A Grand Hour

Some New York lawyers have increased their hourly rates above the $1,000 mark. Pretty wild. My first response was to think, “What? Nobody’s work is that good!” But then I remembered supply and demand, the likelihood that clients perceive the work of more prominent attorneys as being more valuable than the work of their junior associates, and it makes sense. If enough people think you are the best, there may be more of them than you can handle, so you keep raising your hourly rate until you have the right number of clients.

It’s interesting how economic principles can sometimes conflict with intuitive responses to certain situations. My initial negative response was probably due to two things: (1) the fact that I could not afford a $1,000-per-hour attorney if I wanted one and (2) the fact that I am not a $1,000-per-hour attorney. If I made a final judgment based on those subjective circumstances, it would require me to put on social blinders and fail to recognize that some people can afford $1,000-per-hour attorneys and are willing to pay them, while some attorneys are in high enough demand that they can charge $1,000 for an hour of work.

Someday. Maybe.

Jihad the Musical

Yes, there is a musical called “Jihad the Musical.” I heard a story about it on NPR the other day and finally had a chance to go to the website and check it out. There’s even a page with a couple songs and a video. By all means, go look and listen for yourself.

From the NPR link above:

If we’re supposed to be living in the age of political correctness, someone forgot to tell the writers of Jihad: The Musical.

Billed as a madcap gallop through the wacky world of international terrorism, it tells the story of Afghan peasant Sayid al Boom.

Despite the best efforts of his sister Shazzia, Sayid is recruited by a smooth-talking Islamic fundamentalist in a pinstripe suit: Hussein Al Mansour.

Hussein, played by New York actor Sorab Wadia, lights up the stage with a chorus line of high-kicking women in pink burqas, singing “I Wanna Be Like Osama.”

If only it was playing in Fresno.

Case Law for Arguing with Kids

From the blog California Appellate Report by professor Shaun Martin at the UCSD Law School:

How many times have you had to tell your teenage child that driving (or owning) a car is not a necessary component of life for a sixteen year old? Well, now you’ve got a case that backs you up.

Oh-ho! I can imagine the argument:

Kid: But why dad?

Dad: Because the California First District Court of Appeals said so!

Kid: …

Says the above-named court:

We agree with the juvenile court that while the purpose of juvenile dependency provisions are to “secure for the minor custody, care, and discipline as nearly as possible equivalent to that which should have been given by his or her parents,” the care of a minor does not require payment for car insurance (as opposed to necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter).

Heh heh heh.

New Semester

Fall semester classes begin today. Don’t be surprised if my activity here drops substantially.

Boldly Going Where No One Has Gone Before

Scientists predict that they will have created “artificial” life within a decade. Meanwhile, our technological ability is racing down to the molecular level. It’s probably impossible to imagine how the world will change in the next half century due to developments like those. (Already I am wondering whether lawyering will still be around.) But, really, does it get much cooler than that? Not in my book.

I don’t really have anything else to say. Check out the two articles linked above.

The McGrath Illusion

[Note: The following is a discussion of a book I have not finished reading. I have tried to confine my criticism to what is actually written in the portion I have read. There may be other parts of the book that address my criticism.]

Alister McGrath (along with his wife and co-author Joanna Collicutt McGrath—but Alister says on page 117 that he did most of the work) has written a book that purports to rebut Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. McGrath’s book is called The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine. “This book, [he] suspect[s], will be read mainly by Christians who want to know what to say to their friends who have read The God Delusion and are wondering if believers really are as perverted, degenerate and unthinking as the book makes them out to be. But it is [his] hope that its readers may include atheists whose minds are not yet locked into a pattern of automatic Dawkinsian reflexes.” (McGrath 15.)

Just those two sentences put me on edge. Having read The God Delusion, I did not come away from it with the sense that believers are “perverted, degenerate and unthinking.” (However, those are essentially the same epithets hurled at atheists by believers for thousands of years now. No word on that from McGrath.) Rather, I would say they are profoundly misguided, which to me is a much, much different thing. However, despite the fact that I did go buy McGrath’s book specifically because I think it is foolish not to read books by those one expects to disagree with, I take issue with his characterization of the minds of atheists who will not read his book as “locked into a pattern of automatic Dawkinsian reflexes” (whatever those are). It also strikes me as somewhat odd that McGrath would say such a thing when the sentence immediately prior evinces pretty much the same locked pattern of automatic reflexive responses that religious people seem to have when they encounter Dawkins’ arguments. And that’s only on page 15.

Unfortunately, pages 7 through 14 (the text begins on page 7) are riddled with similar oddities that, even after starting to read with the honest hope of finding out whether McGrath’s issues with Dawkins are viable and worth considering, leave me annoyed and without much hope for the remainder of the book.

McGrath’s Failure to be Self-Consistent
For instance, McGrath says that “Dawkins clearly feels deeply threatened by the possibility of his readers encountering religious ideas or people that they might actually like—or even worse, respect and regard as worthy of serious attention.” (McGrath 14.) That’s a strange thing to say, since, in the “For Further Reading” section on pages 111 through 115 of The Dawkins Delusion, McGrath lists not a single book by Richard Dawkins. Nor does he list any books by the other usual suspects that are typically rounded up with Dawkins: Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Meanwhile, McGrath lists two of his own books on these pages, one of them in the “Introducing Richard Dawkins” section where, oddly enough, as I mentioned above, not a single one of Dawkins’ own books appears—one would think that reading the man’s own books would be the best introduction possible, but not if one is Alister McGrath, apparently. (Then, in the “Christian Belief” section, the only book listed for further reading is McGrath’s own Christian Theology: An Introduction. Apparently, Richard Dawkins cannot be trusted to introduce himself, but Alister McGrath can be trusted to introduce all of Christian belief.) This lack of opposition in the “further reading” section would not be quite so bad if McGrath hadn’t suggested that Dawkins is “deeply threatened” by his own opposition. I cannot help but wonder whether McGrath is not also deeply threatened by the possibility of his readers encountering non-religious or anti-religious ideas that they might actually like, respect, and regard as worthy of serious attention.

I get the same sense of fear in McGrath’s sly rhetorical dodge of his duties as the rebutting opposition here:

[The God Delusion] is often little more than an aggregation of convenient factoids suitably overstated to achieve maximum impact and loosely arranged to suggest that they constitute an argument. To rebut this highly selective appeal to evidence would be unspeakably tedious and would simply lead to a hopelessly dull book that seemed tetchy and reactive. Every one of Dawkins’s misrepresentations and overstatements can be challenged and corrected. Yet a book that merely offered such a litany of corrections would be catatonically boring. Assuming that Dawkins has equal confidence in all parts of his book, I shall simply challenge him at representative points and let readers draw their own conclusions about the overall reliability of his evidence and judgment. (McGrath 13.)

Sorry, Mr. McGrath, but in the first place, if you can take down every one of Dawkins’ “misrepresentations and overstatements,” then I want to see you do it. In the second place, why should I or any other reader trust that you are in fact choosing “representative points” and not just picking off the easy targets? Don’t try to misdirect your failure to address every shoddy piece of Dawkins’ book by claiming that I, the reader, would just be bored and driven catatonic by your attempt to do so. Are you serious about rebutting this thing or not?

This rhetorical hand-waving is particularly annoying because not two pages prior, McGrath criticizes Dawkins for his “turbocharged rhetoric and highly selective manipulation of facts” and launches into this bizarre caricature:

Curiously, there is surprisingly little scientific analysis in The God Delusion. There’s a lot of pseudoscientific speculation, linked with wider cultural criticisms of religion, mostly borrowed from older atheist writings. Dawkins preaches to his god-hating choirs, who are clearly expected to relish his rhetorical salvoes and raise their hands high in adulation. Those who think biological evolution can be reconciled with religion are dishonest! Amen! They belong to the “Neville Chamberlain school” of evolutionists! They are appeasers! Amen! Real scientists reject belief in God! Hallelujah! The God that Jews believed in back in Old Testament times is a psychotic child abuser! Amen! You tell them brother! (McGrath 11-12.)

Wait, wait. So Dawkins gets criticized for his “highly selective manipulation of facts,” but McGrath gets to pick and choose “representative points and let readers draw their own conclusions about the overall reliability of [Dawkins'] evidence and judgment”? Dawkins gets criticized for lacking scientific analysis, but McGrath gets to go on with a condescending extended metaphor that makes Dawkins sound like a fundamentalist preacher? How exactly does that work? (If you want to see what Dawkins at his most aggressive sounds like in person, check out this video. Does it match McGrath’s representation? Hardly, in my opinion, though you may disagree.)

And worse, just one page after that weird little Dawkins-as-preacher bit, McGrath says that “to write an equally aggressive, inaccurate book, ridiculing atheism by misrepresenting its ideas and presenting its charlatans as if they were its saints” would be “pointless and counterproductive, not to mention intellectually dishonest”! (McGrath 13.) Even if McGrath is right that Dawkins’ book is aggressive and inaccurate, and that it ridiculous and misrepresents believers, that hardly excuses his own blatant hypocrisy right there in the pages of his own book.

McGrath’s Apparent Lack of Critical Evaluation Skills
McGrath also makes a few statements in his introduction that betray a shocking (to me) lack of critical evaluation skills. For instance, he says we “need to treat those who disagree with us on such questions [as religion] with complete intellectual respect rather than dismissing them as liars, knaves, and charlatans.” (McGrath 11.) (One wonders whether the bizarre caricature quoted above, which McGrath launches into just two sentences later, counts as dismissal on grounds of charlatanhood.) This point of McGrath’s is one that Dawkins addresses in the opening pages of The God Delusion:

A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts—the non-religious included—is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other. (Dawkins 20.)

Dawkins then quotes Douglas Adams:

Religion . . . has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not?—because you’re not!’ . . . We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much of a furore Richard [Dawkins] creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be. (Dawkins 20-21.)

Why indeed should we treat those who disagree with us on religion with “complete intellectual respect”? This is a point that McGrath merely broaches, then slides right past without either explaining himself or addressing the remark that is directly on point in the book he claims to be rebutting. That seems a little strange to me. Maybe this is not one of those “representative points.” Or maybe it’s one that McGrath just doesn’t have an answer for. (I honestly don’t know, as I have not finished reading his book, but I cannot find any notes at the back of McGrath’s book indicating that he cited the pages I quoted above, nor from flipping through the book and looking at chapter titles and subheadings can I find any indication that McGrath has an answer.) If someone came to McGrath claiming a sincere religious belief that pigeons were actually incarnations of God, sent to watch over us, I have to wonder whether he would treat that person with “complete intellectual respect,” or whether he would suggest psychiatric evaluation. (Of course, if the believer in the Pigeon Religion were to convince others, write some scriptures, and set in motion a cultural movement that survived for a few generations, perhaps McGrath (and many others) would have a different response, while the claims of the Pigeon Religion believer would still present no better foundation for evaluating their truth. Perhaps you see my point.)

McGrath also uncritically accepts a statement from Stephen Jay Gould, to the effect that we must take religious belief seriously because half of the intelligent and informed people he knew had religious beliefs and we wouldn’t want to say they are “total fools,” would we? (McGrath 11.) Huh? That sure sounds like either an appeal to authority (the authority being “intelligent and informed people”—who we can always trust, right?) or an argument from the number of people who agree (half of the intelligent informed people known to Stephen Jay Gould). Because, you know, if a lot of people believe it, then it must be true. Even more so if they are intelligent and informed. (Like, remember all those intelligent and informed people who believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?)

Finally, McGrath says something I have heard before, but which only struck me as being a little strange today when I read it again. First he cites “the humanist writer Michael Shermer” as noting that “never in history have so many, and such a high percentage of the American population, believed in God.” (McGrath 8.) Then he declares triumphantly, “Not only is God not ‘dead,’ as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche prematurely proclaimed; he never seems to have been more alive.” (McGrath 8-9.)

First, okay, don’t go criticizing the rhetorical flair of your opposition, and then cite people like Michael Shermer to score points off of atheists. How is that any different from the stuff you’re criticizing? If you’re going to do it, too, then keep quiet when Richard Dawkins does it.

Second, if you’re going to criticize Dawkins for “tired, weak and recycled arguments” (McGrath 12) then how about you stop dragging Nietzsche’s “god is dead” line into things? Talk about tired, weak and recycled. But that’s really more a matter of style than substance.

Third, and most importantly, the thing that struck me as being a little strange is the way McGrath sort of uncritically defines the vitality of his God by the number of people who believe in it. If the Christian God (which is the one McGrath worships) is dead or alive, wouldn’t that have absolutely nothing to do with whether or how many people believed in it? (Yeah, I’m saying “it” instead of “him” or “Him” because you have to accept the claims of Christians, who cast their God in masculine terms, before it really makes sense to refer to their God with the male pronoun, don’t you?) In other words, shouldn’t the number of people who believe in God be utterly immaterial to any discussion of whether God is dead, alive, active, inactive, or otherwise relevant to anyone’s life? Or is God one of those things that depends on collective belief in order to “exist”? It seems like someone of McGrath’s stature should not be so sloppy.

A Strange Introduction
To help set the stage for his book (or perhaps taint the waters in his favor), McGrath notes the similarities and differences between he and Dawkins, then draws an oddly one-sided conclusion:

We are both Oxford academics who love the natural sciences. Both of us believe passionately in evidence-based thinking and are critical of those who hold passionate beliefs for inadequate reasons. We would both like to think that we would change our minds about God if the evidence demanded it. Yet on the basis of our experience and analysis of the same world, we have reached radically different conclusions about God. The comparison between us is instructive, yet it raises some difficult questions for Dawkins. (McGrath 9.)

Really? Why does it not also raise difficult questions for McGrath? This one little paragraph seems to betray much in McGrath’s approach to the conversation. His position is easy—nope, no difficult questions here—and Dawkins does not challenge his beliefs in the least. Except he needs to write a book to rebut Dawkins, and he can rebut every misrepresentation Dawkins made, but he doesn’t need to because that would be boring, which circumstances leave me feeling rather bewildered. If Dawkins’ book really is that bad, and his position so weak, and if McGrath’s position really is that strong, then why does McGrath need to write a book rebutting the work of Dawkins? Might it be that he feels deeply threatened by the possibility of his readers encountering non-religious or anti-religious ideas that they might actually like, respect, and regard as worthy of serious attention?

If you are not really familiar with Dawkins, or with other atheists, you might think they take a similar stance, believing their own position to be quite strong and without difficulty, while religious people with all their crazy ideas cannot assail their unbelief. But I have never encountered an atheist who does not wrestle with the prospect of a godless universe. Atheism presents plenty of difficult questions, even to those who identify with it. To treat atheists as though they are just glossing over difficult questions, especially ones like Richard Dawkins, who has made a career of wrestling with some of those difficult questions and writing books that do an exceptionally good job of discussing them simply for others, is quite strange to me. That seems especially true when I pick up a book by a Christian who purports to provide a direct rebuttal of an atheist book and, within fifteen pages, I can discover at least one potentially difficult question that might have been answered directly, but was not.

One More Thing For Now
Although I have not read much more than the introduction and briefly flipped through the remainder of McGrath’s book, I did find one more odd bit in the first chapter, which I want to relay here. In that chapter, McGrath gets into Dawkins’ objection to the widespread practice of indoctrinating children into the religion of their parents. He notes that Dawkins has a “reasonable point,” but then goes on to say:

Having read the misrepresentations of religion that are such a depressing feature of The God Delusion, I very much fear that secularists would merely force their own dogmas down the throats of the same gullible children—who lack, as Dawkins rightly points out, the discriminatory capacities needed to evaluate the ideas. I do not wish to be unkind, but this whole approach sounds uncomfortably like the antireligious programs built into the education of Soviet children during the 1950s, based on mantras such as “Science has disproved religion!” “Religion is superstition!” and the like. (McGrath 21.)

First, I want to mention that “this whole approach” appears to refer not to any “approach” actually advocated by Richard Dawkins, but to the forcing of secularist dogmas that McGrath has himself imagined and “very much fear[s].” Perhaps I am reading it wrong, or out of context, but I am pretty sure I read it correctly. If you want to talk about “misrepresentations,” that one sure seems like a doozy to me. It is also one hundred percent unwarranted. If McGrath really wanted to know whether Dawkins advocates forcing “secularist dogmas” on “gullible children,” he should have read the final chapter of Dawkins’ book A Devil’s Chaplain, which is in the form of a letter to Dawkins’ own daughter, who was ten years old at the time. He wrote:

Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say. (Dawkins, Devil’s Chaplain 248)

It seems to me pretty irresponsible of Alister McGrath to slyly or sloppily compare Richard Dawkins to those in the Soviet regime who indoctrinated children with dogma, when there is evidence right there in a published book that Dawkins’ advice to his own daughter—who I’m sure he hopes will see the world as he does—is that she needs to critically evaluate every claim of truth that is put to her, including, presumably, the claims he puts to her himself.

If I have the time, I’ll probably post more about McGrath’s book as I read through it.

Why is this so difficult to understand?

On August 2nd, I quoted from a contribution to an email discussion group, in which a law professor said something I thought was ludicrous. Here is another annoying statement from the same list, but a different professor (regarding a case where a graduate student was dismissed from a practicum, apparently for giving church groups as an option for bereavement counseling):

Assuming [a] policy of prohibiting mention of religious bereavement counseling options was set up by a state actor, why doesn’t that policy violate the Establishment Clause? It’s principal effect seems to be to inhibit religion. Here the client had indicated a religious commitment; to require the employee/student to ignore that information and to not even mention the possibility of religious bereavement counseling is actively hostile to religion. In effect it sets up a secular orthodoxy in dealing with a matter that for thousands of years has been an important part of religious practice. [Italics added.]

There was no “policy of prohibiting mention of religious bereavement counseling options” in this case. However, you can still discuss the issue if you take the statement on its face and assume such a policy for the sake of argument (or, as the lawyerly lovers of Latin like to say, “assume arguendo“).

If the government, or a “state actor” (which, basically, is a private individual or entity that is performing a governmental function), tries to keep from violating the Establishment Clause by enacting a policy against the insertion of religion in its business, and we can legitimately label that a “secular orthodoxy” and call it “establishment of religion” (you know, because we have taken that historically religious word—”orthodoxy—and slapped it onto a nonreligious word), then what exactly would not violate the Establishment Clause? You can’t have a policy that requires the insertion of religion because that would be violative, but you can’t have a policy that prohibits it either? Huh?

This is just another manifestation of that bizarre and irrational claim that “no religion” equals “religion.”

Despite some weirdness in the case law on this point, it seems quite clear to me that the Establishment Clause exists so that the Free Exercise Clause can exist, too. If you are dealing with the government or with a state actor and a particular religious perspective comes to you under the auspices of the government, with all the attendant weight those auspices would lend, does that not discourage your own free exercise? The question is not whether the government and its employees and agents (including state actors) have a right to free exercise when it comes to using their position as such to advance their religious views—they don’t!

When you are acting in your capacity as an employee or agent of the government, how can you say that you have any kind of constitutional right to advance your religious views without violating the Establishment Clause? If you are an employee or agent of the government and you are acting within the scope of that employment or agency, then you are acting on behalf of the government and subject to its control, and the constitutional limitations on the government apply to you. One of those limitations is that the government may not establish a religion—any religion.

Enforcing that limitation on the government (and its employees and agents) makes it possible for everybody else (i.e., not the government, its employees, and agents—including employees and agents who are not within the scope of their employment or agency) to freely exercise their right to religious belief. It’s not “secular orthodoxy”; it’s the only way for the government to operate constitutionally.

Beyond that, however, setting aside the constitution, it’s the only way for a society to run itself if it really wants to respect the rights of its citizens to have their own, individual, and conflicting beliefs. If the authorities to which all citizens are subject (e.g., the IRS, the court system, etc.) are allowed to advance the religious beliefs of just some citizens, then all of the citizens who don’t share those beliefs are placed under some rather sneaky psychological pressure. (Or, not so sneaky, and far more outrageous, in some cases.)

If you really want to be serious about freedom, and you want to be free to believe as you see fit, then you have to recognize that the basic matrix in which our society functions, which is manifested as our system of government, needs to be completely neutral as to religion. Here’s an easy way to define neutrality: Can the subject of a particular government act look at that act and thereby determine the religious beliefs of the actor? If yes, then the actor is not behaving neutrally regarding religion.

Here’s a hypothetical situation to illustrate: If you go to a government-sponsored health clinic for treatment of some malady and the doctor, after a thorough examination, tells you to take a particular medication to cure the malady, is the government doctor’s act religiously neutral? What if the doctor privately would like to tell you that, as well as taking the medication, you should also begin attending a synagogue and praying, but does not tell you those things because she is trying not to violate the constitutional limitation on government establishment of religion?

Some people might be tempted to say that since the doctor held back from sharing her personal religious beliefs with you, that the “secular orthodoxy” of the system is evident and that the “secular orthodoxy” has thus been unconstitutionally established as a religion. But that’s not the case.

Put yourself back in the position of sitting on the table in the examining room with the government doctor, who tells you simply to take a particular medication and mentions nothing about any religion or religious practices. Can you, in that situation, determine the doctor’s religious beliefs? Imagine the doctor is Christian or Buddhist or Muslim or Hindu and similarly forgoes religiously-tinged advice. If no religious comments are forthcoming, you have no way to determine the religious beliefs of the doctor. You cannot even say whether the doctor is one of those dreaded “secularly orthodox” atheists because the doctor, in respect for your constitutional rights to free exercise, has not disclosed the nature of his or her belief or lack of belief.

Isn’t this pretty simple? Pretty easy to follow? But the law professor quoted above apparently hasn’t figured it out. Neither has the United States Supreme Court.

This Post is Not About Polygamy

When I saw the headline “Polygamy Prosecutors See Unfinished Job,” my frustration with lunacy started revving up before I could even get the page with the whole story to load in my browser. I thought, “Why do we have prosecutors out there trying to bring criminal proceedings against consenting adults who want to have multiple spouses? Why should that be a crime?”

But I was wrong because the story at the other end of that link has almost nothing to do with polygamy and everything to do with having sex with minors.

[E]ight men were accused of entering polygamous unions with young girls and then fathering their children. Authorities had hoped their indictments would serve as a warning to other male members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

If it is already a crime to have sex with minors, why characterize these activities as “polygamous unions”? If an ordinary person, not a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FCJCLDS), were to have sex with more than one minor, we wouldn’t call that person a “polygamist,” but maybe a child molester engaged in a pattern of behavior.

These guys at the FCJCLDS are just engaged in such a strong pattern that they have built their whole social structure around it, so they are embedded in a community where their conduct is “normal.” The problem is not that they are polygamous, but that they are having sex with minors!

It’s not that I’m a big fan of polygamy or anything (I’m not), but in the interests of freedom, I see no reason to keep other people from practicing it (as you might have gathered from my comment in the first paragraph of this post). Conflating the behavior of the FCJCLDS with ordinary polygamists is ridiculous. Sure, you could call them polygamists, because they have multiple spouses, but that’s not what’s really offensive about their conduct. The reason we prosecute them is because they are raising young girls for the purpose, essentially, of robbing them of their liberty and self-determination. In a sense, they treat their girls like cattle. Cattle with human vaginas.

And while I’m on the subject, women and girls are not cattle. Nor are they prey. For those who have not figured this out—and there are shocking numbers who haven’t—human females are in fact human. That means they have minds of their own, volition, things they want to do, things to say, independent wills, and all of that.

Threfore:

Men, women are not your playthings. (Conversely, women, men are not your playthings.) Girls are not your cattle. Women are not your receptacles. They are interesting people and they make excellent friends. (Conversely, women, men are also interesting people who make excellent friends.)

Women, you are smart and interesting people. If I have to listen to one more woman say, “Oh, I’m not that smart. I’m really kind of boring,” I think I might scream. The only women I have ever met who are not that smart and kind of boring are the women who let men treat them like playthings. The rest of you are fascinating people.

And men of the FCJCLDS, you have stolen and destroyed decades worth of individual potential by taking the lives of your girls and forcing them to your desires. Some of them are grown and will never escape. Others will grow up and get out but never escape the psychological and emotional scars you have left on them. These are people with consciousness and the ability to think and experience pain and have self-awareness, just like you. And you have systematically smashed all of that, as though the unique characteristics that make people human should only belong to you.

(Now I’ll sit back and see how many hits this post gets because it includes the phrase “sex with minors.”)

The Battle Continues

A Hebrew-English charter school is opening next week in Florida. Its sponsors claim they will be teaching Hebrew culture, but not Jewish religion. Some of us are a bit skeptical.

The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the school sets a dangerous precedent.

“Whenever you have a public school, a public charter school, that focuses on a particular culture that has an intense religious connection, there is the risk that you will end up teaching that religion,” he said. “It could happen because some people believe culture and religion are inseparable, or it could happen because many of the teachers and administrators are of one religion and don’t recognize the problem.”

Even the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federation of Broward County have expressed church-state separation issues.

“There are unanswered questions as to how the subject matter of Jewish culture can be taught without also teaching the Jewish religion,” said federation head Eric Stillman.

Those are good questions, but one parent quoted toward the end of the article linked above also pointed out, “If I were to send [my daughter] to any other public school, you better believe that come December, she’d be learning Christmas carols.”

Meanwhile, the simplest solution to the ongoing nightmare that is American public education remains unmentioned: How about we privatize education and stop fighting over tax dollars to fund schools? Parents and politicians are never going to stop fighting about this, because they all want their kids to be exposed to particular religious ideas, or not exposed to particular religious ideas. Or, probably more commonly, most parents and politicians do not even have the level of understanding and analytical ability to figure out where religious ideas end and basic education begins.

And it won’t work to just remove religion completely from public schools because religious people have time and again shown that they will fight that tooth and nail, too, on the bizarre and illogical argument that “no religion” equals “religion.”

No matter what we do, nobody is going to be happy because despite the fact that nobody can agree on how to run schools, for some obscure (and, in my opinion, idiotic) reason, we nevertheless all agree that children should be required to attend school.

Two potential solutions to that dilemma present themselves pretty easily: either we ditch the “compulsory” aspect of education, or we ditch the “universal” aspect. If we ditch universal public education, then we don’t have to agree anymore. You want to send your kids to a religious school? Go right ahead. We can keep the laws the make it compulsory—you have to send your kid to some school, but you don’t have to send your kids to government-run schools.

Then we stop doling out government money, so there are no Establishment Clause issues, private sponsors take over, and maybe we stop destroying children’s curiosity with our public education system.

Time Waster

Do you have twenty-four minutes and two seconds that you need to waste? (No, neither do I.) Try watching this satirical video about “bad science.” Find out how cloud damage kills monkeys, who was the fourth man on the Apollo 11 mission, and what a light-saving brick is.