Free speech – England versus United States

Occasionally I think our speech in the U.S. is a little too free – like when the tabloids traffic in gossips that should make the purveyor and the consumer both want to go home and shower off the slime. It’s the sort of thing that well-formed Christians will shun, but it’s pervasive in our culture.

But I’ll take our free-wheeling system in a heartbeat over the British system where libel suits are used to silence critics, and where the burden is on the critic to prove that what he said was true, not on the target to prove that it was false.

Even the British system comes out okay in the end sometimes, as told in “Now Charlatans will know to beware the geeks.” It seems that one “Simon Singh had written an article which was true and important about the dangers of the quack therapy of chiropractic healing.” In classic British libel law form, British chiropractors tried to kill the messenger:

Then, like so many authors and publishers before him, he learnedEnglish law persecuted rather than protected honest argument and that he was in trouble.

The British Chiropractic Association was suing him for saying that there was “not a jot of evidence” that its members could help sick children by manipulating babies’ spines in accordance with the teachings of a more-than-usually nutty American faith healer.

Well-run societies do not defend men who make money from worried parents and, more seriously, fob off their children with bogus “cures”. In his wisdom, however, Mr Justice Eady decided that the law would intervene to silence a debate on public health and ruled that it would not be enough for Singh to show that there was no reliable evidence that alleged treatments worked, which Singh would have difficulty in doing because there wasn’t. Because he had written that the chiropractic association “happily promotes bogus treatments”, the judge said he had to jump the insuperable barrier of proving that the therapists were lying rather than merely deluded and face costs of £500,000 or more if he failed.

But this time the intimidation didn’t work:

Far from being depressed, the audience turned into a heaving mass of furious geeks, who roared their anger and vowed that they would not rest until they had brought down the rotten system The “skeptic movement” (always spelt with “k” by the way, to emphasise their distinctiveness) had come to Singh’s aid. He was now in the protective custody of men and women, who, with straight faces, introduced themselves by the titles of their blogs: “Hi, I’m Gimpy.”

“Jack of Kent, pleased to meet you, love your writing. This is Holford Watch, Zeno, Jago, and I thought I saw the Quackometer getting a round in at the bar.”

Unnerved by their determination, I said to Ben Goldacre, demolisher of pseudo-science in all its fraudulent forms: “The nerds are on the march. I wouldn’t like to be the one standing in their way.” An uncharacteristically mystical look passed over the great debunker’s face. “Yes,” he said. “Strike us down, we shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”

Full disclosure: I go to a Chiropractor the way I went to my M.D. before I had a chronic condition that needed monitoring: when I’ve got a problem I think he can help, typically a characteristic headache that seems to originate in neck and shoulders. I’ve never met the kind of chiropractor who make sweeping claims:

Meanwhile, their allies tracked down the web pages of every chiropractor in Britain who was claiming they could treat asthmatic children and reported him or her to their local trading standards officer.

Back to the U.S.A. In my experience, lawsuits are used to silence critics here as well, despite our free speech tradition. It may not be a straight-up libel suit, but rather may take the form of an “intentional infliction of emotional distress” claim or even a discrimination claim if the quack is in some sort of minority. I’m defending one right now (it’s unusual for me to litigate).

The problem is well-enough known that states have enacted laws to punish those who start the aptly-named SLAPP suites – Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.

I once was sued in a SLAPP by my city government for signing a petition asking it to enforce a zoning ordinance. Diana Vice, who blogs at Welcome to My Tea Party, has been sued by a roofing contractor in something that – let me be cautious here – fairly plausibly looks like a SLAPP suit by a roofing contractor that does a lot of work for school systems in ways that Vice finds fishy.

I wish Judges wouldn’t be so hesitant to impose an award of attorney fees to a winning defendant, because these suits are effective to at least “chill” free speech on important topics as long as there’s a prospect of spending unreimbursed 5-figure attorney fees as the price of speaking out.

Also, it’s particularly important that guys like Singh prevail in Britain because British law is being used to silence critics in cyberspace, which knows no borders, world-wide — on the theory that the American author spoke or “published” in Great Britain, which accordingly has jurisdiction to entertain complaints of the aggrieved — oh, let’s say Czech. You get the idea. Because someone in Britain read it on the internet, British courts can referee the spat between two non-Brits.

And it’s especially gratifying that the cyber-community mustered the evidence to win Singh’s suit.

Can homosexual orientation be changed?

Oh, my! The saga continues! This is as more confusing as than the the Intelligent Design versus Evolution kerfuffle!

The weight of professional opinion seemed to me to have become that same-sex orientation was unchangeable.

So I had pretty much come to the conclusion that Christian people with exclusive same-sex attraction simply needed to gird themselves for life-long sexual abstinence, without even the hope of an abstinent bachelor or spinster (I know the former is neutral, the latter deprecatory in connotation – sorry) someday finding Mister or Miss Right. (I generally say “chastity” instead of “abstinence” when dealing with, say, teen sexuality of clients at Matrix Lifeline, because of chastity’s relatively positive connotation. But chastity outside Christian marriage means abstinence and repentance for lapses.)

I would not have urged a gay or lesbian Christian, in other words, to try to become heterosexual.

I might have encouraged them to consider a monastic vocation to get away from our hypersexualized culture and, for an Orthodox monastic, to engage in this ultimate battle against all the passions. But monastic vocation should not be undertaken toward the specific end of sexual reorientation, as if to say “I’ll be a monastic until I’m straight, and then I’ll laicize and marry.”

But here is a flawed column citing provocative information to the effect that I may have been wrong.

[T]he American College of Pediatricians … recently began a campaign to educate schools on sexual orientation and youth. “Facts About Youth” cites research that shows that over 85% of students with homosexual attractions will ultimately adopt a heterosexual identity as adults.

Okay, the American College of Pediatricians can be, as is being, faulted as a Christian front group impersonating the American Academy of Pediatrics. Point taken. But the American Psychiatric Association did not dispassionately de-list homosexuality as a disorder because of the great weight of scientific evidence. They did it for the same reason that the American Bar Association endorsed abortion – just before I resigned: a powerful lobby with an agenda mau-maued the APA (and the ABA). It’s hard to find neutrality on some subjects.

But what of these studies they cite?

If they exist, and are methodologically sound, they at least suggest that sexuality in youth is highly confused – perhaps even malleable. Mightn’t it be premature to tell conflicted adolescents that “you’re gay (or bi-); get used to it and celebrate it”? As long ago as Kinsey, there were claims that an astonishing proportion of people had experienced some same-sex encounter in their lives. And there are, after all, even adults who get sexually aroused by things like feet or underwear. Adolescent arousal by a member of the same sex may not mean much about one’s ultimate sexual destiny. (Would you think you were destined to get off with shoes forever if they turned you on?)

[There is a] growing body of research demonstrating that changing one’s sexual orientation is indeed possible.

Among those being ignored is Columbia University’s Dr. Robert Spitzer, whose 2003 landmark study was published in the prestigious journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. To his surprise, Spitzer – who ironically spearheaded the removal of homosexuality from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 – found that the majority of his 200 subjects experienced significant change in their same-sex feelings through therapy and support groups: “Like most psychiatrists, I thought that homosexual behavior could only be resisted, and that no one could really change their sexual orientation. I now believe that to be false. Some people can and do change.”

If that’s not convincing enough, in 2009 the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality published a comprehensive overview of research, citing over 500 scientific studies spanning nearly 100 years of research that demonstrates change is possible. However, these facts aren’t being communicated to young people. What is being educated to our youth is based on political correctness, not sexual freedom.

Dr. Robert Spitzer has no known ax to grind, but is a fairly dramatic “conversion story.” NARTH may have an ax to grind; that’s not clear to me.

By all means stop the persecution of young people who have doubt about their sexuality or who have come out as gay or lesbian (or are harassed for other reasons, like Phoebe Prince), but let’s have a little retiscence about showing 13 year old boys how most safely to sodomize or be sodomized, and suchlike.

And I’m not ruling out the possibility that some adults can change from gay to straight. It won’t upset my worldview if it proves false, but I may have closed my book prematurely.

Metaphors of the Atonement.

Father Stephen Freeman, whose thought and spirit I greatly appreciate, has this evening posted on Metaphors of the Atonement. I commend it to Orthodox readers especially, but it may be of interest to western Christians (Roman Catholics and Protestants) to see how their characteristic “forensic” understanding differs from the unfamiliar Orthodox view – which I have come to cherish.

This is not some arcane theological backwater, by the way. The differing views of Christ’s atonement and “descent into hades” are quite fundamental differences that ramify extensively through the churches – and individual Christians – who hold them — not just in express doctrinal propositions, but in how the two sides of the Great Schism have come to perceive the world and the place of people in it.

A second difference, not touched on by Father Stephen in this post, is what Wikipedia not unreasonably calls Experience of God (Theoria) vs Scholasticism. Theoria is the Orthodox emphasis; Scholasticism (a term of art, not to be confused with intelligence or intellectual bent) was a post-schism development largely of Thomas Aquinas and his fellow schoolmen in the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church, and which influence Protestant thought as well.

Both are deep differences, which make Orthodoxy worth a look by folks burnt out on the western Church(es) they’ve known, but haunted by Christ.

Drinking from a firehose

I experienced yesterday three sessions of what sometimes is now referred to as “drinking from a firehose.”

The first was a meeting with somebody who had a new approach to marketing my law firm’s services. I thought I had a general understanding going into the meeting, but his company has really taken a vaguely familiar idea to a much higher level than I had imagined. It is exciting, but challenging, since it does not simply involve paying his company some money and then watching magic happen.
I met with a construction manager who has prepared a sophisticated estimate of what it will cost to build the church design that I have shared earlier on this blog. Suffice to say that it is not within our tentative budget. It is exciting, but challenging, since it does not simply involve paying his company some money and then watching magic happen. I will now become involved in a new round of meetings to see if the higher dollar figure is achievable and to try to trim costs if it is not ( or simply on general principle insofar as the construction manager has identified “fat” in the design).
I had my first “food class” with, and got my diet plan from, a weight loss Center I have signed up with to lose 72 pounds over the next 24 weeks. It is exciting, but challenging, since it does not simply involve paying this company some money and then watching magic happen. I’m going to have to become much more intentional about my eating and nutrition for the next 24 weeks. Meals “on the run” are not going to work well; if I am going to eat on the run, is going to be something that I had been meticulously planned in advance.

The point of all this is that I’m going to be striving to reduce the frequency with which I blog. I haven’t been at this for very long, and it really is great fun, but proper priorities say that it’s less important than some other things. ( If you read my introduction, you’ll see that I never anticipated blogging as often as I have been anyway.) My early evenings are going to need to be for exercise, not catching up on e-mail and the day’s blogs, so those tasks are going to get pushed off into the later evening, leaving less time to write my own content or even to forward good stuff.

I don’t expect to shut this down or to stop blogging entirely (I have known people who stopped blogging for Lent, for instance). And I hope to be back strong in a while.

Replacing Justice Stevens

The world of punditry is full of opinions about filling the seat of Justice John Paul Stevens upon his long-overdue retirement this summer, so important has become the Supreme Court to our polity.

Doug Masson, perhaps half-jokingly, defended what I’d call a moderately activist judiciary. It’s moderate because the activism Doug advocated involved pulling legislative chestnuts out of the fire more than inventing new constitutional “rights”:

What occurred to me only later is what immense responsibility this would place on legislators if they were actually forced to deal with nothing but strict constructionist judges. They’d have to think through the full implications of what they wrote into law without being able to trust that judges would be, well, judicious in how the law was applied …

I’ve read enough legislation and draft legislation in my time to shudder a bit at the thought of judges applying the language absolutely in all situations unless the text specifically instructs them not to regardless of whether doing so makes sense or seems remotely just. That would really up the pressure on legislators to craft legislation meticulously, being sure to describe every caveat and exception.

I agree completely with Doug that lots of legislation is drafted shoddily, but I think that’s partly a consequence of knowing that the Court’s will bail them out.

I’d love to see our legislatures become something other than the Branch of Grand-and-Voter Pleasing Platitudes. Courts legitimately resolve ambiguities in positive law (i.e., legislative enactments), but a law can be unambiguously stupid. Unless there’s no rational purpose to it, judges should enforce it with perhaps a rebuke thrown in for the legislature (e.g., “What in heaven’s name they were thinking when they wrote this is beyond me, but ….”)

I am particularly appalled at the increasingly common disregard of legislators – at all levels, including County Commissioners – to shrug off their oath to uphold the Constitution by saying, in effect, that “constitutionality is for the courts to decide; I think this law will please my constiuents, so to hell with my oath.” (Okay, I exaggerate, but only a little.)

Adam Liptak at the New York Time is one of many noting that Stevens is, formally, the last Protestant on the Supreme Court:

His retirement, which was announced on Friday, makes possible something that would have been unimaginable a generation or two ago — a court without a single member of the nation’s majority religion.

I cannot recall what Protestant allegiance Stevens ever claimed, but were it not so implausible, I’d suspect he was a soul-competency Baptist. As I wrote quoted soon after his announcement:

[I]n four different places in an opinion barely five paragraphs long, Justice Stevens used the word “indoctrination” as a synonym for religious education. Stevens asserted that the voucher program was being used to pay for “the indoctrination of thousands of grammar school children.” He surmised that an educational emergency might provide a motivation for parents to “accept religious indoctrination [of their children] that they otherwise would have avoided.” He decried the fact that “the vast majority” of voucher recipients chose to receive “religious indoctrination at state expense.” And he depicted the voucher program as a governmental choice “to pay for religious indoctrination.”

This is not an unfair summary of Justice Stevens’ hostility to any religion that actually has doctrinal content that adherents think should be preserved and transmitted. I infer that his deprecatory use of “indoctrination” reflects the view that everyone should decide all this stuff for himself or herself – a very, very American approach that has led to countless sects, cults and semi-Christian denominations, not to mention multiply-countless unaffiliated Churches (unaffiliated means you get whatever the Pastor feels like today – kind of like following a blog, except that bloggers, taken with the appropriate grain of salt, are less likely to lead you to delusion and damnation).

See also Ann Coulter’s entertaining take on the last Protestant. (Coulter is like a 15 car pileup – I feel guilty for reading her sometimes, but it’s irresistible. She is quite smart about the law, too.)

I agree with George Will that political experience is not a prerequisite, and I always have shuddered when someone like Oren Hatch is mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee because his colleagues respect him, he could be confirmed fairly easily, and he once upon a time went to law school.

Lastly, I’d say Timothy Egan is right on the facts about Harvard and Yale being disproportionately represented on the Court, but I’d sure hate to see law school diversity become a criterion for nomination. Yeah: Michigan, Chicago, Stanford (Justices O’Connor and Rehnquist, I believe) are top-tier, and I wouldn’t expect a Justice from the top tier of one of those institutions to be appallingly stupid. But I suspect, especially from his title (“Supreme Club”) that Egan is engaged in a little populist posturing at the highly elitist New York Times.

What’s going on here? Boy Scout sex abuse case.

This Wall Street Journal story blind-sided me this morning. I was unaware of this lawsuit.

On the one hand, the Boy Scouts have been roundly vilified, and even banned from city-owned buildings in gay-friendly cities, for expelling scouts who come out. Now an Oregon jury thinks they were too lenient about pedophile scoutmasters:

The jury found the national body 60% negligent for the abuse and the local council just 15% negligent, assessing economic damages of $840,000 and $210,000, respectively.

Deliberations on punitive damages—the plaintiff’s attorneys are asking for $25 million—resume here next week.

I know the connection between homosexuality and pedophilia is disputed, and denial of any connection seems very plausible to me.

But on the theory that “we’re just like you except that we prefer the same sex,” I consult my own feelings (especially when I was a younger adult) about sexually mature adolescent girls. Hmmm. It seems to me that it would be highly imprudent to put a young straight guy in a position where he could finagle sexual access to nubile female charges.

By “just like you except …” extension, is it not imprudent to allow a gay adult male to be in charge as Scoutmaster of a bunch of sexually mature if young adolescent boys? (Note, however, that the plaintiff here was apparently 11 or 12 during the abuse, and likely pre-pubescent.) We had a local tragedy as a result of “out” gay Greg Ledbetter being put in charge of troubled adolescent boys (although he was caught later, elsewhere), and the politically correct line throughout was that the charges against him were not even plausible, but were cooked up by fanatical homophobes.

The national Boy Scout organization apparently tried to avoid such problems:

[T]he Portland case against the Boy Scouts drew national attention, in part because it was one of the very few times jurors have been allowed to review secret “perversion files” the Boy Scouts compiled against its own membership.

The national organization in the past has tried to keep those files out of court proceedings, but lost an appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court last February that would have kept confidential its files on pedophiles dating back to 1964. During the trial, attorneys for the Boy Scouts argued that the files demonstrated the lengths Boy Scouts officials have gone to police their ranks and keep suspected pedophiles away from children.

Attorneys for the defendants declined to comment, citing the coming deliberation on punitive damages. The Boy Scouts of America issued a statement on its Web site denouncing the jury’s decision.

“We are gravely disappointed,” the scouting organization said. “We believe that the allegations made against our youth protection efforts are not valid. We intend to appeal.”

I’m imputing no political agenda to the Plaintiff in this case, but is this a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma for the Scouts? How can an organization the puts adults and kids together steer between the Scylla of phobia and the Charybdis of laxity?

Greetings, Masson’s Blog followers

There’s no explanation for the traffic spike today besides Doug Masson’s kind words at his blog. Welcome to you all.

I’ll see if I can come up with something new to say, but meanwhile those of you converging from the left coasts should like “Places not worth caring about” from last night. James Howard Kunstler posits, among other things, that if we keep building places not worth caring about, we’ll soon have a Country not worth caring about – a point on which there should be ample ground between thoughtful liberals and conservatives, I’d think. We’re embodied creatures, after all, and the space we inhabit affects us powerfully.

Like a lot of young men, I once thought I’d be an architect. I quickly learned that I did not have what it took, so I thought I’d be a homebuilder. I abandoned that for different reasons – heck, it was the 60s and early 70s and everything was unsettled – and eventually landed in the disreputable profession of law, having tired of making an honest living. [Note to self: locate smiley-face icon. Or winky-face.]

Doug described me as a true conservative, which I’ll take as high praise. Religiously, I went off the scale 13 years ago, embracing Eastern Orthodox Christianity – which it’s critics fault for not changing with the times. To that, I say, “Damn straight!” That’s as conservative as it gets religiously, though you’ll find some Obama bumper stickers in our parking lot on Sunday. Religious and political conservatism are not, except for perhaps a few issues, a package deal.

Back to places worth caring about. I’m Chairman of my Church Building Committee as we plan a new building that we intend to be very much worth caring about. Here’s a few thoughts I shared along with two key renderings. [Note to self: incorporate PayPal button for friendly Church Building Fund donations.]

We’ve hired a Charleston, SC designer to lead in the design of an Orthodox temple and site to cherish for centuries. His sensibility is New Urbanist, but we’ll be building at 43N and 225 just west of Battle Ground, on 8 acres currently supporting corn or soybeans.

As important as the temple itself – which will even have real plaster walls to receive iconography in the future – is the site plan, creating a fitting sense of both invitation and separation, with a courtyard that will serve a fairly important purpose at “Orthodox Easter.” The idea is not alien to the points Kunstler is making about urban spaces in “Places not worth caring about.”

Again: welcome, visitors/newcomers.

Places not worth caring about

In James Howard Kunstler’s view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.

And argue it he does, with passion in the greatest tirade I can recall ever watching. Take 19:48 to watch it yourself and see if you can keep from laughing – and agreeing. (Oh yeah: watch it with your earbuds or after the kiddies are down for the night.)

“Suburbia – Advanced Mutation” and “What’s Really Going On Here?” look too much like the postwar excrescences in my hometown. I used to think it was my town that was the problem, but most of the stuff built since World War II – i.e., most of the stuff built in my lifetime – is not worth caring about.

Tactical shift coming in Supreme Court confirmation fight?

Since Roe v. Wade was imposed on us by the Supremes 37 years ago, there has been a pervasive “abortion distortion factor”:

The “Abortion distortion factor” is that phenomenon whereby when established rules of law encounter the abortion right, the established rule is bent to accomodate the abortion right.

(Bopp, James, in A Passion for Justice – A Pro-life Review of 1987 and a Look ahead to 1988, at page 80) That factor has been huge in most Supreme Court appointment battles since 1980 – generally couched in code words and litmus tests that fooled no observant observer.

The successor for Justice Stevens may face a significantly different constellation of questions, centering on “Obamacare” partly because that issue works to the benefit of the Republicans though so pervasive is the Abortion Distortion Factor that it won’t be entirely out of play:

Another set of questions could prove embarrassing for Democrats who have lauded Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade for creating a right to privacy that includes contraception and abortion. “How can the freedom to make such choices with your doctor be protected and not freedom to choose a hip replacement or a Caesarean section?” asks former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey in The Wall Street Journal. “Either your body is protected from government interference or it’s not.”

McCaughey also notes that in 2006 the Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Oregon ruled that the federal government couldn’t set standards for doctors to administer lethal drugs to terminally ill patients under Oregon’s death with dignity act. So does the Constitution empower the feds to regulate non-lethal drugs in contravention of other state laws?

Such questions may not persuade an Obama nominee to rule that Obamacare is unconstitutional. But they can raise politically damaging issues in a high-visibility forum at a time when Democrats would like to move beyond health care and talk about jobs and financial regulation. Stevens apparently timed his retirement to secure the confirmation of a congenial successor — but some Democrats probably wish that he had quit a year ago, when they had more Senate votes and fewer unpopular policies.

Poverty porn and Celebrity Saviors

Oh, my! I looked away from pop culture for a few unguarded decades and failed to notice that philanthropy can have unintended consequences and that noisy philanthropists may be promoting themselves.

For political leaders, who increasingly struggle to make a connection with their publics, and the media, which has an unhealthy appetite for poverty porn, the attraction of Geldof was always that he was a maverick, a doer rather than a thinker, whose quickly thought-up campaigns — from Live Aid in 1985 to Live 8 in 2005 — provided politicians with an opportunity to shoulder-rub with rock stars and look caring at the same time and gave the media yet another opportunity to publish photographs of emaciated foreigners. This is also what riled Geldof’s then small number of critics, which included me. Some of us argued that the depiction of Geldof as Africa’s “messiah” both rehabilitated the outdated idea of the White Man’s Burden and also distracted from any serious debate about the kind of massive economic development sub-Saharan Africa really needs, and how it might go about getting it.

(Note to self: add “poverty porn” and “celebrity savior” to sound bite collection. Second note to self: don’t use it to the point of cynicism.)