One Karen, Two Karens, an Army of Karens

I spent several hours on Christmas Eve watching video clips of anti-maskers behaving badly.  I regret it, it was a highly toxic experience that left me feeling lousy for a day or two, but it also helped me understand why so many people feel that watching TV news and punditry makes them feel terrible.  Usually I just watch four or five minutes of such material; five or six straight hours of it was painful.  It's also habit-forming, and I'm finding it harder than I expected to stop.

It wasn't just watching mostly middle-aged, mostly white, mostly women bullying store clerks and lower-level managers who are required by their employers to treat abusive customers with courtesy, though of course that was infuriating.  (On the other hand, getting into screaming wrestling matches with them would not be better for their peace of mind either.)  I was also bothered by the mostly amateur pundits who reposted the clips to Youtube.  There were some professionals, such as the lefty channel The Young Turks, whose Rick Strom quickly annoyed me as much as the anti-maskers did.  Strom's smirk makes me think of Rachel Maddow in a scraggly hipster beard - in fact I propose that he and his ilk should be known as Rachels hereafter.  (Or maybe Cenks, after the would-be union-busting star of The Young Turks.)  His commentary adds nothing to the clips, but I guess a guy has to earn a living.  And maybe I'm being unfair: Strom appears on the TYT Sports channel, maybe I'm taking him too seriously.

I noticed that the commentators (let alone those who commented on the videos) weren't really much smarter than the anti-maskers they derided.  The clip above, posted by a guy called Xenoshot, epitomizes the style.  It's framed by several seconds of a video game, then switches to a scene of three (or maybe four, if the person recording is one of them) stereotypical anti-maskers exercising their Freedom in a coffee shop as the young manager patiently, calmly, stands firm on the mask requirement and finally calls the police to remove them.  The invaders are equipped with the usual printouts that they claim prove their right not to wear a mask.  Whether they are from the CDC website, as they claim, should be doubted, but without seeing the printouts I can't be sure.  Their leader claims that the manager is discriminating against them, citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which has no bearing on the situation either.

Xenoshot's world-weary drone is about as irrelevant as Rick Strom's, but the interesting thing is that his grasp of the law is as weak as the anti-maskers'.  The leader lectures one of the cafe workers:

This is not free and equal access, which you have to comply with, that's an established law, so if you are basically treating us differently than other customers, you are violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is a crime.  This is a crime, okay? 

Over more videogame footage, Xenoshot drawls:

Yeah, I'm sure the Civil Rights Act recognizes anti-maskers as a protected class, when are Karens gonna understand that private businesses have every right to refuse service, it's like some insane concept to them. "No shirt no shoes no service," I'm sure they've heard of that. If you don't comply with a business's rules, you're the one who's breaking the law.  They have every right to have you arrested for trespassing.

It's true that the Civil Rights Act does not protect your right to violate public health regulations by refusing to wear a mask: it states which kinds of discrimination (race, sex, religion, etc.) are prohibited and in what domains (education, hiring, public accommodations, etc.).  However, far from giving private businesses "every right to refuse service" according to their "rules," the Act restricts businesses' rights to do so.  Misconceptions about civil rights and antidiscrimination laws are as widespread on the left and in the center as they are on the right, as I've pointed out numerous times.

The sign you see posted above the cashier's station in many small businesses, "We reserve the right to refuse service for any reason" has no more legal standing than the popular Facebook posts declaring the poster's legal ownership of what he or she posts there - that is to say, none.  They can be challenged, and have been.  As for "No shirt no shoes no service", those signs are technically legal, but "their scope is limited."  These decisions are judgment calls, subject to challenge if they are abused.  Which, to avoid confusion, is not happening in this clip.

Businesses that require masks, or try to, are doing so not because of the owners' idiosyncratic disapproval of uncovered faces but to comply with state and local laws and health regulations.  They might require masks in a pandemic even without those regulations, but they can call the police in, as the manager of the cafe in this clip did, because they have law behind them.  Anti-maskers also like to claim that health regulations aren't law, but guess what?  They're wrong about that too.

I'd like to think it would be helpful if Xenoshot, Rick Strom, Karens in the Wild, Kodelyoko and other Youtube Rachels bothered to inform themselves before they post their putdowns.  The same goes for the anti-maskers and the Trump cultists trying to overturn the 2020 election, of course, but we know that.  Just because the anti-maskers are stupid, it doesn't follow that the Cenks are smart.  The Rachels are like MSNBC: they're about tone, not substance; about clicks and branding, not intelligent commentary; stroking the prejudices of their audience, just like Fox News.  If it feels good ... think again. 

My House, My Rules

Y'know, I think I've learned a lesson this weekend, watching some of the fuss over a Virginia restaurant's refusal to serve Trump's press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  That lesson is that many reasonably well-educated people have no idea what "civility" means.

If you haven't heard, Sanders and seven other people drove up to Lexington, Virginia (pop. 7,000), and walked into a small (26 seats) restaurant called the Red Hen.  The staff recognized her and called the owner, who was at home. The owner arrived, asked Sanders to step aside with her, and politely asked her to leave. Sanders politely agreed.

Sanders went back to the table, picked up her things and walked out. The others at her table had been welcome to stay, Wilkinson said. But they didn’t, so the servers cleared away the cheese plates and glasses.

“They offered to pay,” Wilkinson said. “I said, ‘No. It’s on the house.’ ”

One of the servers mentioned the incident on his Facebook page, and the shit hit the fan.  Sanders tweeted about it: "I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so ... Her actions say far more about her than about me."  Other reactions were predictable: Trump fans were outraged, predicted that the Red Hen would soon close for lack of business, many Trump haters were delighted.  Large numbers from both groups posted reviews of the restaurant on social sites like Yelp, even though as the Washington Post article notes, few if any had ever eaten there or ever would.  Some Democrats, also predictably, attacked the owner for lack of "civility," saying that Sanders should have been served no matter what.

I saw a lot of online complaints about the lack of "civility" the Red Hen's owner supposedly showed.  I don't think there was any incivility or lack of respect (as I presume Sanders meant) involved.  The owner was both civil and polite, even respectful.  She explained her reasons and politely asked her to leave.  One of the basic mistakes many of the commentators make is their apparent belief that you can't disagree with, let alone cut off socially or in other areas, a person without being civil -- that civility means maintaining friendly relations with anyone, no matter how vile.  And while Sarah Huckabee Sanders isn't as vile as Donald Trump himself, she's his press secretary, lying for him, defending his vilest policies.  She's personally and professionally complicit in his evil.  Even if you believe (as I do not) that the Red Hen should not have refused her service, civility is a separate question.  The same goes for "respect."  If Sanders meant (as I presume she did) that she'd been treated disrespectfully, she was mistaken.

The owner of the Red Hen did not scream profane abuse at Sanders.  She didn't punch her in the nose. She didn't overturn the table, spilling cheese and drinks over the party.  She didn't invite other patrons to throw food at them.  She didn't lock them into a wire cage and beat them, starve them, inject them with drugs to make them docile, or throw them out on the street months later, unwashed and infested with lice.  Since Sanders and her boss and the people they represent support the right of small businesses to refuse service to anyone whose lifestyle or beliefs they disapprove of, Sanders in particular has no ground for complaint at all.

If Sanders were starving, I'd give her food.  But she's in no danger of starving, now or ever.  There are, as her fans crowed on social media, many restaurants where she and her friends and colleagues will be welcome.  Someone, in a tweet I can't find now, speculated reasonably that she'd traveled outside Washington, where "everybody hates her," to find a place to eat.  It seems she made a small blunder in her choice of the Red Hen, and I wonder who recommended it to her.  According to the Washington Post article, "Lexington, population 7,000, had voted overwhelmingly against Trump in a county that voted overwhelmingly for him."  So Sanders somehow lighted on one of the few places in Red America where she might not be welcome.

Another theme that raged in the line exchanges was Who's A Hypocrite Now?  Both Trumpists and liberals invoked the Masterpiece Cakeshop Decision.  The Trumpists asked how libs could object to refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay male couple, yet accept refusal of service for Sanders.  The liberals asked the reverse: if it's okay to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, then why isn't it okay to refuse to serve Sanders?  Of course I think the liberals have the stronger case.  Some liberals argued that the two cases are obviously totally different and if you can't see that then there's something wrong with you.  I agree that there are differences but I don't agree that they're relevant: the refusal to serve Sanders doesn't constitute legal or unjust discrimination.  And since the Right has been opposed to civil rights laws all along, they can't suddenly change their mind without some pretty hefty explaining.

Contrary to some complaints, it is not clear that "discrimination" was involved, and certainly not "prejudice."  "Prejudice" means pre-judging someone without evidence, or based on irrelevant evidence -- assuming that a pale, rather chunky woman will be a Trump supporter for example.  But the objection was to Sanders herself, a public figure, who has defined herself by her words and her willingness to defend the indefensible.  "Discrimination" is similarly slippery.  Some opponents of public accommodation laws like to point out irrelevantly that we all discriminate all the time.  That's true.  But unlawful discrimination is determined and defined by civil rights laws, and it's rather narrow.  People may use the word sloppily, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders was refused service because of her words and actions, the kind of person she has shown herself to be.  Someone irrelevantly quoted Martin Luther King's "judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" line at me.  I don't like it much, because we can never really know the content of anyone else's character.  But they (and we) do show something of our character by our actions, our words, the people we choose to associate with and work for, and Sanders has shown us enough about her character to judge her by.  It's discrimination, all right, but not the kind of discrimination civil rights law is meant to prohibit.

It raises another important question.  Public officials at all levels almost never face any accountability for crimes even greater than Trump's, for moral cowardice even greater than Sanders's.  The feeling of many Democrats (leave the Trump fanatics aside) that Sanders should face no accountability, no consequences for her actions or words, also has to be evaluated in the context of the refusal of the Obama administration to punish Bush-era figures who justified and ordered torture and other war crimes, or to punish the fraud and other crimes of business figures who nearly destroyed the economy in 2008.  Between doing nothing at one "extreme" and, oh let's say public execution by fire (the kind of extreme that centrists will think of to show the impossibility of doing anything other than nothing), there are many possibilities.  Compared to the imaginable extremes, being ejected from a restaurant is pretty small accountability for Sanders, and one that I'm sure she will be able to live with.

Glenn Greenwald posted a challenge today:

Everyone accusing each other of hypocrisy over the gay-wedding-baker and Sarah Sanders cases: please state the general principle you support when it comes to the right of business owners to refuse service to customers. That would be a more constructive way to have this discussion[.]

I think this is a good question.  As I expected, the responses were mostly not very constructive, to put it mildly, except insofar as they showed that most people have no general principles on this issue.  People they dislike should suffer, those they don't dislike should not suffer, and there's an end on't.  "It's very simple," one person said to me, and "Seems pretty straight forward," another said to Greenwald, thus showing how little they had thought about it.  Which is understandable -- how much do most of us think about difficult issues?

This takes me back to a question I've been grappling with for some time, namely under which circumstances it is all right to refuse service to someone, or to remove them from a job for actions or words committed outside (or even during) working hours.  Someone scolded me online that it's never right to refuse service to anyone.  This is obviously false, and absurd.  Bartenders refuse service to people all the time, for example.  At the same time, I disagree, and I think most people would disagree if they took it seriously, that any business owner should be able to refuse service to anyone for any reason. The absolutes are unworkable, so we have to judge actual cases in the middle.  This bothers many people, not only on the Right, who want moral absolutes, with no middle ground.

I don't think that general principles can definitively answer Greenwald's question.  That may be our problem.  General principles are useful but they only take us so far, and from there we must wing it, make judgments that may or not turn out to be right.  There don't even seem to be reliable ways to decide whether a judgment is right or wrong.

Which of These Things Is Not Like the Others?

Voters in Houston have overwhelmingly rejected a city law that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity -- along with race, sex, color, religion, and other characteristics already protected by federal civil rights law but not by local ordinance. The law had been passed by the Houston City Council in 2014.  Today in the e-mail I got a press release from the National LBGTQ Task Force Action Fund, which referred to

the city’s ordinance that extends non-discrimination protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people--among 13 other protected classes including race, religion, sex, color, age, ethnicity, disability, national origin, marital status, military status, genetic information, pregnancy, and family status.

There's something off here.  I looked it up, and found that, sure enough, the ordinance prohibits discrimination based on "sexual orientation" and "gender identity," along with 13 other traits.  It doesn't specify lesbians, gay men, or the rest, which would have laid the law open to legal challenge.

I confess that some of the confusion was in my own mind.  I gather that "protected class" does not refer to a group of individuals -- it's legalese for the protected characteristic, but in neutral terms: "race," not "African-Americans"; "sex", not "women."  But the related "protected group" is confusing too.  Wikipedia, in a very brief article, says it "is a group of people qualified for special protection by a law, policy, or similar authority... U.S. federal law protects employees from discrimination or harassment based on sex, race, age, disability, color, creed, national origin or religion."  My point is that "sex, race, age, etc." don't refer to groups, but to all individuals.  A law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation protects heterosexuals as well as homosexuals and bisexuals; a law prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity will protect cisgender as well as transgender individuals; and so on.  I've said before that I don't know what sort of discrimination cisgender individuals might face, but someone's bound to figure out a way to do it before long.  That's one of the generally-ignored pitfalls (or is it a pitfall?) of civil rights antidiscrimination law: it protects majorities as well as well as minorities.  White men have sought and found relief under existing civil rights legislation, as have heterosexuals and bisexuals who were discriminated against by gay men.  And Christians, despite the whining of some of them, are already (in) a protected class. 

In this respect civil rights law is at odds with the dominant multiculti discourse on (for example) racism, which defines racism solely as structural racism and declares dogmatically that white people cannot suffer from racism.  Perhaps not -- it's evidently a matter of definition -- but they (we) can certainly experience discrimination based on our race.  It's written into the law, though as with many laws the consequences may not have been foreseen.  (Remember the article I discussed a couple of months ago, which treated racism as a consequence of innate human tendencies to stereotype people by their appearance, and declared that all white people are racist.  It also conflicted with the dominant multicultural model in treating racism as a matter of individual prejudice rather than structural factors, but neglected to notice that it also proved that all people of color are racist, since they have the same innate stereotyping tendencies.  When I pointed this out to the diversity manager who'd posted the article on Facebook, he floundered: he hadn't noticed the problem, and still didn't get it, caught as he is in the toils of diversity-management / culture of therapy discourse.  That couldn't be what the article meant, because it couldn't be.  That's the big trouble with diversity management in institutions, whether schools or corporations: people are given authority over others even though they don't really know what they're talking about.  But not to worry, they're just following the orders of their DNA.)

I understand why the Task Force phrased their press release as they did; it's a long-established convention to refer to civil rights laws in terms of the minorities they were enacted to protect, so that many people have come to believe that "Civil Rights" means specifically the rights of black people.  "Gay rights" is shorthand for prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, but many people, gay and straight, take it literally; and so on.  Since most people evidently have forgotten, if they ever knew, what the shorthand is short for, I think it's necessary to abandon the shorthand and spell out the actual meaning for a while.  Maybe it won't do much good.  Opposition to civil rights laws doesn't come from a misunderstanding of what the laws are supposed to do; bigots deliberately misunderstand the laws for their own reasons.  But it can't help that supporters of civil rights law don't undertand the laws either.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

By Cthulhu's tentacles!  I didn't think this shameful spectacle could get any worse, and then of course it did.  It's almost certainly not over yet.

I confess, I didn't pay much attention at first to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as it moved through the Indiana Legislature.  I don't know why; I pay less attention to state politics than to local, national or international politics, and that's not something to be proud of.  But as more and more people began drawing my attention to the bill, and the temperature of the opponents' rhetoric rose, I grudgingly took a look.

First I looked at the text of the bill itself.  I took for granted that "Religious Freedom Restoration Act" was intentionally misleading, a smokescreen like "Defense of Marriage Act" or "Marriage Equality".  People I knew were fuming that it would be a license for discrimination against LGBT people, and I wondered what such a law would look like.  Someone mentioned that there was a Federal RFRA too, passed during the Clinton administration.

As I'd rather suspected, the Indiana bill, like the Federal one, didn't explicitly mention sexual orientation or gay or trans people.  Both versions were weirdly vague, which I thought was worrisome enough.  The gist of the Federal bill, as well as of the Indiana version (I know, I know, but hold your horses -- I'll get to that presently) was that "Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability" and that any burden must be justified as "furtherance of a compelling government interest."  The point of the Federal bill was to protect small, marginal religious sects when their practices ran afoul of majority prejudices and laws.  The best-known example of this was peyote use by the Native American Church, but the RFRA was cited in other contexts too, ranging from conflicts over the renovation of a Roman Catholic church building that had been designated a historical landmark to the infamous 2014 Hobby Lobby case.

In 1997 the US Supreme Court overturned part of the Federal RFRA, "with respect to its applicability to States (but not Federally), stating that Congress had stepped beyond their power of enforcement provided in the Fourteenth Amendment."  Numerous states then passed RFRAs of their own, of which the Indiana version is (so far) the latest.  In some cases, court rulings provided similar protections at the state level.

That the Indiana bill didn't refer explicitly to sexual orientation doesn't tell us anything about its intent, of course; that's why I find its vagueness so worrisome.  What constitutes a "substantial burden" probably is constrained somewhat by case law, what the courts have ruled on the subject in the past.  But that's just what is being debated now: is it a "substantial burden" to require businesses to serve customers whose lives are at some kind of variance with the business owners' religion?  This is likely to be fought in the courts for years to come.

When I pointed this out, asking snarkily how many of the Indiana bill's opponents had actually read it, the reactions (basically "you think you're so smart!") indicated that they hadn't, but OMFG we have to do something right away, because this law will give Bible-thumpers a license to discriminate against LGBT people!

On this point I confess I was slow on the uptake.  It took me a few days of debate before I remembered that Bible-thumpers in Indiana (or anyone else, in fact) already have "a license to discriminate against LGBT people": Indiana's civil rights law doesn't include sexual orientation as a basis on which it is forbidden to discriminate.  Not only that, Indiana localities are not permitted to add anything to the state law's provisions in their own civil rights ordinances.  My liberal city, Bloomington, tried to do so in the 1970s, but that ordinance was overturned.  In the 1990s, West Lafayette and Bloomington tried another approach: they passed ordinances which forbade discrimination based on sexual orientation, but without any provision for enforcement.  The city would attempt to mediate complaints about discrimination, but there could be no penalties.  Those ordinances are still on the books, but they don't constitute any real prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Nor is Indiana unique in this regard.  Some people I knew began calling for boycotts of Indiana if the bill passed.  The first lives in Kentucky.  Kentucky already has a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and does not legally forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation.  The state government of Kentucky is currently fighting against the legalization of same-sex civil marriage there.  So shouldn't he boycott himself first?  Then my liberal law-professor friend said, half-jokingly I guess, that she wasn't sure she should visit her family in Indiana, she didn't want to spend money here.  She lives in Texas, which already has a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and no legal protection for sexual orientation.  As a law professor who specializes in civil rights law, she surely is aware of this.  (So far she has yet to say anything about the Indiana RFRA that betrays any intelligence at all.)  Before long some random person in Michigan issued the clarion call to boycott Indiana.  While Michigan doesn't have a state RFRA, it does have "RFRA-like protections provided by state court decisions," and permits discrimination based on sexual orientation; it also has a ban on same-sex marriage passed by popular vote ten years ago, but still in force so far. (The Detroit Free Press editorial I just linked to was one of the more sensible things I've read on this issue.)  This map, already out of date but still helpful, shows the thirty-one states that have RFRAs or RFRA-like court decisions.

Same-sex civil marriage is legal in Indiana, by contrast, and it seems that the RFRA was introduced as a sullen riposte to the activist courts that made it so.  (So there, too!)  I wouldn't be at all surprised if Governor Mike Pence, who clearly isn't the sharpest pencil in the box, was unaware that antigay (as well as anti-straight) discrimination was already legal in the state he governs. 

Now, it is true that the Indiana law has some important differences from the federal RFRA, and from other state versions, as discussed here.  They're clearly meant to make it easier for bigots to cite religious freedom to defend discrimination.  Again, however, none of these differences point to sexual orientation.  They are meant to defend all kinds of discrimination, even those that are prohibited by existing civil rights law.  And let me repeat: In Indiana and most other states, there's no need to cite religion as a justification for discriminating against LGBT people, since it is already legal to discriminate against us here.  What I find annoying about most of the Indiana RFRA's critics is that, first, they ignore this elementary fact.  Numerous people quoted Stephen King's line "Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act is gay discrimination, pure and simple. You can frost a dog turd, but it's still a dog turd."  Leaving aside King's evident confusion about terminology (it's antigay discrimination, not "gay discrimination"), the Indiana RFRA is not specifically about gay people.

My second concern is that in the hysteria over this law as a license to discriminate against gay people, its critics are overlooking other forms of discrimination that are at least as relevant in a Republican, heavily conservative-evangelical state.  If a good Christian shopkeeper wants to refuse to serve a woman in a hijab or other Muslim head covering because America's a Christian country so go back where you came from, for example, this bill would provide a cover for that refusal -- at least until the courts overturn it.  Most (all that I've seen, in fact) of the fuss over the Indiana RFRA focuses on antigay discrimination, while ignoring its other implications.  This may be partly because so many LGBT Americans, being Americans, are quite comfortable with anti-Muslim discrimination, racism, sexism, and other areas where faith and the law may clash.  The campaigns for "marriage equality" and against the US military ban on homosexuals involved a lot of reactionary flag-waving and Bible-thumping to assure their fellow citizens that LGBTs can be good Republicans and Moral Majoritarians too.

Which brings me to another flaw in the criticism.  Given the vagueness of Religious Freedom Restoration laws at all levels, their writers' intent is not all that important, but it can still be noticed and discussed.  Given the people who inspired and worked on the Indiana bill and who were present when Pence signed it into law, I don't doubt that enabling antigay discrimination was their intention.  (Though they'd probably be quite happy if it could be used against Muslims, Jews, Wiccans, atheists, and others.)  But the intentions of a law's framers don't determine much.

Take the the Equal Access Act of 1984 (via), passed during the Reagan administration to force public schools to allow students to use their facilities for prayer and Bible-study groups.  In those heady days, when the Christian Right saw Reagan as their Vindicator who would make the whole world bend the knee to Christ as they conceived of him, it's not surprising that the bill's sponsors and supporters dismissed concerns that it could be used by secularists and homosexuals and others they disliked.  But the EEA turned out to be the "single most important tool available"* to the Gay-Straight Alliances that spread across the US in the 1990s.

Returning to the RFRAs: the Federal version was intended to protect minority religious groups, notably Native Americans.  It failed to do so.  First the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional as it applied to actions by the states, while sustaining it at the Federal level.  Then it turned out that Native Americans who used peyote in religious rituals were still running afoul of law enforcement, so the law had to be amended in very specific language: "the use, possession, or transportation of peyote by an Indian for bona fide traditional ceremony purposes in connection with the practice of a traditional Indian religion is lawful, and shall not be prohibited by the United States or any state. No Indian shall be penalized or discriminated against on the basis of such use, possession or transportation."

The authors of the Indiana RFRA learned from the failures of other state RFRAs. Its provision that government entities need not be involved to make a case for infringement of religious freedom, for example, was evidently inspired by a court's rejection of such a case involving a private business in New Mexico.  The Indiana bill attempts to plug that hole.  Whether the courts will accept this plug will have to be seen.  Again, the critics of the Indiana law ignored such issues until their noses were rubbed in them, and then they still preferred to focus on its nonexistent "license to discriminate against gays" aspect.

Some unexpected and unwelcome invocations of religious freedom have been turning up even before the Indiana RFRA was passed.  Some were meant seriously, others humorously, but they were no less educational for all that.  One example that got a lot of press was the "nearly nine-foot-tall bronzed statue of a Baphomet, a goat-headed idol seated on a throne before two children, which [the Satanic Temple] plans to erect in the Oklahoma Capitol."  I hope that creative interventions like this will proliferate, letting the Christian Right and the American public know just what a Pandora's box the RFRAs will open.  While the intention of the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration act was certainly bad, the intentions of many of its critics are also suspect as far as I can tell.

Next: the backlash.
-------------------------------
*Melinda Miceli, Standing Out, Standing Together: The Social and Political Aspects of Gay-Straight Alliances (Routledge, 2005), page 39.

Pink, Pinker, Pinkest: Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?

Someone posted a link to this 2006 article on Facebook yesterday.  (At first I mistook it for a more recent publication.  You see what happens when you assume.)   It's about a neurobiologist named Ben Barres, who was born female but transitioned to male in the 1990s, and discovered that he and his work were treated very differently than when he was a woman.  When he was an undergraduate at MIT,

An M.I.T. professor accused me of cheating on this test. I was the only one in the class who solved a particular problem, and he said my boyfriend must have solved it for me. One, I did not have a boyfriend. And two, I solved it myself, goddamn it! But it did not occur to me to think of sexism. I was just indignant that I would be accused of cheating.

Years later, after his transition, he gave a presentation at MIT, and, "a friend later told him, one scientist turned to another and remarked what a great seminar it had been, adding, 'Ben Barres’s work is much better than his sister’s.'"  You guessed it: Barres doesn't have a sister -- the work being deprecated was his/her own.  The only thing that had changed was the name attached to it.

What makes the Washington Post article so interesting is that they invited some of the men Barres criticized to respond.  Larry Summers didn't, but Peter Lawrence and Steven Pinker did, and both declared "convincing data show there are differences between men and women in a host of mental abilities."

Pinker, who said he is a feminist, said experiments have shown, on average, that women are better than men at mathematical calculation and verbal fluency, and that men are better at spatial visualization and mathematical reasoning. It is hardly surprising, he said, that in his own field of language development, the number of women outstrips men, while in mechanical engineering, there are far more men.

"Is it essential to women's progress that women be indistinguishable from men?" he asked. "It confuses the issue of fairness with sameness. Let's say the data shows sex differences. Does it become okay to discriminate against women? The moral issue of treating individuals fairly should be kept separate from the empirical issues."

Well!  If Steven Pinker says he's a feminist, then he couldn't possibly be biased, could he?  Besides, he's a scientist, and an atheist besides, so he's rational and honest by definition; only religious fundamentalists try to keep women down.  His dishonesty and plain foolishness, which I've seen before, surprised even me.  Sure, there is some evidence of "average" differences between men and women in certain domains, though it's disputed.  But average differences don't mean much.  That men, on average, may be "better at spatial visualization and mathematical reasoning," doesn't tell us the amount of variation among men, or among women.  The amount of difference in the averages also matter.  Many women will be better at spatial visualization and mathematical reasoning than most men are; if you assume that a woman can't do good scientific or mathematical work because she's a woman -- like the MIT prof who refused to believe that Barbara Barres had solved a difficult math problem, and accused her (nonexistent) boyfriend of doing it for her -- then you're not just biased, you're showing that you don't understand averages in a very basic way.  Either way, you're not competent to teach or evaluate would-be scientists.

By Pinker's logic, men shouldn't teach classes involving "language fluency," meaning not only grammar but probably literature as well.  But men have traditionally dominated higher education in the humanities, including literature classes, and have accorded the writing of men greater value than that of women.  (So do most women, it seems.  But in what other area than gender do the primitive myths and misconceptions of the masses get respect from enlightened scientists?)  To this day they try to rationalize their judgments, but clearly (if Pinker were right) they're just ignoring the science of gender differences.  Contrary to Pinker's protestation, though, the "moral issue of treating individuals fairly" is inseparable from "the empirical issues," because unfair treatment of women is an empirical issue.

The article Barres published in Nature is available online.  It combines anecdotal accounts of bias against women in science and mathematics with references to research that shows how bias works.  There's considerable literature on discrimination against women in the sciences, from women being denied access to laboratories because their ladyparts would affect the accuracy of the delicate scientific equipment to women being denied credit for their work -- often work of considerable importance, like the discovery of nuclear fission.  Lise Meitner, who made crucial contributions to that discovery, was overlooked when it came time to award a Nobel Prize for it.  The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science (The Feminist Press, 2010), by Julie Des Jardins, covers Meitner's case, as well as more mundane examples of the barriers female scientists had to contend with; so does Margaret Wertheim's Pythagoras's Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender War (Norton, 1997).  Bias against women may not be "a primary factor" in the lower numbers of women in certain fields, but it's clearly a significant one, and Pinker's denial is not persuasive, since he fails to comprehend the issues involved.

Peter Lawrence is no better:

Lawrence said it is a "utopian" idea that "one fine day, there will be an equal number of men and women in all jobs, including those in scientific research."

He said a range of cognitive differences could partly account for stark disparities, such as at his own institute, which has 56 male and six female scientists. But even as he played down the role of sexism, Lawrence said the "rat race" in science is skewed in favor of pushy, aggressive people -- most of whom, he said, happen to be men.

"We should try and look for the qualities we actually need," he said. "I believe if we did, that we would choose more women and more gentle men. It is gentle people of all sorts who are discriminated against in our struggle to survive."

The incoherence of his remarks is interesting.  It may be utopian to aim for equal numbers of men and women in all jobs, but I don't think Barres is calling for equal numbers; he's calling for an end to bias that keeps talented and qualified women out of fields they want to enter.  Beyond that, Lawrence goes all mushy and touchy-feely in advocating that "we" (who's "we," by the way? hiring committees?) should "choose more women and more gentle men."  This is a common move by apologists for bias and injustice, by the way.  (Like Barack Obama lauding the work of Gandhi and King in his Nobel Prize address before dismissing it as utopian: "I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.")  It's part of the standard defense of the scientific status quo that knowledge is not advanced by mere technical ability, but by a masculine competitiveness -- what Lawrence called the "rat race" -- that drives (male) scientists to obsessive devotion to their work.  That Nobel Prize isn't going to win itself!

There's another aspect to this.  A wide range of scientific ability appears among men as well as among women, yet boys are encouraged to study science and girls aren't, even though most of them will not go on to pursue science as a career, let alone do top-ranking work.  There's no need to expect that every girl in a high-school or college science class will be a Marie Curie or a Lise Meitner, any more than every boy who attends summer basketball camp will be a Michael Jordan.  First, you can't tell in advance who will eventually stand out; second, you need a large population of non-specialists to appreciate and support the very best achievers.  Excellence will largely take care of itself; discouraging those who don't show excellence from day one is self-defeating if you want a culture of self-critical scientific rationalists, of both sexes.

Toleration for Me, But Not for Thee!

The point I was driving at in yesterday's post was not only that anyone who tries to silence someone else on the grounds that the latter is an "asshole" who utters "bullshit" has discredited him or herself as a rational person, but that allowing such complaints to affect public discussions (whether in "private" or "public" environments) will severely limit, if not destroy, free speech in our society.  You don't like what I say?  Complain to my employer or to my web host that I'm an asshole!  If enough people complain, I'll be fired and my blog deleted.  Social conservatives won't be the only ones who will be silenced; anyone who offends enough people will also be removed from the public eye, because private employers and companies aren't required to protect freedom of expression except their own, not that of their employees -- and a newscaster or a columnist or a variety show host is an employee, who's employed at the will and pleasure of his or her employer.

This evidently doesn't worry the people who try to silence others, either because they believe they have the power to protect themselves or because they don't realize that their blogs, their tumblrs, their Twitter feeds, their Facebook accounts, are private rather than "public" media -- until they run up against the limits of corporate tolerance.  Corporate tolerance is limited by public pressure, and you never know when your boss or web host will decide you're more trouble than you're worth.  (Not that it's very different in the increasingly corporate world of government: just ask Shirley Sherrod, for one.)  And it's not even necessary to construct an argument: according to that xkcd cartoon and the liberals who spread it around the Internet, it's enough that someone thinks you're an asshole and your opinions are bullshit.  Your (and my) freedom of expression consists of freedom from government action against you, limited though that is by legal restrictions but also because there are fewer and fewer venues not under corporate ownership and control nowadays.  Public sites like parks are increasingly privatized, so you have no guarantee of freedom of assembly or expression there.  The police will silence you, not because the government doesn't like you, but because the owner of the site doesn't like you; besides, you're only an asshole.

Now, granted that there is a rational case to be made against Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla; in yesterday's post I linked to some people who attempted to make one.  Because Eich participated by donation in the Proposition 8 campaign against same-sex marriage in California, he arguably took a step beyond speech into action against the rights of other citizens -- though as I argued, such action is and should be protected by law to some extent, an extent which can be debated but isn't clearly marked out anywhere.  And as CEO he does have a representative function where his political opinions and actions might be the concern of Mozilla.

It occurs to me, though, that the same "employees have no rights" line was used by the critics of Phil Robertson, Paula Deen, and others, though their offense was limited to speech.  Stupid, bigoted speech, true, but speech nonetheless, and it's one of the pillars of free speech doctrine that speech is not (necessarily) action.  It also occurs to me that the idea that every performer in corporate media represents the corporate owner, who is therefore responsible for their every word and thought, is very similar to the claim advanced by religious opponents of same-sex marriage, who claim that taking money to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple amounts to endorsement and acceptance, even celebration of their marriage.  Some writers pointed out quite simply that no, baking a cake for a wedding doesn't constitute endorsement of the coupling.  In the same way, my buying used books from the shop of a right-wing acquaintance of mine doesn't constitute endorsement of or agreement with his often fascist opinions -- just as his occasional part-time employment of me doesn't constitute agreement with or endorsement of my America-hating, Communist opinions.  I pick on him constantly, but I still do business with him.  I might consider changing that policy if he crossed some line or other, but I can't think at the moment of what the line would be.

A writer at Slate asked, rhetorically but seriously, why, if conservatives are so upset by the plight of Brendan Eich, they don't also concern themselves with ordinary Americans.  It's a good article.  But it works both ways.  The liberals who howled for Eich's removal, justifying it because he works for a private company, must also explain why they think lower-profile employees shouldn't be subject to the discretion of their private employers.  If customers complain about a salesperson's visible tattoos or piercings, for example, shouldn't that be grounds for firing her?  After all, it's not like the government is picking on her.  Or if a business loses customers (or is afraid it will lose customers) who don't want to deal with a black clerk, or a female doctor, it's not the business's fault; shouldn't employers be allowed to comply with (their fantasies about) public opinion?

As the Slate writer points out, in most of the US a private employer can discriminate in employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender "identity."  Instead of acknowledging that private employees have no freedom in such areas, many people are working to limit the rights of private employers by passing a law forbidding such discrimination.  The excuse is largely that sexual orientation or gender identity is not a "choice" but something innate and therefore should be protected against discrimination, an excuse which is doubtful for various reasons; but the key point is that private employers do not have total license to cave in to public complaints about what the public considers unacceptable employees, and their freedom to do so is not written in stone but can change.  Where to draw the line is not clear either; it is a matter of judgment, and as such needs to be debated as rationally as possible.  That's not going to be easy, but it's necessary.  And it's odd to see many liberals and progressives suddenly so solicitous about the power businesses have over their employees.

The Girl Can't Help It

I love oral histories, so I'm currently reading Alison Owings's Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray (University of California Press, 2002).  Most of the book is derived from interviews with thirty-five women who've worked on that side of the tray, and it's fascinating.  But then I tripped over something that bugged me a little -- not enough to make me want to stop reading, but enough that I'm taking time out to write about it.

In the 1970s Cathryn Anita Smith broke through the sex barrier at La Côte Basque, a celebrated French restaurant in New York City. It took a protracted legal battle, but she succeeded, and her story is a delight.  As usual, Smith had to make herself much more competent than most of her male co-workers to be considered half as good, but she managed it.  (Luckily, as the old joke has it, it wasn't that difficult.)

"In the period when they refused to work with me, they hired another waiter to work with me.  He hit me once.  We were having a little confrontation about a check.  I told him the table needed a check, and he hadn't put it down.  We were in the stairwell, and I had a tray, and he went like ..."  She mimed a smash to her stomach.  "He hit me right here. It so happened that one Italian waiter saw it.  He stood up for me.  I ran to the men's locker room, and they were trying to get him to say he hadn't seen it.  But, 'I'm sick of it.  I saw it.  He hit her'" [80].

Stories like this are interesting because it's official lore that Men Don't Hit Women.  But they do anyway, and they always have, especially when a woman refuses to stay in her place.  I once had a curious online exchange with a guy who was claiming that a woman couldn't play football with men, because the men have been conditioned not to hit women, so they won't be able to bring themselves to tackle her.  Maybe not, but football players of the highest calibre (we'll never know just how many) have been able to break that conditioning to beat the shit out of the women they love.  Masculine solidarity then requires that they cover for each other.

But I digress.  On the legal basis for Smith's case, Owings explains (75):

One of the best-known parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title VII essentially says employers cannot refuse jobs to people based on matters not of their choosing, such as sex or skin color.

Le sigh.  I've been through this before.  Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act also forbids jobs discrimination based on religion, which is a matter of one's choosing.  As far as I can tell, the Civil Rights Act doesn't explain the basis for its prohibition of discrimination, but I always had the impression that what was at issue was whether a given trait or condition affected one's ability to do the job.  This is why it's okay for the NBA to discriminate, as I presume it does, on the basis of height.  There must a religious exemption in there somewhere, though, because the Roman Catholic Church need not ordain women as priests, nor even non-Catholic males.

As I said, this minor issue doesn't make me want to stop reading Hey, Waitress!  But it does bother me.  When did it become common sense that civil rights laws were meant to protect people who didn't choose their disgusting condition, it's not their fault, they can't help themselves, they were born this way?  Given the general level of ignorance and misinformation about civil rights and discrimination, plus continuing racism and other kinds of bigotry, I suspect this lore was invented by people who didn't know what it was all about and didn't really want to know.  That's obviously the case with affirmative action.  But I'm still surprised and dispirited when someone who's clearly smart enough to know better doesn't get it.

Long Briefs

Some (relatively) brief items.

Band Of Thebes (who has yet to notice that Adrienne Rich died, though he did have time to slobber on Camille Paglia for her birthday) noted yesterday that voters in Anchorage, Alaska "appear to have rejected Prop 5 which would have added lgbt people to the city's existing nondiscrimination laws."

This would be a nitpick if it didn't affect so many people's perception of antidiscrimination (and "hate crime") laws, but since it does, maybe it deserves more attention. Unless Prop 5 is utterly unique, it will not add LGBT people to the law: it will add sexual orientation to the list of grounds on which it is illegal to discriminate in housing, employment, and other select domains. That means that heterosexuals will also be protected.

Maybe you'll think something like "Yeah, sure, like heterosexuals need protection against discrimination!" Probably not, but they will be protected, and they probably will seek redress in the real world. In the 1990s, for example, a heterosexual couple behaved obnoxiously in a gay bar in San Francisco. The bartender refused to serve them, and when they refused and began kissing ostentatiously, he told them that mixed-sex PDAs were forbidden in the bar. Bam: the bar was hit by an antidiscrimination complaint, which was upheld. I can't find a link for this story now, though it got national press coverage at the time, but there have been similar cases since then: the British Equality and Human Rights Commission announced last year that" it has not received any complaints over gay-only hotels but is looking for evidence of potential discrimination" against heterosexuals.

John Bellamy, who runs the gay-only Hamilton Hall in Bournemouth, said that equality legislation was a “double-edged sword” and claimed that forcing gay bars and hotels to accept straight people was killing gay culture.

I also found this curious thread, in which it's declared that heterosexuals in gay bars are a "recent" development. I can testify from my own experience and observation that it's not a "new phenomena" at all. Comments on the same question here show equal cluelessness. Clearly a lot of gay people have no idea how antidiscrimination law works. White males have successfully filed complaints of being discriminated against for their sex or their race, and the same white males who cry to heaven about their suffering in a reverse-racist society are unaware of this.

I've also participated in several online debates about "hate crime" laws, where some (normally straight male) opponents of such laws argued that if we keep adding kinds of people that you're not allowed to murder, then no one will be able to murder anybody. "How long do you think it will take," asked one person, "before every crime committed against any member of a marginalized group will be prosecuted as a hate crime?" Another complained that "nobody seems to cry out for hate crime legislation whenever the victim is a straight white person. ... why should the punishment for a crime committed against you be any greater than a crime committed against me?"

Several participants tried to explain to them that, as with antidiscrimination laws, hate-crimes laws don't specify that you can't kill gays, left-handed Eskimos, or short-haired Seventh-Day Adventists. The 1964 Federal Civil Rights Law, for example, "permits federal prosecution of anyone who 'willingly injures, intimidates or interferes with another person, or attempts to do so, by force because of the other person's race, color, religion or national origin' because of the victim's attempt to engage in one of six types of federally protected activities, such as attending school, patronizing a public place/facility, applying for employment, acting as a juror in a state court or voting." In other words, you can be prosecuted for trying to prevent a white Christian American male from trying to vote. In those same online debates, several people posted FBI statistics showing that hate crimes against whites, males, and heterosexuals are tracked, and prosecuted -- except for those against heterosexuals, because sexual orientation isn't covered by the federal statute. The straight white male critics were unaware of this, as were some gay ones.

So, it may look trivial to criticize speaking of "lgbt rights" and the like, but that terminology clearly leads to (or reflects) a great deal of confusion about antidiscrimination law in the US. Of course, before we can clear up the confusion about the terminology, we need to clear up the prior confusion in people's minds about what racism and other forms of bigotry are, and how they work. Fat chance, I'm afraid.

Oops, that wasn't so brief after all. Separate posts for separate topics, then.

My Secret Identity

Not everyone will agree with me, of course, but I think it's good news that Archie comics will be introducing an openly gay character in the September 2010 issue of Veronica. I used to read several different comics in the the Archie series as a young fagling, but this is the first time in 40-some years there's been reason to revisit them. I like the way that the gay character, Kevin, casually mentions that he's gay to Jughead (hint, hint?); odd as it may be to say of this kind of comic book, it reminds me of the real world. I suppose I should have the local comics store order me a copy so I won't miss it.

The comments under that Comics Beat story got my attention. Most were positive, but there were the predictable rants from bigots, like the one who complained that "this only promotes sex and I would not let my kids read these… I believe these COMICS are for kids and I dnt want my kids to be havn sex b4 marriage (no, that is not impossible) and kids should b able to b a kid without relating to everyone in the world… not just an opinion, read the Bible!" As other commenters quickly pointed out, the whole Archie world is built on (hetero)sex: Betty's crush on Archie, Archie's lust for Veronica, for example. How a gay Archie character would lead kids to have sex before marriage any more than the straight ones do is not obvious except to the hysterical.

And I loved this guy, who touched base with every cliche in the book, crammed into one paragraph:

Why is it when anyone disgrees with something that is pro Gay, they are critisized as being hatefull and ignorant. We have become a nation that has no morals or convictions! I believe being homosexual is wrong based on God’s Word (the Bible) I also beleive that only God can judge. As Christians we need to stand up and stop being intimidate becasue we dont want be be labeled as horrible people. I know swveral Gay, people, I even have gay family members, I love them all I just do not approve of the lifestle. Just as you have the right to say you like the comic change, I and anyone else have the right to say we dont like it and dont want our children to read it. What happened to freedom of speech! Why am I ignorant or hateful because I have differnt beliefs than you? So many of your comments are so hypocrital! Introducing diffenent nationalities is not the same as introducing a Gay character. A perso is concisded gay because of sexual oreintation. Our society is so sexualized, no wonder Rape, Aids, Abortion and teen pregnancy is so high! I can not letmy son watch videos or certain commericals without him seeing a woman being objectified or shaking her body! I pray for all of you as well as our Country. I pray that God will send someone in your life to show you the light. May Jesus be with all of you even the ones that will write hateful comments. As for me and my house, We will serve the Lord!

(Serving the Lord: dip Lord in egg batter and roll in seasoned flour. Fry in 400-degree oil until crispy; serve while hot, with the beer of your choice. But I digress.)

I especially like the "What happened to freedom of speech!" since freedom of speech not only guarantees one's right to say what one thinks right, but guarantees others' right to disagree vehemently. (This person answered well for the most part, except for assuming that we are "born gay" and a few other blunders.) But then this guy threw in his two cents' worth, with more pruriency about "gay bowel system" which "is so disgusting its symptoms can only be alluded to" and our high numbers of sexual partners (jealous much?), which prompted this whiny and ill-informed response:

I’m sorry, there are so many lies in this quote it’s maddening. I’m gay, I’ve been out for eight years, and I think I’ve dated a total of MAYBE fourteen people during that time. Fourteen. In eight years.

I've pointed out before how stupid people are about statistics. If gay men in Atlanta (the previous bigot's example) had "an average of 60 partners a year" in 1994, that average is built not only on people as pathetic as this commenter, but on those who have many more than 60 partners a year. But he lost any sympathy I might have felt for him when he added that he "goes to a Baptist Church! ... we are a very forward thinking church, in every sense of the word. Towards women, gays, African Americans, etc. (as it should be!) So everyone, please just keep in mind not all Christians are so close-minded." Evidently he doesn't go to a Southern Baptist Church, but anyhow this is just the flip side of his mistake about averages. Not all Christians "are so close-minded," but many are. It's as misleading to stereotype Christians as gay-positive, feminist, and anti-racist as it is to stereotype them in the reverse directions. And it gets worse as he goes along.

Another commenter sensibly pointed out, "How many times will deflecting the attention of girls who want him because he’s a hunk work in stories? And if he’s the only gay in Riverdale, he has no one to date." Still, the caveat is premature, I think. All we've seen so far is the first page of the story. Maybe Kevin will ask Jughead to the prom. And maybe Jughead will say Yes.

Suffer the Little Children

Still feeling under the weather, but this item caught my attention today: the Denver Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church notified a lesbian couple that their child would not be allowed to re-enroll in a Catholic pre-school he had been attending. Some school staff members expressed their displeasure to a television reporter, but they "asked to remain anonymous" -- wisely, since open disagreement with the hierarchy is a good way to lose your job. (Jesus knows who they are, though, and he's making a list.) What, you think the Roman Catholic Church is a democracy?

There is talk of organizing a protest, which is nice, but it's not likely to have any effect. "One woman leaving Mass said she disagreed with the decision as well. 'I just feel the Catholic Church is a church that should be teaching acceptance and tolerance,' Juli Aderman-Hagerty said. 'I just don't think this is an example of that.'" Naive, isn't she? The Church has the legal right to discriminate in this area as well as others, "legal experts" told journalists.

But you have to remember, the Church had only the child's best interests at heart. The pastor of the parish in question explained in his online column:

If a child of gay parents comes to our school, and we teach that gay marriage is against the will of God, then the child will think that we are saying their parents are bad. We don't want to put any child in that tough position -- nor do we want to put the parents, or the teachers, at odds with the teachings of the Catholic Church. Why would good parents want their children to learn something they don't believe in? It doesn't make sense. There are so many schools in Boulder that see the meaning of sexuality in an entirely different way than the Catholic Church does. Why not send their child there?

Really? The Church is fulminating against gay marriage in pre-school? Still, Father Bill has a point. Why would caring parents send their child to a pre-school run by a hate group that denounces their relationship? Normally I'm not wild about terms like "hate group," but I'm using it here because non-religious groups which agitate against minority groups as the Church does against gays would be labeled hate groups in a heartbeat by nice liberals. I think that if you're going to call Fred Phelps a preacher of hate, you should do the same with Pope Benedict XVI, who has a long record of antigay bigotry, seeking to interfere not just in the lives of Catholics but of non-Catholics and secular society as well, and who can't even bring himself to denounce the pending Uganda law which would execute gay people.

I must say I don't believe Father Bill's claim that he doesn't want to put a child in a "tough position" by denouncing the lifestyle of its parents. But as David Gibson, the writer I've linked to, points out:

Still, critics wondered why any child should be singled out for rejection because of his or her parents, but also why a gay couple was being singled out given that many parents of students at Catholic schools are divorced or remarried or unmarried, or using birth control or living lifestyles that church teaching would also consider sinful.

Moreover, many Catholic schools across the country gladly enroll non-Catholic students, and in some urban areas the percentage of non-Catholic students reaches upward of 90 percent. How such families would fit into the rigorous definition offered by the Denver archdiocese was unclear.

Gibson says that those who disapprove of this decision have "little legal recourse" apart from "public protests." I suppose he has in mind demonstrations with chants and signs. That's true for the mothers of the child involved in this case, but I suspect that if enough other parents were to identify themselves as divorced and remarried, single mothers, using birth control, or practicing other naughty lifestyles that the Church disapproves, so that the school had to decide whether principle trumped tuition, it might have some effect. Or they could simply remove their children from the pre-school. Maybe that would shake things up. But maybe not. Maybe there's a long waiting list and defectors could be replaced easily. The key point is that no responsible parent, regardless of sexual orientation or religion, should be supporting the Roman Catholic Church. Every time you turn around, there's new reason to support my position.

P.S. Roy Ashburn, the antigay California State Senator who was arrested for driving erratically after leaving a gay bar with a date, has come out in an interview on a conservative radio talk-show.

“The best way to handle that is to be truthful and to say to my constituents and all who care that I am gay,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s something that has affected, nor will it affect, how I do my job.”

Ashburn has voted against a number of gay rights measures, including efforts to expand anti-discrimination laws and recognize out-of-state gay marriages. Last year, he opposed a bill to establish a day of recognition to honor slain gay rights activist Harvey Milk. ...

Ashburn said his votes reflected the way constituents in his district wanted him to vote, not necessarily his own views. ...

In the radio interview, Ashburn said he is drawing on his Christian faith, and he asked people to pray for him.

He said he does not plan to run for any public office after his term ends this year.

I do feel a little bit sorry for Ashburn -- married, father of four, 55 years old, he's been carrying a heavy burden for a long time. (I feel sorrier for his family, though. You know how politicians exploit their families to get into office -- especially right-wing politicians.) But let me see, he's served in "statewide office" for fourteen years, since the mid-90s. That's a long time after Stonewall, after Harvey Milk, after all sorts of cultural changes that he could not have ignored entirely. He was no kid when he sold himself to people who hated him, so he could be a politician. There were other options available; he chose the lifestyle of a professional antigay bigot, so my sympathy for him is limited. My sympathy and admiration have always gone to people who had the courage to go against the current, or those who suffered for it, sometimes paying with their lives, thanks in part to people like Roy Ashburn.