Insulting Rules and Hospitality

Cindy and I ate kosher last night. It tasted fine but I'm still not sure how I feel about it all.

A friend of mine is leaving town and, although we already attended a big leaving party for him a few weeks ago, he invited us to a more intimate dinner hosted by a friend of his. It was a bit last-minute but we didn't mind; we were told that dinner would be barbecue beef brisket so I grabbed a bottle of red that I'd been saving.

When we arrived the hostess thanked us for offering the wine but said that she couldn't serve it because she keeps kosher. Cindy rolled her eyes and steeled herself for a night of biting her tongue; I allowed my miserliness to distract me from dwelling on it and accepted the alcoholic punch she offered.

That should have been the end of it but when the other guests arrived the hostess made a point of telling them that I had been thoughtful enough to bring wine that she wouldn't let us drink. I felt like saying to her, "Don't rub it in!" when our friend apologised for not letting me know and started to explain, incorrectly, that the only thing that makes wine kosher is the rule about letting fields lie fallow so that poor people can have some of the fruit. (He made it sound like a version of fair-trade. If that were the only rule I'd consider buying that sort of wine all the time.) I uncharacteristically tried to divert him from the subject because it was his leaving event and I didn't want to talk about sensitive issues. But when he finished saying that that was the only rule, I had to point out to him that there's also the rule that no gentiles can be involved in the production of kosher wine. (I think they can pick the grapes but that's all. Only sterilisation makes it ok for gentiles to touch.) It's not just about the ingredients and the method per se, it's also about who makes it. If I were the winemaker, I'd be very offended by that! Nothing I could do would make them willing to drink it - that's racism. (Or something extraordinarily close to it. I guess someone could convert to Judaism just to make the wine but, because the rabbi has to refuse your request three times, it's tantamount to racism.)

Afterwards when Cindy and I debriefed, she suggested that the reason why our hostess didn't just say, "I won't have any, so only open the bottle if the three of you can finish it without me" might have been because she was trying to keep all her glasses kosher. (It was only when she served dinner and our friend asked which were "the meat plates" that we realised just how serious she was. She also gave me Baileys in a different glass from everyone else, because it's dairy.)

I guess it might seem too much like BYO to not share it with the hostess. Her other option might have been to lie and say that she had paired another wine specifically with the meal. I would have looked forward to tasting whatever wine she served if she had said that! And it need not be a lie, she could actually pair wines with dishes in the future, if she wanted to avoid telling people that she was rejecting it because of the ethnicity of the winemakers. But of course she didn't expect gentiles to know those rules (she said as much).

The other issue that I didn't raise was the fact that we were served kosher meat. I've heard it suggested before that kosher and halal slaughter are less humane than stunned killing and I've been thinking about it again since the recent brouhaha in Australia. I'm no expert and I'm not going to give up meat altogether but when the RSPCA tells me that some methods of slaughter are unacceptable, though legal through religious loopholes, I take that seriously. I haven't made it a rule to refuse to eat kosher or halal meat because it seems there's still some experts who claim it's just as painless when done right. I suspect that these are outliers but I don't know enough to make a moral stand on this point.

Deontologically speaking, I probably should have said something about both the meat and the wine -- it's hard to justify putting politeness above opposing racism and cruelty, even if I would rather my vegetarian friends didn't lecture me. Kant himself would say that we may use animals as means to an end except where the cruelty makes us worse as humans. The kosher system is institutionalised enough for that to be a possibility they don't believe that they're beling cruel, so I'm not sure if that would count for Kant.

For consequentialism it would depend on whether any good could come of it. That means not turning on my heel and leaving but remaining and lecturing them on the wrongs of their two rules. But I didn't have enough info at my fingertips so there's no way I could have produced more good than displeasure by carrying on like that.

It would seem that I did exactly the right thing for virtue ethics -- trying to be a gracious guest. But I knew that, even if she didn't mean it that way, refusing our wine for that reason should be construed as insulting. The reason I didn't make a fuss was not just to keep the peace but more because I didn't feel offended. I guess I'm not very emotional but it still seems strange that what I know intellectually to be an insult didn't register emotionally as offence. When you look at it like that, it becomes a little less clear that I did the right thing from an aretaic view. A true Aristotelian phronimos might say that I should have demanded satisfaction. (I didn't have a glove with me but we could have left.) Similarly, a Confucian gentleman might be concerned with defending Cindy in some way. Naturally I would respond verbally to any deliberate insult but should people be called out for accidental ones? More to the point, I know that Cindy's emotional response was not offence, it was more like plain old disapproval (and she doesn't need my assistance with that!).

Marriage is a Social Construct

I recently read this article opposing same-sex marriage. It's probably the best article I've seen opposing it but it's still wrong. Here's why:
There's a decent critique here.

But more importantly, the article depends on the reader's instinct to agree with them. I think that the key to understanding their persuasiveness is seeing the way they try to force the reader to agree that marriage is some sort of "natural kind" that has a real essence about which we can be right or wrong, as opposed to a social construct, which is just whatever we make it. The authors try to discourage people whose instinct is to support same-sex marriage from taking the constructivist line by saying that for marriage to be a right, it has to be a real thing with an essence.

Even if marriage did not have this independent reality, our other arguments against revisionists would weigh equally against constructivists who favor legally recognizing same‐sex unions: They would have no grounds at all for arguing that our view in‐ fringes same‐sex couplesʹ natural and inviolable right to marriage, nor for denying recognition to unions apparently just as socially valuable as same‐sex ones, for marriage would be a mere fiction designed to efficiently promote social utility.

It certainly seems that asserting the constructivist line would preclude rights-talk. I'm not sure if they're doing this deliberately or not but it seems that this line works by making the reader think that the social constructivist line precludes all moral assessment of the situation, not just rights-based ethics. If we think fairness is a virtue, same-sex marriage is in, even if it is a social construct.

The authors do have another follow-up argument, which happens to take a consequentialist line. They claim that monogamous heterosexual marriage is the only sort that will lead to maximal societal harmony and that anything else would actively erode the current situation. It would make me very uncomfortable to say that we should employ a useful fiction à la Plato's Republic but, if they had decent empirical data to support it, they'd have half an argument. But they don't really.

I have to say, though, that I'm grateful to the authors of this paper for helping me bite the bullet and realise that marriage really is a social construct. It's clear that polygamous and incestuous unions are not marriages in contemporary western society but who would say that Hussein bin Ali really was married to his first wife but nos 2-4 were mere concubines? Who would say that Cleopatra wasn't really married to her brothers, Ptolemy XIII & XIV even when their being married was crucial to their position in Macedonian Egypt? There might be plenty of moral arguments against polygamy and incest but that doesn't mean it can't be called marriage.

Circumcision

I really don't understand Americans sometimes. I mean, I'm au fait with the arguments but I find myself unable to understand them in a Davidsonian sense because, try as I might, the only explanation I can come up with is that they justify contradictory traditions with a small amount of tolerance and a heaping helping of mauvaise foi.

Currently there's a debate about banning routine neo-natal male circumcision.

What's truly disturbing is how the newspapers are talking about the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The ban is only for minors, adults will still be free to get circumcised. But it seem's that that's not good enough for Americans because (a) They consider their children's bodies as chattels; and (b) They can't imagine that their children would later choose their own religion.

This is the only explanation I can see for why a country with such a large proportion arguing for a woman's right to control her own body would stand for this.

A few comments in that article complain that there are too many laws already. That's often the case, well-meaning people sometimes insist on making their cause a law when it's not necessary. In this case I guess you could argue that non-consentual circumcisions should be prosecuted as assaults but I'm sure there's too many reasons against this. Most obviously because 30-50% of American male babies are still being circumcised, so much more awareness would be needed (it would be unfair to take a widespread practice and deem it assault overnight but it wouldn't be unfair to ban it with some warning).

Unfortunately one of the campaigners has drawn a comic book attacking circumcision that comes off as anti-Jewish. I don't know whether he is or not. Certainly he makes mohels into villains but, given the theme, he's probably just attacking their practices, not their ethnicity, attacking them qua mutilators, not qua Jews. But it's no surprise that people assume that it's both. But even assuming that this one activist is racist, that doesn't mean the result he's after is the wrong one. People could be motivated to ban polygamy out of a hatred of Mormons and Muslims, that doesn't make it the wrong thing to do.

7th June
Here's an argument I had today with a Jewish friend:

M: Should it also be illegal to tie off umbilical cords? Who knows? Maybe that hurts a baby. For other medical procedures, it is the parent who decides for the minor--why not circumcision? especially because it is known to provide health benefits to the child which is why it has become standard practice in american hospitals. also, you don't believe that this is just another attack on Muslims (and also Jews) in America by crazies on the right?

Nick: There are certainly many good reasons for all sorts of surgery. My point is that the reasoning should be entirely therapeutic, without regard to religious or secular traditions. (By secular tradition, I mean the fact that the USA is the only western country to perform the procedure because nowhere else do doctors see any health benefits. It's a Victorian tradition that has died out everywhere but here and Muslim countries.)
It's very sad that crazy people use serious issues to spite the ones they hate because it muddies the waters of what should be an ethical question, not an aesthetic one. The problem is, good people can argue for the right thing from good principles while at the same time hateful people argue for the same result from hateful principles. Then the good people have to waste time distancing themselves from the crazies and their serious message gets lost.
Nick: http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=132
PS It really worries me that you think foreskins are similar to umbilical cords!

M: It really worries me that you and these other folks think that circumcision is some kind of mutilation. I'm not arguing that circumcision is a cure all or that it prevents HIV. It just seems that if being circumcised can enrich the life of a Jewish or Muslim baby and the procedure is not painful, why should anyone try to restrict the practice? We don't make piercing the ears of children illegal for the same reason.

Nick: Firstly, I don't accept your use of terms like "Muslim baby" as no baby can accept that Allah is the only god and Muhammad is his prophet. (I agree with Dawkins completely on this point, but I won't repeat his inflammatory language here.)
Nick: But if it makes you feel any better, I do think that there should be a minimum age for ear piercing. If you'd like to talk bioethics, maybe we should do piercing first, because most of the points are the same but there's much less at stake:
If you want to define terms, I'd happily extend a weak sense of "mutilation" to ear piercing because it certainly is non-therapeutic modification of the human body. (But it might be wiser to leave out emotionally laden language.)
In principle non-therapeutic body modification should never happen to anyone who doesn't/can't consent. When determining what constitutes consent, we could either take an absolute cut off for all things (18) or admit degrees of reason. I would suggest that the age of reason for ear piercing should be lower than for voting or for sex because it's reversible -- ear-lobes heal almost completely (just a little scar). I don't have strong views about where the age limit should be set but, at a guess, I'd say somewhere between 8 and 14. Likewise, if it were ever banned, I think that any penalty should be very mild, to reflect the fact it is reversible.
Other types of piercing are more complicated. In Australia, e.g., all genital piercing is banned for minors; parental consent does not give the child the right to have their genitals pierced by a professional. (I can only assume that the rationale in this case has more to do with the intimacy of the area and the higher risk of complications.) I imagine that there are some 16-year-olds who believe that their lives are less rich because of this nanny-state restriction but no adult thinks it's an infringement of their rights to make them wait a little.
Nick: Just to be clear -- this was not meant to be the male equivalent of a feminist rant against labiaplasty. I'm not trying to convince you, M., or anyone else to change your aesthetic preferences.
What I am trying to persuade you to do is, if you ever have a son, allow him to make this choice for himself.

M: There is such a thing as a Jewish baby and I have known some young men who were Jewish but not circumcised and it gave them a lot of anxiety. I would never put my own child through that. Second, I think that just because something is "nontherapeutic modification" doesn't mean it is harmful. And, I would argue that the rule against children getting genital piercings is more because children make stupid decisions rather than because their parents or families do. If there were non-harmful other forms of body modification required culturally or religiously I would also say that the benefits for the acquiring of such a modification outweigh the cost and from an ethical standpoint should not be medically restricted.
M: But, as we've discovered before, it is difficult for us to have a conversation because I am a cultural relativist from your perspective and you are a believer in one clear cut truth from my perspective.

I love arguments but it's rare that I have one about an important ethical issue so this one made me quite angry. "A Jewish baby" could only possibly mean that mitochondial DNA makes it ok. And her description of genital piercing being banned because kids do silly things misses the point that parental consent does not change it in that instance but I'll let that go because I recognise that her last comment gets to the nub of our disagreement, more or less.

I doubt I would have succeeded in persuading her if I hadn't pulled punches the way I did. I can leave the argument over cultural relativism for another day (she's not admitting that that's her position, so it'll be a long argument). The only thing I'd have liked to add would be to explain how docking of dogs' tails is illegal in NSW. That's a stronger point than genital piercing because, if you can't do these things to animals, you certainly shouldn't do them to humans.

Moral of the story: cultural moral relativism makes me angry when it has real world consequences.

8th June

R: Is there such a thing as a Republican baby? Or a Liberal baby? Or a Marxist baby?
R: M, pehaps giving the child as wide an education as possible while supporting any decision the child makes on religious, (or non), convictions combined with a parental backbone that supports your child even at the expense of one's own social isolation may be a better and more moral standpoint than hacking into a boy's penis without consent for no medical advantage whatsoever simply to please the neighbours. Wow, that was a loooong sentence. :D
R: Or possibly simply ask the hard questions, like: say, why is it so important that I take the foreskin off of my son? "Because God demands it", is simply not a good enough answer since God also demads slavery, genocide and stonings in the Old Testament and these have been dropped due to the arbitrary cruelty involved. So how is this different? And isn't it a parent's job to protect their child? It seems to me that your defence of this practice places a parent's responsibility of the congregation ahead of their responsibility to their child. And really, if abuse or shame is directed at the child because they haven't been circumcised, is it a rational, parental response to take to their child with a knife rather than remove them from the people orchastrating the grief and the shame? The poor child will feel guilt when we teach him that he SHOULD feel guilty and his parents don't stand up for him. The parents should be ashamed of themselves for their cowardice and for failing to prioritise their child above their own fear of social isolation. There is no way around it. People who defend this practice on the grounds on religion or culture are immoral and call into question their own fitness as parents.

M: Mr. R, sorry it has taken me so long to respond to you--It's been a holiday. So, Judaism is not just a set of beliefs like republicanism, marxism, etc. Religion is just one aspect of Judaism. It's also an ethnic, cultural and genetic group(s). The better, closer question would be more like, can there be a black baby? can there be an American, Australian, German baby? And, I think we'd both agree that the answer is yes, despite all of these categories being largely man-made.
M: Additionally, there seem to be several medical advantages (at least through corolation) including reduced risk of genital cancer as well as reduced risk for some sexually transmitted diseases. I'd also argue that a circumcision is not a cruelty--just as earpiercing (which is actually less acceptable by old testament standards (it's what you do to someone when their period of slavery is over and yet, they'd like to be a slave for life) or any other non-harmful body modification.
M: Finally, I don't think that many parents see their reasons for circumcising their children to be because "God demands it", in particular because so many people (in America) who get their children circumcised are neither Jews nor Muslims but Christians, who feel that the old testament laws have been succeeded by the faith offered as an alternative in the new testament. So, they are obviously choosing circumcision for other reasons. Within Judaism, however, "because God demands it" is never enough and reasons for, laws about, details regarding the practice and ceremony of circumcision have been debated, consulted, argued against, etc., for thousands of years. Speaking of which, since the practice is thousands of years old, and Jews are still around, as they've always been, why would anyone think that this process is harmful?

Nick: We could have a different argument based on circumcision as prophylaxis against certain conditions. I’d be quite happy to consider that because I’m all in favour of vaccination (which does carry some risks); I’m open to game-theory in bioethics. You’d have to weigh the severity of and likelihood of contracting those conditions that it’s supposed to prevent and how reliably it prevents them against the foreskin’s role protecting a very sensitive organ. Sure, in certain situations I could see circumcision as the lesser of two evils.
But based on the information I’ve seen, the foreskin has been treated the way tonsils were and, like tonsils, doctors in most countries have rethought circumcision. If a single bout of tonsillitis is not a good enough reason to remove tonsils, you should really think twice before cutting the foreskin off a perfectly healthy baby. (No one is talking about banning therapeutic circumcision.)
http://www.abc.net.au/tasmania/stories/s2004776.htm
Nick: I grew up in a family with a Jack Russell Terrier. We used to joke occasionally about her docked tail but when we researched the breed we learnt that this was an important feature of Jack Russells for practical reasons. Jack Russell and Fox Terriers were bred for hunting foxes and, after the hounds had chased them to ground, it was the terriers who would go down the hole after them. But they couldn’t dig their own way out, so the hunter would pull them out by the tail. A short stumpy tail is much less likely to get dislocated when pulled, so docking was for the dogs’ own good. Even though this wasn’t the reason our dog had her tail docked before we bought her, I freely admit that she didn’t seem adversely affected by having only half a tail (surely she couldn’t remember having a whole one).
Then, in 2004, a number of Australian states banned the docking of dogs’ tails and the cropping of their ears. (I would rank circumcision as less severe than tail docking because it’s soft tissue but worse than ear cropping because it leaves a sensitive organ exposed.) Many breeders objected that short tails and pointy ears were part of the definition of these breeds and that they’d been practising these traditions for hundreds of years. The government said “Tough!” and the general public is coming around to seeing docking and cropping as completely unnecessary (and potentially cruel).
If a government is willing to protect pets against unnecessary body modification, they should do even more to protect humans!
Nick: After our old dog died, my sister got another Jack Russell, with a long tail. I’ll admit, at first it looked weird when she wagged that long floppy tail. But the dog was no less loved and we all soon got used to having a long-tailed Jack Russell Terrier. The breeder we bought her from said that he’d stopped docking their tails well before the ban. That was probably difficult for him, having others look at his dogs and say that they’re not “real” Jack Russells. The universal ban must have been particularly good for him because it meant that the whole community of dog breeders was forced to change its standards. Some people call it “the nanny state”, I call it “moral leadership”.
I understand that property rights are strongly protected in America by that libertarian streak that comes out in everyone occasionally, so I know that cropping of animals’ ears won’t be banned here in the near future. But shifting the circumcision debate towards seeing infants as humans with rights is a move in the right direction. You make me wonder, M, how the arguments would run if there were a strictly non-religious ethnic group that thought it important to practise a tradition like circumcision on their infants. Judging from the predominance of “free practice” arguments in the newsmedia, I think Americans would be more willing to tell other ethnic groups that their practices need to change, no matter what their mitochondrial DNA might hold.

R: Religious beliefs are not genetic. There is no evidence to support that notion. It makes little sense to compare a "jewish' baby to a black one. A person can change their beliefs, they cannot change their skin colour. The most wonderful feature of a democracy is that a person has the right to reject and move away from the beliefs of their parents and the community in which they are raised. Religion actively undermines this blessing through indoctrinations legitimised by 'rites of passage' mumbo jumbo like circumcision. Also, to state that Judaism, (or any religious belief system), is unlike other, (say political) beliefs because of the community and culture that surrounds it, completely ignores such instances, (such as in the USSR and China), where a politcal belief has been enforced by a culture and community in much the same way that religious communities were set up in the 10th - 12th century. And sure, a baby can be legally declared 'Australian' or 'German' and this is a neccessary step in a world where realism in international relations theory is the norm so as to guarantee the rights that come with citizenship, (whatever they may be). But can you imagine the outcry if an Australian citizen ceremony came with a dozen lashes because, hey, after all, that's all part and parcel of Australian settlement history and therefore tradition? Also, if religion is a genetic issue, isn't it incredibly lucky that Jewish children seem ALWAYS to have Jewish parents! What a stroke of good fortune! I can't imagine how difficult it is for all those children in Iran living in Muslim families while struggling to suppress their inner Jew! Religion is also does not fall under an ethic umbrella. To subscribe to that notion, one would have to assume that the people of Tonga, now overwhelmingly Christian were simply playing around with religion until the missionaries arrived. So does Tongan=Christian? Or is it more accurate to say that many, (most?), Tongans identify themselves as Christians in 2011? What's the difference? It's all in the way we view individual human beings. For if we can simply group people at the moment they are born and before they get a chance to make their own choices, we have removed free will from their lives and that flies in the face of both religious belief and secular human rights.
R: Neither the Australian Medical Association nor the American Medical Association agree that circumcision have any medical benefits at all. It's purpose was never medical. The medical arguments, (all now discredited), were simply rationalisations by 'loose' Christians as to why the practice should be continued. Often, fathers would have it done to their sons simply because it was done to them and they didn't want their son to be teased. We also now don't tolerate slavery, so any argument based on its use in biblical times is simply anachronistic to the 21st century, as is the circumcision argument as a whole. M, the assertion that the Jews are still here so therefore it can't be harmful is just plain silly. Millions of African women undergo female circumcision each year and have done so four thousands of years and yet they're still around. Is that okay? Other religions have been killing Jews for sport for thousands of years but they managed to survive as a race. So is this acceptable too? Do accept this on the basis on the survivability on the race again overlooks to rights and trials of the individual. In both cases, individual lives, and the lives of their families, were ruined. There have also been plenty of individual deaths due to circumcision, even in the USA, when rabbis infect babies via the germs in their mouths. So why would anyone think it is harmful? Evidence.

The Only Good Terrorist

Here's what my Facebook friends are saying:

Dumb question time: why did it take this long for someone to say, "Hey! What's up with the GIANT mansion with the huge concrete walls and the barbed wire and shit?"

feels like, mayyybbbeee Bin Laden shouldn't have checked in his location on facebook.

"I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure." - Mark Twain.

At least Osama got some joy by been able to watch the royal wedding before he died.

likes R.I.P Osama Bin Laden - World Hide And Go Seek Champion (2001 - 2011)

Would love to read a transcript of the phone call between Obama and his predecessor.

The way Obama just walked away from that podium reminds me of the very last scene of "Stayin' Alive".

CNN is reporting that Bin Laden was in...Pakistan. Someone should notify Morgan Spurlock.

It took almost 24 hours but someone has finally posted something much less cynical:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." Martin Luther King

Monachy, Gender and Religion

The UK government has recently come to realise that the Act of Settlement, governing the rules of succession, is a terribly prejudiced and out-dated document. Well, derr!
So, instead of doing the sensible thing and just getting rid of the monarchy altogether, they're thinking of allowing the oldest child to succeed, regardless of sex. Really, is that it? Surely they're not going to change the rules for all those peerages that use a similar rule. (That would be almost impossible as the rules of succession for each peerage are set down in letters patent for each creation. And it doesn't matter at all any more because peers have no power.)
This is relevant outside the UK because, if Westminster passes this law, they're going to ask all the other Commonwealth monarchies to pass the same law (so that William and Kate don't end up with a daughter who is queen of the UK and a son who is king of Canada and Australia). But, as far as I've heard, the Poms aren't considering taking out any of the religious rules and asking the Australian and Kiwi PMs to sign off on a law requiring that someone be a member of the CofE and never marry a Papist seems a bit suss. It might even be against Australia's constitution. The most sensible solution would just be to become a republic and I'm hoping increased scrutiny of these rules will incline more Australians to see it that way too.
But assuming we don't get rid of the monarchy, what would we have to do to make it religiously acceptable? Why was it they included all the clauses banning Catholics (and those married to Catholics)? Enoch Powell, whose views on most other matters are thoroughly reprehensible, thought there was a pretty good reason:

When Thomas Hobbes wrote that "the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof", he was promulgating an enormously important truth. Authority in the Roman Church is the exertion of that imperium from which England in the 16th century finally and decisively declared its national independence as the alter imperium, the "other empire", of which Henry VIII declared "This realm of England is an empire" ... It would signal the beginning of the end of the British monarchy. It would portend the eventual surrender of everything that has made us, and keeps us still, a nation.

There could be a grain of truth here. Not many twenty-first century Catholics heed the pope the way they did in the eighteenth century (or even in JFK's generation) but the monarchy is not about how things actually work, just about how they could happen in extreme situations. The reason why no one wants to introduce the guillotine is because all the British monarchs since William IV have behaved themselves and acted on the advice of their PMs. As good little Anglicans, they believe that only God is above them and so there isn't really any devil on the other shoulder to tell them to ignore the PM. But a Catholic monarch might be tempted to veto bills on abortion, contraception, etc.
Obviously I'd like to see them get rid of the bit that requires communion with the CofE. (I'm surprised that the UK still hasn't disestablished, Scandinavian countries have done it already.) And clearly an atheist monarch would have a similar, if not better, relationship with parliament. But if the goal is to open this up to as many people as possible, then we should probably say that the monarchy is open to people of any religious persuasion so long as they don't have any pontiff lording it over them. So Baptists, yes; Catholics, no. Sunnis, yes; Shi'ites, no. What could be more reasonable? (Only a republic.)

20th May 2011
This is why I'm right:

Representative Dale E. Kildee, an anti-abortion Democrat from Michigan who decided this week to support the Senate bill, said: “I will be 81 years old in September. Certainly at this point in my life, I’m not going to change my mind and support abortion, and I’m not going to risk my eternal salvation.”

French Catholicism

They say that Catholicism as practised in France is a bit more permissive than elsewhere, e.g. Ireland. Combined with the fact that most of them are only nominally Catholic (like so many Australians), the actual image of religious dogma that you hear from French agnostics can be a little unorthodox. On the nature of the trinity:

C'est toujours au bébé Jesus qu'on prie. Parce que p'tit Jesus, d'accord ; Dieu, il met la lumière sur le berceau du bébé... Mais on ne prie pas au grand dadais qui s'est tapé Marianne.

And her interpretation of the issue of monophysitism vs dyophysitism:

It's like being an angel, when they get a kicked in the butt, they're put back into human form. It's a big disappointment for their families that they're not angels any more. Same for God.

Burqas, Niqabs and Hijabs

This is such a big issue that everyone seems to have an opinion about. What surprises me is that no one is willing to admit that it's a complicated issue with decent arguments on both sides. That's why I haven't written about it until now.
Coming to Philadelphia has given me a slightly better perspective because, living in West Philly, I am for the first time in a suburb where I can walk down the street and see masked women. Walking down the right street here there's a good chance of seeing a woman in a niqab; two or three if you walk past the mosque. I realise that it's not as confronting as I thought it might be but that might be because I'm a man and don't empathise with women in a visceral way (some feminists bristle at the sight of a veiled woman for fear that they could be subject to the same situation).

I think part of the reason the debate is all heat and no light is because it's all or nothing, for or against completely banning a practice that means a lot to certain people. At least that's how it's portrayed; there's certainly differences in degree between banning something in the streets vs government buildings vs government employees.
But when France banned all religious symbols from schools in 2004 it seemed like overkill. Headscarves, kippahs etc. don't interfere with a student's ability to learn and one would think that a mere symbol wouldn't start fights in schools. Certainly I can't think of anywhere in Australia where religious symbols would work as gang tags (because that would require that religion be more controversial than race, which is not something you wear). One could imagine a situation where a school is divided along religious lines, which would necessitate the banning of religious symbols. But until this actually happens, why would you deprive people of a little freedom of expression?
Of course I have a lot of respect for France's tradition of secularity but I don't think it needs to apply to every citizen. What it should apply to is agents of the state, so teachers and postal workers shouldn't be allowed to wear religious symbols.

The prominent public philosopher Martha Nussbaum has weighed into the debate. She considers it from an American legal perspective, demolishing each argument for banning the practice based on the legal notion of respect. Because she considers only American law, there is an inbuilt assumption that the state won't interfere unless absolutely necessary:

Furthermore, equal respect for persons is compatible, as I said, with limiting religious freedom in the case of a “compelling state interest.” In the snake-handler case, the interest was in public safety. Another government intervention that was right, in my view, was the judgment that Bob Jones University should lose its tax exemption for its ban on interracial dating (Bob Jones v. U. S., 461 U. S. 574 (1983). Here the Supreme Court agreed that the ban was part of that sect’s religion, and thus that the loss of tax-exempt status was a “substantial burden” on the exercise of that religion, but they said that society has a compelling interest in not cooperating with racism. Never has the government taken similar steps against the many Roman Catholic universities that restrict their presidencies to a priest, hence a male; but in my view they should all lose their tax exemptions for this reason.

When she considers the claim that only an outright ban can stop men from forcing their wives to cover up, her legal answer is that there are already laws to stop that. This seems to be one of the weaker points of her discussion. I don't know if she'd say the same thing about other laws targeting very specific forms of abuse, such as genital mutilation laws. It seems to me that a canny politician is missing an opportunity here to play both sides by introducing a bill that only bans the coercion of others into covering their faces. This should please feminists but you'd also get the right on side by making an example of the very small number of Muslim men living in Western countries who actually abuse their wives in this way.

Nussbaum discusses coercion of children in a reply to comments on the first article. I think her discussion of coercion recognises but refuses to say what the nub of the issue is. She would have the government ban only those practices that can be shown to be physically harmful and irreversible. Thus she thinks male circumcision ok because, although irreversible, she doesn't believe that it's harmful. But because burqas come off they can be imposed on children. Here's the problem: the first person to say to Nussbaum, 'What about the mental damage done?' will meet the instant rejoinder, 'You have no objective measure to decide what sort of indoctrination constitutes harm and what is merely enculturation.'
While I'd like to defend everyone's right to choose, I'm not enough of a cultural relativist to say that all or even most of those women who choose to cover their faces are making a free choice. Keeping one's face uncovered is the natural default position and making someone think that talking from behind a screen in preferable amounts to brainwashing. For the small number of women who actually make a free choice, I can't think of any explanation for wanting to hide that part of the body from everyone apart from some sort of pathological shyness. It's futile to fight brainwashing in the current generation but we can try to stop parents doing it to the next; pathological shyness is not a sin but should not be encouraged.

And when she discusses the Amish depriving their children of compulsory education, Nussbaum just cites legal precedent. Very unsatisfying as a moral argument but at least she acknowledges that this is tricky - 'The case is difficult, because the parents made a convincing case that work on the farm, at that crucial age, was a key part of their community-based religion — and yet education opens up so many exit opportunities that the denial even of those two years may unreasonably limit children’s future choices.'
However, I don't think it's as difficult as she makes it seem: children are not their parents' chattels so it doesn't much matter that the practice is a way to get their children to follow in their footsteps. All that matters is that the children have a choice

Why can no one see that people on different ends of the political spectrum can start with different principles but come up with the same answer? It's like they want to cut off their noses to spite their faces. As much as I hate Fred Nile, I agree with his anti-tobacco stance and if I were a parliamentarian and he introduced a workable bill, I'd vote for it. Closer to the main point, the British Nationalist Party has a good stance against animal cruelty. This is probably just a way to annoy Muslims and Jews by banning Halal and Kosher slaughter but the BNP's bad motives are not reason enough to oppose this sort of legislation. Sure, when nasty people support something, that might make you take a look, but in the end the only criterion should be whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

Maybe this sort of public declaration from Muslims will make liberals realise that they're supporting the same end for very different reasons:

Women did not wear Islamic dress out of freedom of choice, Fautmeh Ardati told the Lakemba rally.
''Because to use freedom of choice as a justification, then we are also accepting of women who undress out of this same freedom of choice, and we can never do this as Muslim women. We dress like this because it is the command of Allah, not any man.''

Unlike liberals, progressives might claim that they're just using different language to talk about the same thing, ie pluralism rather than mere liberty but that's going to be hard to argue. And the end of the article undermines the plausibility even further -- 'One woman wearing a burqa said she would have to ask her husband before speaking to the Herald. When asked if she needed her husband's permission to speak, she said: ''We are allowed but we choose not to.'''