Notes

Even though the Supreme Court said it’s okay, there are plenty of good reasons not to keep a loaded handgun in your home. And these guys appear to agree.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist or anything, but it sure seems pretty weird that John McCain has an advisor who thinks (probably correctly) that a terrorist attack would drive paranoid voters to take shelter under his hawkish, Republican wings in November and now he is claiming that he’ll not leap ahead of Barack Obama until 48 hours before election day. Recall that John Kerry thought Osama bin Laden’s video release days before the 2004 election cost him the presidency. He was probably right. This is all just a specific application of the old “October surprise” concept, but far more insidious. What exactly does John McCain know?

Now that we’re embroiled in this “war on terror,” vast swaths of the American public have transformed into paranoia-addled, gullible sheep who believe that trading their rights for “security” is an act of patriotism. But look, if you want “security,” then you should start looking for unicorns, bigfoot, and mermaids, too. Do you want to live in a safer world? Then stop voting for people who will perpetuate failed wars, failed energy policies, and failed ideologies. There is no such thing as security, but you can avoid promoting insecurity. And I’ll tell you what, John McCain is not your man for that job:

• His idea of intelligent energy policy is to keep on chugging oil— just domestic instead of foreign—which is like a smoker talking about “cutting back.” Right.
• He seems to think the war in Iraq is a good idea, even though it has failed to achieve its alleged goal of reducing terrorism. The idea that Americans fighting in Iraq will make us safer is sort of like the idea that driving a huge SUV will make you safer—yeah, you’ll be safer at the expense of everybody else being less safe.
• Either he is extremely cynical or he doesn’t understand how the law works. One minute he says “that the rules we have agreed to live by are those made by the people themselves, not a small elite that claims to be wiser than everybody else,” so “the role of judges is not to impose their own view as to the best policy choices for society.” But the next minute he says “that shaping the judiciary through the appointment power is one of the most important and solemn responsibilities a President has.” Wait, huh? So the President isn’t a “small elite,” but the federal judiciary is?

These are not the kind of ideas that will make our society happier, healthier, safer, or wealthier. These are the kind of ideas that will just dig us deeper into our economic hole, our foreign relations failure, and our needless social infighting. These ideas, translated into policy, will not move us forward as a nation.

Conservative evangelical James Dobson is not very good at making a point.

Barack Obama said:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. What do I mean by this? It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons . . . but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I can’t simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

James Dobson replied:

What the senator is saying there, in essence, is that I can’t seek to pass legislation . . . that bans partial-birth abortion because there are people in the culture who don’t see that as a moral issue. And if I can’t get everyone to agree with me, it is undemocratic to try to pass legislation that I find offensive to the Scripture. Now, that is a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution. This is why we have elections—to support what we believe to be wise and moral. We don’t have to go to the lowest common denominator or morality, which is what he is suggesting.

First, where exactly is Obama interpreting the Constitution? He’s setting forth a principle that ought to be obvious, which is that public discourse is best served by arguments and proposals that are grounded on reasons and arguments that are accessible to everyone, without regard to their religious beliefs. That has nothing to do with the Constitution.

Second, the first two sentences of Dobson’s response reproduced above are not really responsive to what Obama said because they critically misrepresent it. If you want to respond to something effectively, you need to make sure that you’re responding to something your opponent actually said.

Obama did not say that people like Dobson “can’t seek to pass legislation” because they are motivated by their own religious beliefs. They can seek to pass it all the want. But if they want to live in a society that is not fractured by the impassable rift that people like Dobson work so hard to maintain, then, regardless of their religious motivations, they need to present their arguments and reasons in such a way that people who do not share their religious convictions can at least evaluate those arguments and reasons on grounds other than simply rejecting them out of hand because they come from right-wing religious people like Dobson.

In other words, Obama was telling people like Dobson how to succeed: talk to the rest of us in terms we can understand without first swallowing all of your beliefs. If you can’t do that, then you can’t expect us to listen to you without just rejecting you out of hand because we think your beliefs are wacky.

If you find something “offensive to the Scripture,” that’s fine. But don’t just waltz into the halls of the legislature, waive your scripture around, and expect everyone else to go along with you. Then, when they don’t go along with you, don’t just pull back and start expressing your disdain for “the culture” and blaming everything you don’t like on the vague and nebulous forces of immorality.

Why can’t you do what Obama—and lots of the rest of us—would understand and respect? Why can’t you present your arguments in universal terms that are amenable to reason, without recourse to your scriptures?

When you either cannot or will not present arguments amenable to reason—or especially if you are just offended that someone even expects you to—then the lurking implication is that your position really is not amenable to reason. Of course, if your position is based on what is “offensive to the Scripture” and it’s not amenable to reason, that sort of also implies that your scripture, or your reading of it, is not amenable to reason, either. So I suppose there are sufficient grounds at least for Dobson’s motivation, if not the substance of his remarks.

This is disappointing, if you are hoping the United States will not slip into fascism:

Three years ago, Congress gave Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff an unusual power to “waive all legal requirements” that could stand in the way of building the fence. These requirements included the nation’s environmental protection laws. The same congressional action took away the authority of judges to review Chertoff’s decisions.

Last year, after Chertoff waived at least 20 laws and regulations to complete a section of the fence in Arizona, two environmental groups sued. They said it was unconstitutional to give a Cabinet secretary such sweeping power.

But a federal judge rejected that claim. And on Monday the Supreme Court without comment declined to hear a petition submitted by Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club.

(Yes, I mentioned this once before.) When the Supreme Court denies certiorari, it doesn’t usually say why. At least a denial carries no precedential power, so if a more attractive version of the issue came before the Court, they might be interested in addressing it and telling Americans whether Congress has the power to give people like Michael Chertoff the power to break any laws he feels like.

Who would have thought that Americans would use the specter of “terrorism” to keep Mexicans out?

After five weeks of studying for the bar exam, I have:

• Attended 19 video lectures, which comes to just under 60 hours of talking professors.
• Watched another 6 hours of MBE “workshop” lectures.
• Made 135 flash cards.
• Created about 145 pages of all new outlines in seven different subjects.
• Written 15 practice essays and outlined at least fifteen more.
• Done just over 1,500 multiple-choice MBE questions.

And there are still five more weeks until the bar exam.

My brother has decided to stir up discussion on atheism, starting from two statements, neither of which he personally endorses (so far as I know), but both of which are commonly expressed by people who oppose (and, in my opinion, completely misunderstand) atheism:

(1) Atheism is ridiculous.

(2) Atheism is faith.

Visit his blog and join the conversation.

Somehow in the last few years it has become popular to have traditional graduation ceremonies—caps, gowns, Elgar—for increasingly younger students at increasingly inconsequential stages in their education. Apparently this idiotic tendency has also taken up the traditional valedictorian and speech.

I say “apparently” because, while I have not seen this phenomenon in the wild, my blog—this blog—has recently been found by a surprising number of people using search terms like “elementary valedictory speech” and even—I kid you not—”kindergarten valedictory speech.”

Normally, I try to refrain from using my favorite four-letter words on my blog because I want the widest coverage possible, but I’ll find a happy medium here: Any graduation ceremony for educational transitions below high school is f#@%ing ridiculous. And I say this as a participant in a cap-and-gown-and-Elgar ceremony for both my sixth grade “graduation” and my eighth grade “graduation.” Those were stupid wastes of time.

Kids go through lots of transitions while they grow up. A lot of the time, they’re scared out of their minds when they have to go to a new school or advance a grade. So transitional support is good. But inflicting medieval traditions on them so their parents can take cute pictures of them in little caps and gowns is just stupid. There’s no better word.

And it’s even more ridiculous to expect them to make speeches. At least, that’s what I assume people are looking to do when they come to my blog on the search terms listed above. Maybe—though I seriously doubt it—they are actually just looking for things that adults could say as a valediction at these events. The word “valedictorian” derives from the Latin for “one who says farewell.” Maybe that’s what they’re doing. But I don’t have a lot of faith in people living in modern American having any idea of the meaning of the words they use, especially when it comes to their children. I suspect there are places where kindergartners and elementary school students are actually expected to make speeches. As if listening to speeches by older, supposedly more articulate valedictorians, was ever enjoyable. (Again, I speak as one who recently gave a valedictory address, for my law school class, so I’m under no illusions as to how difficult it is to recite a good speech from the other side of the lectern.)

(And by the way, that’s another thing. If you are standing behind it, it’s a lectern. If you’re standing on it, it’s a podium. You can remember that because the pod- root in podium is related to the ped- root in words like pedestrian—roughly, it means feet. You stand on a podium, behind a lectern. Got it? Thanks. Never make that mistake again, please.)

So. Parents. School administrators. People who think it would be cute to stick caps and gowns on your children who are going to a different school next year and run them through a graduation ceremony where you make mountains out of life-change molehills. Stop. Just give it up. Child education is a joke anyway, especially in public schools. You would do better to devote your resources to actually improving the intellectual and social development of your children than to dress them up in the patina of learning for a couple hours.

Remember when I said that Professor Erwin Chemerinsky had a terribly boring manner in his Bar/Bri lecture for Constitutional Law? It turns out that he has a much more engaging persona on the radio. Check out the most recent edition of Lawyer2Lawyer. (Which also happens to address the interesting issue of whether the United States needs more law schools.)

Yet another reason why the iPhone is the greatest handheld device ever made.

It’s hard to make sense of stuff like this.