Texas’ gay marriage ban may have banned all marriages
By Dave Montgomery
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

AUSTIN — Texans: Are you really married?

Maybe not.

Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston lawyer and Democratic candidate for attorney general, says that a 22-word clause in a 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages erroneously endangers the legal status of all marriages in the state.

The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that “marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.” But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:

“This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

No, we’re not likely to see the dismantling of marriages across Texas, but according to Radnofsky, the clear language of Subsection B brings up legal questions about spousal rights, insurance claims, inheritance, and more. Go read the full article here.

The National Center for Science Education is refuting Comfort’s staggeringly long and misleading introduction, so I needn’t say more about it. But flipping through the book, there was one highly dishonest aspect that struck me–font size.

Comfort’s introduction is in big font and nicely spaced. You can breeze through those fifty pages, almost like reading Harry Potter. By contrast, Darwin’s text at the back is in tiny, cramped font, a real trial to get through. Gee, what part of the book do you think students are intended to read?

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, even though I am. It appears creationists like Comfort will even stoop to manipulating font sizes in their arrogant and ignorant quest to undermine knowledge.

In response, the National Center for Science Education has launched a campaign to counter the stunt: www.dontdisdarwin.com features resources, a detailed analysis of the Comfort introduction, the NCSE Safety Bookmark (for use with Comfort’s edition of Origin), and this terrific flier–which I’m glad to report was all over the Duke campus today. Help spread the truth by sharing the url and reposting the flier on your own site.

Thanks to Steve Newton, Robert Luhn, Eugenie, Josh, and all the great folks with NCSE.

Oh well, so much for that idea. If this is what DI wants, this is not what DI is going to get.

There is not much to say about Meyer’s “God of the Gaps” argument anyway, now applied to the origins of life just as it has previously been applied to the bacterial flagellum, the Cambrian explosion, and so on. Research is going on into the origins of life, but we have not yet solved the mystery. It just isn’t scientifically fruitful to invoke “intelligent design” in this context, as if it solves a problem, rather than just raising another one (who designed the super-complex designer, and so on).

However, I do want to comment on one aspect of Meyer’s book that’s really jaw-dropping–albeit not in a strictly scientific area.

Meyer is trained as a historian and philosopher of science, not a biologist. So one would think he would know what his own field has to say about the relationship between science, religion, and naturalism.

Yet on the contrary, in Signature in the Cell–and especially in Chapter 6, “The Origin of Science and the Possibility of Design”–he selectively uses historical science research to claim that modern science can still be infused with a sense of the divine. In the process, Meyer selectively ignores important developments from the 19th century and on.

As historians of science like Ronald Numbers have shown, after the Darwinian revolution, science became closely tied to methodological naturalism and a sense of fixed natural laws that are unchanging–and therefore capable of being studied in controlled experiments. In this context, appeals to miracles, divine intervention, intelligent design, and so on, were ruled out by practicing scientists, whether they were personally religious or not–for very good reason. They were seen as an inappropriate hinderance, and not based on testable data or inference. They were vague, and didn’t have any explanatory power. They might be religously satisfying, but as science, they were a cop-out.

Granted, we have to go a bit closer into what Meyer is saying, as there is a grain of truth mixed into the sands of dubiousness. In citing early modern scientists like Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and so on, Meyer rightly notes that these pioneers felt that the order in the nature that they could detect was the work of an organizing intelligence–a great clockmaker for the clockwork universe. Therefore, science itself was, in a very strong sense, inquiry into the nature of the divine.

And so Meyer asks:

How could the act of invoking something so foundational to the history of science as the idea of design now completely violate the rules of science itself, as I had repeatedly heard many scientists assert? If belief in intelligent design first inspired modern scientific investigation, how could mere openness to the design hypothesis now act as a “science stopper” and threaten to put an end to productive scientific research altogether, as some scientists feared?

Clearly, the idea of intelligent design had played a formative role in the foundation of modern science. Many great scientists had proposed specific design hypotheses. This seemed to suggest that intelligent design could function as a possible scientific hypothesis. But many contemporary scientists rejected this idea out of hand. Why?

The answer to this question is obvious, and if Meyer is a historian of science, he should know it.

In the 19th century especially–but it began even earlier–science differentiated itself from religion and decided that supernatural appeals were no longer testable or within the purview of science. Great battles were fought on this head, by the likes of John Tyndall, Thomas Henry Huxley, and many more. “The more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become,” wrote Darwin in his Autobiography.

This is why, when lightning strikes, we no longer fear it is godly punishment. Rather, we know it is electricity. This is why, if patients’ symptoms improve after they pray or are prayed for, we know it is the placebo effect. Or at least, we know that is all that science can say about the matter.

Meyer is right about how Kepler and Newton thought, but modern scientists have long since decided that they don’t work in the way Kepler, or Newton, or Paley did. Religious or otherwise, they leave claims about the supernatural out of what they do professionally, because there is no way to test such claims, or get other scientists to agree about them. For instance, you couldn’t convince an atheistic scientist, or even many Christian scientists, to accept the idea of supernatural design as a scientific, testable hypothesis. Science has left behind the supernatural for very sound methodological reasons; ID wants to bring it back.

But that just isn’t going to happen. Stronger distinctions have been built between science and religion as science advanced and professionalized, and that’s a good thing. Vast progress has been made in this way; many pointless discussions have been avoided. There is no way that ID is going to pull science  back to the 17th century, and as a historian of science, Meyer ought to know that.

folks round here got the fear of god
everybody say lawdy lawd
there’s only one thing we fear more
that’s the corps of engineers

The words seem particularly appropriate today as we learn that a federal judge has ruled that the Corps is (big surprise) responsible for the levee failures in Katrina–indeed, that the agency is guilty of “gross negligence,” “insouciance, myopia and shortsightedness”, and so forth. The Corps’ poorly maintained Mississippi River Gulf Outlet made the damage from Katrina’s storm surge worse, and the Corps knew it. It’s a sad fact, but can’t be ignored: Katrina was not simply an “act of God.” Neither was it simply an act of global warming. It was a disaster caused as much by human failures as by the workings of nature.

But at the same time, we also heard from Chomsky on politics–and this forced me to reflect (as I haven’t in some time) on just how far I am from being able to accept his radical, anti-corporate, anti-establishment positions. I do see a modicum of truth to all of them. But again and again, they’re taken so far that Chomsky loses me along the way.

At the outset, let me explain my basic politics. I’ve always been a liberal, but never a radical. I’ve written at various times for The New Republic, The American Prospect, and The Nation, spanning the spectrum of the mainline political left magazines–and I’ve also occasionally crossed over and written for Reason. Throughout, I’ve felt that I can have a valuable dialogue with readers of all of these magazines, and that all of them have serious things to say.

Especially with the New Republic crowd, but also in liberalism generally, there has been a distaste for the Chomskyite view, which runs something like this: wealthy, powerful interests systematically conspire to keep us down and themselves up. They trick us through the brainwashing of public relations and advertising into wanting their products. They financially enslave us through college loans and credit cards and an inequitable healthcare system and unfair tax structures. And they sell us unethical wars–again through what are fundamentally marketing campaigns–that only serve to preserve existing power structures.

In this view, as I understand it, there is really no major difference between Democrats and Republicans. Both parties are similarly licking the feet of the real folks in power, the rich and the corporate. In our seminar, Chomsky even criticized Obama’s historic election, writing it off as the greatest of marketing campaigns, and so likening it to corporate brainwashing triumphs like getting us to smoke cigarettes or want Macs.

With Chomsky’s position, there is always a grain of truth. But there is also, I feel, a lack of nuance.

First off, let’s talk about marketing. There is no doubt that it works, because human beings aren’t fundamentally rational, or at least not all the time. Appeals to the emotions, to desires for comfort and security and, yes, sex, really get to us. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out, and so advertising companies have increasingly perfected the art of getting us to want things we don’t need. So far, so good.

But my problem with the Chomskyite view is that I find it strangely unrealistic when confronted with these realities. The idea seems to be that we ought to liberate ourselves from all the brainwashing and cram it all back down the PR agencies’ craws. But this just isn’t going to happen. Once again, people aren’t rational, they don’t have time to fully research every choice they make in their lives, or to critically examine every mass media message they hear, and this isn’t going to change. We’ll always be susceptible to advertising. The answer, then, is to do precisely what Obama did–convey the need for real policy solutions by tying that need, emotionally, to a message of hope, change, and a better future.

I don’t see what is wrong with this. In fact, I see a vast amount that is right with this.

Or take the topic of financial inequity and debt enslavement–something which does indeed happen to our best and brightest and most idealistic young  people. You finish college, you want to change the world, and so you take a public interest oriented job. And then reality strikes. You aren’t making enough money. You can barely support a family. Before long, you start wishing you had gone to law school and gotten a corporate job where the Christmas bonuses are much bigger than your current salary.

Once again, this situation sucks–but in response to this problem of material wants, it is my experience that the radical left preaches an unrealistic, ascetic, self-denying approach that will never work for most people. To some extent, the public interest jobs are poorly paid because there just isn’t enough money; but to some extent, the left actually likes it that way. It is seen as a mark of virtue to live on almost nothing, working for a PIRG right out of college, courtesy of Ralph Nader. But it is ridiculous to expect that our best minds and greatest talents will consent to carry on in this way throughout their lives like good soldiers, driven by ardor for a cause and continually ready to dutifully clash with the corporate lobbyists who earn three to five to ten times more money annually.

I have repeatedly observed, for instance, that one highly revealing aspect of the Marc Morano problem is his comfortable salary. On our side of the climate debate, philanthropists and universities do not create counter-Moranos who can match him not only in the battlefield of ideas, but in the competition  to earn a good livelihood. And it isn’t merely that we don’t have as much money on our side of the fence as the corporations do. That may be true, but the fact remains that there is tons of money in foundations and universities, which sport multi-billion dollar endowments or government and state funding. The problem is, we rarely spend that money in the way that one would do if one actually wanted to win in the battle of ideas. The corporate folks play to win, and that’s why they usually do. The idealists and intellectuals divide their forces, bicker, play to lose, and then exult in the virtue of their cause and the rightness of their ideas even as they fail to make them successful or a reality.

Or at least, such is my experience.

Finally–and last but not least–let’s talk about the “Washington establishment.” I’ve been there. I’ve been a journalist in DC, and I watched how the mainstream left and right alike fell for the Iraq war. I am ashamed to say that I was initially one of those dupes, unfortunately believing along with everyone else the “WMD” lie–although I later I sought to make up for it with it this 2004 Columbia Journalism Review article (unfortunately no longer online) which took to task the editorial pages of our five biggest newspapers for too often beating a drum towards war.

The point is that there is something very powerful, and very insidious, about how the “mainstream” can coalesce around a consensus that is wrong and that trivializes real Chomsky-style dissent until it is too late–especially when everybody is living in an atmosphere of fear (which we were after 9/11, the anthrax attacks, and so on).

So Chomsky is very much on to something here. But again, what is the solution? To duck out the the game and point fingers from the radical margin? Or to figure out a better way to get more voices heard–a strategy that, once again, is going to require some serious ideas marketing?

Once again, I choose the latter.

I’m really glad we have Noam Chomsky. In a genial way, he states a very strong and uncompromising position that everybody should grapple with and that, again, contains at least a partial truth. But where he doesn’t win the argument, in my view, is when he attacks the system outright, rather than showing us how to work successfully within it for change.

We are not going to junk our entire politics or our entire market system. And we are not going to turn people into fully rational creatures who see how advertisers manipulate them and how moneyed interests enslave them, and who are willing to forsake the need for a life of comfort and well-being out of idealism and devotion to a cause. We need to treat people as people, understand their foibles, and then get as much political progress out of them as we possibly can. And in this endeavor, I believe that the Obama way, rather than the Chomsky way, holds the greatest promise for improving our country and our world.

The choice of photo for the cover of this week’s Newsweek is unfortunate. When it comes to Sarah Palin, this “news” magazine has relished focusing on the irrelevant rather than the relevant. The Runner’s World magazine one-page profile for which this photo was taken was all about health and fitness — a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to this nation. The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin. The media will do anything to draw attention — even if out of context.

I am extremely disappointed in Newsweek for pulling a fraternity-prank-like stunt. Yes, I strongly disagree with Palin’s political views about almost everything, but that does not make their decision acceptable. Choosing an out-of-context image is not only dubious, but a manipulative move, unworthy of the magazine. Misrepresentation may indeed sell well, but it comes at the cost of integrity.

In the broader context, I am sick of this sexist nonsense. How are we to encourage more women to consider a career in politics when the media casts every female as a ‘pin-up’ or ‘bitch’ with no middle ground? As I’ve written in the past, while candidates should never be chosen based on a number of X chromosomes, it would benefit everyone if women became more involved in the decision-making process given we represent about 50% of the population. The way Clinton and Palin were treated in 2008 made Washington seem like a boys club. I often wondered how many girls might be completely turned off to politics by watching the unrelenting onslaught of ogling, sexy photo-shopping, and worse that ensued from across the aisle. And so, with many miles to go toward achieving an equal voice in America and around the world, Newsweek’s latest faux pas sets us back.