PZ Myers posted yesterday in response to Andrew Brown’s whining about the so-called “New Atheists.” Brown makes the following complaint:

They are none of them philosophers and, though most are scientists, none [of the New Atheists] study psychology, history, the sociology of religion, or any other discipline which might cast light on the objects of their execration. All of them make claims about religion and about believers which go far beyond the mere disbelief in God which I take to be the distinguishing mark of an atheist.

Myers rightly points out that Brown has stacked the deck:

[H]e seems to have neglected a few rather more prominent names, which damage his premise rather severely. Where’s Dan Dennett? Shouldn’t he have been named right there with Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens? Perhaps because he is a philosopher, he isn’t really a New Atheist. And what about A.C. Grayling? He always seems to be vociferously godless, and he certainly ought to qualify.

But there’s another problem with Brown’s argument, one that Myers addresses only briefly: “Philosophers do not have a monopoly on social, political, or intellectual issues, so it is rather irrelevant.” In other words, why should only academic specialists in philosophy, or in “psychology, history, the sociology of religion” (or whatever Brown means by “any other discipline which might cast light on the objects of [the New Atheists'] execration”) get to “make claims about religion and about believers”? How does he determine that only these certain subjects (and that circularly-defined catch-all) can “cast light” on the relevant issues? This, I think, is a much deeper and more troublesome problem than the blatant dishonesty of leaving known atheist philosophers out of the mix.

This is the trouble with our specialist society. While specialization allows people to delve deeply into complex problems that are best examined in narrow fields, it also breeds the popular and contradictory beliefs that (1) specialists are the exclusive masters of their domains, (2) non-specialists, or specialists from other domains, can never offer valid, useful, or insightful perspectives about subjects where specialists work (i.e., no one except another specialist in the same field can evaluate the work of a specialist), and (3) we should nevertheless automatically evaluate specialists in other fields to be telling the truth.

First, if the religious defenders’ factual claims about the nature of reality hold any water, then there is no way that religious specialists can be the exclusive masters of their domain. If an enchanted world is a day-to-day reality, then the work of academic religious specialists would mean almost nothing at all. If you want to have faith or experience God, you shouldn’t need a specialist. (On the other hand, if the psychological benefits of certain actions can be obtained by following a specific set of instructions and practicing them repeatedly, the way some meditative systems work, then having a specialist who can instruct you in these practical matters would be a good idea.)

Second, one of the bigger problems with these ideas about specialists is that, especially for a field like religion, they create a self-reinforcing, almost tautological system that, for utterly stupid reasons, insists that its core principles cannot be validly criticized by people who disagree with its core principles. So we see religious specialists claiming that non-specialists have nothing worthwhile to say, not because the specialists have satisfactorily addressed, evaluated, and dismissed the criticisms offered by the non-specialists, but simply because the critics are not specialists. For example, I have encountered quite a few adherents of Christianity who will confidently dismiss just about any criticism of their religion on the grounds that, after two-thousand years of theological ink-spillage, every possible attack has been sufficiently parried. How else, they argue, would Christianity have survived so long? The critic just needs to study more—i.e., the critic needs to become a specialist. This is just laziness.

On the other hand, atheists and other critics of religion could do a much better job of rooting out the silliness of religion where it lives, by seeking out the most sophisticated and intellectually tempting arguments of religious adherents, engaging them fully, and offering a satisfying discourse in rebuttal. While there are certainly strong and satisfying arguments that underly the rhetoric of the “New Atheists,” religious people are obviously not going to do their homework and work out these structures on their own. But maybe the anti-religious forces just need a new synthesis. And why shouldn’t it come from someone with a non-incestuous, non-specialist perspective?  Why would religious people shun the wisdom of the outsider view? Anybody who produces something—writing, art, engineering schematics, manufactured goods, whatever—can tell you the value of getting “another set of eyeballs” on your work. When you fail to step back and get a different perspective, you lose track of reality. But for religious people, apparently, flatly refusing to step back and get another perspective, after thousands of years of intellectual inbreeding, is one of the highest virtues. It’s time they come off it.

Every now and then, I run into somebody who believes in the “harmful” effects of information, writing, words, etc.—all that stuff we just call “content” these days. Frank Fisher at the Guardian has found one of them:

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That’s my view. Absolutely categorical,” [Andy] Burnham, the [Member of Parliament] for Leigh in Greater Manchester, told the Daily Telegraph. “If you look back at the people who created the internet, they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now.”

Can this nutjob really be serious? “Content that should just not be available to be viewed”? Fisher points out that, while Burnham’s perspective might be an interesting philosophical idea, to be discussed informally, we should be troubled that someone in government, with at least a modicum of real power, is trying to take this idea and turn it into law:

This isn’t a guy in the pub talking, this is a government minister who says he knows what people should and shouldn’t be allowed to read and see. Well sorry, Andy, while we might discuss the possibility of you deciding that for children, you certainly don’t get to decide that for me. The temptation is simply to brush the arrogance away with an angry wave, and figure nothing will come of it. That would be dangerous.

As we see in Australia, just because a policy is insane, futile, counter-productive and hugely unpopular doesn’t mean it won’t end up being implemented.

The idea of the internet as a safe haven for free speech, where “governments couldn’t reach” has been a great tool to break down barriers all over the world and allow people to see that, while the rule of law is necessary, building the walls of national borders and pretending that we need to keep ourselves secure against each other is probably something more like a well-adapted virus that keeps its victims mobile enough to keep propagating in others. But government officials don’t want us on the internet here, like this, whispering about how they’re just parasites that ruin life for the rest of us. That would threaten their job security.

Ordinary people need to be thinking a bit more about the rule of law, how it works, and what it ought to do. When people like Burnham suggest, almost literally, that we just shut down free speech like it was a dead ideal gone horribly wrong, ordinary people need to stop and ask themselves why he would suggest that kind of policy. Why would we want governments tinkering on the internet, restricting free speech? Whose interests would that really serve? And especially in nations like ours where many of our policymakers are elected by the votes of ordinary people, what does it mean to talk about “authority” and the “will of the people”?

But let me just get down to it: people like Burnham are idiots and jack-booted thugs. They want a world completely sanitized at the expense of ignoring human nature. They want to control the international channels of communication. They like the world partitioned into a bunch of nation-states because that keeps crimes and crises coming across their desks, so they will have something to do with their power.

There is no such thing as “content that should just not be available to be viewed.” What people like Burnham really mean is that only government officials should get to view all the content, and then decide what the rest of us are allowed to see. So what, then, does it mean to get elected? What are we saying when we tell a person, “I want you to be a government official?” And what kinds of incentives does one have to seek government office? It means we create a world where the people in government are the people who think something like, “I’d sure enjoy getting a look-see at all the stuff nobody else is allowed to see, like all the extra-dirty porn!” Or they are the people who think, “I am so vastly superior than everyone else, I need to decide what everyone else should get to see and think about.”

In other words, allowing governments to regulate free speech is just a recipe for increasing how many scoundrels and jack-booted thugs are elected or appointed to office. If our society destroys itself, I would rather we do it by exercising our freedom to excess, so we know it was our fault, that we simply could not handle living together, that there was some fundamental weakness in human nature that prevented us from achieving more than being a bunch of petty little communities wracked by war and infighting. But if we let the government drive us into the ground, we will always wonder, “Could we have stopped it? Could we have risen above?”

Some interesting blog posts about the auto industry showed up in my Google Reader queue this morning.

First, here is Neil Buchanan over at Dorf on Law, suggesting that auto dealers are one of the bigger problems with the auto industry as a whole:

The problem, from a business standpoint, is that customers are alienated and angry. Buying a car is such a stressful experience that people put it off as long as they can. While GM would like to build a bond with their customers to increase the likelihood of repeat business, car salesmen and their dealerships are in it for the quick kill. It was, in fact, the traditional dealerships that put huge amounts of pressure on GM to euthanize Saturn. If the Big Three automakers really want to get the people behind them, they could do a lot worse than proposing a complete break with the way cars are sold.

Indeed. I have often said that salespeople are less than worthless: they either are an obstacle to the products that informed customers have already decided to buy, or they are ignorant or dishonest dust-throwers in the eyes of car shoppers who foolishly rely on dealers to tell them what they need. I recently purchased a car, but while my experience was mostly painless, it could and should have been much easier. Buchanan is right when he points out that “the ‘no haggle’ dealers are merely toned down versions of the sleazy norm.” I purchased mine from a “no haggle” dealer, but I still had to haggle—although I did it over the phone, explaining to the salesperson that since I live so far from his lot, I would not bother to drive out, and he would have zero chance of making a sale, unless he could give me a final quote in writing, via fax or email, on the day before my appointment. He was amenable, and everything worked out, and I got a good price, but even then, why should I have to go through that kind of experience just to buy something that is basically just a commodity, and practically a necessity for most people, including me?

Meanwhile, Judge Posner writes about the United Auto Workers and slips in this little gem that should warm the hearts of people like me who have a hard time seeing modern labor unions in the noble light they claim for themselves:

The goal of unions is to redistribute wealth from the owners and managers of firms, and from workers willing to work for very low wages, to the unionized workers and the union’s officers. Unions do this by organizing (or threatening) strikes that impose costs on employers. For employers are rationally willing to avoid those costs at a cost (provided it is smaller) of higher wages and benefits and restrictive work rules. Because the added cost to the employer of a unionized work force is a marginal cost (a cost that varies with the output of the firm), unionization results in reduced output by the unionized firm and, in consequence, benefits nonunionized competitors. Unless those competitors are too few or too small to be able to expand output at a cost no higher than the cost to the unionized firms, unionization will gradually drive the unionized firms out of business.

Unions, in other words, are worker cartels. 

As my law school professor of both Contracts and Remedies often said, leave it to Judge Posner to give you an excellent and detailed description of how things really work.

So if you are looking for a place to direct your ire about the government bailout of Chrysler and General Motors, but you are tired of blaming the executives, think about dealers and unions. They helped a good piece, too, in making the American auto industry fail.

The Legal Satyricon comments on a story out of Maryland:

The high school kids [in Montgomery County] decided that it would be funny and/or great revenge to make fake license plates and speed through known traffic cameras.

From the local newspaper there:

[One] parent said that “our civil rights are exploited,” and the entire premise behind the Speed Camera Program is called into question as a result of the growing this fad [sic] among students.

Indeed. But one commenter to The Legal Satyricon post disagrees that traffic cameras impinge on our civil liberties:

While the cameras might be obnoxious, and they may well cause more accidents than they prevent, they do not interfere with any liberty or privacy interest that I can identify. When you’re out in public, people can see you. You never had a right to speed through an intersection or run a red light in the first place.

Sure, traffic cameras may not interfere with any liberty or privacy interests that have already been identified, but you might say they challenge or bedevil the fundamental idea of privacy interests. The problem with traffic cameras is not that they see things that were already observable in public, but that they contradict our ancient and deeply-rooted sense that observations require individual, subjective observers.

Anyone who sits to think about privacy for just a few moments will realize that “privacy” is really a fragile concept. For example, we all imagine that we have “privacy” in our own homes, but homes are not black holes: they emit all kinds of information, through windows, other members of the household, sound waves traveling through the walls, or by whatever information can be gleaned from careful, deductive observers on the street or next door. But we don’t use that as an excuse to infiltrate the perceived privacy of people’s homes on behalf of law enforcement. Privacy is really a sense of distance from other humans, that they can’t see you when you don’t want to be seen, and there is a way to hide from their prying eyes.

(Note to nit-pickers of the black hole analogy: yes, I know about Hawking radiation.)

And while, as the commenter quoted above points out, we generally don’t afford people a privacy right to exceed the acceptable boundaries of their liberty interests (by, for example, breaking the law when no one is looking, or because no one is looking), our civil liberties are a little like the temperature outdoors, where there’s a thermometer temperature and a “feels like” temperature that is created by other factors. When we change the societal observers—the ones catching people in the act of breaking the law—from individual police officers or vigilant fellow citizens to always-on cameras that capture everything “objectively,” which here I mean as “without cognitive biases in perception” (like unconsciously assuming that a lawbreaker is a member of a particular race), we don’t change the privacy and liberty interests already identified, but we act in a way that is contrary to our deeply rooted human nature and sense of privacy.

To put it another way, yes, people can always happen to be around when you run a red light. They might be in the crosswalk, on the side of the street, in another car, and so on. Those people can always observe you running the red light and you don’t think, “No! Don’t look! I’m in private here!” But an electronic observer, one who is always there, who sees from a perspective fundamentally unlike those of your fellow citizens, who has, in a sense, a God’s-eye view, that observer creates a problem. It makes you feel watched, and your “feels like” right of privacy slips away.

Everyone knows, intuitively, what it feels like to stand in a crowd and feel like nobody knows you’re there. We can have intensely “private”-feeling moments when we are immediately surrounded by thousands of other people. That comes instinctively. But adding surveillance cameras into the mix confounds our instincts. Even people who are religious, who believe there really is a God’s-eye view on them at all times, from some undisclosed divine location, should be disturbed, because an electronic God’s-eye view, one in the control of the police or some other governmental, corporate, or otherwise more-powerful-than-you entity, creates a social imbalance. It means that what once was only the territory of your omniscient God has now become the territory of the local police force. That should disturb you. It makes that “feels like” right of privacy dip down pretty low.

So I think people like the commenter I quoted above, while they are technically legally correct, are being much too formalistic. They are not taking human nature into account, and they are not considering the fact that what people really want is not necessarily actual freedom, but the feeling of freedom. People need the psychological sensation of believing they have certain liberties. When you take away that sensation, without actually taking away the liberties, people are still going to be upset. And why shouldn’t they? Can’t we figure out better ways to manage our society without destroying our sense of freedom?

For those reasons, I have to applaud the teenagers in Montgomery County, Maryland. They are causing mischief, and they are annoying people, and they are probably breaking the law, but they are engaged in civil disobedience, or even performance art, that induces people to think a little harder about what is happening in their community. Ultimately, any gains derived from that behavior are likely to outweigh the consequences from their technical breaches of the law.

Because, apparently, your ill-founded personal beliefs are a fine excuse to let someone else suffer:

The Bush administration yesterday granted sweeping new protections to health workers who refuse to provide care that violates their personal beliefs[.]

. . .

The far-reaching regulation cuts off federal funding for any state or local government, hospital, health plan, clinic or other entity that does not accommodate doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other employees who refuse to participate in care they find ethically, morally or religiously objectionable. It was sought by conservative groups, abortion opponents and others to safeguard workers from being fired, disciplined or penalized in other ways.

Thanks for passing the buck to the legal profession. I suspect that not a few employment attorneys would have substantial moral and ethical objections to representing a health care worker who was fired, disciplined, or penalized for refusing to provide care on the grounds that someone, somewhere, purported to receive a secret message from an imaginary realm that does not exist, telling them to ensure that every pregnant woman should be forced to give birth.

Rules like this just roll back any progress we have made toward building a society whose rules are designed to serve all the people in the society, instead of the imaginary friends of some people in the society. 

And we’re not just talking about abortion here:

The rule comes at a time of increasingly frequent reports of conflicts between health-care workers and patients. Pharmacists have turned away women seeking birth control and morning-after emergency contraception pills. Fertility doctors have refused to help unmarried women and lesbians conceive by artificial insemination. Catholic hospitals refuse to provide the morning-after pill and to perform abortions and sterilizations.

Experts predict the issue could escalate sharply if a broad array of therapies becomes available using embryonic stem cells, which are controversial because they are obtained by destroying very early embryos.

Look at those basic things: birth control, artificial insemination, sterilization. Those things all affect what we as a society have already decided are part and parcel with the fundamental right of reproduction. But the means to exercise that fundamental right are tied up with the medical profession. When you let health care workers refuse to provide the services necessary to exercise that right, you pit one right against another. Look which one is winning here. Not the one with repeatable science and real-world consequences behind it, with women, children, and families who suffer—no, not that one. The one with the upper hand in our insane society is the one that relies on a belief in objectively intelligible messages from another realm, whose alleged existence has never left a shred of evidence—much less any verified, discernible content!

If you want to have a moral principle, if you want to exercise your conscience, then why can’t you do it in a way that can be grounded in reality, in what we experience? If you care about human suffering, about the poor, the widows, the orphans who figure so prominently in the Bible—and aren’t they right there in the center spotlight with this issue?—then how does your conscience tell you to favor a thing that does not yet exist, only the potentiality of a personality, something without any facility to know that it exists, much less suffer, over a living, breathing person who stands before you and begs for help?

You’re a pharmacist and a girl asks for a morning-after pill. She’s fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school. Smart kid, happened to get pregnant. You could give her a pill and she could go on with her life, do something fantastic, raise a family when she is prepared, when she has the means, both psychologically and financially. You could help. But instead you refuse and consign her to a series of possibilities that are only likely to increase her suffering: have an abortion, if she can find someone to perform it? give up her child? drop out of school or forgo further education? Meanwhile, the young man who got her pregnant will, in all likelihood, suffer none of these. He will probably continue in school, might go to college, increase his earning capacity, accumulate power and prestige. And then society suffers, too, because you contribute to the continuing inequality between men and women.

Because your conscience, which obviously is not oriented to helping your fellow human being or contributing to the success and well-being of the greater human community, tells you not to give her that pill. And now you know that you can refuse the pill and go along your merry way, without fear of penalty. Keep getting that paycheck, working that cushy pharmacist job, going to church and feeling good about your conscience, while some girl somewhere is struggling just to survive. One hopes that she and her child reject your petty god.

Oh, but I’m sure you’d be glad to direct her to an adoption agency to make sure her baby is adopted by people who will inculcate the tenets of your religion in its fresh, impressionable mind. God forbid—probably literally, in your mind—her child be adopted by gays or lesbians or atheists or Muslims or anybody who’s not a Christian. Your conscience apparently won’t let those others use artificial insemination, either, if they are unable to bring a child into the world. You’re “pro-life,” but only if it means people like you get to have babies.

This is not a rule of conscience, but a rule of conquest. That’s especially apparent with the inclusion of artificial insemination as something to which health care workers can permissively object. Maybe the rule will be repealed, or maybe, better yet, the market will function and health care providers where people refuse basic reproductive or stem-cell services will flail financially while ones where services are always provided, without a hint of objection, will thrive.

The very idea that a rule like this could be passed at the highest levels of our government is disturbing. It demonstrates the political clout of people who, if they could, would surely dictate every intimate aspect of all our lives. And that, no doubt, is another point of contention. Religious people always claim that requiring them to participate in society like everyone else, following all the same rules, somehow injures their private practice of religion. As if doctors who provide artificial insemination to lesbians or dole out morning-after pills to women who are unprepared or unwilling to bear a pregnancy walk away from that transaction with anything remotely like the consequences for those others. You feel guilty because you prevented loving parents from having a child, or you saved a woman from a derailed life? Seek pity elsewhere.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown makes a good point:

“There are certain rights that are not to be subject to popular votes, otherwise they are not fundamental rights,” Brown said in an interview. “If every fundamental liberty can be stripped away by a majority vote, then it’s not a fundamental liberty.”

And that goes straight to the heart of all the complaining from Proposition 8 supporters. You can whine all you want that “the will of the people” must be acknowledged, but when you establish that “the people” can exert their “will” to deny rights to some members of the population simply on the grounds of a vaguely asserted moral approbation, together with some alarmist pseudo-history, then you are well on your way down a pretty frightening path. The Germans can tell you where it may lead.

The gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender crowd is complaining about Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. From NPR:

In an open letter to Obama, Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, wrote, “By inviting Rick Warren to your inauguration, you have tarnished the view that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans have a place at your table.”

So what would you prefer? That Obama treat Warren and his evangelicals like they are non-persons, by ignoring their existence, and not inviting their participation in anything? That sure sounds like the way gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people have typically been treated. How would you have felt if George W. Bush had asked a prominent member of your crowd to offer a prayer at a national ceremony? It would have been a breakthrough moment. But the evangelical people would have issued a statement just like Solmonese’s open letter, claiming that our religious foundations were tarnished.

The victory of a Democrat should not mean that all the other players who don’t agree with your agenda should suddenly be excluded from the table, as the Bush administration has excluded people who disagreed with its collective views and ideology. Have you forgotten that watchword of the Obama campaign, change? So long as whoever has the reins of power is just using that power to shunt dissenters to the side, instead of drawing everyone into the national conversation, we will never make progress. The change is to broaden the conversation, not just to swap out who is talking.

Putting Rick Warren up there to give an invocation at the inauguration is not some portent of doom. Obama has said publicly that he disagrees with Warren about a lot of things, but appreciates the “magic” of America, under which people who disagree can still participate in whatever we do.

So get over yourselves, Joe Solomonese, and the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender crowd. Don’t turn into your enemies just because you’ve made some progress toward your goals.  The real problem is that there is an invocation at all during an inauguration ceremony. The strong, underlying message remains: If you want to be an American, you have to worship God. All other possibilities are subtly omitted and excluded. So Obama could still do more, yes—for instance, he could invite Sam Harris to offer some words during the same portion of the program when Warren speaks—but asking Rick Warren to give an invocation is not a bad thing.

A few weeks ago, Judge Posner had a great post on “The Future of Conservatism.” He wrote:

For myself, I would be happy to see conservatism exit from the political scene—provided it takes liberalism with it. I would like to see us enter a post-ideological era in which policies are based on pragmatic considerations rather than on conformity to a set of preconceptions rooted in a rapidly vanishing past.

Then a couple days ago, Professor Dorf had an equally interesting post called “Pragmatism and the Reciprocity of Means and Ends,” in which he wrote:

[O]ur leading contemporary legal pragmatist, Richard Posner, sometimes invokes [Oliver Wendell] Holmes[, Jr.] as an exemplar of the more prosaic notion of pragmatism as simply a rejection of core principles in favor of “muddling through” (in Charles Lindblom’s phrase). That also appears to be the notion of pragmatism favored by Justice Stephen Breyer. Both espouse pragmatism as a kind of post-ideological moderation. And of course, the pragmatist du jour is the President-elect [Barack Obama], who has been described as “ruthlessly pragmatic.”

If you’ve read this blog a while, you will probably have figured out that I, too, should be counted with Holmes, Posner, Breyer, and Obama as a post-ideological pragmatist. And if you are curious about what exactly that means, I can recommend both of the posts linked above for further reading. Enjoy.

The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) has gone off the deep end. Here is how professor Richard Esenberg at PrawfsBlawg summarizes a complaint they recently filed:

The Thomas More Law Center has filed a complaint on behalf of a Michigan resident against Treasury Secretary Paulsen and the Board of Governors of the Fed. It alleges that the bailout of AIG violates the Establishment Clause.

Yes, that’s right, the Establishment Clause, the first clause of the First Amendment, the one that says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” How does bailing out an insurance company violate that principle? Professor Esenberg continues:

It turns out that AIG has a business unit that offers Shariah compliant financial products. In particular, it offers Takaful lines of insurance which, according to the complaint, invest in no businesses that areharam (or unIslamic). The Shariah compliant business units also pay the zakat, a religious tax that supports only Islamic charities.

. . .

The idea, I suppose, is that, by taking an ownership position in AIG, the government somehow endorses everything that the company does or converts AIG’s activities into state action. This is distinct from, say, pension fund investments because the state operates here as an active rather than a passive investor.

There are a couple different theories for how to deal with the Establishment Clause. The predominant one is called the Lemon test, named after the case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, where the Supreme Court first articulated it. Under that test, the court will ask whether the government act in question has a secular legislative purpose, whether the primary effect of the act is to advance or inhibit religion, and whether the act leads to excessive government entanglement with religion. Another test is called the endorsement test, because  under that test the court will ask whether the government action “endorses religion.” The endorsement test was first articulated in Lynch v. Donnelly.

Almost everybody complains about the Lemon test, but the endorsement test is not really a full replacement for it. From what I can tell, both tests just cling to life in the purgatory where all the other Constitutional doctrines slink around and wait for judges to manhandle them into the eerie twilight that is a Constitutional opinion.

Anyway, this is basic stuff. What makes an Establishment Clause violation? The different tests are ways for judges to look at a wide variety of government acts and sort them out with at least a modicum of rationality: this is a violation, this isn’t, and so on. But anybody, not just judges, can figure this one out, I think. By just about any standard, including the Lemon test, the endorsement test, and just plain “common sense” (whatever that may be), can even a slightly thoughtful person look at the AIG bailout and decide that it falls into the “violation” category?

Start with the easy one. As an ordinary person observing current events, do you get the impression that, in bailing out AIG, the government is endorsing religion? Neither do I. So move on to the full-blown, three-prong Lemon test. What’s the primary legislative purpose of the bailout? To keep the entire world economy from collapsing in a little puddle? Looks like a clearly secular purpose to me. What’s the primary effect of the bailout? To shore up the bastions of Islam? Hardly. Should we even bother with asking whether there’s any government entanglement with religion, much less “excessive” entanglement?

So what are they smoking over at the TMLC? That’s an easy one. Just read their own website:

The Thomas More Law Center is a not-for-profit public interest law firm dedicated to the defense and promotion of the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life. Our purpose is to be the sword and shield for people of faith, providing legal representation without charge to defend and protect Christians and their religious beliefs in the public square.

But the freedom of Muslims to purchase insurance that complies with their religious belief (sort of like the freedom of Jews to purchase kosher foods that comply with their religious beliefs) apparently does not matter, not in the face of the bulldozer-Christianity advocated by the TMLC. And the fact that TMLC doggedly advocates for violations of the Establishment Clause in favor of Christianity sure makes this sound like the famous case of Pot v. Kettle.

How can we, as a society, fairly resolve these petty squabbles between religious people? By adhering to strict separation between religious matters and secular political matters, so there is no sense of unfairness or impropriety in government dealings with people of different religious beliefs. Just as the law should be no respecter of persons, it should be respecter of the beliefs of those persons.

Mary moved to a new house recently and had to suffer through the ordeal that is Comcast “service.” So she wrote a blog post about it. Lo and behold, a Comcast employee shows up in the comment section and writes:

I’m sorry for the poor experience we created for you. I’m glad everything worked out in the end, but I would like to see that you are compensated for your time and frustrations.

. . .

If you would like my assistance, please email our team at We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com. We’ll work to make this right for you.

Something similar happened to me. You email the people at that address and they really do fix things up quickly. But still, can you people over at Comcast get a shred of perspective, for just a second? Do you realize how utterly stupid it is that you can’t manage to allocate your resources efficiently, or train your workforce effectively, so that you get things right the first time? Do you realize how absolutely, stunningly idiotic it is that you have people, apparently, who troll the blogosphere looking for posts like Mary’s, so you can send in your decent technical and customer support crew? Why not just, you know, get it right the first time? Why mess around with all this lunacy of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, and the left hand just making problems for the right hand to fix?

Some Comcast person will probably show up and comment on this post now. Wasting time that would be much better spent on improving the internal operations of your company. Thanks for sending me a monthly bill for this crap. Thanks for being the only outfit that can get me semi-reliable fast internet service, so I have no options, you have no competition, and you have no real incentive to do a good job. You have us all by the balls, Comcast. At least with your left hand. But your right hand is busy doing magic tricks to keep us entertained.