Martha Coakley Says Today What Needed To Be Said Thirteen Years Ago

...and that is that the Federal Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. Here, in a nutshell, are the theories advanced by Massachusetts' Attorney General:

• Federalism. The Tenth Amendment reserves the power to define marriage to the states. Therefore, the Federal government may not define marriage. If Massachusetts says a gay couple is married, they're married, and the Federal government doesn't get to say otherwise. Therefore, Congress exceeded its power when it passed DOMA.
• Equal Protection. It effects a denial of the equal protection of the laws to same-sex spouses in Massachusetts. An individual who is married in Massachusetts to an individual of the same sex does not have the ability to file a joint tax return and take advantage of the moderately favorable tax rates that an individual who is married to an opposite sex spouse in Pennsylvania could. There is no compelling or even rational reason for the government to have done this. Further, it compels states to treat same-sex spouses differently than opposite-sex spouses, even ones that recognize same-sex marriage, because same-sex spouses are treated as single people for (for instance) Medicaid benefits which are funded by the Federal government and then administered by the several states.
• Discriminatory Animus. Under the case of Romer v. Evans (1996) 517 U.S. 620, a law passed by initiative was determined to be motivated by a desire to discriminate against homosexuals, and therefore this law violated the Equal Protections Clause. A similar standard should apply to the federal government, and the Defense of Marriage Act was enacted with a legislative intent to treat homosexuals disadvantageously as compared to heterosexuals.

The strongest argument, I think, is the first. It's also the cleverest. The last argument is the weakest. It's not clear to me that Congress was motivated by a desire to disadvantage homosexuals so much as it was motivated by a desire to mollify religious conservatives when it passed DOMA. But it's the middle argument -- the one relating to Federally-funded, state-administered programs -- that gives standing, and that's kind of the critical issue in every Federal lawsuit.

Read the whole complaint, styled Massachusetts v. Sebelius, here, courtesy of LawDork.

By the way, it's not an argument to say that the Equal Protections Clause applies only to the states. The guarantee of equal protection applies to the Federal Government as part of the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process. For this proposition, I refer Readers to the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in Bolling v. Sharpe (1954) 374 U.S. 497, citing Hurd v. Hodge (1948) 334 U.S. 24: "In view of our decision that the Constitution prohibits the states from maintaining racially segregated public schools, it would be unthinkable that the same Constitution would impose a lesser duty on the Federal Government. We hold that racial segregation in the public schools of the District of Columbia is a denial of the due process of law guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution."

Local News Team Denied Action Coverage

A local TV reporter in Cleveland wanted to get coverage of an interesting local story. Only by the time the news van got there, the opportunity was gone. But no worries - the reporter and cameraman team found a solution. Of sorts. You have to see this to believe it.

Hat tip to Volokh, who got it from startup blogger Jillian.

The Force Will Not Be With Her

Big Hollywood blogger Kurt Schlichter is, I fear, a bit too fond of Sarah Palin for his own good. He wrote yesterday that her abrupt and as-yet unexplained resignation from the Governorship of Alaska may have been prompted by media criticism of her and vicious attacks on her family, but this has made her “more powerful than [her enemies] can possibly imagine.” A cute analogy, especially with the clip from Star Wars. But Schlichter’s Obi-Wan Kenobi analogy is simply not right. I know that Sarah Palin fans want to believe what Schlichter is writing turns out to be true, but wanting it doesn’t make it so.

Soon-to-be-former-Governor Palin is not stronger now than she was before and certainly will not become stronger than her liberal critics can possibly imagine in the future. She is weaker now, not stronger, than she was even a week ago. She will only become weaker once she becomes “Former Governor Palin.” In order to gain power, you need to show that you can use the power you already have effectively. No less a staunch partisan Republican political strategist than Karl Rove agreed with former Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee that her resignation is a “risky strategy” that has left him “perplexed.”

First, if she’s going to try and build a national campaign starting now, this is a very unorthodox move and consequently, she’s shooting herself in both feet. Three recent examples demonstrate that bailing out of government is a bad way to prepare for a Presidential campaign:

A) Hillary Rodham Clinton. Eight years’ worth of machinations, resume-building, maintenance and upgrades to an already-impressive political machine, and what's more, possibly the most impressive set of political alliances and presumptions of inevitability did not result in President Hillary Clinton. Senator Clinton was outdone by then-Senator Obama virtue of the fact that fundamentally, she did not have enough personal executive experience running an enterprise like a Presidential campaign. At best for Palin, she has not yet demonstrated the kind of executive skill necessary to do that. Palin fans will likely bristle at this characterization of Governor Palin, but see my explanation below examples B) and C).

Nor has she been able to convince me that she is capable of personally overseeing the kind of political machine-building that Clinton did during the Bush Administration. Maybe she wouldn't need to if she piggybacks on the "movement," which already exists and already has machinery of its own in place. That seems to be how she catapulted herself onto the stage of state politics several years ago.

B) Fred Dalton Thompson. He didn’t declare for months after the primary season opened. He assembled “virtual” machinery, recording YouTube videos from a small studio in his house. He skipped debates and continued to party like a private citizen. He didn’t network, didn’t fundraise, and took too long to put together a platform on the issues – and when he did get around to doing that, he didn’t look or sound all that different than the guys who had been out on the campaign trail for months. He didn’t win a single delegate and got only eight unelected delegates to commit to him before he released them to McCain.

An unorthodox campaign style with “new machinery” did not produce President Fred Thompson – for all the talk of the “new machinery” Obama assembled, a scandalous amount of his electoral power came from old-fashioned volunteer work, and even more old-fashioned dirty tricks like ballot-box stuffing and polling-place thuggery. What was new about Obama was that he found a new way to build the old-fashioned machinery. What was new about Fred Thompson was that his non-traditional campaign produced non-traditional results.

C) Rudolph William Lewis Giuliani. Remarkable personal charisma and six years’ worth of groundwork raising money for himself and for the political allies he sought as backers was not enough for Rudy! to find purchase in the Republican Party. Too many strange things from his past, too many bad decisions made along the campaign trail. Now, in his case, he did not reverse position on abortion, but he did promise "movement conservatives" that he would appoint "strict constructionist" judges to the Supreme Court, and as we all know, "strict constructionist" is conservative code for "Will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade," something that is so far on top of the conservatives' wish list that they seem willing to forgive nearly anything else a politician or a judge does as long as they do that.

Sarah Palin, too, has outstanding personal charisma and unlike Rudy! she is personally pro-life and does not need to cozy up to the religious right on this issue. Now, I presume that if she is quitting now to lay the groundwork for a run full-time and from a location more convenient than Juneau or Wasilla. She will do the same thing that Rudy! did from 2002 to 2008 by whoring himself out to other candidates to give speeches and lend his political support and fundraising ability to them. Palin, too, can only try to make the right friends by raising money and making campaign appearances for them in 2010. But making very strange decisions – personal, policy, and political – are a pattern that can be found in Sarah Palin’s abbreviated political history, as well. The resignation is only the culmination of a series of odd decisions she's made, from "going maverick" in the middle of the McCain campaign to letting herself get interviewed in front of a working open-air poultry slaughterhouse to demanding new elections for Senator after it seemed to her the voters of Alaska voted wrong. And this bodes very poorly for her abilities as a candidate.

As promised, here is my thesis for Sarah Palin’s unproven executive ability. Sure, Alaska has a balanced budget, but that’s because it makes so damn much money on its excise tax that a fourth-grader could balance the state’s budget. Palin's brief tenure as Governor of Alaska has been highlighted by a number of ethics investigations that found the Governor to have abused her authority but which lacked the teeth to punish her in the face of a generally-friendly Legislature -- the most high profile of which she claimed exonerated her when in fact the exact opposite was true. Also, she presided over the the creation of a natural gas pipeline that had been in the works for four years before she assumed office, vacillated on accepting Federal pork money, and the institution of helicopter wolf hunts (which may make sense if you accept the idea that wolves in Alaska needed to be culled, but it just looks bad and besides, this is hardly a towering accomplishment). She took on some corruption in her own party, which was good, but has been unable to escape the taint of corruption herself. You can find the rumors about how her really nice house got built yourself.

Second, whether there is a scandal or corruption problems with her or not, it looks like she’s stepping down because she has something she wants to hide. You could say, “She wants to protect her family from this evil media machine,” and I’d totally respect that if it were true. But if she refuses to endure the media circus, then that means that she doesn’t want to run for President (at least, in a way which would be reasonably calculated to her actually winning). The fact that it looks like she’s running out of the kitchen because she can’t stand the heat is what’s important, because perception matters more than reality. I’ve heard more than a few rumors that the scandal she is ducking has to do with her time as Mayor of Wasilla rather than as Governor of Alaska, with a deal that looks really similar to the Ted Stevens scandal.

(An aside: Palin didn’t win any points with me for sticking up for Ted Stevens, either. That’s not to say I think the prosecutors handled the case against him well, because they didn’t. Stevens is a free man now because the prosecutors overstepped the case. But to say the prosecutors screwed up the case is not the same thing as saying Stevens was innocent. The evidence strongly suggests he was on the take, and we don’t need a figure of towering, arrogant, unapologetic corruption as a leader in the GOP. We now return to the peroration of your regularly-scheduled jeremiad.)

There were people -- nearly all of them self-identified "movement conservatives" -- who wanted Dan Quayle to run for President in 1996, in 2000 and even still had a few die-hard proponents early in the 2008 cycle. Quayle’s supporters were attracted to the former Vice President for the same sort of visceral reason that they are attracted to Governor Palin now: he was an object of derision and hate by the left and they felt sympathy for him as a whipping boy who didn’t really deserve the abuse he got. This was a reaction to a choice made by the Left. Had the Left not savaged Quayle so thoroughly, the Right would have picked a different avatar.

This was, and still is, bad politics -- don't let the Left pick your candidates for you because they're going to pick the one that they think they can beat easiest. That person, right now, is Sarah Palin. Ever since her resignation, every Democrat I know has said, "I hope this means she does run for President, and I hope you guys are dumb enough to nominate her." This is the political equivalent of the double-dog dare. These Democrats say that not because they fear or despise Palin. (Well, they do despise her, but that's because she's a "gender-traitor," a woman who dares to adhere to a political point of view at variance with the "feminist" constellation of policy positions.) It's because like Republicans, they like winning. And hey're convinced they can beat her.

You may (correctly) think the Democrats are wrong-headed about (many of) their policies, and you may find them (more or less correctly) to be morally bankrupt as a political unit and as represented by their leadership. But don't let that fool you into thinking they're stoooopid.

Dan Quayle was irrelevant in 2000 and even more irrelevant in 2008, and he had the good sense to realize that. He shows up to events, speaks to the rank-and-file faithful, raises some money, and then he goes home. Dan Quayle’s past is Sarah Palin’s future.

Must Have Been Quite A Party

On the morning of July 4th, I got up as I usually do and let the dogs out to do their business. Only they both ran straight for the wall of the back yard, the one that adjoins the street. They both made a beeline for the same spot, tails wagging, and then their tails stopped wagging as they smelled something.

"Okay, what's this, now?" I thought. I didn't want them eating a dead bird or a beer can or something like that. Only it wasn't those things. It was a single shoe. A woman's chunky high-heeled shoe, made or covered with purple suede. It looked a lot like the specimen to the left.

I grabbed it from the dogs and got them back in the house. Then I kind of forgot about it because The Wife and I were having a nice morning outside. She went in to get a cup of coffee and said someone was knocking on the door and because I have less modesty about that sort of thing, she wanted me to answer it.

An attractive young lady, maybe 21 years old, was there. She was not wearing any makeup and had on casual clothes, but I got the idea that when she put some attention into her appearance, she probably turned some heads. "Excuse me. I know this sounds weird, but I think my shoe got thrown in your yard last night."

"I've got it right here. I rescued it from my dogs, they're, um, aggressive chewers. Hang on." I gave the girl her shoe back, and she was happy.

That's Why We Have Joe Biden, After All

If Steve Jobs dies any time soon, will the board of directors at Apple prop him up and carry his corpse around like Weekend at Bernie's? At this point, I think they'd have to, in order to preserve shareholder value. This is the direct result of not-good leadership by Jobs. Seems to me that if Jobs were doing a good job as a leader, Apple would be in a strong enough position to continue as a viable company in his absence. No one, not even the guy at the top, should be indispensible -- and it's the responsibility of the guy at the top to see to it that this is a reality.

Who Do They Think They Are Just Coming Here Looking For Economic Opportunity And Stealing Our Resources, Anyway?

Joe Wurzelbacher spoke at a "tea party" event over this 4th of July weekend. I thought the tea parties were to protest high taxes, high government spending, intrusive regulation of day-to-day activities, and most of all, the ever-accumulating Federal debt. But apparently I missed the part that's about immigration (and not just of the illegal variety, either):

"I believe we need to spend a little more on illegal immigrants get them the (expletive) out of our (expletive) country, and close the borders down," Wurzelbacher said. "We can do it. We’ve got the greatest military in the world and you’re telling me we can’t close our borders- that’s just ridiculous."

I think the guy in the picture to the left would agree.

Damn I Forgot David Carradine

Too many celebrity deaths in June. Of course, Michael Jackson wins the poll.

No Monopoly

The only read I get from the Dallas Morning News is that less than the 50,000 expected showed up for "America's Tea Party" on the Fourth. Missing from the coverage is any estimate for the actual number. One is left with the impression -- "only a smattering of people" -- that almost no one showed up. But I can't tell one way or the other. Proving that crappy, incomplete, and often misleading coverage is not confined to the Los Angeles Fish Wrapper.

Drool-Inducing

Indian Pasta. Not in a million years would I have thought to have done anything like this. Much less found ricotta made from goat's milk.

Homeopathy: The Drama

Whoa. That's strong stuff.

Hat tip to Science-Based Medicine.

Reverse Pareidolia

If I Volunteer To Rescue Animals, What's My Cut Of The Action?

When you Christians get raptured, you know that I won't be. I'm an atheist and I have blasphemed as set forth in Mark 3:29.* So I wonder what share of the fee I get for working for these people?


* I hereby curse and deny the existence of the Holy Spirit.

A Nation Of Lawyers

Were I to suggest that the American War of Independence was fought for legal procedure, I would clearly overstate my case. But the precipitating causes of that war were, to a very significant degree, rooted in issues of legal procedure, and in particular criminal procedure. On a day-to-day basis, laypeople are familiar with this sort of thing only in the Miranda warning they see on cop shows and in the movies. I hope that my Readers come here looking for something a little deeper than that.

Last year at this time, I broke down the Declaration, sentence by sentence, to help Readers understand what it is* really about. Today, I ask you to consider these items from the "list of grievances" portion of the Declaration of Independence -- the reasons why the colonists felt justified in rebelling against King and country -- and what they say about the kind of people those colonists were:

• [King George III] has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
• He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
• He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
• He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
• He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.
• For protecting [British soldiers], by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.
• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury.
• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.
• For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.
• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
• For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
• He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

Of matters of import and to political sovereignty, which is to say self-government, Jefferson lists a smaller number:

• [The King] has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
• For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.
• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.
• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.
• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
• He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
• He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
• He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

By noting a quantitative diminishment in the colonists' grievances against the King, I do not intend to imply a qualitative diminishment; the imposition of martial law was and remains obnoxious to notions of decency and basic civil rights under any system of government. Yet even these, in many ways, are related in a more than tangential way to the idea of the government itself being subject to law rather than the arbitrary application of the will of the sovereign.

We tend to think of the Declaration of Independence as a purely political act on the part of the Founders, and this is at best an incomplete vision of what happened. Not only a political act, the Declaration of Independence was a statement about the importance of the rule of law.

The Declaration of Independence is a powerful statement of the ideals deepest to Americans and a claim that they are so important that we Americans are willing to fight and die to preserve them. It is rightfully thought of as an inspiration to the rest of the world and to future generations of those ideals. It speaks, extensively, on what the rule of law is and how the King had violated its principles. It meditates on how laws are to be made, enforced, and executed. And it dwells on this subject more than it does any other -- more than it articulates a political theory.

When I was sworn in to the bar, the judge administering the oath distinguished between "attorneys" and "lawyers." An "attorney," he explained, is someone who acts on behalf of someone else. That day, my friends and I were becoming attorneys; we were becoming licensed by the state to act on behalf of other people in the judicial system. But it was more important, the judge said, that we understand that a "lawyer" is someone who is knowledgeable about the law, who acts as a guardian and protector of the law. He told us that he was confident we would all go forth and be good attorneys -- but our challenge was to also be good lawyers.

As I read the Declaration of Independence, it says that we are, ultimately, a nation of lawyers -- a people who have dedicated themselves to the rule of law.

Happy Independence Day.**


* Please note my deliberate use of the present tense.
** Global Readers, of course, are welcome to join America's celebration and on behalf of my fellow Americans, I hope that you too live in societies that cherish the rule of law.

Well Now That's Interesting

Gee, why do you think she's doing this?

The Third System Is Sometimes The Best

Public Defender Sarah makes an eminently reasonable observation about the prosecution of Lori Drew. The civil justice system is significantly more flexible than the criminal justice system, and for good reason.

The downside to the civil courts is that Lori Drew probably has no money and no substantial assets. While she did something that at minimum comes close to the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress, I wouldn't sue her. Not that I don't think I could win, but I don't think I could collect.

But on the criminal side of things, it seems to me that over-zealous prosecutors whose desire for some limelight to serve as nitrous oxide for their careers give themselves significant blind spots to the big picture. A prosecutor's client is not the government, it is not the victim, it is not the police, it is not the conviction. The prosecutor's client should be justice. Too often, it seems prosecutors act as though their client is the pleasure of the voters. Courts are not supposed to be democratic institutions and I remain convinced that democracy can corrupt the courts.

That's especially true when you have judges who let themselves grow afraid of public opinion. Sarah rightly takes the judge in the Lori Drew case to task -- he could and should have thrown the prosecution out at an early stage because no crime was committed. A despicable act was committed yes, but not a criminal one. There's a difference. The judge in this case is a federal judge with a lifetime appointment -- he's supposed to be insulated from that political pressure.

But that gets us away from the point -- she committed no crime and should not have been criminally prosecuted, and she's judgment proof so she can't really be gone after in the civil courts. So how can justice be meted out to Lori Drew? My answer is that she will get -- and has already got -- her punishment in the court of public opinion. When we think about justice, we often forget that shame is, or ought to be, a significant thing. There are things people are ashamed of that they shouldn't be (like having sexual desires) and things they aren't ashamed of but should be (like cheating on their taxes). Lori Drew's punishment for her despicable act should be, and is, humiliation, public opprobrium. Every time she goes to Wal-Mart and people sneer at her, that's her punishment.

Asteroids

Hat tip to Shakesville:

Universal has won a four-studio bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game "Asteroids." Matthew Lopez will write the script for the feature adaptation, which will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura.

* * *

As opposed to today's games, there is no story line or fancy world-building mythology, so the studio would be creating a plot from scratch. Universal, however, is used to that development process, as it's in the middle of doing just that for several of the Hasbro board game properties it is translating to the big screen, such as "Battleship" and "Candyland."

Yes, that "Asteroids." I'll call this the Transformers effect. You can take anything that is popular, or once was popular, with kids, and make a movie out of it, and it stands a good chance of getting green-lit, because someone will think it stands a good chance of making money. Which is why there was a "four studio bidding war" for the film rights to a thirty-year-old video game that lacked even the semblance of a story.

Why Religious People Should Stop Telling Omar Stories

I came across this story arising from near Portland, Oregon today and was moved to finally understand something I've read about and resisted in the past.

[Fifteen-month-old] Ava Worthington died March 2, 2008, after her parents and other members of the Followers of Christ tried to treat her with faith healing.

Ava's father, who goes by Brent, his middle name, described what happened:

Ava came down with what appeared to be a cold or the flu on a Tuesday. By Saturday, her breathing became labored and the family turned to its traditional faith-healing rituals, praying, fasting, anointing the body with oil, administering diluted wine and laying on of hands.

By Sunday, Brent Worthington said he thought there was "a possibility" his daughter was so sick she could die. Then, after a final session of laying on of hands at about 5 p.m., "she perked up," he said. She grabbed her bottle and "took some food."

"She was peaceful; she was rested," Worthington said.

Two hours later Ava was dead.

What's missing here? Doctors, that's what. You can imagine that one of the first questions police asked when investigating the death of this infant was, "Why didn't you take her to a doctor?" The father responded:

He said no one in his immediate family has ever been to a doctor or used prescription or over-the-counter medicine. "It's not something we believe in."

Her parents have been charged with manslaughter. It is an odd feeling indeed to feel very sorry for this couple, who lost a daughter they clearly loved, and at the same time feel so angry at them for letting this happen. But they clearly deserve the prosecution.

It took six days for this girl to die, and if you read the story in detail you'll see that they were aware of a growth in the girl's neck that obstructed her breathing -- it was a benign tumor, the autopsy demonstrated after her death, but still a problem because it made breathing difficult for an inexperienced and weak breather (as all infants are).

This shows that the parents were very aware that their daughter had serious medical problems. They paid attention to her and attempted a misguided form of assistance. But the assistance they offered was primitive, ritualistic magic. It got dressed up as religion but the form of the religion hardly matters. They could have been sticking pins in a doll, rolling dice made out of chicken bones, or mixing bat gall with boiling mercury for all I care. They should have taken her to a doctor. If they had, it is probable to the point of near-certainty that she would be alive today.

Pneumonia and blood infection are easily treatable with antibiotics and the success rate of such a treatment is phenomenally high. The success rate for prayer as a medical treatment is statistically identical to the success rate for no treatment at all. Which is no wonder -- because in reality, prayer alone is no treatment at all.

As I read this and wrote about it, I began to think about friends who reported prayer working to cure seemingly terrible diseases. I've heard these stories more than once, from people I like, people I trust, people I know would not lie, people of greater than average intelligence. The story always takes a particular form, and so it is possible for me to write an amalgam of them, describing a hypothetical patient I'll name "Omar" for storytelling purposes:

Omar was very, very sick. He had been diagnosed with Stage IV leukemia and was advancing to Stage V. That's the point where the doctors stop trying to cure you and just give you painkillers until you die. They said he only had a few weeks and he was making arrangements to put his estate in order before he passed. But in doing that, he asked for some us from the church community to gather around his hospital bed and pray with him. I'd only known Omar a little bit from church, but me and a lot of other congregants got together and came to the hospital with our pastor. We held hands and the pastor led us in a prayer. We asked God to heal Omar and to make him better, we asked to keep him with us for a while longer, and the pastor reminded us that we were praying in Jesus' name. I felt such an outpouring of love for Omar there in that room. Over the next couple of weeks, Omar began to get stronger. Eventually, he started walking again. The doctors were amazed, they had no explanation for what happened. About a month after we prayed over Omar, they couldn't find any trace of the leukemia in his blood at all, and they sent him home. Omar is alive today and it's because of the power of prayer and the miraculous intervention of Jesus.

It would defy my belief if you, good Reader, had not heard this story at least once before reading it here -- probably told to you by someone you know personally and maybe by someone whose judgment you otherwise would trust. I've been told this story at least twenty times in my life, by personal friends.

(Oh, it's also almost always cancer, by the way. It's never an amputation. Faith healing doesn't seem to work on amputees. That should be the test: what evidence would I need to see in order to start believing in God? If I saw a group of people gather and pray for an amputee, and that amputee grew back a missing limb, then yes, I'd seriously consider the possibility of divine intervention. Not an idea original to me, but it's a good enough one that I'll adopt it.)

In the past, I've discounted the stories but not made strong challenges to them. After all, the people in question derive strength, pleasure, community, and moral fortitude from their religions, so their religious activity can't be all bad. A misguided vestige from a more primitive time in history, but still serving an important social function nevertheless.

And my friends who have told me these stories aren't crazy people -- they aren't handling snakes, they aren't stockpiling weapons and building fortresses, they aren't sacrificing live animals, they aren't strapping bombs to their chests and blowing up train stations. They aren't suggesting that "Omar" was wrong or foolish to have sought conventional medical treatment. They're just saying that conventional medical treatment wasn't enough in his case; what Omar needed, in the story, was the intervention of God with the help of prayerful friends.

I want to remain friends with these people because they are good people, good friends. So the most I've done in the past is to point out that maybe we don't fully understand cancer yet, and maybe some other treatment reached a critical point and the disease went into remission right about the time of the prayer session. This invariably fails to convince the religious person -- the idea that maybe fifty treatments of drugs took several weeks to cumulate in a patient's system, and even after stopping the drug treatment the medicine that had accumulated continued to work, and that the medicine, through a mechanism not understood by modern medical science, caused such a sudden turnaround, is not nearly as sexy an idea as prayer.

These religious folks want to believe the prayer worked. Consequently, the cause-and-effect relationship seems immediate and therefore irrefutable. Selection and timing fallacies enter their thought. And the idea that the doctor doesn't know everything about cancer while still treating the patient is somehow terrifying. Another preference fallacy there -- I don't want the doctor to have limited power, therefore he doesn't, and therefore he represents everything science knows and will ever know.

Unlike God, Doctors are not omniscient, medical science is an impressive but still finite body of knowledge, and there are challenges that are yet beyond their ability to resolve. There always will be. Also unlike God, doctors and medical science are real, not just comforting fairy tales. Also unlike God, medical science can produce results, not dead fifteen-month-old babies.

What this story has moved me to understand is that my well-meaning friends -- those nice people who gather around and pray for people like "Omar" -- are enabling the crazies. Their stories of gentle, prayerful, and miraculous cures provide intellectual and moral support for the more crazy and extreme claims of magic-dressed-up-as-religion. If there weren't tens of thousands of "Omar stories" out there, there would be a lot fewer stories like the one from Portland where a deeply-religious parent eschews medical treatment entirely to resort to incantations to cure a readily-treatable disease.

By telling "Omar stories," these well-meaning, otherwise-reasonable people are implying that the decision made by these Portland parents was reasonable. After all, in this guy's personal experience, prayer and ritual had always worked in the past. He had no reason to think it wouldn't work on his daughter. But he should have been in an environment were there were people around him who would have told him that he was acting unreasonably. He should not have been in an environment were he was constantly told, again and again, that prayer alone can heal grave illnesses. This notion should never have seemed reasonable to him. And "Omar stories" make that sort of idea seem reasonable. That is the harm of telling "Omar stories," what Richard Dawkins called the "enabling" effect of moderate religion in The God Delusion.

Yes, it's possible for a religious person to use common sense and good judgment, and take their sick children to doctors. The vast majority of them do just that. They don't stop being religious when they do it, either. But here's my prediction: the rate of successful treatment for religious parents who use medical science in addition to praying for their sick children will be statistically identical to the success rate of non-religious parents who use medical treatment alone. I'll predict further: the rate of successful treatment for parents who use religion alone, and no medical science, to treat their sick children, will the statistically identical to the success rate of parents who do not treat their children at all.

Anyone want to put some money down on those predictions? Any takers?

Hat tip to Hemant Mehta.

Jenny Sanford And Rush Limbaugh Blame Gay Marriage For Husband's Infidelity

Wow. Straight out of South Carolina:

“Of course I’m not saying that Mark is gay,” [Ms.] Sanford said, “but he may as well be. The moral decay in this country has claimed another victim and this time it was my family. Our marriage was perfect until these laws started passing around the country. Clearly the slow dissolution of the sanctity of marriage in America seeped into Mark’s psyche until he no longer felt compelled to abide by our vows.”

Social conservatives were quick to show their support for the first lady’s statement.

“It’s finally happened,” said Rush Limbaugh, conservative radio personality. “America, I’ve been warning you for years that gay marriage would destroy the American family and look… there they are, a husband, wife, and four children — destroyed. When is this going to stop America? When will the liberals be satisfied? When all the marriages break up? This wasn’t Mark Sanford’s fault, this was Ted Kennedy’s fault. Sanford didn’t cheapen the value of marriage, he was victimized by the cheapening of marriage.”

IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO THE OBTUSE FOLLOWS, HIGHLIGHT TO READ: It's not from The Onion but yes, the linked article is actually a deliciously deadpan parody and therefore, in its own subversive way, even funnier than the venerable Madison humor institution that consistently puts the Harvard Lampoon to shame. This is a joke, but do you doubt for even a nanosecond that there are actually people who would seriously believe this if they were told it?

Two Proposed Constitutional Amendments

While I'm very down on politics this morning, I'm not down at all on our Constitution, which I still think is a colossal monument to some of the best thinking about government that has ever been done. And one of the things that is so great about it is that the Framers did not anticipate that they were laying down rules to be set in stone for all time -- they invited future generations to consider modifying those rules to meet the needs and challenges of their time.

So I do not feel in the least bit bad about throwing out, for discussion, the above two amendments to the U.S. Constitution. I think they are good ideas. I welcome criticism, feedback, or proposed amendments. Readers, if you were in a position to vote on these ideas, would you sign off on them?

First, a proposal to modify the Presidential line of succession. Nancy Pelosi's recent public statements have convinced me that, in a worst-case scenario of both the President and Vice-President being taken out of office at the same time -- like if the bad guys drop one on the White House -- we must make absolutely sure that Speaker Pelosi does not become President Pelosi.

On a somewhat more serious note, the skill set that one needs to succeed in the House of Representatives, or any other large deliberative and legislative body, is significantly different than the skill set one needs to succeed as an executive leader. So setting the Presidential line of succession to pass through the top members of the two houses of Congress strikes me as unwise in today's world. So if the President and Vice President are "removed from office" (that is, killed at the same time) I would rather see an interrex take over for the purpose of calling a special election and letting the public pick a new President through the elective process.

Section 1:

In the event that the office of the President and the Vice President are simultaneously vacant, the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall be the Acting President. While serving as Acting President, the Speaker shall not exercise or discharge any duty in Congress. The Speaker shall then set a date for a special election for persons to fill the remaining term of President and Vice President as soon as is practicable, and unless the United States be at war with another nation that election shall be not later than thirty days after the Speaker assumes the duties of Acting President.

The special election shall proceed according to the laws as set forth by Congress and the several states for regular elections of Presidential electors, excepting only the date of election of electors. The Electors shall meet within two weeks of the conclusion of the special election, and the results of their election shall be transmitted to Congress, where the results counted, within one week thereafter. Neither the Speaker nor any person who, having previously served six or more years' time as President of the United States, shall be eligible to receive any votes of the Electoral College in the special election.

The winner of the Electoral College shall become President, and thereafter shall take the oath of office, within one week’s time of Congress counting and announcing the results of the Electoral College. Upon the newly-elected President's assumption of office, the Speaker shall no longer be Acting President and shall resume service in Congress.

The President and Vice President thus elected shall serve the balance of the remaining term of office to which the previous President had been entitled to serve. If the newly-elected President’s term of service is greater than two years in duration, the President thus elected shall be eligible to run for re-election to a single four-year term as President thereafter.

Section 2:

Within ten days of assuming the office of President by any manner other than election, the President shall then nominate a new Vice President, who shall immediately assume the office of Acting Vice President and shall become Vice President unless a majority of the Senate shall object to the nomination within thirty days of the President’s nomination.

This section shall not be operative if the President assumes office within thirty days of the date set for the election of President of the United States.

Section 2 is in there because we've had some significant periods of time in our history in which the office of Vice President has been left vacant. My objective in this proposed amendment is to not allow the Speaker of the House -- who was elected by only a fraction of the citizens of a single state and who assumed this position of Constitutional prominence by virtue of doing whatever it takes to get ahead in Congress, which seems to be bringing home public largesse to particular localities in the nation and appealing to parochial rather than national concerns -- to execute the power of the Presidency for a significant period of time.

And second, while I'm thinking about tinkering around with the mechanisms and structures of our government, let me advance, again, my proposal to streamline the process of filling judicial vacancies, and imposing long term limits on federal judges. I anticipate that this would result in a federal judiciary that is very slightly more in step with the current ebb and flow of national politics, but still an institution insulated from the rough and tumble of day-to-day political battles.

Section 1:

The President shall appoint judges to the Supreme Court and to the lesser Courts of the United States by way of transmitting a nomination to the Senate. All judges thus appointed shall be citizens of the United States at the time of their appointment and shall not have been convicted of any felony or crime of moral turpitude. Any person thus appointed who, having been admitted ten years or more to practice law pursuant to the laws of any of the several States, shall assume the office thus appointed unless a majority of the Senate transmits to the President a request to advise and consent within thirty days after the President transmits the nomination. If the Senate thus acts, the Senate shall thereafter vote to confirm or reject the nomination within ninety days of the President’s nomination by majority vote, and if the Senate fails to confirm the nomination thereafter, the nomination shall be rejected.

Section 2:

All judges appointed to the Supreme Court and to the lesser Courts of the United States shall serve a term of eighteen years. Upon completion of this term, the judge thus appointed shall not be eligible for re-nomination to the same Court thereafter for a period of five years. Excepted, any person holding judicial office at the time of the adoption of this Amendment, whose term of service shall be unaffected thereby.

Not entirely coincidentally, eighteen years is both the amount of time set by Congress for full lifetime judicial pensions to vest and something close to the average term of actual service under the present regime of lifetime appointments.

To Our Friends Up North

Happy Canada Day to our friends from the Great White North, eh! On this day in 1867, Queen Victoria gave the colonies of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia the right to form a confederation, which also split the colony of Canada into two provinces, Ontario and Quebec, and fixed Ottawa as the centre of government. Effectively, this spun Canada off as a nation independent from the United Kingdom.

Absolute political sovereignty did not come until 1982, however, with passage of the Constitution Act fully vesting political control of Canada in its own Parliament. The Queen remains the titular head of state since Canada remains a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations, but neither she nor the British Parliament exercise even a vestige of political power in Canada -- whatever political power remains in the hands of the Queen is exercised by Canada's Governor-General, who is selected by Parliament.

So enjoy your barbeques and baseball and day off work and school, Canucks. We'll be having the same sort of fun this weekend to celebrate our own independence later this week.