Same-sex marriage and freedom of association (2)

I have previously noted some philosophical reasons why we should allow marriage equality and freedom of assocation to coexist rather than allow either of them to trump the other. I now want to point out a more practical reason, namely, that by fighting against freedom of association, we are giving the 'phobes an unnecessary PR victory.

People are already pointing to antidiscrimination lawsuits against bakers and the like as evidence that we are not seeking only the right to live our own lives, but also the power to dictate others' lives. We thus feed the myth of individual liberty as a zero-sum game, i.e., one in which our gains are automatically someone else's losses. We also run the risk of looking like hypocrites for demanding freedom of association for ourselves but no one else.

More Randroid teathuglican blather about Obama. Oh, wait ....

Which freeper wingnuts do you suppose wrote the following?

Mr Obama has become a more amiable and efficient manager of the American empire. And, in the name of national security, he is laying the foundation for a frighteningly dystopian future by combining full-spectrum surveillance with full-spectrum military dominance.

* * *

Mr Obama, under whom hunger strikers are force fed and whistleblowers prosecuted with unparalleled ferocity, needs to recalibrate before he drives the final nails into the coffin of a once-proud American republic.

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick wrote that in Financial Times.

La la la, progressives can't hear you.

Progressives of my acquaintance seem convinced that drug prohibition is solely the fault of the private-prison industry and of small-government types. No amount of logic or evidence to the contrary will sway them; even the glaring contradiction inherent in blaming drug prohibition on small-government types escapes them. Once I said to one of them, "If only our elected officials would step in and do something." He not only thought that I was being serious but even expressed agreement with me.

If I didn't know better, I'd almost start to think that progressives refused to blame government for anything except not doing enough. More generally, I'd almost start to think that they deployed invincible ignorance (a/k/a the "La la la, I can't hear you" fallacy) against any logic or evidence that countered their world view. As I've said before, reality is negotiable; dogma isn't.

The straw-man apocalypse, or: How not to convince me that I'm wrong

One difficulty that I have found in arguing with progressives is that when they want to attack my position, they often do not actually attack my position, but instead set up a straw man or even a whole army of them. By "straw man," I mean the following:

The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position.

For instance, the other evening, I was informed that libertarians agree with Republican flip-flopping on health care, the "get your government hands off of my Social Security and Medicare" viewpoint, crony capitalism, the religious right's social positions, and even drug prohibition (which, in case you didn't know, is entirely the fault of the private sector and of limited-government types). Setting up straw men does not make the other side look wrong; instead, it makes the side setting them up look either ignorant or dishonest.

See also The straw atheist and the straw Christian.

Religious right or P.C. left? Quotes 45 and 46

In this series of blog posts, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read each quote and guess, before doing a Web search, whether someone in the religious right or the politically correct left said it.

45.

The reality is that humans are born male or female. At birth we don’t “assign” sex to a child arbitrarily, as the analysis of this bill implies. We recognize the child’s sex – it is a physical reality. But in the world of this bill, that reality doesn’t matter. Like Cinderella in a fantasy world, a person may choose or change his sex, saying, “I can be whatever I want to be.”

46.

What struck me in reading your document is that those who are biologically female is a simple category (persons with XX genes and genitals) but the other category is not clearly defined, it is so foggy that it could be expanded to include the class of all males on the planet (theoretically). No matter how you define the gender-trans category you run into difficulties. That’s why you have ways of defining that are highly subjective. If it’s “my gender is what I say it is” then persons with dissociative personality disorder or with multiple personalities, would be understood as changing genders more or less frequently.

Study finds positive correlation between economic freedom and tolerance toward homosexuals.

It's a common talking point among both the left and the right that economic freedom and tolerance toward LGBT people are at loggerheads. A recent study suggests otherwise.

The study, performed by two Swedish researchers (see here and here), finds,

Cross-sectional and first-difference regression analysis of up to 69 countries reveals that economic freedom is positively related to tolerance towards homosexuals, especially in the longer run....

Of course, correlation is not causation; also, the data are derived from polls and therefore could suffer from the Bradley effect. Still, the study provides counter-evidence to an anti-freedom talking point.

Today's vocabulary word: dialogue

dialogue, n. monologue: We need to have a dialogue about [pet topic].