not so. They know fallacies you have not been exposed to yet. They have believed somebody’s stupid lies which you have never thought to refute because they are so obviously wrong.

When they say something new, sometimes they are right and sometimes wrong. How should you judge the likelihood of each? Ideally you would not prejudge the issue but carefully notice what they say, and decide on its merits as best you can.

Thank you. I do appreciate both that I have become a symbol you naturally pluck without much thought about the person, and your response to the person.

It is not that I lack self-love, it is that I don’t think the self-love of an individual person is the proper subject for a public debate about something as important as marriage.

I chose to enter this debate in an important way and it would be silly to complain that people dislike me for it. To frame it in that way trivializes what is at stake.

Nonetheless, I appreciate your effort to try to understand why tolerance does or does not extend to people like me.

“trivializes what is at stake.”

Oh for Christ’s sake. What is at stake is your ability to discriminate and other people’s ability to live their lives as they see fit. No one is asking you to get gay married! They just want you to mind your own business. Gay marriage has been a fact for years and so far we are carrying on pretty much as before. The only real change is that some people who love each other now have access to the same rights that you have. Seems like a win to me.

Your side has already lost. They youth have made their decision on this issue. And they choose the side of respect and equality. The kids really are all right.

#109 ZM

But I think maybe the father of the daughter would have had the right to make the contract of marriage with the suitor/suitors father not the daughter herself.

Now we get into something like anthropology, except when we talk about the past we can’t exactly send anthropologists back to talk to people.

I remember reading about inuit customs. The custom was that a man who wanted to marry would go to the girl’s father and ask his permission. The father would look at him, and wait, and then say yes or no. If the answer was yes, then the boy would grab his bride and carry her off, and as a dutiful daughter she was supposed to scream and impede him and try to spread out so she wouldn’t fit through the door. Then when he plopped her on the sled she would stop resisting and help him travel. Weddings were all in the time people camped in tents and not when they were living underground or in ice houses, because in the other times home entrances were things an unwilling woman could not be dragged through.

How much was it sham-acting? How much did fathers pair their daughters off with husbands without a good sense how they would get along? How often did brides fight for real? The anthropologists seemed to think it was rare, but I don’t know how much data they had.

Similarly, it did not make sense to travel or live alone. It took one person to hunt, and another to cook and repair furs and equipment etc. Sometimes it made sense for a wife to travel with a man who was not her husband. Sometimes it made sense for pairs of couples to work together. They did a certain amount of wife-swapping and wife-sharing, and the men told anthropologists that their wives slept with whoever they told them to. But in observed examples women chose about that and refused the deal whenever they didn’t want to. Sometimes a woman would ask to share a husband, and typically if the wife agreed she’d say she had to ask him.

Pretty often people are not doing what they say they’re doing. Maybe in the old days aristocrat women tended to marry whoever it was practical to marry — there’s a lot of that today, isn’t there? How often did they refuse and get married off anyway? I doubt there’s reliable data about that.

I’ve not read about Inuit marriage customs. There is a good book called The Gender of the Gift on women’s agency in marriage exchange in kinship societies in Papua.

At least some past English marriage laws would have been codified or recorded – I remember reading in a book on feudal laws of the provisions for if a woman of high standing married a man who was a peasant etc. I’m sure there’s a lot of information, but I don’t have time to research it.

#115 Maggie Gallagher

What opinions in a democracy we are supposed to tolerate in one another and what are “outside the pale” for what theoretical reasons, is an important and not an easy question.

I agree.

The usual argument is that we should let people do whatever they want if it doesn’t hurt anybody. Or maybe if it doesn’t hurt anybody else. Or maybe if it doesn’t hurt anybody but volunteers, who agree to be hurt.

But then it isn’t always obvious who gets hurt.

Like, it used to be the general rule that if a woman got divorced on the excuse that her husband had sex with somebody other than her but she had been faithful, then she deserved alimony — he should support her for the rest of her life.

Possibly women didn’t deserve that much money for that particular reason. But when the courts did away with alimony, a lot of married women perhaps felt that they had to get jobs because they didn’t trust their husbands not to divorce them and leave them penniless and unemployable. Maybe a lot of families would have been better off with somebody who actually took care of the home and the children, but they couldn’t have it because the trust was not there and the laws did not replace that trust.

Sometimes it’s hard to measure what harm is done.

Maybe our society is built like a very badly-designed computer program, with lots of dependencies where a small change in one part has big effects somewhere else. You simply can’t predict what harm might be done by a small change. If so, don’t we owe it to society to try to rebuild it cleaner? Problems are coming up that we’ll have to respond to, and if any little change can crash society, that’s bad….

Anyway, at any given time we develop a consensus about which opinions we should tolerate. The consensus may not make sense, but it’s the consensus at that time. It might hurt people, but when it’s the consensus in a democracy there isn’t much you can do about it except try to get a better consensus. When a whole lot of people are so sure they’re right that they won’t listen to anything else, that’s frustrating. But there’s nothing to do about it except try to persuade people anyway.

I have the idea that sometimes a joke can help get people to see an absurdity when they won’t listen to rational argument.

Another key here that is rarely mentioned:

If the Greens really practiced Christianity according to Jesus’s own words, they couldn’t even own a business, unless it were a co-op of sorts. Jesus constantly railed against the rich, saying they could never get into heaven, and he said in order to follow him, the rich had to give away all of their earthly possessions to the poor, first. The Old Testament prophets were similarly predisposed to Marxist-like attacks on the rich. And from we know about Jesus’s own life, he lived like an ur-communist, with nothing more than a robe on his back and perhaps a pair of sandals or two, sharing everything, never asking for a penny in return. There is nothing in his bio or his words that even remotely allows one to be a follower and get rich — especially not via exploitation of workers.

The Greens and others on the religious right make claims about their religion telling them not to do this or that. But if they’re wealthy, they are already breaking one of the most fundamental of all of their god’s teachings. They have NO chance to get into their heaven if they are rich. Why is that ignored, while contraception and abortion, which are never, ever mentioned in the bible, take center state? And, while there are hundreds of blistering speeches in the bible directed against the rich, Jesus never says word one about gay people.

In short, it’s wrong to privilege “religious belief” above all other philosophies, when it comes to our laws. It should be kept in the personal realm, only. But a court accepting completely unfounded interpretations of those beliefs takes things to the nth level of the absurd. Evidence and burden of proof are essential to our adjudication of conflicts. Why does religious belief get a free pass on that?

A substantial proportion of Republicans believe (or at least assert) that Democrats/liberals
* Are traitors, seeking to bring the country under the control of a UN world government
* Are complicit in plans to impose sharia law
* Are in league with the Antichrist (Obama)
and act on these beliefs, for example, by seeking to disenfranchise Democratic voters wherever possible.
These are, broadly speaking, the same people who are complaining about oppression wrt equal marriage. Certainly if Maggie Gallagher has any problem with people who say this kind of thing, she hasn’t made much noise about it.

I’d say that a liberal response would preclude retaliation as regards voting rights, while of course seeking to fight disenfranchisement. But otherwise, it’s hard to see why the views of people like this deserve more than bare tolerance.

“All I need, to make my point, is that marriage is an ancient institution that, normally, adults have been able to expect to participate in.”

I don’t think you do. I agree denial of basic rights is a “gross and manifest injustice” (see torture, censorship). I’m not sure denial of an activities adults have in the past been able and expected to do is (see attendance at public executions, carrying blades in public, cruelty to animals). They’re very different classes of actions.

” ‘Right’ is not quite it ”

Wow, what the heck had happened here, while I was asleep (or am I still)? This is confusing. Is John Holbo a bigot now? Tell me it ain’t so.

Jerry Vinokurov’s comment at #31 immediately brought to mind Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The conservative movement stands proudly against blacks, women, Muslims, atheists having any voice or public influence, yet conservative intellectuals and think tanks love handing the megaphone to a black, female Muslim-turned-atheist when she criticises Islam.

Ali doesn’t say anything that a thousand white male Christian conservatives aren’t already, but whenever she publishes or makes a public appearance, it’s surrounded by that atmosphere of glee and barely-repressed cries of, “Checkmate, liberals! She’s all the minorities! Your own rules ban you from disagreeing!”

“And, that is the intended end game for the left and freedom of religion: That it be restricted to the inside of your head, while you faithfully render unto Caesar everything that is Caesar’s, which is to say, everything. You can believe what you want, so long as the only beliefs you act on are the left’s.”

As usual, you are lying. What the Greens want is to have the advantages of incorporation, but not the disadvantages. If Hobby Lobby was a non-profit, they’d have been OK.

John Quiggin at 124 is exactly right.

Roy, as usual, is making excuses for bigotry.

Also this is pretty much all anyone needs to know about Maggie Gallagher:

“Gallagher received tens of thousands of dollars from the Department of Health and Human Services during 2002 and 2003 for helping the George W. Bush administration promote the President’s Healthy Marriage Initiative. During this time, Gallagher testified before Congress in favor of “healthy marriage” programs, but never disclosed the payments. When asked about that situation, she replied “Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it? I don’t know. You tell me. …frankly, it never occurred to me””

Brett Bellmore @ 78

“I advocate that law leave us free enough that no religious practice it would be even remotely sensible to tolerate NEEDS an exception. You don’t, for instance, need a religious exception for sacramental wine, if you don’t have prohibition. You don’t need a religious exception for peyote, if you don’t have a war on drugs. But you’re not going to grant a religious exception to murder laws to a modern revival of Thugee. And we shouldn’t be giving Scientology an exception from laws against extortion and blackmail, whether or not you take that racket seriously as a religion.”

You choose your examples carefully, but there are others. There are e.g. religious people who oppose blood transfusions. If Congress can pass no law which offends their religious views, then there can be no minimum standards for health insurance which includes coverage for these things. In practice, this means there can be no minimum standards for health insurance at all, since any minimum requirement might offend some religious view.

Beyond that, ISTM your POV renders any government impossible. If Hobby Lobby can’t be required to fund contraception because it offends their religious views, how can Quakers continue to be required to fund drones to kill Afghanis? Surely the uses of taxation more profoundly violate their religious views! So even the minimal function of government – defense – usually granted by libertarians is unacceptable to you.

“I see no reason whatsoever that the federal government should be setting minimum standards for health insurance.”

Of course you don’t….

” In the world we live in, where your job is your livelihood (and, in the US, your ticket to healthcare!), it seems unreasonable to allow people to be deprived of it for their politics.”

What if the NAACP discovered that one of their employees was a committed KKK member? Would it be reasonable for people to put pressure on that KKK member to resign?

Remember that Eich was NOT fired. He resigned.

#127 Roy Belmont

It’s stunning how often seemingly rational young people respond to
“these religious people think their religion is more important than the laws of a community which doesn’t share their religious views”
with
“Well, they shouldn’t.”

What do you think they ought to do instead?

Consider another group, NAMBLA. As I understand it, their main disagreement with mainstream culture is that they think some children should have the right to informed consent.

But mainstream culture says that children can’t perform informed consent. There’s too much power imbalance. You should never have sex with adults until you have learned what it all involves by means of extended experimentation with other people who don’t know any more than you do. Or maybe you become capable of informed consent when you reach a certain age, because your genes unlock things in your brain or something. Or maybe it’s that if you’re a virgin and you marry a virgin and neither of you ever has sex with anybody else, then power issues etc will never be important or if the man gets all the power that’s how it’s supposed to be. Or something else. Maybe the mainstream is a whole lot of ideas that partly fit together and partly conflict, and they agree on some practical specifics.

Anyway, if you were to make a religion out of NAMBLA and insist on doing things your way, as I understand it you could be arrested and jailed for talking about your preferences, for writing porn about it, for doing artwork depicting it, etc. There goes freedom of speech. You could be put on a sexual offenders list that would make it hard for you to find places to rent, it would be public knowledge, and most places you tried to live you would be hounded by your neighbors who can’t stand the thought of you living near their children. Segregation? Etc etc.

People who belong to despised minorities do not have rights because they are despised minorities. To have minority rights you must be a respected minority.

“these NAMBLA people think their preferences are more important than the laws of a community which doesn’t share their views.”

“Well, they shouldn’t.”

If people respect your religion they won’t do that. They will look for compromises. Perhaps they might agree that children of NAMBLA members can participate? No, I didn’t think so.

It’s harder when your minority tries to tell everybody else how to live. If a religious minority wants their own children to be unvaccinated, maybe we can let them do that. It is their own children after all, why should we infringe on their rights over their own children? If they insist that nobody should be vaccinated that’s harder.

If a minority thinks abortion is wrong and they shouldn’t do it, no problem at all! If they decide that nobody can do it, it’s harder.

If they want to baptise their children into their religion, that’s fine. If they insist that every child must be baptised into their religion, it’s harder.

The question is always, how important are they? If they’re the size of NAMBLA they get no respect whatsoever. If they have tens of millions of followers and billions of dollars, then it’s harder to argue that they should conform.

MPAVictoria @142

What if the NAACP discovered that one of their employees was a committed KKK member? Would it be reasonable for people to put pressure on that KKK member to resign?

Well, that is a tough one. I could just say that hard cases make bad law, and that the existence of a small number of cases of such extreme mismatch between the beliefs of the employee and those of the employer should not invalidate the general principle, but this is the internet, and such answers won’t do.

I am happy enough to say that the NAACP should not be able to fire someone for their membership of the KKK unless it was obvious that it was interfering with their duties. You can argue that it would be impossible for the beliefs implied by KKK membership to not interfere somehow, in which case hurrah! you have your cause for firing the person as soon as you observe the interference. I think you’d need to find some actual evidence of the person having failed in their duties though, not some vague “loss of confidence”.

I suppose what we’re really getting down to is the question of whether we can have protection for the political beliefs of, say, pro-choice (or even, it seems, pro-contraception) employees of companies owned or managed by Christians, without needing to extend similar protection to racists employed by the NAACP. Maybe we can, and I’d certainly see the former as more deserving of protection. But I think the rule would work better if it were universal and thus considerably easier to understand and enforce, than if it were selectively applied to certain groups in certain situations. If even the racist NAACP employee is protected, the rest of us can be pretty damn confident that our rights are going to be secure, which just isn’t the case if someone gets to make exclusions based on their view of what happens to be beyond the Pale.

Consumatopia @144:

Eich wasn’t fired. He quit because people, including employees, complained, some threatening to quit. So the only way Eich could be kept on the job is by preventing those employees from doing that. So if you want to change the Eich case, the abstract principle you have to uphold is that employees can be required–either by law or by social norm–to keep working for someone they don’t want to work for. Seems to me that has an obvious liberal answer.

Yeah, here I am on slightly sketchy ground. That said, I think that laws have roles in shaping norms as well as their more direct role in the criminal justice system. If there’s a law which says that you can’t be fired for your political beliefs, we’d have at least some high-profile cases of people fighting and winning cases against their employers in court, we’d have stronger norms of separation between personal and employment-related views, and so on. So, a different legal setup might still have produced a different outcome even if the law would not have directly prevented the outcome that actually happened. In a “crisis” situation like Eich’s, we reach for precedent and the US doesn’t really have many precedents for a person retaining employment when challenged over their personal beliefs.

Beyond that, yes, you’re correct. I’m annoyed about the Eich case because in respect of the things that, in my view, really matter about Mozilla, he was on the side of the angels to a considerably greater extent than any other candidate. People who take technology user freedom seriously are, understandably but regrettably, pretty rare in technology leadership positions. Other people disagreed, and they won. I don’t think that they won by much, and I think modest differences in employment culture could have swung the case, but as a general principle I don’t think that it should be illegal to persuade someone to leave a job. What happened to Eich was perfectly legal and I wouldn’t wish to change that.

BTW, in the Mozilla case it was worse – they rely on a large amount of unpaid labor being donated.

Look, what is “freedom”? I think it’s the space between what somebody else thinks you ought to do, and what you can be forced to do, the space between what somebody else thinks you should refrain from, and what you can be forced to refrain from.

One of the problems liberals seem to have, is that they don’t seem to believe that space ought to exist. You think something’s good, you immediately want to mandate it, you think something’s bad, you immediately want to ban it.

No, the government shouldn’t be mandating what insurance has to cover, because it isn’t just the government that is entitled to make decisions. And if this means that somebody has to pay for Plan B out of pocket, instead of it being covered by their insurance? Fine. Part of getting to make your own decisions, is getting to pay for them.

The more government does, the more of life it takes over, the more it conflicts with people who want to make their own decisions.

No, choosing between the Greens and you folks is easy. The Greens know what it means to let somebody else make their own decisions. You? The idea that they might not make the decision YOU think they ought to make outrages you.

I think it’s the space between what somebody else thinks you ought to do, and what you can be forced to do, the space between what somebody else thinks you should refrain from, and what you can be forced to refrain from.

Sure, that sounds good. As long as we understand that deprivation of capability is one means of forcing people to refrain from action.

Actually, no, leave that aside. Lets keep our freedom negative. Private property undeniably forces people to refrain from things all the time. You want to step on this land. You can’t, you’re forced to refrain by laws against trespass.

It follows from that the restrictions on the ways in which private property is used to force people to refrain from action can mean that people have more freedom–they can be forced to do or refrain from doing less. Simple, albeit small, example: the recently passed restrictions on cell phone locking. Now it is harder to force people to refrain from unlocking their cell phone. Doing so means that phone companies are forced to refrain from forcing customers from refraining from unlocking their cell phone. This is an increase in freedom on net–as you defined it above–especially as wireless carriers, by their very nature, benefit from the government forcing people to refrain from lots of actions, in particular FCC regulation of spectrum.

Hobby Lobby is forcing employees to refrain from using their earned benefits to acquire certain medical services. Some of their employees might want to make their own decisions about how their benefits should be used. If the government forces Hobby Lobby to refrain from forcing their employees to refrain from using their benefits to purchase birth control, that’s a net increase of freedom–not only because the medical decisions of the employee are no proper business of the employer, but because those benefits are earned by the employee and shouldn’t be controlled by the employer’s religion.

You think something’s good, you immediately want to mandate it,

False. We mandated health insurance, in particular, because when we didn’t insurance companies were forcing people with preexisting conditions to refrain from buying it. Health insurance happened to be a unique market in this regard–we do not mandate broccoli purchases even though broccoli is both healthy and delicious.

No, the government shouldn’t be mandating what insurance has to cover, because it isn’t just the government that is entitled to make decisions.

It isn’t just the employer or the insurance company to make decisions, either. That would represent a loss of freedom.

The Greens know what it means to let somebody else make their own decisions.

No, that’s precisely what they don’t know. The idea that their employees might not decide to use the benefits those employees earned in the way the Greens think they ought to enrages them.

John @ 131.

My understanding is part of the point of your post was: (1) deprivation of a basic right “would constitute a gross and manifest injustice”, (2) marriage is a basic right, therefore (3) denial of the right to marry is a “gross and manifest injustice”. (1) is pretty much true by definition, but the syllogism fails based on (2) since it’s unlikely that marriage is a basic right.

Can you save youself by substituting marriage as being an “ancient institution that, normally, adults have been able to expect to participate in”? Well, (2) works fine if you do, but (1) become extremely dubious. Plenty of ancient institutions that adults have been able to expect to participate in are commonly thought of as vile – as I say, attendence at public executions, cruelty to animals for sport, etc.

I think this is an interesting distinction when thinking about gay liberation. The Stonewall radicals thought of marriage as an oppressive ancient institution to be destroyed. Current legal actions have established same sex marriage by entrenching the precedent for marriage as a right. As we’ve established this is not something that was historically the case, and if you do think marriage is oppressive this is not good news.

Maggie Gallagher @ 115
“What opinions in a democracy we are supposed to tolerate in one another and what are “outside the pale” for what theoretical reasons, is an important and not an easy question. ”

You see, I think the language here is perhaps enlightening to the deeper problem. Tolerance of *opinions* ought to be a given, it is tolerance of *actions* taken in accordance with those opinions that is in question, and who is harmed thereby.

J Thomas 5: “If it turns out that someone argues against the existence of a right, and the large majority of people who believe in that right are disgusted to hear it and disgusted at the person who says it, the person who disgusts them still has the right to make the argument and disgust them. They have the right to be disgusted. If they don’t like hearing it and being disgusted they have the right not to listen.”

Seems to me that says it all. How can this even be controversial?

“They have the right to be disgusted”

Those who want to get disgusted, they certainly have the right to be disgusted, but they shouldn’t participate in discussions. Otherwise, you get buckets of vomit and no light whatsoever. Give them an “I’m disgusted” counter, or something…

#148 Consumatopia

I think you could find even more absurd cases than an envelope stuffing Klan member at the NAACP offices. Suppose an adviser to a political candidate makes donations to their opponent.

What if it was an employee who was trying to organize a union? Shouldn’t they be able to fire him on the spot and arrest him for trespassing if he ever comes back onto company property?

This isn’t just somebody who has attitudes opposed to their politics. It’s somebody who’s working directly against the company, trying to suck away corporate profits, the most direct enemy the company can have.

How can it possibly be illegal to fire everybody who is suspected of union organizing? If a company can fire anybody at all, surely they can fire anybody who tries to start a union.

JT 163, is your question serious? US federal law specifically states that union activity is one cause (out of very few) for which you cannot be legally fired.

“Hobby Lobby is forcing employees to refrain from using their earned benefits to acquire certain medical services. “

Not if you regard being paid as an earned benefit. They’re refusing to designate part of the earned benefit for acquiring certain medical services.

No, that isn’t what’s happening. See my post @98.

Hobby Lobby insists on supplying health insurance, so that part of their employee’s compensation is one that they keep control over. They are not merely refusing to facilitate actions. The ACA left them that option–just pay wages and the mandate penalty instead of health insurance. That wasn’t good enough. Hobby Lobby insisted on taking control of benefits earned by the employee.

The Greens are trying to control how other people use their own medical benefits. Under the definition of freedom you gave at 151, the Greens are shrinking the “space” you call freedom.

Brett,

It’s a major stretch for you to make this about freedom of choice, when the Greens are taking away a benefit from female employees, and only female employees. The Greens are making that choice FOR those employees, even though they aren’t involved, ever, in the choice to use contraception. That’s between the woman and her doctor. The Greens should have nothing to do with it.

If, however, the ACA mandated the USE of contraception, then you’d have an easy, slam dunk case to make. The Greens then could frame this all in terms of Big Government forcing them to do something against their will, and those of us on the left, I dare say, would support you and the Greens.

But this isn’t that. There is no mandate for usage. The Greens can say their religion prohibits them from using contraception, and they can decline. No law, anywhere, says they can’t do this. But the second they try to increase the realm of that prohibition to their employees, they no longer can claim that this is about their freedom of choice, much less that of their employees. They move from being the oppressed, to the oppressor.

A clear pattern whenever I read conservatives on issues of freedom: They seem incapable of realizing that the “freedom” of employers to do as they please takes freedoms away from workers. Pretty much always. And it almost always takes freedoms away from consumers, and creates even more imbalances of freedoms, privileges and power in society overall.

It’s maddening to try to discuss this with conservatives, though it’s even worse with propertarians. In general, they do not seem to recognize that one person’s freedom can and often does mean the loss of freedom for others. They seem to believe it’s always win/win . . . . just as they have this incredibly naive and rose-colored view of commercial transactions. That is, to them, always already voluntary and win/win. The concept of being forced by a system to do something seems foreign to them. They’ve drunk the koolaid.

An analogy: Joe hates smoke-filled bars, but he loves bars. He and his best friend, Milton Hayek, go to one and it’s overwhelmingly smokey for Joe.

“I can’t take it anymore, Milton.”
“Well, I like it here. If you don’t, you’re free to go to any other bar of your choosing.”
“But they’re all smokey, Milton.”
“You’re still free to choose.”

The Greens can say their religion prohibits them from using contraception, and they can decline. No law, anywhere, says they can’t do this. But the second they try to increase the realm of that prohibition to their employees, they no longer can claim that this is about their freedom of choice

Let me make sure I’m understanding you.

I can say that I won’t engage in racist tirades in the store parking lot, but it would be WRONG for me to forbid my employees from doing so?

And the curve bends a little bit more towards justice…

http://gawker.com/federal-appeals-court-strikes-down-virginias-gay-marria-1612122552

“And your position is that no one should be able to force someone to do something – or obey anything – which they conscientiously object to.”

Not only is that not my position, it is a position I have explicitly rejected. See my remarks regarding Thugee or Scientology.

It is my position that, since to make something “illegal” is to state that the government is to resort to violence if you do it, just as to mandate it is to state that the government is to resort to violence if you won’t do it, law is only appropriate for subjects where violence is appropriate.

And since I can’t delegate an authority I don’t possess, I refuse to advocate any law where I think *I* would not be justified in resorting to violence were it just my own will involved, rather than a legislature.

But the list of those laws is not the null set. Laws against murder, theft, rape.

Not laws against offering insurance I think inadequate.

Laws against murder, theft, rape.

Theft and trespass being the big ones, because they mean that every conflicting set of desires for what to do with a scarce resources is one in which government force (or government sanctioned private force) must take a side. So when the insurance company decides to increase its profits by denying applications for coverage, it’s government force that defends the wealth, property, and contracts that make such a decision possible.

It’s probably worth pointing out that there’s a half-dozen countries out there that maintain some degree of institutional continuity with HRE fiefs: that is, they unquestionably arose as private landholdings under a larger sovereign. So the “private actors use force too” isn’t theoretical.

[belgium luxemborg monaco italy [via savoy] lichtenstein [obviously] and austria. Germany doesn’t, because the way modern germany was established after WWII wiped the institutional connections.]

Dr. Hilarius 07.29.14 at 12:03 am
“Barry @151: Why such an emotional response, particularly when I was agreeing with your general point? You may disagree that Hobby Lobby poses any threat to the the separation of corporate and personal spheres but the concern is not original with me, it’s been advanced by a number of legal commenters. But seriously, calm down, it’s nothing worth having a stroke over.”

I did not read it as such. To be fair, your comment had such bad logic that my getting your intent wrong was quite likely.

Digby has a great peace today on the stupidity of hoping to “build a bridge” to the tight wingers

”
Don’t count your populist chickens

by digby

Yes, these are the kind of people we can count on to join us in a populist revolution:
Fox News’ morning program questioned a Texas official about providing emergency services to undocumented migrants, asking whether 911 calls from immigrants must be answered “even though for the most part, when you get there, you realize they’re not even American citizens.”

On July 23, Fox & Friends centered a discussion on how undocumented immigrants in Brooks County, Texas are “bombarding” the police department with 911 calls. Host Brian Kilmeade set up an interview with the Texas county’s chief deputy by claiming that “illegal immigrants are learning the hard way there’s a deadly cost to crossing the border.” Kilmeade suggested Brooks County emergency response services might be strained because, “not only are they understaffed and lacking resources, now they’ve got to deal with illegal immigrants who have no business being here.”

As an example, the program aired two emergency calls from Spanish speakers each identified on-screen as “Immigrant.” In the first, a distressed male requests emergency assistance for his cousin, whom the man described as “turning blue.” Another call featured a man and woman explaining to the 911 operator that they have not had access to water in three days.

Kilmeade asked the deputy, “So those calls, you have to respond to, even though for the most part, when you get there you realize, they’re not even American citizens?”

I think we’ve determined that most of the right wing believes that only Americans deserve to live, just as a general principle. And even then, if they don’t have adequate insurance or are part of the 47% of parasites who fail to pay enough taxes to derive any benefits (unless you happen to be a white, conservative Real American 47percenter who deserves her benefits) then you probably don’t deserve to live either.

There is simply no way that people with these beliefs will ever join left wing populists. No matter how much they may hate the big banks and bailouts, they hate the “other” more. And that “other” includes liberals like you and me”

Sam Chèvre “I can say that I won’t engage in racist tirades in the store parking lot, but it would be WRONG for me to forbid my employees from doing so?”

You are missing the point of the Hobby Lobby decision. This is not about preventing employees from doing something socially wrong (though racists tirades in parking lots are likely protected under the 1st Amendment, FYI.)

The Greens feel the IUD & the morning after pill an instrument of murder – in opposition to physicians, gynecologists, science, etc. The Greens have decided that not only do THEY not want to use these highly effective FAMILY PLANNING methods, they do not want to provide insurance that covers these products to employees who, like many in the US, may believe that the IUD and morning after pills are effective FAMILY PLANNING tools, not instruments of murder.

As I understand it, prior to ACA, the Greens provided Hobby Lobby employees with insurance that DID cover these birth control methods they now find objectionable.

Five Catholic Supreme Court justices decided that these birth control methods are indeed objectionable, as their church dictates they should believe. FYI – I am a Catholic who strays far from the Catholic dogma surrounding the ability to control the size of one’s family – but the justices do not stray far at all from the teachings of their church. One hopes they do not decide all birth control is objectionable – we’ll see how that plays out in the future.

I find it HILARIOUS that the Satanic Temple is claiming religious exemption from distributing anti-abortion info to those interested in abortion http://bit.ly/WKOWK1

SCOTUS has opened up Pandora’s box with the Hobby Lobby ruling.

Main Street Muse, you are correct. Hobby Lobby covered 18 of the 20 contraceptives in question up until 2012, dropping two of them not long before they took the whole thing to court. They also covered and still cover vasectomies.

But the Greens also invest tens of millions in the companies that make those contraceptives, including those they sought to ban from their employees.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/hobby-lobby-retirement-plan-invested-emergency-contraception-and-abortion-drug-makers

So, if “complicity” is their rationale, one would think making money off contraception would be a bigger no no than simply letting insurance cover them, while never knowing when an employee takes advantage of the new benefit.

And, as mentioned, there is nothing in the bible about contraception or abortion; Jesus never mentions them, nor does he talk about gay people.

I find it amazing that the Supreme Court could rule on a subject without requiring any supporting evidence from the Greens, as to why those two and then four forms of contraception go against their religious beliefs. One would think that any court, but especially the Supreme Court, would not just take their word for it.

“Defendant, we have several eye witnesses who place you at the scene of the crime. Do you have proof that you were not there on the 20th of November at 8:00pm?”
“No, your honor, but you can trust me, because I have sincerely held religious views, and one of them is that I am innocent.”
“Well, that’s good enough for me. Case closed!!”

“The throwaway point is this: one reason why opinion shifted on the gay marriage issue so quickly – this is a sociological guess – is precisely that marriage is such an old institution.”

IMHO, the only reason opinion shifted is because the new opinion was sold through the media (mostly TV). Selling the opposite opinion would be even easier.

“You are too willing to believe that people can be indoctrinated with any strange new ideology an elite may wish to disseminate – such as: marriage isn’t for everyone! ”

Marriage is for everyone. They issue is, rather, what “marriage” is. Here, I’ve been told, opinions differ.

You never noticed, in the last 10 years or so, any unusual presence of movies, TV shows, news items sympathetic to gay couples? Of course you have. You probably think it’s just natural. But it could be the opposite.

“so I think a lot of people would agree with you that it isn’t just the members and senators of parliament /congress etc that should hold all decision making power. ”

No, we’re not agreeing, because you’re talking about who makes the decisions, and I’m talking about what sorts of decisions it can be appropriate to make collectively, NOT who is part of the collective decision making.

Essentially, I think that government can only have the powers it’s delegated, and can only be delegated those powers the people doing the delegating had to begin with. And, in as much as people without government don’t have a right to insert themselves as a third party into voluntary transactions, they can’t delegate that power to a collective.

I favor a “night-watchman” state, because I think anything more goes beyond what people in a state of nature are entitled to do visa vi each other.

“I understand that you think that you are the fine traditionalist, and I am the manic, rationalist revisionist.”

I don’t think that I’m a traditionalist, quite the opposite. I only think I can understand a traditionalist. Since you mentioned it, I do think you’re a bit manic (no offense). The symptom: you stick to your paradigm and refuse to consider any other angle. That goes exactly to the question of tolerance (in the title).

To you, marriage is some signifier of love (so amazingly square of you, I must say). To someone else it’s an institutional mechanism for procreation, cultural reproduction and social stability. This is not complicated. These two are not necessarily easy to reconcile: love is ephemeral. Thus the clash. Am I evil for thinking this way?

” To someone else it’s an institutional mechanism for procreation, cultural reproduction and social stability”

Who exactly? I have been to a ton of weddings and have heard pretty much nothing about cultural reproduction and social stability. I have however heard a great deal about love and commitment and support.

In fact, I bet if you went to the weddings of these social conservatives they would say they were getting married because they loved their partners. Interesting how love no longer becomes a reason to get married as soon as it is homosexuals who want to take part in the activity.

Makes you think there might be something else behind their efforts to discriminate….

“Are you saying that love is necessarily inimical to marriage. There’s no such thing as love combined with successful (long-term) marriage?”

I have the impression that to a traditionalist ‘love’ means something else. It’s more like a warm feeling towards the mother of your children, respect for the “breadwinner”, this sort of thing. It doesn’t have to (and typically don’t) exist before the marriage. Marriage creates love. What you call ‘love’ they call ‘lust’.

Oh, and about the role of the media in people’s general attitude: I agree that “once people decided that gay people are normal, in the relevant moral respects …” etc. But for that to happen they had to stop seeing things like Cruising and Basic Instinct and start getting completely different images beaming from their boxes, don’t they? An elite consensus, I imagine.

“n Ze’s defense, in an anthropological sense it seems reasonable to generalize that these are typical functions of the family unit, even if they don’t get a shout-out at weddings.”

Well yes but you can be a family unit without actually getting married. In modern society the purpose of the vast majority of marriage is to symbolize and codify the love that two people have for each other. There is no reason to deny gay people this except animus.

“Oh, and about the role of the media in people’s general attitude: I agree that “once people decided that gay people are normal, in the relevant moral respects …” etc. But for that to happen they had to stop seeing things like Cruising and Basic Instinct and start getting completely different images beaming from their boxes, don’t they? An elite consensus, I imagine.”

I haven’t kept up with this thread but just noticed this. It seems worth mentioning the recent general election here in Ontario. The leader of the governing Liberals was (and still is, after the election) Kathleen Wynne, a lesbian in a stable relationship. During the election campaign there was quite a bit of bitterness expressed about some big financial scandals that had happened under the Liberals’ watch (though Wynne was not premier during them). My son worked in the campaign of our local NDP candidate and knocked on many doors and talked to many people on the phone. Many people were angry at the Liberals but not once did anyone mention Wynne’s sexual orientation. I kept forgetting it myself because it just wasn’t relevant to the election and so many other things were.

“I kept forgetting it myself because it just wasn’t relevant to the election and so many other things were.”

Yeah that was great wasn’t it? I was so happy when it never became an issue.

John Holbo @ 193

Serious people do not talk like Jonah Goldberg.

Maybe not, but people we’re obliged to take seriously because of the havoc, mayhem and misery they cause do talk like Jonah Goldberg — or at least to the unproselytized ear it sounds as though they do. Binyamin Netanyahu being but one very prominent example There are, sadly, many other voices joined in this malevolent chorus. It’s almost as though the 21st century was always destined to become the age of atavism, barbarism, and dirty talk, with dirty deeds to replace the dirty talk wherever circumstances seem propitious. Is it time, once again, for the withdrawal of reasonable persons to hidden scriptoria?

(Apologies to Yeats and his rough beasts, who were hustled off stage in the first act, before their true relevance could be revealed.)

“That’s what I’m saying, yes. Not saying they should, not saying I would be willing to work for or buy from from them, but yes: if a corporation wants to ban its employees from smoking, even off the job, it should be able to. If it wants to require that they refrain from dongle jokes at tech conferences, it should be able to”

Working here allows me two luxuries to which I have grown accustomed: eating and sleeping indoors.

“That’s what I’m saying, yes. Not saying they should, not saying I would be willing to work for or buy from from them, but yes: if a corporation wants to ban its employees from smoking, even off the job, it should be able to. If it wants to require that they refrain from dongle jokes at tech conferences, it should be able to.”

What is the difference between this form of society and feudalism? It can’t be the right to vote, because the effective range of government is so narrowed as to make elections largely irrelevant. I suppose it could be freedom, e.g. the freedom to choose another employer, but it requires only a modest level of unemployment (which can be manufactured by employers) to eradicate that option. Employers can limit the mobility of employees with bans on owning cars, homes, savings, etc.

So you’re left with peasants & barons, and a largely powerless king. Why not?

“It’s striking that when the issue is all about whose liberty, conservatives almost always choose that of business owners over workers, consumers or the earth, and propertarians always choose business owners over workers, consumers and the earth. Both consistently choose the liberty of the few over the many.”

+1

221: Thanks for your confirmation. I assume as good liberals we have no choice but to concede that you have the right to your opinions, even opinions as barbaric as those. I see no point in further debating this but at least we have clarified our disagreement.

While Will and Grace will probably garner a well-deserved place in the SSM Hall-of-Fame (or, at least, as regards its implementation and acceptance in Canada), I can’t help but suspect that the burgeoning acceptance for it was immeasurably helped by the rapid growth and spread of the internet. In my own case, I’d only met a handful of (openly) gay people in real life ere the legislation was passed up here; but through the miracles of instant communication with a vast swathe of people of different nationalities, ethnicity, and interests, begun back in the halcyon days ere Windows 95 was sprung upon a poised civilization, I became exposed to a wealth of writings, comments, blogs, threads, essays, etc. from homosexuals; indeed, formed some of my fondest and most enduring virtual attachments with them, and, in the so doing, became immersed within reading and hearing about their travails, their experience with second-class citizenship, and, most importantly of all, the singular importance of their respective partners in every aspect of their lives. In this way I was moved from an initially halting toleration for the institution to full-bore support. I would imagine that similar exposure to large numbers of LGBT individuals whom many a one would otherwise never have met (nor expended comparatively much thought about) went at least as far as a the presence of a sympathetic media towards changing the minds of a significant number of people regarding SSM. Notwithstanding its abrasions, the internet is a humanizing environment, and became only more so once the technology allowed it to expand beyond being merely a textual domain.

Bruce Wilder @ 225

Well, the house I’m renting is owned by a couple, not a corporation, but smoking is forbidden (by them, in the lease).

#205 ZM

Written records usually come after some sort of the delegation of powers to kings and governments &c. as far as I can tell – so you have no way of knowing – unless you rely on oral history from non-writing societies like kinship societies – what powers people had before any sort of political delegation was begun?

I strongly doubt that Brett cares about the history. He’s interested in rights, and governments that arose illegitimately, trampling people’s actual rights, don’t really count. No existing government in the world is legitimate by his standards, but it might be possible to create one someday.

But looking at old records, the Gilgamish epic starts with Gilgamish as king. He sometimes required his people to build giant walls around his city-state, and other times let the walls deteriorate. He had sex with every woman on her wedding night. When people had a problem they didn’t know how to handle, they sent a messenger to Gilgamish and expected he would handle it.

Why was he king? It doesn’t explicitly say, but
1. He was big and the best wrestler in his kingdom.
2. His mother was an important priestess, and his father was kind of a god.

In old Ireland, the story is that when time came to select a new king, a truth-teller was chosen. He ate a lot of beef and drank the broth, and he dreamed of the new king, giving the details of how to find him. If his prophecy did not come true he was put to death. One time the seer told them to find a naked man on the road armed with a sling. They looked and brought in one of the king’s sons. They asked him why he was naked on the road, and he explained that he saw some waterfowl who lured him into the water as he tried to get close enough to kill him. Suddenly they turned into armed men who threatened him, but one of them made the others stop and told him to start walking home because he was going to be the new king. He was walking home naked carrying a spear because a big bird told him to.

Israel was sort of run by priests. People came to the high priest and told him they wanted a king like the nations around them. He warned them it would be a bad idea but they insisted. So he chose a tall but undistinguished man from an undistinguished family from a small tribe, somebody who would probably fail as king. Later when Saul was in trouble he went to Samuel for a blessing and Samuel told him to die. But after Saul was killed, a foreign ruler chose an Israelite mercenary to be the new king, and he got established well enough to shop around for a better patron to be vassal to, and David’s kingdom lasted two generations before it fell apart.

http://www.ishwar.com/judaism/holy_neviim/book03/book03_008.html

And he said: ‘This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: he will take your sons, and appoint them unto him, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and they shall run before his chariots.

And he will appoint them unto him for captains of thousands, and captains of fifties; and to plow his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and the instruments of his chariots.

And he will take your daughters to be perfumers, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.

And he will take your men-servants, and your maid-servants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

He will take the tenth of your flocks; and ye shall be his servants.

And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king whom ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not answer you in that day.’

Most governments have been monarchies. They tended to be restrained somewhat by tradition, and by ad hoc organizations that sprang up to oppose them. Like, there was a middle-east tradition that kings could not drag married women into their harems. Abraham and Sarah used this tradition to play the badger game, as did Isaac and Rebecca.

When the Israelite government had a census which would let it organize the tax base, immediately there were reports of a giant plague which made the census obsolete. The priests blandly reported that the plague happened because of the census.

As I remember the story, when Solomon sent 30,000 slaves to Hiram of Tyre, people got upset. It was one thing to do forced labor in their own country and something else to be sold into another country. Solomon’s hasbarah team went into overdrive, they said it was only for a month at a time and the slaves could come home, that it was only foreigners who could be enslaved and sold elsewhere, and the government sent food from Israel to Tyre for the slaves to eat so they wouldn’t have to eat foreign food or depend on foreign masters to feed them.

Kings might appear to have absolute power over their people, but they were vulnerable to public outrage and continually had to respond to stories that made them look bad, spread by people who did palace intrigue.

None of this has any obvious relation to Brett’s ideas about what governments should be allowed to do, which governments are legitimate, etc. Except to show that in the past it has not been the way he wants.

#230

In my own case, I’d only met a handful of (openly) gay people in real life ere the legislation was passed up here; but through the miracles of instant communication with a vast swathe of people of different nationalities, ethnicity, and interests, begun back in the halcyon days ere Windows 95 was sprung upon a poised civilization, I became exposed to a wealth of writings, comments, blogs, threads, essays, etc. from homosexuals; indeed, formed some of my fondest and most enduring virtual attachments with them, and, in the so doing, became immersed within reading and hearing about their travails, their experience with second-class citizenship, and, most importantly of all, the singular importance of their respective partners in every aspect of their lives. In this way I was moved from an initially halting toleration for the institution to full-bore support.

And this is why it is vitally important for Israel to strictly limit internet access for palestinians.

” (within basic no-harm-to-others limits).”

Requiring someone not use birth control seems to be a harm to me.

“Assuming that the terms were disclosed up-front, and the need for them can be predicted up-front[1], they should be able to request anything they want (within basic no-harm-to-others limits).”

Wow, so there are limits! You will of course run into trouble defining what represents a harm, which is precisely at the crux of Hobby Lobby: Hobby Lobby claim that they are harmed by their employees using birth control, whereas many employees feel harmed by being denied birth control coverage. Which of these claims is more persuasive? Apparently that depends heavily on one’s gender and religion.

Sam’s scenario of a rental contract forbidding birth control might even be legal in the US, at least in some states, I’m not sure. In more civilized countries, there are laws regulating what can and cannot be part of a rental, or employment, contract, and it’s pretty clear that a contract clause saying that a tenant/employee must, or must not, use birth control would certainly be invalid and unenforceable (*). Sam would probably view such laws as oppressive, a restriction on the freedom of property and business owners. Am I right?

(*) except perhaps in the case of sex work, where it is legal.

The landlord can insist that I pay rent, even though if someone stopped me on the street and demanded a week’s pay, I would definitely count that as a harm.

In the state of nature, these two situations would be the same. Your landlord and a person stopping you on the street would be equivalent.

Claiming a piece of property means less property available for others. Putting arbitrary coercive restrictions on the use of that property–e.g. no birth control–is a harm to everyone else looking for a place to live.

“Seriously, the necessity of the existence of private property, so long as scarcity continues to be an issue, (I don’t assume it always will be.) is so well established, that people who attack private property should be assumed to be either crazy or malign.”

There’s a vast expanse between the two extremes. You’re standing on one peak, shouting across the valley toward another, ignoring the mass of humanity between you. And it has to be said, I’m really not sure there’s anyone on that other peak you keep shaking your fist at.

The internet has expanded my tolerance in this respect. I am not sure if I would still be so self righteous if not for that exposure.

Interesting. My own experience is that nothing brought out the trolls as much as the time I claimed there could be a equivalent way for a humanist to understand something like “sin.” The middle ground may not exist on the Internet, but at least some souls end up getting pushed in the right direction.

“You’re allowed to build the house, but if you rent it out and aren’t living in it, you aren’t allowed to put arbitrary restrictions on the tenants living in it.”

I don’t see any good reason why somebody besides me and my potential tenants should have any say in what restrictions are “arbitrary”. The government wants to decide what the rules are in a house, let them build their own damn houses.

Here’s a good reason: because you are coercively excluding the rest of us from using that land, and even relying on the government to defend your claim to it. If you want the community to go along with that you’ll have to agree to the community’s terms. If you don’t like the community’s terms, go find a different community.

John Holbo,

Apparently, your idea of freedom is quite different from mine. In my usage, if I want to rent from you, letting you decide on what terms you’d be glad to do so, and me deciding whether that’s acceptable–and Joe and Jim doing the same–is MORE freedom than requiring that Joe and Jim reach the same agreement you and I reach.

Freedom (in the liberal, not the totalitarian, sense) is (pretty much always and everywhere) conducive to public peace; compare Europe pre-1600 and post-1650 to note the difference. I thought that “conducive to public peace” might be a more communicative term than “freedom”, in this “submitting to the will of your rulers is true Freedom” corner of the world.

It would almost have to involve some sort of institutions bigger than individual citizens, but I don’t now how it should work. If we got something like that which was effective, it might not look much like what we think of as government today.

No, it wouldn’t. It would probably look a lot like the traditional liberal democracies of a century ago.

I have seriously had conversations with propertarians online where they admitted they were fine with private allodial title to land regardless of scale. The local government wants money from property owners each year? That’s theft, like all taxation. A giant parcel of land is privately owned by landlords who extract rents from all inhabitants? That’s a contract between free individuals. Someone who refuses to pay property taxes to government is resisting theft, while someone who refuses to pay rent in the new privately owned state of Idaho is initiating theft.

But of course that vast concentration of ownership couldn’t happen in libertopia, because government meddling is the sole cause of perverse outcomes in market economies. And because it couldn’t happen, libertopia will never enact laws against it. And then after the impossible happens you just have to accept the outcome in the name of consistency because all the paving stones on the road to private tyranny were sort of freedom-shaped.

I don’t see any guaranteed way to keep one entity from becoming too powerful. Maybe we could look for ways to make it less likely. It would almost have to involve some sort of institutions bigger than individual citizens, but I don’t now how it should work. If we got something like that which was effective, it might not look much like what we think of as government today.

I am totally with you. I don’t argue with propertarians because I think modern liberalism is the perfect platonic form of government. I’m desperately searching for something better. I don’t even rule out the idea that some exotic new business model we can’t even imagine today could make markets and capitalism work as well and as justly as propertarians pretend it currently does.

But we aren’t going to find it if we think that poor people submitting to the will of their landlords and bosses is true Freedom.

John Q., casting Eich in employment at will terms cuts both ways, though. I’ve heard a lot of liberals lately defending the situation by saying that of course the company has the right to fire anyone who has offended their sensibilities or that of the public. Had this been 20 years ago, and Eich pressured out of his job for pro-gay advocacy, I don’t think liberals would be making this argument. People who don’t think people should be fired or demoted, or pressured to resign by a movement advocating firing or demotion (I don’t see an important difference between firing and demotion here), but are OK with what happened to Eich have to make a case why this situation is different.

Some have tried to square the circle by saying that Eich as an executive should be accountable for his private views in ways that other employees are not. It is a huge struggle to prevent the affluent from having more rights than others; attempting to give them less is not going to fly. Aside from the political impossibility, it tosses out the whole concept of rights as universal. If people have a right to express their political opinions outside of work without reprisal in the workplace, then executives have this right too, because they are also people.

If liberals are going to accept the principle that people can be penalized at work for their private political views, the main victims will be liberals. Thanks to Google, Facebook, Twitter, your ISP, the NSA etc., your political views if given any voice online can be traced to you in great detail, unless you go to a lot of skilled trouble to avoid it. Up to now, routine political discrimination against employees has been usually more trouble than worth, because information was difficult to acquire (you could check voter rolls for party affiliation, but with only 2 significant parties, this doesn’t convey enough information). I don’t think the potential of the current situation has been fully exploited yet, but that is where we are heading. And liberals, having cheered the axing of Eich, will have little grounds to object. For getting to feel good jeering at one homophobe, we are undermining our right to object to what could easily become routine discrimination involving millions. Millions of us.

“Conservatives, on the other hand, seem to wish for protections for Eich, but not for employees generally.”

100% right, 0% wrong.

“I arbitrarily demanded that my tennants not keep their dogs in the basement without cleaning up after them, they arbitrarilly skipped town when the rent was due after tearing holes in the walls. (Took six months’ rent to repair the place.) You should not perhaps expect me to automatically side with tennants in light of this, let alone side with the government against both tennants and landlords.”

Sorry you had bad tenants man but that doesn’t make you right about any of this.

“you don’t think of the government as a third party butting in where it doesn’t belong”

Property is government. If you hold a deed, you chose to involve the government. The problem is that you love government, coercion and force, but you like to pretend that you don’t.

John Holbo,

Conservatives, on the other hand, seem to wish for protections for Eich, but not for employees generally.

You keep saying this; I don’t think it means what you think it means.

I followed this somewhat; I can’t remember any conservative, anywhere, arguing that Eich’s firing/resignation under pressure/demotion (at the CEO level, it’s not usually called a firing) should be illegal. Cite, please? (I saw plenty of arguments that it was a bad idea, a demonstration of the left’s general lack of any concept of rights as universal, a dangerous precedent, etc; I saw no calls to change the law to make it illegal.)

Property is government.

I’m not sure whether the indications point more strongly toward needing an insane asylum or a history lesson.

“I followed this somewhat; I can’t remember any conservative, anywhere, arguing that Eich’s firing/resignation under pressure/demotion (at the CEO level, it’s not usually called a firing) should be illegal. Cite, please? (I saw plenty of arguments that it was a bad idea, a demonstration of the left’s general lack of any concept of rights as universal, a dangerous precedent, etc; I saw no calls to change the law to make it illegal.)”

Heck, John Fund says it already is illegal.

http://www.newsmax.com/NewsmaxTv/BrendanEich-JohnFund-gay-marriage/2014/04/08/id/564372/

Colin Street @259: But the government isn’t your puppet. It’s an independent actor, with agency and judgement, and it’s not obliged to agree with you. Your position doesn’t work. Either the government decides what rights you have in your property, or there’s no “property” at all.

So where does “The Government” get the standards it uses to make such decisions? Must be something like community standards, in which case it isn’t really an independent actor. And here we are back at the top. If it really is independent, we should maybe better call it “The Management” and it starts to smell like totalitarianism.

What John said @258 for sure. I guess the best thing is to maintain as much public peace as possible in defense of Holbosian freedom while community standards evolve … without moral teleology we’re just doomed. Fortunately, looking around and taking a longish view of a back and forth process, moral teleology we’ve got.

(… don’t really mean -ology. What’s a suffix denoting a process? Got no Greek here, sorry.)

“There’s the last fifty years, where as the scope within which private property was left alone by the national government has shrunk, the level of government force needed to maintain order has grown exponentially. (For a rough estimate, the imprisonment rate has gone up a factor of 5 since 1960.)”

Yet property crime rates per capita have actually declined over that time, so there doesn’t seem to be any obvious relationship between the scope of government regulation over property and the incarceration rate.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-high-budgetary-cost-of-incarceration/

“Also, you still owe me an answer. When you say ‘let them build their own damn house,’ do you mean that what you say applies only in the case that they can build their own damn house, as a practical matter? Or, in the event that they can’t build their own damn house, are they flat out of luck?”

I have a hard time imagining that the government would ever be unable to build it’s own damn house.

Correcting myself @ 280, I’m overstating the case. Property crime incarceration rates are marginally higher than in 1960, but only marginally. The point remains that the overall incarceration rate explosion can’t be explained by any expansion in government regulation of property.

#273 Sam Chevre

You have elegantly restated a very old idea; the traditional name is “error has no rights”, and the idea dates back in Christian history at least to Audustine of Hippo.

This viewpoint hasn’t been observed to promote liberal-sense freedom where it has been tried, historically.

Yes, agreed. It is logically consistent, but it isn’t pleasant for minorities who disagree with the consensus about what’s right and what’s wrong.

We have a whole lot of it running around. Like, we have a whole lot of people who think that abortion should be flat-out illegal, because they are sure they are right and that women who think they need abortions are wrong.

We have a lot of people who think that gays should not be allowed to marry, because they are right and gays are wrong.

Etc etc.

Imagine that the government did not intervene about property rights. For example, somebody has built a house on land you own because they wrongly think they own that land, and you persuade them to go away so you can move onto your own land. You have more guns than they do and you have more friends with guns than they do. Why should their wrong opinion about who owns the land get any traction at all, versus your actual ownership?

The issue is a balance-of-power shift, then. But this makes all the stuff about liberal tolerance and religious freedom kind of… secondary.

The issue is the revised definition of tolerance, which is now taken to mean, not “live and let live” or “do your own thing” as one might expect, but rather “liberalism”.[1]

That is what allows people to argue that we should be very “intolerant” (procedural definition) towards those who are not “tolerant” (substantive definition). Or, to put it more bluntly, that is why you can be fired from your job for not being a liberal.

[1] “Bigot” of course is another a term which has undergone similar revisions, now meaning anyone who is not a liberal, regardless of the reasonableness of their opinions.

Brett Bellmore,
Re: your bad tenants experience &
“I have a hard time imagining that the government would ever be unable to build it’s own damn house.”

I don’t have time to write a thorough response I’m sorry, but this will have to do.

I think you live in the USA but I don’t know what state. I can’t tell whether your State has poor tenancy regulations or if because you don’t think governments should regulate overmuch you decided not to follow your state’s tenancy and animal cruelty regulations.

In Victoria tenancy is quite strongly regulated. Tenants pay a bond and sign a contract at the start of the lease. If tenants leave having damaged things, accidentally or on purpose, or having not cleaned up for the next tenant, or if they left with rent owing, – the landlord May keep the appropriate portion of the bond. If the damage/bill for cleaning exceeds the bond amount the landlord can go to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to get awarded due compensation. Likewise, if the landlord has unfairly kept the bond then tenants can go to VCAT also. Their us a tenants union because tenants have less power than landlords. The government loans a bond amount to poor tenants – but it has to be paid back before they can get a second loan. Animal cruelty should be reported to the local council or the RSPCA I think.

With regard to governments building social housing – this is actually a difficult area. Governments have sold a lot of their social housing without rebuilding and their are very lengthy wait lists for social housing. The governments argue building housing is expensive, as is maintaining social housing. In Australia social housing has been more successful at low or medium density than in high rise towers it is generally thought. But we do not have such troubles as the Englush television show The Bill depicts (but this might not be a true depiction of social housing in England). At the moment the governments are not building very much social housing – there is a national affordable housing scheme where I think councils can try to get developers to provide some affordable housing in their developments, and the City of Port Philip have been notably progressive in this area too. But a shortage of social and affordable housing is quite apparent.

An additional problem is that done people are very troubled souls – but they need housing just the same anyway. We had a local tragedy recently when a young man was evicted from his social housing unit and then moved to the city to live in boarding houses and he very tragically died. RIP.