Spot the difference

The boston.com news section is reporting a new TV ad being run in Maine that tries to make gay marriage look like a religious liberty issue—which it is, but not in the way the ad attempts to spin it.

In the ad, Jim O’Reilly of the Wildflower Inn in Lyndonville says he and his wife paid $30,000 to settle the lawsuit and can no longer host any weddings simply because they don’t support gay marriage because of their religious beliefs. A voiceover on the 15-second ad then says, ‘‘Vote No on Question 1 to avoid this in Maine,’’ a reference to the Nov. 6 ballot question asking residents if they want to legalize same-sex marriage.

Gay marriage opponents say that the ad sends a message that legalizing same-sex marriage in Maine will have a chilling effect on free speech and that people no longer will feel free to follow their religious convictions.

Let’s have that same report again, with one slight edit.

In the ad, Jim O’Reilly of the Wildflower Inn in Lyndonville says he and his wife paid $30,000 to settle the lawsuit and can no longer host any weddings simply because they don’t support mixed-race marriage because of their religious beliefs. A voiceover on the 15-second ad then says, ‘‘Vote No on Question 1 to avoid this in Maine,’’ a reference to the Nov. 6 ballot question asking residents if they want to legalize mixed-race marriage.

Mixed marriage opponents say that the ad sends a message that legalizing mixed-race marriage in Maine will have a chilling effect on free speech and that people no longer will feel free to follow their religious convictions.

Can you spot the difference? Me neither.

Blood drives

The last time I gave blood, there was a sign outside that says, “Giving blood saves lives.” As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I’d like to ask a question. If giving blood saves lives, why don’t we have people roaming the streets, grabbing healthy-looking individuals, and taking their blood by force? I think most people know the answer: it’s because each of us has a sovereign right to bodily autonomy that no one else has the right to violate, even if it might mean saving someone else’s life.

This to set the stage for a question posed in a couple comments by NotAnAtheist on yesterday’s post, concerning my remark about how the unformed child does not become a person until later on.

When does this “becoming a person” happen? … The child that is 1 hr from being born, anatomically, genetically, and in all other senses I know of, is the same child right after birth (If someone knows of some big difference, let me know).

If there is that similarity, how can it be that the child after birth is a “person”, and the child before is not? Or is it just that the idea of “personhood” has no objective referent and is simply up to the whim of the court?

I’m glad you asked.

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When is it ok to legalize murder?

One of the differences between the Obama/Biden campaign and the Romney/Ryan campaign came out during the VP debates. Biden said he was a faithful Catholic and believed his church’s teaching on abortion (in the true spirit of faith as “believing what you know ain’t so”), but he wasn’t willing to impose his religious beliefs on others (and rightly so). Ryan, on the other hand, was adamant that abortion was murder and should be immediately outlawed, except in cases of rape, incest, and the health of the mother. And that’s a very interesting set of exceptions.

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Reducing men’s participation to the level of women’s interest

Thanks to some links by Jay, I’ve found some of the original writings of Christina Hoff Sommers, and while it’s interesting reading, it does tend to raise some questions in my mind. For example, just clicking around the AEI website, I came across one of her articles entitled “The Gender-Equity Hammer Comes Out.” She’s making the argument that it will be harmful to apply Title IX standards to academic science because, well, look what it’s done to sports.

Although Title IX has contributed to the progress of women’s athletics, it has done serious harm to men’s sports. Over the years, judges, federal officials, and college administrators have interpreted it to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.” That is to say, if a college’s student body is 60 percent female, then 60 percent of the athletes should be female–even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic directors have been unable to attract the same proportions of women as men. So, to avoid government harassment, loss of funding, and lawsuits, educational institutions have eliminated men’s teams–in effect, reducing men’s participation to the level of women’s interest. That kind of regulatory calibration–call it reductio ad feminem–would wreak havoc in fields that drive the economy such as math, physics and computer science.

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Spirit of the Sith

Today’s link goes to Mano Singham’s post, The Obama administration considers constitutional rights to be dangerous. The administration is correct: constitutional rights are dangerous, at least to those who are exploiting others from positions of privilege and power. But the absence of rights is far more dangerous, in terms of the scope and extent of everyday harm.

Fire brigades

Thanks to the Atheism+ debate, I’m getting to learn about something called “equity feminism” versus “gender feminism.” The difference seems to revolve around the degree of activism required. I’m new to this particular debate, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I thought I’d put my initial impressions out there so I can see what people say in response.

The equity feminist seems to be saying, “Look, I know that women are equal, and so I don’t personally discriminate against them, and that should be good enough. We don’t need to be gender feminists and try to make society better for women in general.” If that’s not an accurate assessment, feel free to inform me where it goes astray, but if it is, then I have to say I don’t think that equity feminism is sufficient, and I can explain why, using the analogy of the fire brigade.

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Bishops call religious liberty a threat to religious liberty

Washington state’s four Catholic bishops have released a statement warning that if non-Christians are allowed to engage in non-Christian forms of marriage, religious liberty will suffer.

The bishops’ statement, issued Tuesday by the Washington State Catholic Conference, came as Washington-based Expedia became the latest major employer to come out in support of same-sex marriage.

In the most controversial passage of their pastoral statement, the Catholic bishops argue that passage of Referendum 74 would make THEM the objects of discrimination.

Really? And what kind of discrimination would that be?

“The legal separation of marriage from procreation would have a chilling effect on religious liberty and the right of conscience,” the bishops claim.  “Once marriage is redefined as a genderless contract, it will become legally discriminatory for public and private institutions such as schools to promote the unique value of children being raised by their biological mothers and fathers.

“No institution or individual could propose that married mothers and fathers provide a singular benefit to children without being accused of discrimination.  Recent attacks on churches, businesses and nonprofit organizations that express their conscientious objection to the redefinition of marriage underscore the danger.”

In other words, the “discrimination” consists of not being allowed to discriminate against gays under the disingenuous facade of merely “promoting” whatever you imagine as the “unique value” and “singular benefit” of having opposite-sex parents.  Though when you come right down to it, the main benefit of having opposite sex parents is that doing so avoids the persecution and discrimination you’d otherwise be getting from people like the four Catholic bishops.

You can tell they know they’re on the wrong side by the way they can’t bring themselves to admit what it is that they’re really after. The power to persecute others is the exact opposite of religious liberty. So they call themselves defenders of religious liberty, in order to cling to their power to persecute. They ought to just bow down and confess their sin, and repent.

While they’re at it, they should go the whole way and admit that their God is a lie too. It’s not like that’s not obvious too.

Heroes that actually deserve the name

There are relatively few people in this world today who impress me enough for me to call them heroes. But they exist. Belatedly, imperfectly, incompletely, I would like to thank them for inspiring me and encouraging me to expect more and better things.

Here, in no particular order, are some of them. Please help me fill in the names I will inevitably overlook.

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White House pulls plug on popular petition (or does it?)

The Electronic Privacy Information Center reports a disturbing but sadly unsurprising development in the struggle to recover our civil liberties.

At approximately 11:30 am EDT, the White House removed a petition about the TSA airport screening procedures from the White House “We the People” website. About 22,500 of the 25,000 signatures necessary for a response from the Administration were obtained when the White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition. The site also went down for “maintenance” following an article in Wired that sought support for the campaign.

If you follow the link to the Wired article, you can read about the circumstances which led to the petition, which was basically asking the White House to intervene to get the TSA to comply with the law.

UPDATE: Commenter Eidolon tracked down a post from the petition’s author stating that the petition was not pulled early, but simply expired. He speculates that people were assuming that the signing period would extend through midnight, but instead it expired in the middle of the day, at roughly the same time as when he first posted it. That’s not unusual, given how computers keep track of time periods, and it’s understandable that this could create the misperception of a prematurely-terminated petition. He also notes that the petition was given an extra day to compensate for the outage.