Positive Liberty

Now look, people. I’ve heard of demonization, but this is ridiculous.

A high ranking Conservative member of the House of Lords says that the push for civil rights by gays is leading to a nation of obese people.[....]

Tebbit, the former chair of the Tory party and its current Whip in the Lords, was debating the growing problem of obesity with a member of the governing Labor party on a British radio program.

He suggested Labor’s “promotion of buggery” was “intimately connected” to the increasing number of overweight people.

“Families now so seldom eat together. They don’t prepare meals properly. Wives are pressurized into thinking they ought to go out to work instead of looking after their children. And it is the breakdown of family that is at the root of it.”

And here I thought the stereotypical gay man–in the words of Jerry Seinfeld–was “thin, single, and neat.” Maybe so, but they’re making everyone else fat, and it’s got to stop.

Imagine a world where governments had never once thought to establish an official religion.

Now imagine someone proposing that the United States ought to have one, and that our country should be a Christian nation.

Republicans would probably call it “socialized religion,” and they’d fight against it as hard as they could. They would condemn any effort, no matter how minor, to insinuate religion into government. They’d point out that government ruins whatever it touches, and that religion, like medicine, ought to be left to individuals.

They would denounce it as “creeping socialism” whenever the Ten Commandments appeared in a courtroom, whenever prayers were said in public schools, and whenever Biblical creationism was foisted onto students as an alternative to scientific biology.

And these hypothetical Republicans–They’d be entirely right. Tradition should be no excuse for creeping socialism.

PL commentator Laurel suggested that I write a review of www.shipoffools.com. I thought it was a great idea. I’ve also gotten a few other ideas over the last day, and I plan to get to them all eventually, so please, don’t be shy. If you’re a regular, then you know what I like–Send it in, and I’ll comment!

Ship of Fools is a site with a simple mission:

“We’re here for people who prefer disorganized religion to the organized kind,” says ship-of-fools.com editor Simon Jenkins. “From a position of commitment, we try to look objectively at religious trends in an accessible rather than cynical way. We commend as well as debunk. But we are not a campaign, we’re a conversation.”

Debunking sometimes takes the form of Gadgets for God, a section of the site that’s best summed up in the description of one of the gadgets itself. It’s a knitting pattern to crochet the entire Last Supper. Says the description,

A true gadget for God has to pass two critical tests.

Firstly, two cultures must clash,– amply demonstrated here as the Last Supper of Jesus Christ, Son of God, meets size 9 knitting needles. Secondly, we need to imagine someone, somewhere, delighting in the gadget’s creation. Can’t you just picture it? A sweet old lady, sitting in front of a TV soap, calling out to a relative: “When I’ve finished Judas I’ll be right with you, dear. Now then, knit one, purl one…”

Pat’s Patterns offers you, “Jesus, the 12 disciples, the bread, the plates, the wine goblets and wine jug… the full colour pattern for just £3.99.” Amen. Knit this in remembrance of me.

I found one product that delighted even me: the Leprechaun Bible (no link available; it’s under “devotional”). It’s the entire bible, printed so small that it fits onto a single poster-sized sheet. “Each letter is 100th of an inch high and can be read when magnified 12 times.” Brilliant! A professor of mine had the entire Oxford English Dictionary printed similarly. It ran to five volumes, quite compact for the unabridged OED. I could see both being useful in my office.

Several Gadgets for God had descriptions that made me laugh out loud. This comes from a baptismal garment for adults:

Wet t-shirt competitions and baptismal services have something in common: wearing clothes soaked in lots of water. But that, quite definitely, is where the similarity ends. JDM (’Jesus Demands Modesty!’) are only too well aware of those unfortunate see-through moments, when adult baptism takes on an entirely different meaning.

Ship of Fools isn’t all fun and games, though. There are also serious commentaries about religion from the perspective of a group of people who care about religion tremendously–and are worried that it’s going to the dogs these days. For example, there is a piece about missionizing on university campuses in the UK. Here’s a taste:

Ten years ago, you’d try and hand a copy of a Gospel to someone and they’d likely snarl at you for pushing your beliefs onto them. Now, everyone’s fine with it – if it makes you happy.

Ten years ago, doing a mission really pissed people off. You were forcing your beliefs on them. You were a religious thug. It was kind of a thrill, really. It was persecution. People then would at least assert their right to be apathetic. Now, they’re OK with whatever you say, if it makes you happy. Now, people listen politely, and then go away and forget it. This fascinated me… while every argument is nowadays given an equal and fair hearing, fewer converts are made every year. This is because hardly anyone cares enough about religious issues any more, beyond an almost academic interest.

Obviously, he wasn’t writing about the United States, where we all take religion in dead earnest, even if some of us aren’t religious. Nonbelievers here are passionate about religion just like anyone else. To borrow a phrase from Garrison Keillor, American atheists are evangelicals too: It’s the Evangelical God that we don’t believe in.

Ship of Fools recently launched what it bills as “the UK’s first web-based, 3D church,” a VR experience that has to be seen to be believed. Or wait. Aren’t they more blessed who believe without seeing?

Church of Fools is an attempt to create holy ground on the net, where people can worship, pray and talk about faith.

The church is partly intended for people on the edges (and beyond) of faith, so please be aware that the language and behaviour in church is often colourful and occasionally offensive. Please bear with us – this is an experiment and we’re working on creative solutions to the problem of mischievous visitors. Church of Fools is currently not suitable for children.

Not suitable for children? It was enough to make me download the shockwave plugins and see what the fuss was about. Sadly, Mozilla Firefox crashed repeatedly as I tried to enter the Church. It’s the first problem I’ve yet encountered with the new browser, but a tremendously disappointing one. I plan to try it later on Scott’s computer, after I’ve got a couple of martinis in me. Until then, here are the rules for the Church, rules that really ought to apply everywhere:

1. Treat others with respect. Do not use the sanctuary or crypt to be abusive to others, try out your chat-up lines, swear gratuitously or harass other people.

2. Treat other traditions with respect. People come to Church of Fools from all sorts of backgrounds and church traditions. That means they may act differently in church from the way you would. We expect you to be tolerant of difference, but that doesn’t mean tolerating bad behaviour.

3. Don’t become a distraction. Church historians confirm that church has always been home to a little whispering, but if you only want to chat, there are better places and times for it than during worship.

4. Don’t put on a floor show. During services don’t walk around at the front, wander behind the altar or climb into the pulpit. Outside of services you are welcome to explore the building as much as you like.

5. Don’t bring your arguments to worship. We aren’t saying don’t ever argue, but please conduct debate and disagreements elsewhere. You can use the discussion boards on shipoffools.com for this purpose.

6. Take the consequences. If you break the house rules, you will attract the attention of the Church Wardens. They may ask you to stop your behaviour and/or remove you from the Church of Fools environment.

In any event, Ship of Fools reminds me of an idea I had several weeks ago that wasn’t quite developed enough to be a blog essay on its own. It runs like this.

Evangelical Christianity can be separated into three parts. There is a style of worship, a theology of grace, and a political/cultural program. Each of these parts is independent of the others, no matter how much Evangelicals would like to package them together.

The style of worship draws people in. There’s an evangelical church practically next door to me. When they were building the place, they held their services outdoors. On Sunday mornings the parking lot would fill with the sound of motorcycles, passionate preaching, and rock ‘n roll. These people got into it, in a way that Catholics, mainstream Episcopals, and Unitarians basically never do. Worship style is one of the big reasons why Evangelical Christianity is winning in the United States. People want to go to a Church that happens, one where they participate, they sing and shout and feel. No one else is giving them that chance.

There is a great stress placed on the personal relationship with God, and I find that this close, personal relationship is directly related to the style of worship. Being close, even intimate with God, is a major part of the Evangelical appeal. It’s not enough merely to say that God is real; He’s also right freakin’ here, with me, at this very moment. This probably produces a lot of the unease that non-Evangelicals feel when they’re around Evangelicals: How dare these Evangelicals claim a closer relationship with God than the one I have? Don’t they know that God is abstract, and universal, and everywhere? It’s not like you can keep God in your pocket or something…

The theology of grace is a different matter. It goes back to the earliest days of Protestantism and has little to do with the emotive worship in itself. As I understand it, Evangelicals discount the doing of good works as a way to get to heaven. Faith is the key, faith and the divine election of God. We cannot know who is predestined to Heaven or Hell; in justice, all humans are so depraved that we deserve the latter. Only God can change that, and he rewards only those who have faith in him. Salvation is interior, not dependent on what we do.

A lot of people like to say that this is the plain message of the Bible, but I disagree. The commandments obviously exist for a reason, and I can’t make myself believe that God would give them to us just as a way of proving that we’re unworthy. Also, when people asked Jesus what they needed to do to win eternal life, he often replied to the effect of “sell all your possessions and give to the poor.” He didn’t say “Works are useless. Have faith instead.” No, he commanded a very specific, very difficult good work. For example, Matthew 19:21:

Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

The passage is echoed in Mark and Luke as well. In any event, there have been many different interpretations of the Christian message over time, and the Evangelical one–that faith is the only thing necessary–is just one of them.

It strikes me that at times, this theology of grace can conflict with the close personal relationship to God described above. It’s hard to imagine a close friendship with someone who has decided your fate before you were born. It’s hard to imagine a close friendship with someone who does not care about your good works, but sees only the evil in your soul. It’s hard to imagine a close friendship with anyone who would send you to Hell for crossing him.

These are not problems that I often see among Evangelicals, though. One way that they get around such troubles is by an emphasis on being Born Again. To those who have been Born Again, all sins are washed away. God has seen them, but forgiven them–and the Born Again all know it. Before being Born Again, the believer was on the road to Hell. Now he’s going in the opposite direction.

Being Born Again often comes late in life, though, and I can’t help but wonder: What about people who die too soon? What about kids cut down when they’re nine or ten? They’ve had time to commit a few sins, and they also share the original sin that we all supposedly have. But they’ve not had time enough for the mind-altering Born Again experience, which (oddly) seems to strike only when people are adolescents or older.

(”Could it be that brain chemistry has something to do with it?” “Shh… You’re missing the atheist giving a sermon!”)

So it still seems there is a tension between the close, intimate, and emotive worship style of Evangelicals and their theology of grace. Being Born Again is a patch that goes between them, but it doesn’t convince me. Lots of other religions have similar experiences, and the ecstatic state in itself does not prove the truth of any one of them.

It’s also worth pointing out that the first modern predestinarians, the Calvinists of Geneva, were remarkably cold and austere compared to the Evangelical worship styles of today. Calvinism in its early days was a religion of the head, not one of the heart. It stressed simplicity, strict discipline, and a deep gravity about all facets of life. This tension–between the “heart” of emotive worship and the “head” of predestinarian theology–suggests to me that Evangelicalism in the United States could easily split down these lines as well.

Finally, there is the political/cultural program of American Evangelical Christianity. In a way, it’s utterly consistent with early Calvinism: Jean Calvin himself set up a near-totalitarian theocracy where Church and state operated virtually as one, and where sin and crime were perfectly indistinguishable. But there is a contradiction here too, because we are not to believe that any good work of ours will be pleasing to God, and that ought to include remaking the state in His image. Absolutely no good works are pleasing to Him, not even amending the Constitution to stop same-sex marriage.

Sin is abominable to God, of course, and it should be avoided: Thus anyone who thinks marrying gay people is wrong should abstain from doing it. But they should not then expect that they’ll get bonus points by prohibiting another from sinning. Predestinarian religion isn’t about accumulating points. It’s about having faith.

What I would like to see most is a liberal Evangelical movement. Quite simply, there needs to be something for liberal Christians to feel. Right now, it seems as though liberals usually get a “head” religion with very little “heart.” They don’t dance in the aisles, or fall into ecstasies, or talk in tongues. If they did, they might get more converts, because, there are a lot of people who find these religious expressions deeply and personally satisfying. For the moment, they’re being shunted into the conservative Evangelical camp whether they like it or not, and from there it’s only a matter of time until they start agreeing with the political program. Peer pressure is never so strong as in a Church.

A liberal Evangelical movement would cater to people who want an emotive religion, but who find a lot of the current Evangelical politicking petty and unbefitting a religion. Liberal Evangelicals would take parts one and two from the three-part Evangelical scheme above, and then adopt a politics of tolerance and patient admonition. Maybe they’d exclude homosexuals–but maybe not. After all, it’s not our place to determine whom God has chosen to save. We are called to have faith, to accept a deep, emotive relationship with God–and to shun the bean-count of works and sins, punishments and rewards. Liberal Evangelicals could still have a personal friendship with God. They could still be Born Again. What those experiences mean, though, would probably be more diverse–and possibly more fulfilling–than the current, narrowly political Evangelism that predominates in the United States today.

Until recently, illegitimacy rates in the United States had risen alarmingly–and then we started enacting same-sex marriage.

Thereafter, something remarkable happened: Illegitimacy rates started to level off.

The prophets of doom would probably rather have it otherwise, I’m sure.

Alas, a Blog has the statistics on the United States, and these flatly contradict Stanley Kurtz’s findings (or non-findings) from the Netherlands. Over there, Kurtz claimed to detect a trend toward increased illegitimacy, and it was “no coincidence” that it started with the debate over gay marriage.

As many people have pointed out elsewhere, Kurtz’s graph doesn’t even prove correlation, let alone causality. To me, the Dutch graph just looks like a steadily rising line, both before and after the introduction of gay marriage. There is no dramatic turning point anywhere near the landmark developments in the Dutch same-sex marriage struggle.

By contrast, there is a dramatic turning point in the American graph–a leveling-off once the first same-sex marriage court case made the news.

Almost always, such social data-mining is entirely beside the point–and at worst it’s perfectly pernicious–but still, this is an entertaining contrast, and one that I thought you all might appreciate. In the United States, opening the debate on same-sex marriage has not resulted in more illegitimacy. Even in the Netherlands, the point looks doubtful at best. Follow the links and see for yourself.

Do you like what you read here? Great! Here are some things that you can do to make Positive Liberty even better.

1. Don’t send me money. If I thought I could make money off this, I’d go work for a national commentary magazine. Unlike a lot of blogs, I’m not going to beg for your money. I’m not going to sell you keychains or coffee mugs or thong underwear either. I mean really, how many times have you ever seen someone wearing a thong from their favorite blog? My husband would probably throw me out of bed for trying something like that.

2. But if by chance you happen to work for a national commentary magazine, drop me a line. I graduate in December.

3. If you don’t work for a national commentary magazine, but you do have a job opening that you’d like to fill in the DC area, give me a try; I graduate in December.

4. Tell your friends about this great blog you’ve been reading. Share the wealth, because maybe they have a job for me. Mention that I graduate in December.

5. If you spend a lot of time here, then you probably have a good sense of what this place is all about. Send me new ideas, and I’ll try to write about them. I love to get new material about GLBT issues, religion, food, history, philosophy, and economics–especially as they relate to everyday life. Some of my favorite posts have come from helpful readers, and I always welcome contributions.

6. Participate in the discussions. I love getting comments about what I write, and the talk there can also lead to new full-length posts.

7. Start your own blogs. The more the merrier. I’m going to be doing a major update of my blogroll, which has been too small and selective for a very long time now, and I’m going to be adding a bunch more links to it, including anyone who starts up because I suggested it. Looking around the blogosphere, it’s clear that I’m in no danger of visually overloading my readers yet–I can afford to add a few more links.

(Portions of this post were shamelessly stolen from The Truth Laid Bear, who seems not to be blogging anymore.)

Yeah, yeah. Washington intern. Blah blah blah.

Quick takes on the situation:

1. If gay people can’t get married because we’re so promiscuous, then what about her? There oughtta be a constitutional amendment about slutty interns.

2. Gay anal sex is gross. But straight anal sex gets two hundred thousand hits a day. Oh, I get it now.

3. I tried to get my husband Scott interested in the debacle. “You have my permission to read Wonkette at work. Go ahead, you know you want to. It’s a big scandal now. It’s got S&M and prostitution and lying politicians and…”

“That may be your job. But it isn’t mine.”

Scandal is my job, because I’m writing my dissertation on the history of scandal in eighteenth-century France. Let me tell you, we are most certainly not living in an age of peculiar moral depravity. We are living in an age of perfectly normal, typical, run-of-the-mill moral depravity. We’re just like the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century, and every other time in history.

Having sex does not make us special. Not even if it’s kinky sex. Got it? Now get back to work.

Scott has recently discovered geocaching. I quote from the official FAQ:

Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

To play, you need a GPS unit, which seems to cost about $140 minimum. You also need a car, and gas, and a computer, and access to the Internet, and something to leave in the cache.

Chances are I’m going to like geocaching, but I’m not sure if I’m going to be happy about liking it.

I’m an Eagle Scout. I loved scouting and still do, even if they’re never going to take me back now that I’m a godless homosexual. Our troop regularly used to go orienteering. For those of you who don’t know, it’s basically geocaching minus the GPS. All you get are a map, a compass, and a set of coordinates. Advanced orienteering often does away with the map. Scott was hard-pressed to explain just what geocaching has over plain old orienteering, which he claims would be much less interesting.

“I guess I’ve just always wanted to have a GPS.”

Sure, it’s helpful in wilderness hiking, up to a point. But a good hiker with a map and a compass will never be lost, and in his hands a GPS would mostly be a lot of dead weight. Why not learn to use the natural signs around you, plus the age-old technologies that have worked so well for so many?

“One more thing” so often seems like it will make people happier, but so often it doesn’t. My possessions make me no more happy now than they did when I could still fit them all inside the back of a compact car. What makes me happy are people and ideas, and I can have both of those without any more stuff than that. The things I’d miss the most would be my books, but even then, I’ve always got the university library.

Back to geocaching. I suppose that by having a blog, I’ve given up my right to complain about geeky hobbies like this one, or about buying expensive little thingamajigs, or about having fun with them when much simpler things would do. But I don’t care, I’m doing it anyway.

This is from one of my favorite novels, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.

“Strange,” mused the Director, as they turned away, “strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.”

A lot of people will probably think I’m working up to a diatribe against commercialism. I’m not. I am a technophile who believes in both capitalism and innovation. I’m reading Virginia Postrel right now and eating up every word of it.

But think of this: When we compare ourselves to the rest of the world, almost every American is filthy rich. We’ve gotten here through countless technological advancements, improved production methods, and better distribution channels, products of a capitalism that many people don’t fully appreciate. Our incomes have risen again and again, and with them we can buy more and more of our favorite things.

What happens, though, when our amusements themselves grow more expensive? Simply put, we become poorer, because we now can buy fewer units of amusement than we could before. Suppose that one unit of fun costs not $140, but $140,000. Now suppose it costs $140,000,000.

One day it will.

Should it have to? What if we put some effort into finding cheaper ways of having fun, rather than more expensive ones? If the price of fun goes down, then we pocket the difference, and that’s just good economics.

Consider the game of go. Go originated in China; it is a turn-based two-player strategy game with a remarkably simple ruleset; it’s often said that there are just five rules to the whole game. Go has been played continually for at least 3,000 years, and its rules have changed only slightly in the meantime. It’s played on a board of nineteen by nineteen lines; the pieces are 180 unmarked stones on either side. They can be reused forever.

After 3,000 years, people are still making new discoveries in go. After 3,000 years, it’s still endlessly diverting. It also remains perfectly, gloriously human. Where computers have matched or surpassed the very best human chess players, they can barely be programmed to play go at all: The game demands the kind of subtle positional judgments at which humans have always excelled. At go, the best computers are no stronger than a mid-level amateur. Even a weak amateur can usually spot the flaws in a computer’s strategy after a couple of games–and then beat the machine, game after game.

In chess, a computer can compensate for lack of positional judgment by doing a lot of calculation, but it can’t keep up in go. The game of go has just too many variations, too many possibilities for a machine to calculate, and it’s likely to remain that way for a long time. Compared to chess, the number of possible moves in a game of go is larger by thousands of orders of magnitude. Virtually every move is a new judgment call, a new guess, a stab into the total unknown. Go is ours.

Best of all, while it’s true that top-flight tournament go sets are made of extravagant materials and run to the tens of thousands of dollars, still, a perfectly satisfying home set can be had for under thirty. Even go strategy books aren’t all that helpful compared to the practical experience one gets by actually playing the game, so the price of fun is no more and no less than the initial start-up cost.

Thirty bucks, and infinity is yours.

Go is what recreation ought to be. So is yoga. Like go, yoga is infinite but centers on the human. It’s the pure antithesis of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, as Huxley was well aware. Yoga needs only the human body, a little knowledge, and an empty room. Anything more than that usually just gets in the way. Yoga is roughly as old as go, and again, people are still finding great value in this ancient exercise.

The twentieth century has also created its share of cheap-but-deep amusements. Indeed, it rivals the ancient past in coming up with new ones and has probably been the most creative era in the whole history of gaming. A few of these new games have intellectual possibilities every bit as deep as go: Contract bridge, stratego, scrabble, and many others originated within the last hundred years, and every one of these is a game of simple yet profound strategy, mixed with varying degrees of luck.

What is interesting, though, is that these games are competing with other, more expensive amusements, and the latter seem to be winning. We spend more now on video games than we do in movie theaters, and most video games are Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy minus the exercise.

I don’t want to be misunderstood–I’m not a luddite. The simple is getting lost, though, and it shouldn’t be. If everyone played go, or contract bridge, or even Dungeons & Dragons, rather than computer video games, how much more money would still be around to invest, to spend on more lasting commodities, or to use in inventing the next big practical thing?

Never mind the money–think of the time! How much fuller would all of our lives be, if instead of playing video games, we did more gardening, or wrote more poetry? Just a few generations ago, an well-educated man could be expected to compose a sonnet more or less on demand, on whatever topic was asked. What a great mental life they must have had!

Now I wouldn’t think of forcing anyone’s hand here, or of pushing my cultural preferences on another against his will. I’d just like us all to think a bit before we line up for the next game of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy. There’s got to be something better to do.

In some conservative states, the law does not recognize the new gender of post-operative transsexuals. Indeed, one Texas court has found that gender is “fixed by our Creator at birth.” Oddly, this divine mandate creates a loophole for same-sex marriage.

Because she has not changed gender in the eyes of Texas law, a post-op male-to-female transsexual can now marry a woman. Thus, same-sex transsexual marriages are perfectly okay in Texas. Two women can get married so long as one of them started out life with the body of a man.

By the same token, opposite-sex transsexual marriages are not allowed there: The same opinion mentioned above also invalidated a marriage between a man and a woman. The reason? The woman was a post-op transsexual, and therefore technically still a man.

We wouldn’t want to allow any same-sex marriages, after all.

At least two same-sex marriages now exist in Texas, partly because one member of each is a post-op transsexual. It’s just the opposite in California, which judicially recognizes the post-operative gender of all transsexual persons. In California, post-op transsexuals can marry someone of the now-opposite sex. They cannot, however, marry someone of the same sex, because California law prohibits same-sex marriage: A woman who was born a woman, plus a post-op woman, amounts to a same-sex marriage in California, and this is not allowed. At least for the moment.

Writing for Slate, Brendan Koerner reported on the situation earlier this year. He added the following puzzler:

All of these cases have involved transsexuals who underwent their surgeries before getting married. But what if one member of a heterosexual couple decides to have sex reassignment surgery after the marriage, thus creating a homosexual couple? It would be very difficult for a state to invalidate such a union. A general rule of thumb is that a marriage can be declared null and void only if one of the parties pushes for dissolution or dies.

Potentially, then, there is a grandfather (grandperson?) clause for couples who stay together despite a sex-change operation. Heck, a couple like that shouldn’t be broken up anyway. They should get medals for their commitment.

If you’re still with me, there may be another wrinkle that Slate didn’t consider. Yesterday I was informed that in some states it is almost trivially easy to change one’s legal gender: You just go to a courthouse and do it. You don’t need to get surgery or take hormones. You don’t even need to see a shrink. All you have to do is declare that your gender has changed.

I’m reminded of the character in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who spent a year dead for tax purposes. It’s not a bad trick if you can do it, and feminists should have no problem, either: If men and women really are equal, then who cares what your gender is?

So… I was all set to go out and declare myself a female, but then I did a little reading. I just couldn’t find anywhere that permitted this kind of legal trickery. The best I can find so far is this site, which lists state-by-state laws about sex change. Idaho, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas won’t change a person’s birth gender for any reason. Almost all of the other states require a letter from one’s sexual reassignment surgeon stating in no uncertain terms that the operation is complete and successful. The remainder want to see a court order, which presumably amounts to the same thing. Since I have no plans on getting a surgery, this method clearly isn’t going to work.

Incidentally, I’d also have to go back to my birth state to change the record–And my birth state is Massachusetts. While I’m there I could also just pick up a same-sex marriage.

So… Was my anonymous informant misinformed? Or is it still possible to change one’s gender, um… for tax purposes? Readers who have more information are encouraged to reply.

From BoingBoing, we learn that Korean retail chain Lotte is giving away a solid-gold replica of its “Green Gum” packs. I’ve blogged about Lotte in the past, but if you didn’t all know this, it might sound like I was lying when I say that I’m chewing Green Gum right this minute. It’s no lie; I really am.

(BTW, BoingBoing errs in calling Lotte a Japanese gum company…. Those of us who live in central Maryland know that Lotte is much, much more!)

Update: Is Lotte Korean (www.lotte.com) or Japanese (lotte.co.jp)? I don’t read either language and can’t find anything in English on either of these sites. I’d always assumed it was Korean because of the one I visit, which is heavily tilted toward Korean products.

The ongoing project: Do a Google search on “repeal the Nth amendment,” where N=1 - 27. Comment on each of the results. See this post for Part I.

(Note: If you’re hating this series, don’t worry. I won’t be doing it every day, and I can already tell you that no one is proposing to repeal the ninth, twentieth, twenty-fourth, or twenty-seventh amendments. Several of the others are also so brief as to be trivial. And tomorrow I’ll write something unrelated, I promise.)

Repeal the Fourth Amendment generates a fair amount of buzz; Google shows 62 pages talking about the phrase. Interestingly, the political spectrum seems equally divided on this one. First, from NRApublications.org, we read:

If a billion-dollar lobby tried to repeal the Fourth Amendment so that federal agents could search homes for illegal drugs at will and without warrants, would you stand up for your neighbor’s constitutional rights?
Or would you stand silent and allow the Fourth Amendment to be repealed simply because you have nothing to hide?

They have a point, one that becomes clear as we take a look at the left-wing Common Dreams News Center, with an article about how the USA-PATRIOT Act violates the Fourth Amendment’s provisions against unreasonable search, seizure, and detention:

Third, and most important, Ashcroft fails to account for losses in liberty and privacy. If we were to repeal the Fourth Amendment, every police department in the country would be able to point to arrests that were made possible as a result. But to judge whether we lived in a better world for it, we’d want to know how many innocent people had been searched and how much the loss of privacy had undermined our quality of life. Ashcroft tells us only one side of the story. But there are by now thousands, mostly Arabs and Muslims, who could tell us the other side.

In the end, [John] Ashcroft’s self-promotion recalls Benjamin Constant’s account of Jacobin excesses during the French Revolution: “They dreamt of nothing else but measures of public safety, great measures, masterstrokes of state; they thought themselves extraordinary geniuses because justice seemed to them a narrow preoccupation. With each political crime they committed, you could hear them proclaiming: ‘once again we have saved the country!’ Certainly we should have been adequately convinced by this, that a country saved every day in this manner must be a country that will soon be ruined.”

In other words, a billion-dollar lobby is trying to repeal the Fourth Amendment. Would you stand silent and allow it? (For that matter, Cannabisnews.com reports that the DEA is doing its part, too.) Clearly we have to do something–So where are all the gun owners, eager to stand up for their rights?

It’s just this kind of shell game, the playing off of one right against another, that allows all of them to be eroded at once.

A very interesting but unrelated hit takes us to Vietnam, where a group is trying to repeal that country’s Fourth Amendment

An open letter, distributed by a secret society called The National Restoration Organization, has been creating chaos inside Vietnam. No one knows who actually belong to this secret society and, for that matter, how many, but their message is clear: The communist party should not claim to represent the people of Vietnam…

The letters demand that the communist party repeal the Fourth Amendment of its constitution, which is a direct translation of the USSR’s constitution. That amendment basically says that the Vietnamese Communist party represents the hope and dreams of the Vietnamese people and it is committed to Marxist-Leninist ideology and the socialist ideals of Ho Chi Minh.

Clearly it’s a different story, and for the first time in this series, I’m happy to be in the pro-repeal camp.

Repeal the Fifth Amendment has a mere 17 hits. The first one–a fragment so brief that I can’t quite see what he’s getting at–claims that William F. Buckley proposed repealing the Fifth back in the 1970s, in a book titled Four Reforms: A Guide for the Seventies. I can’t find much about this book on Amazon or elsewhere.

Few things are so boring, anyway, as outdated political commentary: It’s the reason weblogs are last-in-first-out, and why only the very best of them have archives worth browsing. So very, very little in politics is worth rehashing, even just a few years later, and Buckley’s proposal doesn’t even seem to get much attention from its creator these days. Hey, remember that hot best seller about the Lewinsky scandal? Never mind the more somnolent policy pieces out there, or forecasts like Future Shock and Megatrends: In politics, the future is the one subject guaranteed to go stale even faster than the present. Stranded on a desert island, I’d sooner take a dogeared copy of I’m Ok, You’re Ok. At least the psyche pretends to be trans-historic. But I digress, and when I do, that means it’s time to move on.

The project: Do a Google search on repeal the Nth amendment, where N=1 - 27. Comment on each of the results.

Repeal the first amendment: The search generates 322 hits. Most of them are hyperboles, but well-justified ones like the following:

Campaign Finance Reform Proposals and the First Amendment, from the CATO Institute.

Then there is this page, which is a lengthy list of conservative taglines. One of them reads, “Protect children from information…REPEAL the FIRST Amendment!!” I’ve often thought that no intelligent argument can ever be made short enough to put on a bumper sticker, and this site gives proof aplenty. The trouble starts when you mix and match them. For example:

Leftists are among the first to speak of their rights.
Be Radical, Demand Your Rights!

Surely there’s a bit of a sneer to the first statement, no? And then comes the second, which makes my head spin. Oh wait, it’s a question of which rights you’re demanding. Some are good (the ones we want), while some are bad (the ones they want). So gun rights are okay, but apparently 14th Amendment rights are not, viz:

Be a sovereign Citizen, not 14th Amendment serf!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s time to move to the other side of the political spectrum with…

Repeal the Second Amendment: Now let me make one thing perfectly clear. I was raised in a gun family. I own guns. I love guns. I think that gun control is a terrible idea. I think that every citizen ought to have a gun, know how to use it, and know how to handle it safely. I’m one of those radicals, see, who demands his rights. All of them. So you can expect I’m going to sneer a bit at the 721 hits from this search: A great many of them aren’t hyperbole at all, but apparently sincere propositions.

Most notably, there is editorial from the May 24, 2000 Miami Herald.

Like a bad dream, like the monster in a horror movie with a never-ending set of sequels, the National Rifle Association just keeps coming back.

Ad hominem.

Unrepentant despite Columbine and countless other cases of carnage in America, the NRA met in convention last weekend to trumpet its alleged comeback, to bluster and to issue political threats.

Guilt by association.

NRA President and former actor Charlton Heston held a musket aloft and challenged anyone to take it away.

Um… So?

But he made it clear that his real target is Al Gore and that the NRA will do anything in its power to hand the election to George W. Bush and defeat the vice president.

It was a reasonable proposition, for those people who picked gun rights as the most important ones. I support gun rights, but I’m not one to pick and choose, so I can’t really say I agree with him, but at least I know where he’s coming from. Interestingly, Ted Rall–who is an idiot in every other context–recently suggested that John Kerry ought to come out against gun control:

The outcome of this year’s presidential election hinges on the economy and the war in Iraq, not guns. And while most Americans believe that they enjoy the right to carry firearms, they also favor government regulation. Nevertheless, Kerry would be wise to break ranks with his party’s liberal base by declaring his enthusiastic support for the Second Amendment.

A polarized electorate neatly divided between the two major parties has created a high-stakes political climate in which relatively low-stakes “values issues”–partial-birth abortion, flag burning, “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance–may determine the outcome of such weightier matters as whether the United States ought to wage preemptive war.

In other words, “I hate guns, but I’m willing to compromise to stop the war in Iraq.” Those of us who don’t like the war, but do like guns, would want Kerry following this advice for different reasons. And while he’s at it, he could maybe repeal the income tax, too, plus abolish farm subsidies, privatize large sections of the federal government, and… Well… I’m getting ahead of myself again.

Repeal the Third Amendment: Zero hits. For the moment, the idea of quartering soldiers in private homes is a political dead letter. Thank God.

Stay tuned, because more is on the way.

A while ago, I blogged about home brewing, mentioning that Scott was attempting to make an authentic Japanese-style sake. His first efforts failed, alas, and we were left with a sour, foamy, gloppy, undrinkable mess.

His second efforts were far more successful. Doburoku is unfiltered homemade sake, and arguably it’s Asia’s most traditional alcoholic beverage. Well, almost.

Until the Mongols came into contact with China, their drink was koomis, or fermented mare’s milk. NOT the party beverage to inspire massive quantity guzzling contests! After conquering much of Hsi-Hsia, Sung and Chin, however, the Mongol clansmen discovered Chinese wines, such as sake and grape wines, and drinking became a military problem.

Scott made his brew with nothing but rice, fungus, water and yeast. It was thick and substantial, almost like a soup. Its flavor was earthy, with all the subtlety of a wine, yet with the grainy, yeasty character of a beer. It was cloudy and separated readily into layers in the fridge; the instructions, though, were very clear: The good stuff’s at the bottom. Now, I’m fully aware that this may sound repulsive, but trust me–It was good. Really good. Easily better than any commercial sake I’ve ever tasted. So stop by our place some time and maybe we’ll serve you a nice, sludgy bowl of doburoku. Mmmm…

Mercedes is going to sell its micro-compact Smart Car in the United States starting in 2006. The Smart may be one of the smallest cars around, but it’s a huge hit in Europe’s narrow city streets. You see them all the time in Paris, zipping through the medieval-sized streets of the Marais and turning four feet of curb into a nice roomy parking spot. In the U.S., the Smart may be the wave of the future. The Washington Post writes:

Drivers are starting to think about the cost of cruising in two tons of steel, and some are turning to a new crop of innovative — and more economical — smaller cars.

Sales of truck-based SUVs fell in April, and sales of small cars went up. Automakers rushed to the aid of SUVs, which is where they earn most of their profit, lowering base prices and offering more incentives than on any other type of vehicle. At the same time, they raised prices on small cars.

The Toyota Prius hybrid and the BMW Mini Cooper are both selling strongly in the American market, while sales of pickups and SUVs have leveled off or declined.

Now, I’m not a fascist about SUVs. If you want to have one, then fine. That’s what’s great about America anyway–Everyone gets their choice, or at least a fair shot at it. Many people really do need them, and others appreciate the extra room even if they never actually use it. And as to fuel efficiency, well… You can’t say we didn’t warn ‘em.

But my ideal car would be an umbrella and a pair of wheels that could go on the highway. Right now I drive a Toyota Echo because it was the littlest thing I could find. Even the Honda Civic has bulked up a lot in the past few years. The Echo is easy to park, gets 37mpg, and tight turns are a breeze, even in Baltimore’s knotty traffic. I think a lot of people would like a smaller car, whether for convenience, or efficiency, or maneuverability, or environmentalism, or just to sock it to the obnoxious house of Saud. When causes like that come together, you really can’t go wrong.

The BBC thinks we’re probably not interested. They seem to think that driving anything so reasonable just isn’t in the American character:

Big, as far as most US car-makers is concerned, is definitely beautiful. Anyone trying to convince drivers to take to a Smart car in the States may well have their work cut out.

We’ll see.

For the last several days, certain voices have warned us against drawing any hasty moral equivalence between the American torture at Abu Ghraib and that of Saddam Hussein. Hussein’s torture was undeniably worse, they like to point out, and it has been complained more than once that while Abu Ghraib makes the national headlines, Saddam Hussein’s tortures have not. If, they suggest, we have mistreated or abused a few prisoners–the hawks are squeamish about the word “torture”–still, there can’t be any moral equivalence between him and us.

Such fine moralists, these warhawks.

And yet it’s hard not to see an equivalence between this and this. If there is any meaningful difference between these photos, then it would seem to rest on one of three excuses.

Excuse #1: Nick Berg’s death was premeditated; the Americans killed these three Iraqis by accident. Perhaps, although I understand it takes a fair amount of force to beat someone to death, and that MPs are all trained in how to subdue a captive without killing him. And if these deaths were accidental, then why are the soldiers in the pictures gloating about them? Why are they so happy about what is supposedly an awful mistake?

Excuse #2: American are supposed to be democratic, peaceful, and respecting of individual rights. The Americans who killed the Iraqis in those pictures represent a horrible exception. By contrast, Nick Berg’s death was a matter of routine policy for al Qaeda. Again, all of this is true, but it’s still no excuse for the people who did it. Indeed, since these people were Americans, raised–one hopes–to uphold our values, then they certainly ought to have known better. To be sure, this “excuse” lets America off the hook in the abstract, but it does nothing at all to mitigate the actions of the killers.

Excuse #3: The dead Iraqis were terrorists anyway. They got what they deserved. This is by far the weakest of the three excuses. Under both American and international law, detainees are innocent until proven guilty. Perhaps the victims’ guilt was manifestly obvious to the perpetrators of these killings, but that in now way empowers them to serve a sentence before a trial. Excuse #3 is nothing more than a betrayal of the rule of law. Even if the dead man in that photo were guilty of a capital crime, since when do we beat the guilty to death with a blunt object? Since when do we desecrate their bodies? We didn’t even do that to the Nazi war criminals.

Some have suggested that our small-scale, limited tortures were a good thing, and that the perpetrators’ only mistake was in getting caught. I have to ask, though, how can a country with a zero-tolerance policy for marijuana have a smidgen-of-tolerance policy for torture? Surely torture is a lot worse than smoking weed.

But no, even Donald Rumsfeld himself gives torture that smidgen of tolerance, making ugly, shameful excuses about why the Geneva Conventions don’t apply. Let’s not forget, we’re still better than Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps we should quantify this new policy, as I suggested a while ago in a comment at Crooked Timber: Let’s survey exactly how much torture Saddam Hussein carried out–and do 20% less per capita. Then we can look smugly down upon the complainers. Hey, we’ve produced a marked decline in the torture of innocents.

Don’t like it? Well that’s tough. It’s a damn good thing we’re here, and you ought to be grateful that we aren’t any worse. Now smile, and if you don’t wave that stupid flag we gave you, we’re going to start the beatings all over again.

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I don’t think I’ve ever been more disgusted with the conduct of those individuals who are supposedly the agents of my country. I have never subscribed to the idea of “my country, right or wrong,” and now I can say for certain that I never will. A country, if it’s to be anything worth fighting for at all, is simply an idea. They are not America. The grinning soldiers in those awful pictures–They are the enemy.

America was founded to embody idea that some things are more important than blood or nationality or even loyalty to one’s country. It was founded on the idea that justice transcends all of these, and that all people–not merely all Americans, not merely all citizens–but all people have certain basic rights. That’s my country, anyway, and America, its current embodiment, can be the greatest nation on earth–but only when it lives up to that idea. To the extent that it fails, America is a sham, and no amount of loyalty can make up for it.

The excuses, though, love to hover about anything that’s both wrong and hard to concede. In desperate times, the use of torture seems to offer a win-win proposal: It lets us learn what we need to know while punishing the enemy. Sometimes that deal seems too good to resist, even for Americans. And so the excuses will continue. Soldiers will protest that they were just following orders. Senators will complain that the prisoners just got what they deserved. Pundits will wonder why we can’t just forget about it all.

And yet there is a poetic justice to the human psyche, because torture very often misleads the torturer. When questioners use pain and humiliation to get a confession, they often elicit only the very things they expect to hear. They can be true, false, or completely absurd. The torturer, though, decides the lines of questioning, and the prisoner learns soon enough what makes him happy.

Do they want to hear about foreign fighters in Fallujah? –Then that’s exactly what they’ll get. In a more creative era, torturers wanted to hear about naked women flying through the air. They, too, found what they wanted.

Torture doesn’t produce reliable information, and while it may punish the enemy, it also hardens his resolve over the long term. Torture creates the most enduring and visible martyrs in the world; it covers even worthless terrorists with a mantle of sainthood that should never be allowed to them. Heaven only help us when we torture the innocent. But there is another and even more serious reason why torture is so abominable, stated eloquently this week by Orson Scott Card:

Isn’t maintaining our own decency as a nation, even in time of war, also worth risking the lives of American soldiers? Isn’t maintaining America as America also a cause worth dying for?

Then, when you consider that the value of the intelligence gathered from these prisoners has been characterized as trivial, chances are that we lost some of our honor in those prisons in exchange for nothing.

Not fifty lives. Not ten lives. Not five.

Nothing…

Getting information from these prisoners is not worth losing our national soul.

And it is our national soul that’s on the line.

We are in Iraq to prove that American values are worth the risk of American lives themselves. Becoming un-American–to save a few American lives–is the antithesis of the mission itself.

Contrary to what one obnoxious talking head recently suggested, we don’t need a national conversation about our use of torture. Even suggesting it gives torture an undeserved moral legitimacy. What we need are fair trials for all, fair punishments for the guilty, and a swift withdrawal from Iraq. If at one time there were good reasons to invade Iraq, then these reasons do not matter anymore or else they have ceased to exist. The invasion is morally bankrupt, the Iraqis have every reason to despise us, and until we leave it’s just going to be more of the same–on our side and on theirs.

Am I celebrating America’s failure or wishing that America would lose? No. I am lamenting America’s failure, because in the war of ideas, we’ve already lost.

I haven’t posted any short fiction on this site in quite a while. Partly it’s because I’ve been terribly busy: I’ve been treating my dissertation as a full-time job and blogging only in my free time. Fiction, though, takes longer than most blog entries to develop.

I also haven’t posted much fiction because most of my new readers didn’t come here for it. Instead, I’ve been writing these sarcastic, punchy little editorials where I ridicule the people I don’t like. I figure if readers came here for the “Dystopian Definition,” then they probably want more of the same. Unquestionably, I’ve been hamming it up for the new audience.

Don’t worry–You will get more of what you came for. But just for today, we’re returning to the unreal world of Jason’s short fiction.