Thursday, July 30, 2015

Religion Can Be Toxic to the Young

Welcome friends!

I read a couple of news items recently that got me thinking about the often harmful intellectual and emotional effects of religion as well as the general inability of religious people to perceive these deleterious effects so I thought I might say a few words about that this week.  I suspect this post may be a bit challenging or dare I say annoying for some of my more spiritually minded readers and I do have some concerns about that.  Not concerned enough to shut the hell up of course.  Let’s not go crazy.  I’ve hardly ever been that concerned about anything.  But concerned enough to suggest that if you’re of a particularly otherworldly temperament and you’re a sensitive soul and especially if you tend to perceive critical discussions of your cherished beliefs as personal insults and even more so if you tend to react to perceived insults of that sort by running after random people in the street waving meat cleavers or what have you may I invite you to stop reading right now?  I don’t intend at all to challenge the ideas of anyone who is in no fit mental or emotional state to entertain any such challenge.  Come back next time and maybe I’ll be discussing something you can digest a bit more easily.  Or then again probably not, but you can always give it a try.  Are we good?  For everyone else; let’s talk.

The story that got me thinking about this issue involved a young homegrown American Muslim terrorist who appears to have been a normal kid until his father, who had emigrated from the Middle East many years before, decided it would be a good idea to get the kid in touch with his heritage and in particular his religious heritage.  He packed the kid off to some sort of religious school out in the Syrian desert somewhere and the kid came back unhappy, unfriendly, and kind of weird.  The police eventually arrested him for plotting to kill random people in a terrorist attack.  The father was duly shocked and couldn’t fathom how such a thing could have happened.  I didn’t save the reference although it shouldn’t be too hard to find.  Sorry about that.  Anyway, doesn’t really matter because as luck would have it we promptly had a similar story about a different young homegrown American Muslim terrorist, this one named Mohammed Abdulazeez, who managed to actually murder a few random people.  I think the final body count was five in that case including a young twenty-one year old fellow by the way, which is the kind of thing I find particularly irksome now I’ve gotten a bit up there in years and everyone else has gotten correspondingly younger.  All unarmed people of course just going about their everyday work although in this case I think their everyday work was at least related to national defense in some way.  Similar situation to the first story although I think I read Mr. Abdulazeez was also a drug addict and had mental problems and so on so maybe the cases are not exactly the same because of these sorts of complicating factors.  Anyway,  he was apparently able to hold it all more or less together until, like the young fellow in the other story, he took a little holiday to Syria only to return a bloody minded murderer.  Shock, amazement, and surprise all around.

How could such things happen?  Well, you know I love a good mystery so of course I immediately started thinking about potential mechanisms by which trips to Syria might transform previously unobjectionable if somewhat troubled young people into murderous terrorists.  I hate to bring up an awkward point but I suspect it may have something to do with religion.  Not necessarily Islam per se.  I don’t know enough about Islam to make that sort of argument and I most likely never will.  No, I mean religion in general.  The entire religious thought process.

I hope I’m not going out on too much of a limb when I suggest many young people are prone to experiencing a certain amount of difficulty transitioning to adult life.  (I know I had a hell of a time myself.)  I suppose this has probably always been the case quite possibly due to biological phenomena (I think I read somewhere one’s brain is undergoing major development and reorganization a good deal later than one might have expected) but it is probably more than ever now at least in the US due to the toxic influence of economic conservatism and the ensuing lack of sympathy and concern for other people and hence absence of any meaningful connection to other people or to society in general.  Of course, money, maturity, and experience all tend to act as buffers to the ignorance, cruelty, and greed that are some of the most salient features of the little world we’ve made ourselves, so if one manages to live long enough and be moderately successful in the world of work and finances one may hope to one day become totally insensate to the ugliness of our world, at least until the world hits one on the head with a rock some fine evening when one is out walking the dog.  Now young people typically live in a rather different world, which is to say, the real world.  They’re not often floating about in a state of benumbed smugness in an insulated cocoon of gated privilege.  No, they’re more often out there rubbing shoulders with the unfortunate bits of our system every day.  It’s stressful.  As one might expect they can develop all manner of unfortunate mental and emotional problems.  In these cases it’s probably natural for religious folk to think they’ll help the kids out by offering them a hit of religion.  In my opinion that’s probably just about the worst thing one can do in this situation.  Pushing religion to an already stressed young person in a misguided attempt to make him or her feel better is like trying to make a homeless person more comfortable by giving him or her a hit of crack cocaine.  It may be well intentioned but one shouldn’t be too surprised if it doesn’t end well.

The problem with foisting religion on mixed-up young people is that religious thought is basically an archaic pre-scientific not entirely rational emotion-based belief system that is totally foreign to anyone who has gone through a modern educational system.  When the modern and pre-modern worlds collide inside a troubled young person’s head strange things can happen.  Like what?  Well, I suspect they can very easily lose their already tenuous ability to evaluate arguments in the cool light of human reason because the principles of secular epistemology, logic, and science don’t necessarily line up very well with whatever mental or intellectual procedures, if any, are associated with various brands of religions thought.  A kid with no exposure to religious thought and hence no intellectual defense against the various strains of brain rot they represent is a sitting duck for any wily evildoer with a flair for eloquence.  Indeed, you may have noticed many of the most virulent religious extremists, I mean the ones who blow up little kids, run people over with cars, murder passers by with meat cleavers and so on, tend to be people who formerly had no religion at all.  Quite often they’re gang members or drug addicts or petty criminals and so on.  My understanding is that many or perhaps even most of the really psychotic killers in the Middle East have emigrated from the slums of Europe.  

The sad thing to me is there’s really no reason for this to be the case.  Education and knowledge are surely the only reliable cures for religious fanaticism and violent extremism and here in the US at least we have a quite respectable educational system.  We might not always get the top scores but then again unlike some other countries we tend to not want to give up on anyone.  Our kids should have plenty of intellectual ammunition in the form of a commitment to rationality, critical thinking, logic, secular philosophy, and the scientific method to deal with the far fetched rantings of any foreign cleric with aplomb.  Unfortunately that’s apparently not always the case.  Even though the fundamental bases of our education system are indeed reason and science we seem to have made a rather unfortunate pact with conservative forces to not enter into any sort of discussion that might reflect poorly on religion.  We have all manner of other educational requirements: language, mathematics, writing, economics, history, art, physical education.  But when it comes to the really big issues like epistemology and ethics and so on we’re just afraid to go there.  Why?  Well, let me explain.  It’s because we try give religion a big old pass.  We don’t want to offend anyone.  The implicit message for young people is that normal intellectual principles are fine and dandy for some things but just don’t really apply in a religious context. When it comes to religion we basically have this notion that one should believe whatever ones feels one ought to believe or feels disposed to believe.  This normally works out fine because most of the religions we’ve traditionally dealt with on a regular basis have been rather benign at least in recent memory, although that certainly wasn’t always the case.  And most people can eventually figure it out on their own, which is why religion in general is gradually losing its icy grip on the back of the neck of modern culture.  But it doesn’t always work out that way.  If a kid is not particularly quick on the uptake or if someone gets to them before they can figure it all out then the stage is set for something rather unfortunate to occur.

Of course, if a kid already has some exposure to religious thought then he or she has an advantage in the sense that relatively innocuous religion can crowd out more unfortunate permutations in the same way beneficial bacteria in the human gut can crowd out harmful bacteria.  This raises an interesting question.  Well, I think it’s interesting anyway.  The question is whether one is doing a kid a service or disservice by proactively introducing what one hopes is a relatively benign form of religion.  I feel it’s an interesting question because I can see two sides to the argument.  I just gave the pro side.  Against that we have the potential issue that once one gets a kid to accept these archaic forms of thinking as just as legitimate in their own way as more modern forms one may very well have facilitated unsavory people waltzing in later and convincing the kid to do literally anything.  It’s a high risk strategy.  “Yes, my son or daughter, you should believe in utter nonsense that has no basis whatsoever in human reason or science but just remember to always be careful which brand of utter nonsense you believe in.”  And then we have the psychological issues that go with having the kid’s parents involved.  Some kids crave their parents’ approval and if that means throwing reason and science out the window that’s what they’ll do.  Other kids want to separate from their parents and if their parents promote one brand of religious claptrap they will inevitably look for another most likely contrasting brand.

Well, I don’t really know the answer to this question of course.  Maybe religious inoculation sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.  But I suppose you can probably guess what I think about the issue.  In my opinion parents are playing with fire when they subject their kids to religion.  We should be responsible adults and teach our kids philosophy, logic, science, critical thinking, and secular ethics.  They can take up and decide about religion later when they have the intellectual and emotional tools to evaluate those sorts of arguments.  We should give them room and time to grow not jump in there and brainwash them and hope for the best.  Try not to become like the bewildered dad in the story I was discussing earlier and end up wondering how your little darling could have become a crazed murderer despite all your crazed religious exhortations to the contrary.  Let’s just give the kids a break for once.

References

Chattanooga shooting: New details emerge about the gunman.  Scott Zamost, Yasmin Khorram, Shimon Prokupecz, and Evan Perez.  July 20, 2015.  CNN.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/20/us/tennessee-naval-reserve-shooting/index.html.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

The Pope, Greed, and Capitalism

Welcome friends!

Can we talk about greed?  I’ve been wanting to take this up again ever since Pope Francis appeared in the papers recently describing an “unfettered pursuit of money” in suitably anachronistic terms as “the dung of the Devil.”  The fact he would say such a thing seems unremarkable to me.  Isn’t that part of the whole Christian theme of respecting the poor?  One of the nobler sentiments of the whole enterprise in my opinion.  No, the interesting bit for me was not what the Pope had to say but what came after.  Many commentators at least here in the US immediately claimed the Pope had said capitalism was the dung of the Devil.  That got me thinking again about the tendency among certain economic conservatives to associate capitalism with greed and hence to believe greed is good presumably because one is ostensibly most useful to society if one is most attuned to the pecuniary incentives expressed in market forces and thus most liable to provide what society evidently values most highly.  I’m sure I must have said a few words about this idea before but it’s been a while so maybe it’s time for another go. It’s not like it’s going anywhere soon.

My first thought on this whole conservative greed is good narrative is that, yes, greed can operate as a driving force for human activity, which I suppose might sometimes be useful activity, by which I mean something other than selling drugs or stealing someone’s car, etc.  However, there would appear to be any number of other such wellsprings of human activity that would fall into pretty much the same category.  People can also be motivated by insecurity, egotism, a lust for power, hatred, fear, cruelty, and any number of other less than entirely savory emotions and feelings.  People can also be motivated by the nobler emotions: love, kindness, duty, honor, and so on.  So why are conservatives always so hung up on greed as the great motivating force?  Well, I don’t know.  It might just be that’s the motivation they’re most familiar with and it just falls out of the familiar tendency of rich conservatives to love and respect themselves and their own motivations and desires above all others.  However, given the close association between conservative ideology and certain branches of economic theory I’ve often wondered if some element of that theory or perhaps bastardization of that theory may have something to do with it.  That’s what I’d like to discuss today.

Let me just start out by saying economic theory does not explicitly or literally portray greed as good.  Therefore, trying to figure out how some people might have gotten this impression requires a bit of detective work.  I see two main suspects in terms of elements of economic theory that might plausibly be related to such a belief.  One is the common assumption within economic models that people have unlimited wants, that is, that holding everything else constant people tend to prefer more to less.  That might seem a little farfetched concerning particular goods.  I like hummus but how much of the stuff can one person eat?  But if we’re talking about money I guess that assumption seems rather reasonable to me.  I think most people could always do with a bit of extra cash even if they intend to save it for a rainy day, pass it out to loved ones, or even hand it out to whosoever they might think of as the deserving poor.  Is that what we normally mean by greed?  I don’t think so.  Greed to me carries the implication of countervailing ethical considerations and one inappropriately choosing mammon over more suitable goals.  I suppose that’s what the Pope was getting at when he mentioned the unfettered pursuit of money.  The pursuit of money fettered so to speak by an attention to ethical concerns is a whole different kettle of fish.

Let’s move on to our second suspect lurking within economic theory, which I feel must be this whole business of utility and so-called welfare economics and so on.  You know what that means, right?  Another opportunity for me to talk about one of my pet peeves: what I consider the incomplete if not entirely incoherent social philosophy represented by neoclassical economic theory or as I’m always careful to say possibly a mangled popular interpretation of that theory.

I think to appreciate what’s going in the endlessly fascinating world of economic theory it helps to understand a little something about the history of the discipline.  The first thing one needs to know is that Adam Smith and the other bewigged old timers who got the ball rolling were amateur theologians and ethicists as much as they were scientists. They were not concerned simply to predict human behavior.  No, these people were mostly what were known as “deists” and had the rather grandiose agenda of establishing the world had been set up by a benevolent deity in such a way the natural laws of human behavior would inevitably lead to optimal outcomes if only people could refrain from mucking up the works.  That’s why the imagery that clearly most resonated with these writers involved things like natural laws, invisible hands, clocks, and so on.  Now I feel it’s quite likely these early writers were indeed concerned to establish that a certain amount of greed was both natural and good at least under the right conditions.  No doubt they looked around and saw a whole heck of a lot of greed and said to themselves, well, apparently greed is a natural condition for the human animal and must therefore fit into the divinely ordained social order.  It’s well known Mr. Smith at least was not so simple minded as to suggest greed was good always and everywhere.  He made some rather pointed remarks about greed.  But his general conviction was clearly if we set things up the way the good Lord intended, which he associated with nature despite the rather obvious human effort required to set up and maintain those particular natural conditions, then greed would function as nature had intended and would lead to beneficial results for us all.

Fast forward a few decades and both economic conditions and intellectual life had moved on.  Some people had been working to formalize economic thinking using the concept of utility, which was at that time defined within the field of economics pretty much the same as it was within the field of ethical philosophy.  However, something odd and clearly rather disconcerting for some people started to happen.  Serious philosophical ethical utilitarians began to cast doubt on the notion the results of any old free market were necessarily really what one ought to consider socially optimal.  Not all that surprising I suppose.  By this time the industrial revolution had made some people fantastically wealthy but had kicked many people up and down the street and some people right off the end of the pier.  Sort of like what information technology is doing today.  Anyway, after what must have seemed an interminable series of novels about suffering street urchins and so on some people began to wonder if they might have missed some important ethical principle along the way.  People were beginning to look askance at the prevailing social order based on free market ideology.  The field of academic economics was in crisis!

Fortunately an Italian fascist named Vilfredo Pareto stepped into the breach along with a number of other like minded souls.  The solution Pareto and others hits upon was to gut the concept of utility within economics by defining it in a way that made it irrelevant to ethical issues involving conflicts between the needs and desires of different people.  That is to say, they switched from using utility to mean a measure of welfare one could compare across people to more of a subjective feeling one could only meaningfully investigate in the context of a single person.  Comparing utility across people was recast as impossible in an (economic) utilitarian context but curiously enough not because they simply explicitly chose to redefine it that way but ostensibly at least because of practical measurement issues.  (The argument was that one could reliably infer someone preferred A to B if that person was given a choice and opted for A, but there was no comparable method for inferring utility across different people.)  The basic idea was that even if all outward appearances suggested one person might generate more utility from some resolution of some conflict of desires, say two people wanted a doughnut and one person was starving and really really needed the doughnut but someone else wanted the doughnut to hang on the dashboard of his or her horse and buggy, assuming such contraptions had dashboards, there was no way to tell which resolution was better based on utility because the subjective feelings of utility associated with the latter might very well be greater than the utility associated with the former.  That is to say, the buggy man or woman in this case might have been one of those superconductors of utility whose passing whims are associated with more utility and are thus more important under this conceptualization of utility than the seemingly more pressing desires of lesser mortals.  With this innovation the discussion of utility within economics and within serious ethical philosophy parted ways perhaps forever.

Economists had found a way to shut down pesky discussions of redistribution based on utilitarian concerns within the field of economics but had they thrown the baby out with the bath water?  Did economic theory still have sufficient intellectual content to convince people of the superiority of the status quo free market system?  Could they still establish interfering with the free market was always a big no no?  Well, that’s an interesting question.  They did and they didn’t.  Or let’s say they did to a small degree that was enough to get some people thinking maybe they did to a much larger degree.  What they established was if one is at a distribution that addresses all one’s ethical issues and so on, and certain conditions prevail (i.e. the well known conditions required for a so-called perfectly competitive market), and one does not currently have the institutions that go with a free market, then one can demonstrate using the stripped down version of utility with seemingly very little potentially divisive ethical content whatsoever that one should be able to improve upon one’s situation by moving to free market institutions.  Of course, that wouldn’t necessarily hold true if adopting those free market institutions moved one to some other distributional result that did not adequately address one’s ethical concerns or even if one’s ethical concerns included the relative standing of different people (because the result is based on demonstrating that under these conditions one could make at least one person better off while making no one worse off in an absolute sense, which of course is entirely consistent with making one person worse off relative to another person).

To further confuse the hell out of everyone economists also developed this notion that they were no longer even talking about social ethics in general terms.  They were simply talking as economists constrained by working with the peculiar stripped down version of utility we’ve been discussing and as such they didn’t have any basis to discuss the mysterious ethical concerns other people might have about how to resolve interpersonal conflicts and hence with distributional issues in general.  They never explicitly suggested other people could not or should not discuss these important and ubiquitous ethical issues.  To this day careful economists will always try to make clear that distributional concerns are outside their purview and if one has ethical beliefs relating to resolving interpersonal conflicts of desire then one should always feel free to redistribute to address those concerns.

But of course the devil is always in the details and in this case the details involved how economist spun their economic policy recommendations.  The underlying conceit was that as a first approximation we should treat all free market results as equivalent and just concentrate on getting to any one.  Once there we can then worry about adjusting for distributional issues as a second step.  The problem is that’s not consistent with how the world actually works at all.  Labor markets and distributional concerns are intimately mixed up with people’s feelings about what constitutes free market institutions and hence cannot really be separated out that way.  It’s entirely unrealistic to imagine one can talk about optimal economic institutions without at the same time bringing up the ethical issues associated with distributional concerns such as who should be getting what.

The practical result of this unfortunate mishmash is that we have some conservatives and economists stuck in the eighteenth century with Adam Smith and his buddies talking about natural laws and clocks and so on, we have some conservatives and economists stuck in the nineteenth talking about how capitalism maximizes total utility and fretting about capitalism versus communism and so on, and we have yet other economists and conservatives stuck in the middle of the twentieth century talking about how we’ve demonstrated the social optimality of free market institutions in general all the while acknowledging and then promptly dismissing distributional issues with a wave of the hand.  I think people in all three of these groups can very easily get the idea if things are going to be natural or socially optimal or whatever then we all need to act as much as possible like the simplified actors that feature in their economic models and respond and react only to the pecuniary and material considerations that are discussed in those models, in other words, that we all be greedy.

However, more careful economists and liberals know that’s not what we’re really talking about at all.  For one thing, even if one wants to muck about with the type of utility discussed in economic theory no one ever said that type of utility only arises from money or goods and services.  One could theoretically derive utility from anything including following one’s ethical beliefs about not being greedy.  Economic models address economic matters and thus concentrate on things like money and goods and services but the issues typically addressed in those models do not represent the totality of human experience.  For another thing, as I just finished discussing the ethical considerations one can imagine might serve as counterparts to greed fall into the category of ethical issues relating to distributional concerns and thus are explicitly not addressed within the context of economic theory.

Oh hell, let’s just have a practical example.  Let’s say one could make a buck putting desperately deprived kids to work in the old coal mine.  (Hey, I’m just trying to make it interesting by setting up a situation where there are some plausible countervailing ethical issues to making a buck.)  However, one has some moral reservations.  One thinks kids should really be sitting around on couches playing video games.  Does economic theory establish one has an ethical obligation to society to be greedy and haul the kids off to the mine?  No, it doesn’t.  One may get more utility from following one’s own ethical theories relating to what kids should be doing than from selling a boxcar of coal.  What about the unmet demand for coal and the fact that society was apparently willing to pay for coal but was not actually offering up anything to have kids sitting about playing video games?  Well, for one thing under the strictures set up within economic theory one can’t really compare the utility of the decider in this case to that of anyone else or any combination of anyone else so there’s no way to tell if the sort of utility discussed within economic theory would be higher if the kids play video games or work the old mine.  Second, all one really has is an indication that people value coal.  One doesn’t have information relating to the potential utility other people might derive from living in a society where kids are not working in coal mines.  That’s not a product one buys on the market.  One might be able to get at that issue indirectly through the political system maybe by seeing what sorts of labor market regulation people are willing to adopt.  And notice I’m not even talking about the utility of the kids because I wanted to abstract away from that issue.  (Yes, assuming the kids share one’s belief they should be playing video games rather than working in coal mines that would represent yet another of those pesky distributional issues I’ve been discussing.)  So does economics establish that greed is good in this example?  No, not at all.  Put briefly, the institutions we tend to call the “free market” or in the case of pugnacious old timers “capitalism” and extol based on the very limited demonstration of the optimality of those institutions in modern neoclassical economic theory does not really involve anyone necessarily being greedy nor does it recommend anyone be greedy.

But the story doesn’t end there although like you I rather wish it did as I’ve already written considerably more than I intended.  We also have the complicated collision of the scientific and ethical elements of economic theory or in the parlance of that old time philosophy I still feel makes a lot of sense, the positive and the normative.  The quasi-ethical stylings of welfare economics is really only one aspect of the field of economics.  Today there are many scientifically minded economists who think all they’re really trying to do with their models is predict behavior.  They’re not interested in trying to convince anyone that anything in particular is socially optimal.  Now according to the assessment of these people their models tend to work well enough to suggest we can think of people as behaving like the actors in those models.  In other words, according to many of these economists, economic theory establishes not that people should be greedy but that they are in fact greedy.  Now of course this by itself doesn’t support any ethical conclusions relating to greed.  Maybe the world would be a better place if economic models didn’t work so well.  However, I can imagine people thinking something along the lines of maybe people just can’t help being greedy so why fight it?  Or maybe everyone is doing it so what’s the big deal?  Indeed, I read about a study a little while ago that found exposure to economic theory was associated with an increase in greedy behavior.  But now I’m just talking about psychological issues like framing what one considers normal behavior.  I’m not talking about justifiable ethical conclusions relating to greed because of course there is no reason to suppose that even if one is in fact greedy one must remain greedy or that it is good for one to be greedy.  Again, economics interpreted as a modern social science does not and cannot establish that greed is good.

I suppose I’ve been going on long enough.  Let me just summarize and close it out.  Greed in the sense of preferring more to less if there are no ethical considerations involved seems unobjectionable.  And if it gets one off the couch then I suppose we can say greed is good in that particular context.  Greed in the sense of elevating the pursuit of material gain to a position of ethical preeminence is not necessarily good depending on how one feels about whatever other considerations we’re talking about.  Economic theory properly interpreted does not imply or rely upon people being greedy.  If one wants to follow the old timers and associate the free market institutions discussed within economic theory with something called “capitalism,” then capitalism also does not imply or rely upon greed.  Personally I’ve never seen much use for such an ambiguous and ill-defined term as capitalism given the limitations of the conclusions relating to free market institutions one can actually derive from modern economic theory.  I prefer to say if the necessary conditions hold (and they sure as heck don’t always) and no other ethical considerations are involved (by which I mean distributional issues that may be associated with one’s ethical beliefs be they utilitarian, rights based, or what have you, and there often are such issues) then free market institutions seem fine.  If the proper conditions don’t hold or one has ethical concerns then I suppose one might feel the need to change some things up.  Do we really need a term for that?  How about common sense-ism?  Get real-ism?  Whatever.  In other words, there might be a lot of greed about right now but there doesn’t have to be.  We can get along just fine without it.  On a more personal level let me just say I like to make a buck as much as the next guy but I think I have to agree with the Pope on this one: the unfettered pursuit of money is indeed the dung of the Devil if one wants to get all medieval about it.  And you know the Pope and I don’t always see eye to eye.  So that’s something.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Marriage Equality

Welcome friends!

Did you see the Supreme Court finally got around to deciding whether the US Constitution allows state governments to discriminate against gay people in the context of marriage?  Thankfully they affirmed what I hoped they would affirm, which is that it does not.  The majority, consisting mostly of the justices considered the more liberal, affirmed that in their professional opinion the US Constitution is not consistent with people passing punitive laws against random people they don’t like at the state level no matter how many rural Confederate flag waving conservative yahoos, arm waving holy rollers, blinged out Catholic bishops, and ranting mullahs might be on board.  Turns out most of the justices felt the Constitution respects the rights of the individual after all.  Of course, all four of what are considered the more conservative justices dissented and vented, as one might have expected, while Republican presidential candidates predictably got their rage on and immediately starting talking about amending the Constitution to enshrine their particular prejudices in the law of the land.  Like that’s ever going to happen.  But with conservative Republicans it’s all about political grandstanding and speechifying; when it comes to actual governing and serious statesmanship they really couldn’t give a damn.

Justice Scalia, the troglodytic progeny of the 1980s conservative counterrevolution and Ronald Reagan’s legacy to the nation, fretted over the Court’s “threat to American democracy” and characterized it as a “judicial putsch.”  In case you’re wondering why he used the rather unusual word “putsch,” which is a word of rather obvious Germanic origin and defined in Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a secretly plotted and suddenly executed attempt to overthrow a government,” that would involve the long standing conservative conceit that everyone who disagrees with them is a Nazi.  (If history is not your cup of tea the allusion here is to an event known colloquially as the Beer Hall Putsch that occurred early in the career of that paragon of mid-twentieth century social conservatism, Adolph Hitler.  Seems he got a posse of two thousand armed goons together and marched into central Munich to seize power by force one day, similar to what I think arch-conservative Donald Trump might have had in mind when he suggested we all march on Washington after President Obama was elected.  Herr Hitler was promptly tossed into jail for treason but then released a mere nine months later as the conservative powers in Germany realized how useful a violent racist nut job could be for their cause of keeping alles in ordnung.  Sort of similar to the way the Republican Party courts neo-Nazis, skinheads, racists, “militias,” gun nuts, and every manner of conservative lunatic in the US today.  I know, Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch is just like the Supreme Court ruling, right?  Can’t really see it?  Yeah, me too.  I think it must be more of the juvenile Republican word game “I know you are but what am I?”)

Justice Roberts, one big step up the evolutionary ladder from Mr. Scalia and the legacy of conservative comedian George W. Bush, commented that in his opinion the decision “had nothing to do with the Constitution.”  Really?  Is he reading the same document as everyone else?  And while it’s completely fine and expected that justices have somewhat different interpretations of the Constitution, which is why we need a Supreme Court in the first place, how monumentally irresponsible is it for him to claim the decision has nothing to do with the Constitution!   No respect for the institution at all.  The Attorney General for Texas Ken Paxton wasted no time backing up Justice Roberts by describing the decision as a “lawless ruling.”  As Mr. Paxton is the top law enforcement official in Texas one might have expected him to announce he would therefore not comply with the ruling, it being lawless and all, but he didn’t go so far as bald faced treason.  Apparently he still intends enforcing the law even though he believes it’s “lawless.”  I know.  Doesn’t take his job very seriously, does he?

Hey, I don’t like any number of Supreme Court decisions myself.  As a random example, how about the Court treating corporations as people for purposes of campaign financing and just in general playing cozy with the economic big shots whenever possible.  But do I go around claiming their decisions have nothing to do with the Constitution?  No.  They’re obviously looking at the Constitution.  It’s just they’re looking at it through the eyes of people with perhaps more than an entirely healthy respect for wealth and power.  It’s their job to interpret the Constitution and because I accept our democratic political system I accept their decisions.  In those cases I guess we’ll just have to try to change the Constitution.  I clearly have a lot more respect for the Supreme Court than does Justice Roberts.  Ever wonder where all the violent conservative hate groups get their rabid anti-government rhetoric?  Ever wonder how domestic conservative terrorist Timothy McVeigh reconciled himself to murdering one hundred and sixty eight innocent people in his twisted war against the ostensibly oppressive US government?  Surprise!  It might very well be based largely on the irresponsible utterances of conservative Supreme Court justices like Mr. Scalia and Mr. Roberts.  According to them one needn’t respect the law at all.  After all, the Supreme Court is just a bunch of Nazis springing a lawless “putsch” on an unsuspecting nation.  The top law enforcement official in the state of Texas agrees.  Thanks Ron and George W.  You guys did a helluva job.

The Republican presidential candidates predictably went on a rampage as well.  Mike Huckabee called the decision “an out-of-control act of unconstitutional, judicial tyranny.”  Unlike Justice Scalia he chose to go with imagery from the Revolutionary War and denigrated the Supreme Court as an “imperial court” akin to the imperial British monarchy that a few centuries ago tried to get all uppity with British colonies in the New World.  (I know; it’s just like that, isn’t it?)  Once again we’re dealing with the conservative theme that he, and conservatives in general, are greater authorities on the US Constitution than the Supreme Court, a perspective Justices Scalia and Roberts would presumably heartily endorse.  Southern crackpot Bobby Jindal piped up to claim no “earthly court” could alter the traditional definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman, evidently confusing the legal definition of marriage in this country, which like any other law is clearly under the purview of the judicial system here on planet Earth, with some sort of religious code that presumably can only be altered by some superhuman agency residing somewhere in the next dimension or more likely in some murky corner of Mr. Jindal’s own mind.  Huckabee and Jindal called for a constitutional amendment to enshrine the time-honored tradition of gay bashing as the law of the land, as though anyone but the most rabid conservative extremist would have any interest in defiling the Constitution in this way at all.

A few conservative candidates weren’t exactly happy but not quite as looney tunes as Huckabee and Jindal, which makes me think there might be hope for the grand old party after all.  Jeb Bush (yes, another one) stated flatly he opposed any effort to amend the Constitution over this issue and rather sensibly urged conservatives to turn their conversation to something a little more mainstream like religious freedom (including I hope a right I cherish in particular; the right to be free of other people’s religions).  The conservative governor of the excruciatingly Midwestern state of Ohio suggested conservatives respect the ruling (and implicitly the Supreme Court itself) and just drop the matter of same sex marriage once and for all.  He must know a little something about politics.

In marked contrast to conservative Republican leaders, leading Democratic candidates Hilary Clinton and Martin O’Malley joined with President Obama in expressing their support for the ruling.  Not a whole lot of parity going on in this case, that’s for sure.

If I can just step back for a moment let me just say I’ve watched this issue of how gay people are treated under the law here in the US develop over the course of my lifetime from the underlying assumption of the bad old days that both formal legal and informal oppression of gay people was a moral imperative, through the early attempts of a few brave individuals to stand up for themselves and to patiently appeal to science and the better side of us all, to the ranting foaming at the mouth conservative backlash of the 80s and 90s, to finally today in the second decade of this twenty-first century an official affirmation from the more liberal justices in the highest court of the land that yes, gay people are people too, and the US Constitution does not grant other people the right to withhold legal rights and privileges from them based on religious feelings and prejudices alone.  If you’re asking me, it’s a grand old day for a grand old country.

And if it’s not too irritating can I just give some words of advice and encouragement for all my conservative friends who see things differently?  Take a deep breath.  It’s OK.  I know there’s been a lot of talk, but your (straight) marriage will not really be destroyed.  No children will be harmed.  No one will force you or your loved ones to become gay.  No one will marry a horse.  The human race will abide.  Those were all just talking points designed to get you acting the fool and voting Republican.  They’re not real issues.  And look on the bright side: won’t it be nice to leave all the neurotic handwringing about sexual matters to places like Russia, Turkey, and the Middle East?  I think so too.  Let’s talk about something else for a while.

References

Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriage nationwide.  Ariane de Vogue and Jeremy Diamond.  CNN.  June 26, 2015.  www.cnn.com/2015/06/26/politics/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage-ruling/index.html.

US Supreme Court rules gay marriage is legal nationwide.  BBS.  June 26, 2015.  www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33290341.

Texas Officials Say They Can Deny Marriage Licenses.  U.S. News and World Report.  June 28, 2015.  www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2015/06/28/paxton-state-workers-can-deny-licenses-to-same-sex-couples.

Who came out against Facebook’s rainbow flags?  BBC.  June 29, 2015.  www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-33313807.

Turkish police fire pepper spray at gay pride parade.  Ashley Fantz, Gul Tuysuz, and Arwa Damon.  CNN.  June 29, 2015.  www.cnn.com/2015/06/28/world/turkey-pride-parade-lgbt-violence/index.html.