Hoisted on her own ‘retard’ petard

Brilliant! Stephen Colbert hoists Sarah Palin on her own hypocritical “retard” petard:

more about “Hoisted on her own ‘retard’ petard“, posted with vodpod

Exposing bigotry

Frank Rich writes about Obama’s tardy action on repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell:

Polls consistently show that independents, however fiscally conservative, are closer to Democrats than Republicans on social issues. (In May’s Gallup survey, 67 percent of independents favored repealing “don’t ask.”) …

It’s in this political context that we can see that there may have been some method to Obama’s troublesome tardiness on gay issues after all. … Should they actually press forward on “don’t ask” in an election year with [Admiral Mike] Mullen and [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates on board — and with even [Sen. John] McCain’s buddy, Joe Lieberman, calling for action “as soon as possible” — they could further the goal and raise the political price for those who stand in the way. Recalcitrant Congressional Republicans will have to explain why their perennial knee-jerk deference to “whatever the commanders want” extends to Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal on troop surges but not to Mullen, who outranks them, on civil rights.

The more bigotry pushed out of the closet for all voters to see, the more likely it is that Americans will be moved to grant overdue full citizenship to gay Americans. It won’t happen overnight, any more than full civil rights for African-Americans immediately followed [President Harry] Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces.

Like marriage equality, full integration of homosexual citizens into the United States’ armed forces is long overdue. Rich notes that the military forces of Canada, Israel, and Britain have openly gay and lesbian soldiers with no ill effect on unit cohesion. Let’s put bigotry aside and allow gays and lesbians to serve their country in the military and to marry. Anything less is un-American.

Destroying the definitional argument

John Corvino fisks the definitional argument against marriage equality — he summarizes the argument as “same-sex ‘marriage’ is not really marriage, and thus legalizing it would amount to a kind of lie or counterfeit” — in an excellent post at 365gay.com. Corvino notes that all other arguments against marriage equality (for example, that it’s bad for kids, that it’s bad for heterosexual marriage)  are testable and provably false and speculates that marriage equality opponents are moving to the definitional argument out of desperation. He then destroys the definitional argument. Key quote:

… Their argument is weak on at least two counts.

First, one can acknowledge a difference between two things while still adopting a blanket term that covers them both. Both chickens and ducks are fowl; both silver and platinum are precious metals.

So even if same-sex and opposite-sex relationships differ in some fundamental way, there’s nothing to prevent us from using the term “marriage” to cover relationships of both sorts—especially if we have compelling reasons for doing so (for example, that marriage equality would make life better for millions of gay people and wouldn’t take anything away from straight people).

The second and deeper problem is that both the chicken/duck example and the silver/platinum example involve what philosophers call “natural kinds”—categories that “carve nature at the joints,” as it were. By contrast, marriage is quintessentially a social, or artifactual, kind: it’s something that humans create.

(One might retort that God created marriage. That rejoinder won’t help marriage-equality opponents attempting to provide a constitutionally valid reason against secular marriage equality. But it might help explain why they sometimes treat marriage as if it were a fixed object in nature.)

Like “baseball,” “art,” “war,” and “government”—to take a random list—and unlike “chicken” or “silver,” the word “marriage” refers to something that humans arrange and can rearrange. Indeed, they HAVE rearranged it. Polygamy was once the norm; wives were the legal property of their husbands; mutual romantic interest was the exception rather than the rule.

Marriage has changed over the centuries, it’s changing again. Unless you’re willing to add an asterisk to the equal protection clause of the Constitution to except homosexuals — and I’ll argue that’s an un-American, anti-patriotic stance — you’ve really got no constitutional or fallacy-free argument to make against marriage equality.

Something else for vaccine doubters to ignore

Anyone who wants to believe that vaccines cause autism — and there are, sadly, many of these conspiracy theorists, all too willing to risk their kids’ lives and other people’s kids’ lives on real communicable diseases out of ignorant fear of a well-debunked link between vaccines and autism — won’t be swayed by this news, but I share it anyway. From Bloomberg:

The Lancet medical journal formally retracted a study that linked a routine childhood vaccine to autism and bowel disease after a U.K. investigation found flaws in the original 1998 paper.

“It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation,” the editors of the Lancet wrote in a statement today. “In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were ‘consecutively referred’ and that the investigations were ‘approved’ by the local ethics committee have proven to be false,” they said.

The paper was retracted from the published record, stripping it of its scientific claims.

Mumps, measles, rubella, pertussis, polio and more — these are real dangers that vaccines prevent. Vaccines do not cause autism. Get your kids immunized, for their own good and for the good of the innocent kids with compromised immune systems (those on chemotherapy, for example) who can’t get immunized and rely on everyone else doing the right thing so that they won’t die of easily avoidable communicable diseases.

The silence is deafening

James O’Keefe, the conservative activist who dressed up as a pimp to try to entrap people associated with ACORN, has been arrested with three others on suspicion that they were trying to wiretap the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) office. Via Salon, the Democratic National Committee’s Hari Sevugan makes an excellent point:

The last time Mr. O’Keefe was in the news, Republicans broke land speed records to praise him as an American hero and fell all over themselves to out-do one another in expressing disgust, outrage and indignation at what he brought to light. Yet today, in light of these deplorable and illegal attacks on the office of a United States Senator by their champion, Republicans have not offered a single iota of disgust, a whisper of indignation or even a hint of outrage. The silence by Republicans in the face of these criminal acts by one their own speaks louder than then their wails of outrage ever did.

O’Keefe, Salon right notes, “skirted the law” with his ACORN adventures, apparently doesn’t know the meaning of hypocrite, so let me take a moment to refresh his memory: It refers to someone who doesn’t live up to the standards he sets for others.

The Onion divines it all

Pat Robertson’s asinine claim that the earthquake in Haiti was the result of a centuries old pact with the devil inspired the brilliant minds at The Onion. They’ve compiled a list of other tragedies and exactly who pissed off god to make them happen. My favorite:

Oakland Hills Firestorm, 1991: Emily Garrity pointed out a logical inconsistency in the concept of an omnipotent god to her Sunday school teacher

Watch out, critical thinking is dangerous stuff!

Adam’s belly button

A.A. Gill writes about his visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky for Vanity Fair; loved this bit:

Adam comes on looking like the Hispanic bass player for a Janis Joplin backup band, with a lot of hair and a tan. He looks a bit stoned. As well he might be, because he’s all on his own in Eden. Nothing can do him any harm, and he’s got the whole pharmacopoeia at arm’s reach. And then you get to Eve, a demure, foxy little girl who could be Juliet in a Guatemalan school play. Her long hair is meticulously glued to her pert and perky breasts. Adam has his as yet unnecessary organ of generation decorously concealed behind foliage. There is something wincingly salacious about this bearded hippie and his schoolgirl mate. And he has what looks suspiciously like a belly button.

Oops.

Torture apologists

Andrew Sullivan nails torture apologists and fundamentalists all in one fell swoop. In this case, Sullivan is responding to Joe Carter in particular in the context of the three simultaneous detainee “suicides” at Gitmo:

Carter does what fundamentalists often do.

He does not inquire into or rebut the full pattern of evidence we see before us, he simply smears the sources. …  If you’re so sure that something is true, why would you oppose any serious attempt to test it? And why is a journalist advocating less information rather than more?

Carter has made his name as a Christian. It seems to me that very credible evidence that three prisoners may have been tortured to death by the US government would be worth any Christian’s concern. It seems to me that a Christian would want to ensure that this potential horror is investigated by independent sources to ensure that it didn’t take place. In a war governed by rules that led to widespread torture and murder of prisoners in US custody – again, factually indisputable – it seems to me that a Christian would seek to discover the full truth without relying on ad hominems, avoidance of the majority of the evidence, ignorance of the sourcing, and denigration of a human rights lawyer.

But then I actually believe the torture is evil. And that power can corrupt. And that freedom and decency requires vigilance from the citizenry, not blind trust in a God-fearing leader. [Emphasis mine.]

And so do I.

Editors are important, part 63

I received an email message from Todd Carley at Writing Assistance, Inc. today. Here’s a screen shot of the top of the note:

Notice the first sentence of the second paragraph. Any half-decent editor knows that you do not hyphenate a compound modifier in which the first word of the compound modifier ends in ly. I expect non-professionals to get this one wrong sometimes, but this email message is trying to convince me that they are writing experts. (The second sentence in the first paragraph also needs a comma, IMHO.)

And here’s a screen shot of a portion of the middle of the note:

Something went terribly wrong with the sentence fragment that starts with en, but nobody bothered to proofread this message carefully enough to catch this glaring error. (I won’t even detail the problems with other various in the last sentence of poor Bill’s profile.)

I’m certainly not going to hire people who send a marketing message on their own behalf that sports errors of ignorance or carelessness like these. If they can’t take better care with their own messaging, I shudder to think what they’d do for a mere client.

If you’re claiming to be a writing expert, you ought to know the value of editing. Clearly Todd Carley and Writing Assistance Inc. do not. Any future email messages that Carley or his company might send me will be routed directly to my junk mailbox, where they belong.

Editors are important, part 62

Even for prosecutors. Because some unnamed Manhattan prosecutor used the word and instead of or on documents charging lap dancers with prostitution, the New York Post reports, the District Attorney’s office might not be able to successfully prosecute two women for allegedly offering sex for money; the use of and is problematic because even the prosecutor acknowledges that the women did not, er, consummate the transaction:

The document in question charges that the pair did “engage, offer and agree” to acts of prostitution with an undercover officer at Big Daddy Lou’s Hot Lap Dance Club on West 38th St. in July, 2008.

But the wording in the state penal code specifies “or,” not “and.” In fact, nobody has ever accused the two of actually engaging in sex with the cop — only of offering the cop a threesome for $5,000.

There’s an important difference between and and or; it looks like being sloppy about it might cost a prosecutor this case.