Brief Essays With Pictures

One of the most irritating things about the ongoing Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints situation in Texas is the infuriating hypocrisy courtesy conservative religious folks. Before we get to that though, this: a bed was found in the FLDS temple which was allegedly used to immediately consummate the relationships between adult men and teenage girls who had been forcibly married. In other words, these teenage girls were forced to have sex in the church right after getting married. In what world do things like this happen? Who still thinks this sort of behavior is not only tolerable, but appropriate?

Perhaps it’s better we don’t get an answer. Maybe Truth Spreader, who commented on the last FLDS post:

…if it was okay to marry a 14 year old two years ago then it is okay today–the only thing that has changed is that the lesbians and feminist managed to amend the marriage statute. well…it is time to amend it back.

I don’t even know how to respond somebody claiming that “lesbians and feminist(s)” ruined it that whole marrying-14-year-old-girls thing for the rest of us.

Still, how can we account for the lack of outrage coming from the conservative religious community, a group that can collectively lose its shit if McDonalds dares to recognize gays? Check out the rest of World Net Daily - there’s nothing under a search for “Mormon.” Nothing either for “Texas.” Search for “FLDS” and you’ll turn up one column describing Warren Jeffs prosecution as unfair because creepy isn’t criminal.

Maybe there’s outrage out there on the conservative religious side, but Lord knows I don’t know where to find it. Meanwhile the articles about the compound’s manipulation of the girls keeps filtering out.

The point that I’m trying to make, badly, is that if one side of the fence is consistently expected to denounce their own members, shouldn’t conservatives, and particularly religious conservatives, be held to the same expectations? Shouldn’t the religious conservatives who regularly tell us about the damage done to marriage by gays who merely want access to the institution have the same courage when it comes to denouncing this sort of abusive nonsense, particularly as it was done in God’s name?

Even the non-polygamous Mormons in Utah maintain - while passing anti-gay legislation at the drop of a hat - that prosecuting polygamists would be unfair. And then there’s this. The message is clear of course: while gays have erred, polygamists, although its practice is illegal, retain the support of even the non-polygamous. Gays should be prosecuted and kept from marrying; polygamists should be welcome to whatever behavior they want, even if it is against the law. Which is how you ultimately end up with this. The state’s attorney general essentially encouraging polygamous behavior (which is illegal) so long as nobody is hurt by it. All of those Christians suggesting that homosexual marriage will lead to polygamy clearly don’t understand that the polygamous seem to enjoy just as much freedom as the monogamous, just so long as they don’t hurt anybody doing so.

The hypocrisy of it is galling. These people clearly believe that while some of us should be judged by a particular set of laws, the laws as applied to Mormons just don’t count. Gays can be prevented from marriage, while multiple marriages can be encouraged amongst the FLDS. That it ended up taking the sexual abuse of perhaps hundreds of children over the course of fifty years for somebody (anybody!) to finally intervene is evidence enough of the inherent corruption of religious conservatives in Utah, Arizona, and Texas. Nobody else would have been given leeway like this.

(This is what I’m talking about. Banning porno to protect the kids. But protesting polygamists who sexually abuse children? Never.)

Raided by officials after a call from a girl confirmed what everybody already knew - polygamist Mormon are all types of dangerous crazy, particularly when children are involved - men at the compound have struck back, claiming their rights were violated. If this is true, shame on the state of Texas for botching what should have been an easy set of prosecutions, and sadly, these men should go free.

However, I’m guessing that nobody’s going to walk here, because I really can’t see where any specific rights were violated. The claims being made by the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (that, amongst other things, police couldn’t have had warrants for every single home within the compound) are thin gruel and not likely to stand up in a court of law that will probably rule that the compound represents a single property and as such, everything within it was authorized to be searched. But I’m not going to law school, so maybe I’m wrong.

Still, it’s funny to see that these polygamists are claiming that their rights have been violated, as if they enjoyed a right to polygamy, underage sex, etc. It’s a funny thing when that Constitutional Freedom of Religion comes into conflict with other laws, and of course, it’s shameful when idiots hide behind that Freedom, claiming that whatever they’ve done was religious in nature and thus protected.

I’ve followed other, similar cases, although none with consequences this dire. One case, in the Northwest, involved a man who wanted to have his 12-year-old circumcised (the father had converted to Judaism), and his mother opposing it. The father claimed dominion on his son’s penis because he was religious. He was actually taken seriously.

It’s strange the lengths we’ll go to protect the religious in their expressions of faith. When I was in college in Massachusetts, the local legal establishment wore kids gloves, and did literally anything they could, to avoid offending the Catholic Church while pursuing the dangerous child molesters who happened to also be priests. Because really, the real victims were the priests.

This claim of violated rights is the first of this nonsense from the FLDS. It’s the only out that they’ve got. By claiming that they’re free to do whatever they want to children because God instructed them to do so, they’re hoping that America will take the same approach as always: generally hands off. “Well, it’s awful, but they’re religious…”

If only everybody enjoyed this sort of legal protection: a drug user saying he was told by God to get high, a recidivist drunk driver claiming God told him to get behind the wheel, a murdered claiming that he was instructed by God to kill. These sorts of things are generally laughed out of the courtroom if they’re allowed in the first place. But the FLDS claim will have credence, because if the problems were really so bad, wouldn’t Texas have intervened long before this situation came to light?

Sadly, the answer is no, because again, America takes a very hands off approach when it comes to the religious. That’s how these hundreds of girls ended up being left at the hands of the monsters in charge of the FLDS.

I’m not suggesting that people don’t enjoy a freedom of their faith, in case anybody was wondering, but rather, that the freedom ends where another person’s begins. Forcing 13-year-old girls, by virtue of the fact that they’ve gotten their periods, to get married and start having children isn’t an expression of free religion, but something more akin to slavery. These girls didn’t willingly choose this life, and those people claiming that the FLDS acted within their boundaries would be wise to remember that.

-First things first - an art show I put together is going up in three weeks. The flyer is above. It will feature local and semi-local artists exploring the topic of love, although not necessarily in that Hallmarkian light. Think of the other things that go along with love - constant frustration, sadness, anger, lunacy - and figure that at least some of those will be included.

Be there! February 1, 8-11pm, Wild Zero Studios, 229 Pleasant Street, Morgantown, West Virginia.

-Sadly, we need to briefly discuss Barrack Obama’s loss in New Hampshire yesterday which would have been, until about a week ago, considered an enormous victory. Here was Hillary Clinton, the establishment’s candidate, who should have been romping and stomping through New Hampshire. Obama wasn’t an afterthought, but it was looking like he’d come in second place. Then he won Iowa, and people starting wondering if he could win New Hampshire. His polling numbers were great, the exit polling looked good…and then Hillary Clinton won the damned thing.

Which means that Democrats, faced with a choice between the old-guard representing everything that is wrong with the party and the fresh face who promised hope…still managed to go in the wrong direction. Again. How in the fuck can a political party be so god-damned stupid? How in the fuck can a party that has lost, and lost, and lost, and lost, continue to look at presidential candidates and pick the one least electable?

There is no way that I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. I’m not holding my nose for a third consecutive election and endorsing a candidate that I have no particular interest in. If the Democrats are so fucking stupid as to push Clinton through as a presidential candidate, then that’ll be one less vote their candidate is getting. This is a strategy that is stupid beyond words; frankly, it deserves to lose in the big election.

Meanwhile, hope springs eternal for Barrack Obama. South Carolina favors him, and potentially Nevada. And a run on Super Tuesday isn’t impossible, because he’s an appealing candidate to all kinds of people, not just the sort of Democrat loyalists who don’t know their heads from their asses. Here’s hoping for a great run from Obama, who predictably sounded better in defeat than Clinton did in victory.

Incidentally, I want everybody who is claiming that Hillary is being opposed because she’s a woman to stop - she’s being opposed because she’s a terrible candidate. Her gender has absolutely nothing to do with it. Or at least, it didn’t, until the media starting killing her for allegedly crying. Way to fuck that one up media punditry. As soon as it came down to something as small as a candidate crying, Hillary went from being a loathsome candidate who came to a state like West Virginia and demanded $1,000 from anybody wanting to be in the same room with her (true story!) and turned her into a victim. All the media had to do was let Hillary pull the rug out from under herself - in their rush to do it for her, they accomplished the exact opposite result, and now we’re stuck with the very real possibility that we’ll be enduring her throughout a prolonged presidential campaign.

A young man in Texas decided to let his wispy mustache grow - his school pulled him out of class and told him to shave it. Are there more important issues in the world? Of course.

Facial hair is a passion of mine. I hate, hate, being clean-shaven, and so I have done it up with huge sideburns, beards, goatees, and anything else that I could get away with. That a school district would claim dominion over a child’s maintenance of his own body, thus preventing the growth of facial hair, is absurd. Previously, I’ve angrily decried rules against t-shirts. This is arguably worse, because instead of school telling a student what clothes he can put on her body, it is telling him what to do to his own body. Schools simply do not enjoy this dominion. A child’s face is his own, and as soon as a school claims the right to shave the kid, surely it will also enjoy the authority to cut his hair, the power to trim his nails, and the strength to do any number of other things.

Besides the intrusion into the lives of these young men - seriously, does a school enjoy the right to tell children what they can and cannot do on their own time? - there is a social issue here about facial hair. My friend Stewart rightly argues that facial hair grows naturally. It is unnatural that it be shaved. We already live in a society in which facial hair is viewed as being something problematic. Now we have schools requiring that young men remove any facial hair that grows immediately, despite the fact that the human condition grows facial hair. Thousands of children (this has apparently been a school policy forever) are growing up believing that facial hair is bad, and not exploring its possibilities during the point in their lives when they’re most likely to decide if they’ll be lifelong growers or lifelong shavers. This is nightmarish.

We don’t need a society of people that look the same. We don’t need a society of people that act the same. And we certainly don’t need yet another policy in which children are treated as pieces of property by schools districts anxious to churn out a graduating class that all looks the same. If individual freedom matters at all, then this is a policy that must be immediately abandoned. To do anything else is unnatural.

Remaking somebody else’s work is a difficult thing to do. Sometimes, it is a stunning success, as in Jeff Buckley’s remake of Leonard Cohen’s “Halleleujah.” A proven piece of work was improved when reimagined by another creative force. The same goes for Cat Power’s interpretation of Oasis’s Wonderwall, and her remake of the Rolling Stones “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” is similarly satisfying. But occasionally, an attempt to remake somebody else’s work goes horribly, horribly awry.

I am currently, as I write this, enduring the nightmare that is Rob Zombie’s inexplicable remake of Halloween, one of the truly great horror movies. I am 37 minutes into this, and at literally every turn, Zombie has made the wrong decision. So far, I’ve witnessed - oh Jesus, Mom just shot herself because she was horrified about birthing Michael Myers, which isn’t what happened in the first movie. Oh, the first movie. How I wish I was watching the first movie.

1. In the first movie, we had no inclination of what drove Michael Myers to commit his evil deeds - making him all the more frightening. Zombie went a different route. He showed us everything that ever happened in Mike Myers life, so we know enough to think that Myers might actually…be justified in his endless killing? His family is awful. He kills them all. His guards in the mental hospital? Awful rapists, so he kills them both. The bully at the very beginning? He kills him. It’s a festival of dead people who are created to look as if they deserved it.

I’ve heard a rumor that the snarling Predator only attacked those, at least in the first two movies, who weren’t innocent. The reason it leaves the woman living in the train is because she’s pregnant. Zombie seems to try to set up the same thing with Myers, except he kills everybody. Unfortunately, we’re torn as viewers because we don’t know whether to loathe this fearsome killing machine - he killed Danny Trejo, a guard at the mental facility who loved him - but he also killed the rapists. What are we to do in this sort of moral quandary?

Answer: not care.

2. In the first movie, Myers kills his family as a young, young child, making the crime all the more inexplicable. Because when we first see him, we don’t know anything about him, we aren’t given reasons to disbelieve his later actions. In this movie, he’s allegedly ten, meaning that when we see him full-grown, we know to disbelieve the fact that he’s six-foot-nine, 280 pounds of muscle. He was tiny as a ten-year-old. There was no chance he grows into an enormous monster while living on hospital food.

3. Really Rob Zombie? A goddamned hour until we meet the more adult Laurie Strode? The first Halloween movie drops us into the action within ten minutes, if that. We don’t know anything more than a kid killer has apparently returned to his hometown. This movie? It takes us almost an hour to learn Myers’s backstory. What a total waste of time.

4. Everybody in my house is angry right now. Nobody is happy with this movie. We still have an hour to go.

5. Rob Zombie loves young women. To the point that it goes beyond disturbing. His female characters are naked, suggestive, aggressive, and generally act inexplicably. So the teenage girls see somebody they think is a pervert. Is the first instinct really to ask if he wants, “Some of the young stuff?”

6. Why are their placards in this movie? Am I really expected to say to my friends, “The movie really reminded me of Fassbinder’s work during it’s Trick Or Treat chapter?” Because, really, I’m never going to say that.

7. On the great list of horror movie kills, Bob getting lifted up into the air and stuck into the wall with a kitchen knife, as phsyics defying as it might be, is one of the all time greats. If it doesn’t happen in this movie, I’m turning it off….and….it doesn’t happen in the kitchen, but at this point I’ll take whatever I can get.

8. According to Bobbi, Rob Zombie loves the shot of a woman, laying on her side, from her feet, so that you can see her ass and, if you manipulate the dvd through use of its pause function, maybe see the slightest hint of a vagina. Grow up Rob Zombie. We have the internet. If we’re that desperate, we’ll find it.

9. Really? Michael kills the adoptive parents? Are you serious? Lame.

10. “And besides, the gravestone weighs half a ton…” Oh my god. Light my friggin hair on fire. What, Myers is hauling around a thousand pound gravestone? Stop giving me reasons to hate this nightmare.

11. Only 40 more minutes…I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

12. My God! It’s amazing how women have to get naked in horror movies to have sex, but men do not. How is it even possible to have sex through a pair of boxer-briefs? It isn’t that I want to see anybody’s junk, but if you want to make a gritty horror movie, then make it, and include the realistic nudity. Zombie couldn’t seem to decide what, exactly, he was making. Other than an unabated shitstorm.

13. “Loud Noises! People Screaming! I Don’t Know What We’re Yelling About!” Brick Tamland’s conversation with his coworkers in Anchorman is a pretty good way to describe this movie as we approach its ending. Its merciful ending.

14. Laurie Strode, running from Michael Myers, afraid, nervous, leads him right back to the younger children. What a cheap way to create tension. Rob Zombie = douchebag.

15. Yep. Michael Myers was hauling around a headstone that allegedly weighs a thousand pounds. Sigh.

16. In the original Halloween, Myers is obsessed with killing his family. In this movie, Michael Myers inexplicably seems to love his younger sister. Excuse me while I throw up all over this computer.

17. Everybody in my living room is terribly angry right now.

18. Loomis, with a .357 and no shooting experience, hits Michael three consecutive times and hardly recoils. It’s the little things Rob Zombie, you jerkoff.

19. “Is that the boogeyman?” “As a matter of fact, I do believe it was.” Michael reaches into the car, grabs Laurie Strode, and starts dragging her around…”Michael, it was my fault, I failed you.” Loomis is being a total loser right now…and now Michael has him, and squeezing his face to the point of crushing his skull…

“Rob Zombie, you are a master of the art,” says Evan, angrily.

Loomis is dead?!?! God, now we can’t have Halloweens 4, 5, and 6, which are hilariously bad. You haven’t lived until you learn that Michael Myers is the embodiment of Samhain, and that evil druids control his movement, and that blah, blah, blah, nobody cares. Back to this shmshmortion.

Michael clobber! Michael break! Michael crush! Michael heap strong, like bull! Michael make smashy! Oh, here’s Michael staring at Laurie while Loomis lays dead at his feet…no wait, he’s alive and grabbing Michael…and now he’s dead again. Michael crush!

Also, was it really necessary to suck for two hours? Couldn’t this movie have achieved similar levels of suckitude in less time?

“This is just tedious,” says Evan, as Michael continues to smash.
Bobbi is moaning. This movie has defeated her.

Laurie’s a bloody mess. And she has Loomis’s gun. And Michael tackles her off the balcony, instead of being shot off in the first one. Laurie’s completely broken now. And she’s got the gun at Michael’s head…and it is out of ammunition. Seriously Rob Zombie? You’re not even trying. Michael grabs her, the gun suddenly has a bullet, and she shoots her older brother in the face. Cue the classic Halloween music, and for me, bed.

Avoid this shitstorm at all costs.

Tomorrow begin..neth the novel. But today? There’s nothing but angry, but pure, unadulterated fury. Shall we begin?

-My best friend in the blogging universe is one Josh Foust. He has worked dilligently since whenever we first met, turning his Conjecturer into a well read site. Well-read enough that he managed to simultaneously infuriate the Instapundit and Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald we’ll get to in a minute, but first, the Instapundit.

Dear Instapundit,

Stop being an idiot. Stop holding the mainstream media to expectations that you’d never place upon yourself. Stop writing ‘Heh’ and ‘Indeed.’ Stop pretending that you aren’t a vacuous mouthpiece of the Bush Administration. Also, stop being a douchebag.

The irritating thing about Greenwald is that I’ve spent the last several weeks really getting to like the guy. Sure, he trends toward absolutism, like every blogger on planet Earth, but he really had a good streak going recently, in which his criticisms seemed spot on and his analysis read well. So what’s to explain his idiotic refusal to, yknow, actually look at Josh’s blog before describing it as a garden variety pro-war blog. Where on Earth is he getting this crap from? More importantly, don’t we live in a world where bloggers can exist in the netherworld that exists between “I Love George Bush” and “I Hate George Bush.” Or are we back on some stupid playground somewhere where you’re either with me and my friends, or you’re against us, and there’s simply no possibility that different people can take different positions and learn, against all odds, to co-exist with one another? I probably know the answer.

-Meanwhile, revisiting the repression of children, here we have the story of a young woman suspended from school for having maroon weaved into her microbraids. Because holy fucking Moses, if a young girl has maroon weaved into her microbraids, western civilization as we know it and understand it will crumble into the abyss almost immediately. How can we possibly move forward if one girl somewhere decides that she wants to have maroon - of all colors!?!?!? - in her hair. Thank God we’ve given teachers and administrators the right to decide what is and isn’t distracting to the other students. Without their dilligent repression of any individuality at all, what would we have but kids in school with vague differences? And for fuck’s sake people, we absolutely cannot have that! We have to have uniformity in our students! We have to! Jesus Christ fucking declared it in the Bible somewhere…or, umm…something…I don’t even know. Principal Sandy Somogyi is just stupid. That’s all there is to it.

-Idiots.

-Finally, this little slice of blatant racism which will, predictably, go unpunished. Libertarians might argue that, “Nobody should be forced to take care of those people!” and of course, they’d be right. But pointing guns at them and telling them to go back toward the hell that they were coming out of? Particularly if the people holding the guns are whites and the refugees are black? You’ll excuse me if I believe that there was more going on here than limited supplies. Clearly, the whites didn’t want the blacks in their town. You’ll excuse me if I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to threaten violence to keep them out.

There are problems with the death penality. This, however, is beyond my ability to comprehend. A man was executed after a court decided it didn’t want to stay open to hear a man’s appeal. So the man was executed.

The mind boggles at the implications. I’ve almost finished a degree in Public Administration and in one class, we read the horrible story of bureaucratic actors who allowed a baby to die because they lacked the permissions from the rules to feed the damned thing. How callous does a bureaucratic office have to be to say, “Sorry, we’re closed, let the man die.” How is it possible that these people exist?

What is the feedback mechanism? What happens to these callous people for their horrible decision? A week’s pay? A suspension? What brings the fucking man back? I don’t care whatever crime he committed; it doesn’t matter. He was allowed an appeal and it was denied not by the justice system, but by the person running the office who decided that 20 minutes of staying open late wasn’t worth a person’s life.

The frustration is killing me.

As we’ve already established this week, I love when college kids are so self-righteous as to think that they’ve got something important to say. “It’s not that we object to criticism of the President,” uttered the College Republican, “It’s just that the word fuck is so foriegn to our precious ears. What’s that? Do a beer bong? Fuck yeah!” However, the protest at Colorado State was somewhat harmless, as nobody on campus cares anymore (two days later) assuming they ever cared at all.

But the students at Harvard who are whining about Jada Pinckett Smith’s alleged heteronormativity? Well they’re just fucking babies. It is shameful that college students made to feel “uncomfortable” according to the article are under the impression that their discomfort matters in the slightest. It doesn’t.

Then, to bury their discomfort in a fake word like heteronormativity? Grow up. Heteronormativity exists because the vast majority of the world is heterosexual. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with other forms of sexuality (outside of a few extreme examples). It just means that the vast majority of the world sees the world through a heterosexual filter. Reflecting that, even in such a way that alleged discomfort is visited upon some hyper aware trust fund babies, shouldn’t be the thought crime that some are insisting it become.

In case you think I’m making the above facts up, here’s the article itself:

“Our position is that the comments weren’t homophobic, but the content was specific to male-female relationships.”

So Pinkett Smith didn’t stray into the sorts of homophobia that ought to give us pause; rather, she spoke from her own experience as a person who has sex with the opposite sex. For this it’s being suggested that speakers ought to be warned about being tolerant of other viewpoints? What, exactly, are these few offended whiners hoping will happen the next time? That somebody who doesn’t share their experience will speak to it anyway? I can guarantee that the first straight who goes rambling in an attempt to include every conceivable relationship will get into hotter water with these same morons.

At some point, there are people throughout this country who need to figure out that their own discomfort with something is not reason enough to stamp their feet and go whining to whomever will listen. According to the article, the vast majority of the not-heteronormative organization at Harvard really liked Pinkett Smith’s comments. That ought to be evidence that maybe, just maybe, those pitching a fit might, dare I say, be wrong. There are times when we have to be responsible enough to deal with our own discomfort, and that doesn’t mean asking everybody else to change.

Oh, how I had enjoyed our brief respite from the gay marriage fight. It must have been at least two weeks, and quite possibly longer, since social conservatives went ballistic about the possibility that those two guys living down the street together would receive legal recognition for their love. But, as a boss at a factory barks, “Breaks over!”

I don’t know why I feel compelled to poke and prod at Libertarians after a decision like this, except that it is worthless to criticize social conservatives (”The Baby Jesus hated gay people and we all know it!”) nor celebrate with pro-gay-marriage activists like myself, I guess. So instead, I turn a suspicious eye toward those who insist that it isn’t that they’re against gay marriage - they’re against government involvement in marriage altogether.

I have to admit that one of the more compelling solutions I’ve ever heard to the gay marriage conundrum involves the government getting out of the marriage business altogether, instead offering civil unions to any two people that want them: gay, straight, whatever. However, this isn’t going to happen in a million, billion years because we’re conditioned to believe that the government ought to have something to do with the institution of marriage. Advocating for humongous change like government abdication on marriage is sort of like advocating for Saturn to stop being so damned big: you can do it, but good luck accomplishing anything.

Libertarians claim to be interested in individual liberty, but it seems to me that they’re often interested in only their own definitions of it. But suppose we aggregated something like liberty. If given a choice between our current situation and a situation wherein gays can get married, isn’t the person who believes in liberty forced to go for the scenario where the government has a hand in marriage, but doesn’t prevent gays from getting married, because the aggregate measure of individual freedom is higher than in the other scenario?

If my concern is giving individuals as much leeway as possible in their daily lives, maybe a long run, ideal solution is getting the government out of the marriage business. But as Keynes argued, “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.” That doesn’t address the very serious short-term problem of gays being unable to legally enshrine their love for one another. Which means that in this particular case, government intervention is actually a good thing, as a decision (like in Iowa) to allow gays to marry increases the overall measure of freedom for all individuals.

Ta-da! A pro-Libertarian argument that still gets me what I want, which is gay marriage for all of my gay friends.

(And so it begins…a good, old-fashioned hate-off!)

(Oh, wait, ballgame.)

Predictably, the Republican Party is circling the wagons around Larry Craig, insisting that the shamed Senator from Idaho deserves a second chan…wait…hold on…nevermind.

Politicians are shameless creatures. They can prattle on and on and on about the importance of loyalty to your country, to the troops, to Americans, to our allies, to each other, and then an opportunity for true loyalty presents itself, and what do politicians do? Go running for the exits, knowing damned well that associating with Craig now would be political suicide.

Just once though, it would be nice to see a politician come forward, ideally from a somewhat progressive state, and say something like, “We live in the greatest democracy the world has ever known, and we live under the greatest political document the world has ever created. That Larry Craig didn’t feel comfortable to live openly as a gay man for his entire life is a shame not just on him, but on all of us. Here’s hoping that we as a society can embrace our brothers and sisters for who they are, instead of insisting that they be who we want them to be. It’s a great big world with a lot of great big problems, and Larry Craig being gay? That isn’t one of them.”

But of course, politicians are spineless losers, and this will never happen.

 I’m with The Agitator on this one: why is Larry Craig in trouble? (More here. And here.) Because he asked somebody in a bathroom for a blowjob? Tacky? Yes. Gross? Absolutely. A punishable offense? Seriously?

Balko rightly points out that people do exactly what Craig allegedly did in bars, restaurants, clubs and dancefloors across America. Nobody gets arrested. Porn producers absolutely do exactly this sort of thing making their movies. Nobody’s banging down their doors…yet. The point is that while Craig might have been a bit skeezy in his behavior, skeezy shouldn’t be illegal. Read that report from Yahoo News. It’s not like Craig even asked outright for a blowjob. He communicated in some sort alleged secret language known only by the gays that, according to the police, means, “Hey, a blowjob?” That he faced criminal sanction for such a thing is absolutely absurd.

I’ve argued this before, and I’ll argue it again, but we cannot criminalize that which weirds us out. Nobody was hurt by Larry Craig asking for a blowjob, even the person being asked. Suggesting otherwise is devaluing those times when people actually are hurt by particular behaviors.  

(As for the blatant hypocrisy of those demanding Craig’s immediate resignation? Well, what did we expect from the Republican Party? What did anybody seriously expect?)

There’s also this.
Let’s face it: if the above photo of me in a beautiful gray suit with a nice blue shirt, pink tie, and flip-flops doesn’t convince you that I’m a fashion maven, ain’t nothing gonna. I maintain that I looked great. Others who attended the wedding with me were more quizzical in their interpretations. As in: “Really? Flip-flops with a suit? Really?!?!”

Fashion is one of those great ways to express ourselves. Maybe it shouldn’t be so, but it is. Today, I was told that I do a good job of rocking the homeless preppy look, which means my plaid shorts, white t-shirts, unshaven face and growing hair apparently. I guess that’s a compliment.

Of course, this brief fashion rant leads us to yet another school board deciding on yet another set of draconian dresscode designed at limiting expression by students. Although originally even stricter - students were going to be required to wear reds, whites, or blues - the dresscode outlaws t-shirts, jeans, and colors other than navy blue, khaki, brown or black.

It is interesting to me how we see the speech of children repressed regularly and casually, as if these younger versions of us are deserving of less protection than we afford ourselves. (Before the first, and most obvious, objection, I’d like to point out that the dresscodes you’re subjected to at work are voluntary. You can always leave your job. Kids cannot leave school if they’re individuality is being trampled all over.) Some argue that dresscodes benefit children because it eliminates one obvious expression of classism between students: the rich kids can’t dress any better than the poor kids. Although this is a somewhat compelling argument, kids are always going to know the difference. The kid who takes the bus to school is going to know that the kid driving his Land Rover to school is richer, regardless of his trousers.

The simple fact that these adults would deprive children of their ability to, say, wear a t-shirt expressing a political or religious or sexual or musical or artistic opinion should be of concern to freedom loving peoples everywhere. But of course, as it almost always is, the concerns of kids are rarely fodder for adults, unless there is a political battle to be won. The adults pushing this ban, incidentally, are doing so because the dresscode will allegedly make this safe school even safer. They don’t care about these kids; they care about the standing it will give them in the community.

And if that standing comes at the cost of free expression by the citizenry? Well, so be it. Sadly, our conceptions of individual freedoms tend to recede considerably at the age of 18. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but I’d rather have kids wearing whatever it is that they want than have an army of lookalike drones.

To read Peter Leeson’s defense of anarchy, you’d come away from it thinking that anarchy was actually a good idea. And although I have numerous objections to his work, my friend Josh does a far better job of dissecting Leeson’s work. But I wanted to object to one particular argument that Leeson, and his other anarcho-capitalists, frequently make: that negative behaviors are no big deal in the long run.

 To illustrate this, Leeson makes the following argument -

Imagine you go to a restaurant and order a $30 filet mignon. When your food arrives you take a bite and realize the restaurant has served you a $10 flank steak instead. The restaurant has defrauded you. You could take the owner to court; but then you realize that the simple time cost this will entail is not worth what you will recover even if you win. Although in principle government exists to adjudicate this matter, in practice it does not.

Your dining experience is a little slice of anarchy. Knowing this, restaurant owners should perpetually serve $10 flank steaks to customers who order filet mignon. Of course restaurants don’t do this. And the reason they don’t is because they realize that if they do, you’ll stop eating there and tell everyone you know to boycott the restaurant as well. Even without government, Smith’s “invisible hand” leads the restaurant to do the right thing.

This is a common argument made by anarcho-capitalists like Leeson. In it, we see that the negative behavior - serving the incorrect food in an attempt to steal profit from the customer - will eventually end as the restaurant’s reputation is so badly damaged that it loses its customers. Sure, a few people have been defrauded out of their money, but over the long run, so what?

There are two very serious problems with this sort of argument. The first is that comparing steaks to the very serious suffering of Somalis is slightly offensive. “Oh, see how I got defrauded out of my $20 bucks for a steak? That’s like 300,000 Somalis dying in an anarchist state. Sure, it sucks in the immediate, but over the long term, so what?” Reading through Leeson’s work - and the work of some other anarcho-capitalists - you see very real human suffering compared to all sorts of pain-in-the-ass experiences, as if there is anything there worth comparing.

The second, and more objectionable, part of Leeson’s argument is that he affords himself and his beliefs an infinite amount of time to work themselves out. In other words, while he gives any form of government approximately no time whatsoever to work itself out, he maintains that places like Somalia will eventually be in tip-top shape. How convenient for his beliefs. It makes it remarkably easy to gloss over 300,000 dead Somalis if, in however long it takes for anarchy to actually work, things eventually get better.

But that’s just it; short term suffering, especially on the scale of the Somali experience, does matter. Glossing it over because, some day, things will be better? That seems cruel at best and downright ignorant at worst. And although Leeson, and other anarcho-capitalists can try, attrocities cannot be ignored simply because they undermine their own beliefs. What’s strange is that the Leesons of the world insist that those of us who believe in some sort of government owe everybody else the same honesty, that we must admit that governments have failed to lived up to expectations. I’ll be the first in line to do so. But ignoring the serious concerns that some of us have over human suffering in an anarchist state, or by simply comparing it to a flank staek, one wonders how seriously Leeson is actually taking things.

(For the record, I have met Peter Leeson, and he seems like a very decent man. He also looks an awful lot like the kid from Rushmore.)

There is a fight going on in Oregon between two parents over their 13-year-old’s penis. The father wants it circumcised; the mother does not. The details of the case are particularly distressing:

1. Dad recently converted, and decided that his son’s foreskin had to go as a result. Don’t ask me about the calculus involved in that decision, because I neither know it nor understand it.

2. Mom claims that the son is too afraid to say no to his father, even though he has privately explained that it is a procedure that he does not want.

3. Several religious organizations have stepped in on the behalf of the father to say that this is a circumcision that has to happen, because if it were prevented, the blow to individual religious liberty would be overwhelming.

4. These two parents have decided that the best place to have an argument over circumcision, and consequently, over their child’s penis, is in a courtroom in front of whoever walks in the court’s doors.

5. At no point in this case has the boy’s testimony been sought. Think about that.

Circumcision is bad enough when it is parents visiting the procedure upon their newborn infant. To insist that it occur to a 13-year-old boy in the throes of adolescence? The fact that the boy’s testimony hasn’t been sought is similarly mind-blowing. Is it being seriously suggested that his opinion simply doesn’t matter? That even if he does object to the procedure, his father’s desire to cut off his foreskin should win the day?

One of the stranger areas of individual liberty that rarely gets touched on are the rights of those under the age of 18. People tend to believe that children are the property of parents, and thus can be manipulated in almost any imaginable way. This is one of the reasons that so few abusive parents ever face anything bordering on legal retribution for their crimes. This case is another unfortunate illustration; some of the adults involved could obviously not care less about the child’s interest in this situation. This is a battle over “religious freedom” and not “individual liberty” in their eyes.

The problem of children is confusing in the extreme because there doesn’t seem to be an easy answer. We don’t want to allow children the right to run willy-nilly across the countryside, but at the same time, surely can’t believe that as parents we have the right to do almost whatever we want to them.

Obviously, I am against the father and his supporters on this case. He and they are so unbelievably wrong that it hurts the imagination. Yet, there is the very distinct possibility that he will win, and that his son’s penis will be circumcised without him ever getting a say-so in the procedure himself. And if that isn’t a blow to individual liberty, what in the hell is?

Update: This is exactly the sort of thing that I’m talking about. Although decades old, the assumption was that, because permission was given, the abuse of these children was acceptable. Children are not property.

Dear Delcambre,

I understand that, despite your best efforts, you struggle to look as good as I do. Seriously, it isn’t easy rocking this face, this body, these tattoos, and this goatee. I do it because I can do it. Not everybody can. Sometimes, people have to walk their own road. That might mean an almost infinite number of possibilities, but amongst them is a look known as “sagging” in which a pair of pants or shorts are worn low on the ass. The older folks in your town don’t like this practice for whatever reason; probably because it looks stupid, but the Lord knows there are a numer of reasons not to like it.

But your response - banning sagging and punishing it with a $500 fine and potentially six months in jail - isn’t just silly, it’s draconian. Its sheer awfulness is almost impossible to fully comprehend, but just for fun, why don’t we try?

1. First, punishing people for wearing stupid looking clothing sets an awfully dangerous precedent. What, I wonder, will be the next to go? Hats? Pink socks? Hush Puppies? Once a government has given itself the ability to tell people what they can and cannot wear, what’s to prevent them from endlessly extending that authority?

2. Although I have never traveled to Delcambre, LA, I have to imagine that the police department there has more important things to be doing than measuring the distance between a man’s waist and his jeans’s waistband. Fark lives it up running headlines that read the following, “Having Solved All Other Problems, X Focuses On Y.” Congratulations Delcambre, you’re now a Fark headline.

3. If this law deserves derision for no other reason - and I pretty clearly believe that it does deserve derision for a multitude of reasons - then how about the sheer laziness of it? Telling somebody that they look like an asshole for how they dress takes guts, nerve, and some serious, as the Spanish might say, cajones. Legislating appearance from a distance? That doesn’t take cajones at all; it takes the sort of long-distance government intervention that socially conservative types all too fondly endorse when it comes to addressing whatever their concerns. It isn’t their responsibility as opponents of the practice to do any, y’know, work by trying to convince people into making other decisions. Rather, it becomes the government’s responsibility to legislate individual decisions about everything from sexuality to abortion to birth control to the way in which a pair of pants are worn.

You’ll excuse me if I’m not interested in that sort of nonsense.

Needless to say, here’s hoping that you reconsider your new law against sagged pants.

Sincerely,
Sam Wilkinson