This is a speech given by Ronald Reagan in 1948 in support of President Truman and of rising Democratic star Hubert Humphrey, who was running for the Senate against incumbent Republican Joseph Ball in Minnesota. Humphrey was a strong supporter of labor unions and of America's growing civil rights movement. Reagan at the time was President of a union himself, the Screen Actors Guild.
If I didn't know this was Reagan, I'd never believe it. Here's an overview of things Reagan says in the speech.
- He criticizes corporations for increasing profits while they let wages stagnate.
- He laments that economic concerns have forced retirees to return to work.
- He condemns Big Oil for price gouging and profiteering. He specifically criticizes Standard Oil. You know it as Exxon. Wow, nothing changes.
- He is critical of the fact that free markets have failed to bring down high prices for consumer goods.
- He condemns the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Taft-Hartley is the landmark legislation that dramatically restricts the activities of unions.
- He condemns the Republican Party for failing to adequately support social security.
- He demands government support for low-income housing.
- He condemns tax breaks for the wealthy.
- He is critical of the curtailment of Federal school lunch programs.
I have always heard that as a young man Reagan had supported FDR and the New Deal, but I thought he had already turned to the dark side by the late 40's. Imagine what a great force of good he might have become if he'd stayed a liberal when he embarked on his political career a few years later. An articulate, charismatic spokesman for labor rights, social security, progressive taxation, affordable housing. Imagine what could have been.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Deconstruction Dobson Part II: Answering more Arguments Against Gay Marriage
Ok, let's polish off the balance of Dr. James Dobson's Eleven Arguments Against Gay Marriage.
2. Children will suffer most.
Here Dobson is just making a bunch of presumptions based on his own bigotry. First, that married same-sex partners will not be monogamous (unlike all hetero couples, right?). Second, that hetero parents are guaranteed to be better parents.
It's a little hard to tell exactly what Dobson is arguing in this part of Eleven Arguments, but I guess the whole point goes back to his belief that gay marriage is a harbinger of a "polyamorous" future. Dobson claims a lot of expertise regarding the conclusions of "social scientists" but doesn't tell us what scientists he's talking about. Presumably, scientists who quote the Old Testament a lot.
3. Public schools in every state will embrace homosexuality.
"With the legalization of homosexual marriage, every public school in the nation will be required to teach this perversion as the moral equivalent of traditional marriage between a man and a woman. Textbooks, even in conservative regions, will have to depict man/man and woman/woman relationships, and stories written for children as young as elementary school, or even kindergarten, will have to give equal space and emphasis to homosexuals. How can a child, fresh out of toddlerhood, comprehend the meaning of adult sexuality?"
This one is totally nonsensical. Dobson worries that because of gay marriage, kindergartners will be taught about adult sexuality. If that's true, wouldn't they already be learning about adult sexuality, since we already have heterosexual marriage? I think what Dobson means to say is that by keeping gay marriage illegal, we can keep young people from finding out about the existence of non-heterosexual relationships. Where does this man live? In a cave in an Amish village? He also worries that public schools will lose the ability to teach that homosexuality is immoral and perverted. Again, what century does this man live in? Public schools don't currently teach that homosexuality is immoral and perverted. If they did, they'd be sued into the ground, and rightly so.
4. Adoption laws will be instantly obsolete.
This is probably the closest Dobson ever comes to saying something that's actually true. If gay marriage becomes legal, laws prohibiting gay couples from adopting will have to change. But since he doesn't actually cite any research that indicates that children placed with gay couples will be worse off than children placed with hetero couples or single people, he hasn't proven anything.
5. Foster-care programs will be impacted dramatically.
"Foster-care parents will be required to undergo "sensitivity training" to rid themselves of bias in favor of heterosexuality, and will have to affirm homosexuality in children and teens. Moral training, at least as it applies to sexuality, will be forbidden. Again, this is the current law in California."
I don't know what kind of sensitivity training in California Dobson is talking about, but if it existed in 2004 when California did not have gay marriage, then the argument gay marriage equals sensitivity training doesn't work.
6. The health care system will stagger and perhaps collapse.
"...millions of new dependents become eligible for coverage. Every HIV-positive patient needs only to find a partner to receive the same coverage as offered to an employee." It is estimated by some analysts that an initial threefold increase in premiums can be anticipated; even with that, it may not be profitable for companies to stay in business."
7. Social Security will be severely stressed.
"Again, with millions of new eligible dependents, what will happen to the Social Security system that is already facing bankruptcy? If it does collapse, what will that mean for elderly people who must rely totally on that meager support?"
In these two arguments, Dobson is worried about same-sex partners obtaining their partners' health care coverage and social security survival benefits. Apparently, he's forgotten that married people tend to live longer, healthier lives than unmarried people, and thus spend more years contributing to their health plans and to the social security system before they start placing great demands on benefits and the entitlement system. And thanks Mr. Dobson, for the suggestion that people with HIV don't deserve health care coverage. You're quite the Christian.
8. Religious freedom will almost certainly be jeopardized.
"Canada is leading the way on this revolutionary path...A man who owned a printing press in Canada was fined $3,400 for refusing to print stationary for a homosexual activist organization."
Canada's curtailment of free speech has gone too far, I agree with that. But to argue that the legalization of gay marriage will in the U.S. will lead to some total transformation of the First Amendment is just a lot of fear mongering. And as for his outrage over a Canadian company running into legal trouble over discrimination, I've got news for Dobson: that kind of discrimination is already illegal in the U.S. Has he ever heard of the Civil Rights Act? Maybe I'd better not ask that.
9. Other nations are watching our march toward homosexual marriage and will follow our lead.
"Marriage among homosexuals will spread throughout the world, just as pornography did after the Nixon Commission declared obscene material “beneficial” to mankind."
Time has already proven Dobson wrong on this one. Canada and Spain enacted gay marriage not long after Eleven Arguments was written, and the institution is doing just fine in both countries. As for equating the legalization of gay marriage with the legalization of pornography, do I really have to dignify that with a response?
10. The gospel of Jesus Christ will be severely curtailed.
Since Christ never condemned homosexuality or same-sex marriage, I'd say this argument is a non-starter.
11. The culture war will be over, and the world may soon become "as it was in the days of Noah" (Matthew 24:37).
The culture war will be over? Don't be silly! What about conservatives' hatred of immigrants? What about the ongoing battle to keep women from controlling their own bodies? To keep the sick from using marijuana? To destroy separation of church and state? To abolish all gun laws? To end public support for the arts?
Mr. Dobson, the culture war is just beginning. And I'll be fighting to make sure you lose.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Deconstruction Dobson: Answering the Argument Against Gay Marriage, Part I
Gay, bisexual and transgender Americans are fighting for the right to marry the partners of their choice and to enjoy all the benefits of wedded bliss. A lot of other Americans are adamantly opposed to gay marriage becoming legal in the United States. Since I support gay marriage, I'm naturally curious as to what those who are against it are saying. What exactly, I'm inclined to ask, are the arguments against gay marriage? Are the people trying who are trying to stop gay marriage making a rational, well-articulated argument in the public forum, one that is likely to convince a lot of people that they are correct?
For answers to these questions, I have decided to review Dr. James Dobson's Eleven Arguments Against Gay Marriage. This article, written in 2004, is a distillation of Dobson's book Marriage Under Fire which was published that same year. Dobson is the Chairman of the evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family, and he claims to have an audience exceeding 200 million for daily radio show. As arguments against gay marriage go, I guess this is the big one.
So, does Dobson make good arguments against gay marriage? No. He repeatedly fails to provide evidence to support his conclusions. The points of "evidence" he does introduce as premises to his arguments are factually inaccurate, contain logical fallacies, are often irrelevant and cannot be defended upon inquiry. Finally, he approaches the subject of the lives of gay people with a lot of preconceived notions and bias (big surprise there) that lead him to conclusions that are clearly preordained.
I'm going to use this post to discuss only the first of Dobson's eleven arguments:
1. The legalization of homosexual marriage will quickly destroy the traditional family.
This is the most serious of Dobson's charges against gay marriage, and the one that requires the most analysis to determine if it has any validity.
Dobson begins with a very serious and sweeping charge, "We’ve already seen evidence from the Scandinavian countries that de-facto homosexual marriage destroys the real McCoy." The synopsis of Marriage Under Fire goes into greater detail on this charge, "A recent article in the Weekly Standard described how the advent of legally sanctioned gay unions in Scandinavian countries has already destroyed the institution of marriage, where half of today's children are born out of wedlock." The article Dobson is talking about, The End of Marriage in Scandinavia, was written in February of 2004 by Stanley Kurtz for the very conservative opinion magazine the Weekly Standard. Here is what Kurtz says in the article:
"Gay marriage is both an effect and a reinforcing cause of the separation of marriage and parenthood. In states like Sweden and Denmark, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were already very high, and the public favored gay marriage, gay unions were an effect of earlier changes. Once in place, gay marriage symbolically ratified the separation of marriage and parenthood. And once established, gay marriage became one of several factors contributing to further increases in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birthrates, as well as to early divorce."
Kurtz supports the idea that gay marriage reinforces the decline of traditional marriage and families by noting, "Once marriage is redefined to accommodate same-sex couples, that change cannot help but lock in and reinforce the very cultural separation between marriage and parenthood that makes gay marriage conceivable to begin with," and "Instead of encouraging a society-wide return to marriage, Scandinavian gay marriage has driven home the message that marriage itself is outdated, and that virtually any family form, including out-of-wedlock parenthood, is acceptable," and finally that "Gay marriage lessened the church's authority by splitting it into warring factions and providing the secular media with occasions to mock and expose divisions. Gay marriage also elevated the church's openly rebellious minority liberal faction to national visibility, allowing Norwegians to feel that their proclivity for unmarried parenthood, if not fully approved by the church, was at least not strongly condemned."
I have three observations about this.
1. Dobson's statements about Kurtz's research are a pack of lies. Kurtz does not at all suggest that gay unions in Scandinavian countries have destroyed the institution of marriage.
2. Kurtz's conclusion that gay unions are a contributing factor to the continuing rise of out-of-wedlock cohabitation and child-rearing is based on conjecture and presumption, and not on any evidence he actually provides.
3. An interesting counterpoint to Kurtz's conclusions was published in 2007 in none other than the Weekly Standard. In the article Defining Marriage Down . . . is no way to save it, David Blankenhorn argues that, "Neither Kurtz nor anyone else can scientifically prove that allowing gay marriage causes the institution of marriage to get weaker." Noting that while, "Support for marriage is by far the weakest in countries with same-sex marriage," he correctly points out that, "Correlation does not imply causation."
Let's move on to Dobson's second reason as to how gay marriage will destroy families: "the introduction of legalized gay marriages will lead inexorably to polygamy and other alternatives to one man/one woman unions."
Dobson's support of this argument gets pretty weird. He seems to think that the overturning of Texas' archaic sodomy laws in the case of Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 has somehow given polygamists a new weapon to support their cause. Given that Lawrence is totally irrelevant to any argument a polygamist might make in court, I don't think Dobson has to worry about it too much. Moving on, here's the heart of Dobson's contention:
"Why will gay marriage set the table for polygamy? Because there is no place to stop once that Rubicon has been crossed. Historically, the definition of marriage has rested on a foundation of tradition, legal precedent, theology and the overwhelming support of the people. After the introduction of marriage between homosexuals, however, it will be supported by nothing more substantial than the opinion of a single judge or by a black-robed panel of justices. After they have reached their dubious decisions, the family will consist of little more than someone’s interpretation of “rights.” Given that unstable legal climate, it is certain that some self-possessed judge, somewhere, will soon rule that three men or three women can marry."
There are two reasons why this argument does not hold water. First, it has always been the case that any judge anywhere may suddenly decide that laws preventing polygamy are unconstitutional. The idea that the legalization of gay marriage will create an "unstable environment" that necessarily makes it more likely that a court will rule in favor of polygamy is an unsupportable presumption. Second, Dobson's argument only makes sense if it is the case that the legal definition of marriage has in the past been absolutely stable and unchanging. In fact, marriage has changed over time. Only forty-two years ago, the state of Virginia was still attempting to prevent couples with slightly different skin colors from marrying. Further back in the past, when a woman married, she lost most or her rights before the law.
Finally, Dobson rounds out this particular indictment of the effects of the campaign for gay marriage with a stunning charge: "Most gays and lesbians do not want to marry each other. That would entangle them in all sorts of legal constraints. Who needs a lifetime commitment to one person? The intention here is to create an entirely different legal structure."
Dobson's suggestion is that the movement to legalize gay marriage is, in its entirety, a cynical and disingenuous endeavour. The suggestion is that the millions of gay couples in America now seeking to marry are actually engaged in a giant conspiracy. And apparently, it's also a secret conspiracy, because Dobson fails to provide a single example of an advocate for gay marriage admitting that his or her real agenda is anything other than obtaining the right to marry the partner of his or her choice.
Doctor Dobson repeatedly reminds us that he and his followers do not wish to be seen as "hate-mongers and bigots." In that case I feel sorry for them, because hate-mongers and bigots is what they are.
For answers to these questions, I have decided to review Dr. James Dobson's Eleven Arguments Against Gay Marriage. This article, written in 2004, is a distillation of Dobson's book Marriage Under Fire which was published that same year. Dobson is the Chairman of the evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family, and he claims to have an audience exceeding 200 million for daily radio show. As arguments against gay marriage go, I guess this is the big one.
So, does Dobson make good arguments against gay marriage? No. He repeatedly fails to provide evidence to support his conclusions. The points of "evidence" he does introduce as premises to his arguments are factually inaccurate, contain logical fallacies, are often irrelevant and cannot be defended upon inquiry. Finally, he approaches the subject of the lives of gay people with a lot of preconceived notions and bias (big surprise there) that lead him to conclusions that are clearly preordained.
I'm going to use this post to discuss only the first of Dobson's eleven arguments:
1. The legalization of homosexual marriage will quickly destroy the traditional family.
This is the most serious of Dobson's charges against gay marriage, and the one that requires the most analysis to determine if it has any validity.
Dobson begins with a very serious and sweeping charge, "We’ve already seen evidence from the Scandinavian countries that de-facto homosexual marriage destroys the real McCoy." The synopsis of Marriage Under Fire goes into greater detail on this charge, "A recent article in the Weekly Standard described how the advent of legally sanctioned gay unions in Scandinavian countries has already destroyed the institution of marriage, where half of today's children are born out of wedlock." The article Dobson is talking about, The End of Marriage in Scandinavia, was written in February of 2004 by Stanley Kurtz for the very conservative opinion magazine the Weekly Standard. Here is what Kurtz says in the article:
"Gay marriage is both an effect and a reinforcing cause of the separation of marriage and parenthood. In states like Sweden and Denmark, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were already very high, and the public favored gay marriage, gay unions were an effect of earlier changes. Once in place, gay marriage symbolically ratified the separation of marriage and parenthood. And once established, gay marriage became one of several factors contributing to further increases in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birthrates, as well as to early divorce."
Kurtz supports the idea that gay marriage reinforces the decline of traditional marriage and families by noting, "Once marriage is redefined to accommodate same-sex couples, that change cannot help but lock in and reinforce the very cultural separation between marriage and parenthood that makes gay marriage conceivable to begin with," and "Instead of encouraging a society-wide return to marriage, Scandinavian gay marriage has driven home the message that marriage itself is outdated, and that virtually any family form, including out-of-wedlock parenthood, is acceptable," and finally that "Gay marriage lessened the church's authority by splitting it into warring factions and providing the secular media with occasions to mock and expose divisions. Gay marriage also elevated the church's openly rebellious minority liberal faction to national visibility, allowing Norwegians to feel that their proclivity for unmarried parenthood, if not fully approved by the church, was at least not strongly condemned."
I have three observations about this.
1. Dobson's statements about Kurtz's research are a pack of lies. Kurtz does not at all suggest that gay unions in Scandinavian countries have destroyed the institution of marriage.
2. Kurtz's conclusion that gay unions are a contributing factor to the continuing rise of out-of-wedlock cohabitation and child-rearing is based on conjecture and presumption, and not on any evidence he actually provides.
3. An interesting counterpoint to Kurtz's conclusions was published in 2007 in none other than the Weekly Standard. In the article Defining Marriage Down . . . is no way to save it, David Blankenhorn argues that, "Neither Kurtz nor anyone else can scientifically prove that allowing gay marriage causes the institution of marriage to get weaker." Noting that while, "Support for marriage is by far the weakest in countries with same-sex marriage," he correctly points out that, "Correlation does not imply causation."
Let's move on to Dobson's second reason as to how gay marriage will destroy families: "the introduction of legalized gay marriages will lead inexorably to polygamy and other alternatives to one man/one woman unions."
Dobson's support of this argument gets pretty weird. He seems to think that the overturning of Texas' archaic sodomy laws in the case of Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 has somehow given polygamists a new weapon to support their cause. Given that Lawrence is totally irrelevant to any argument a polygamist might make in court, I don't think Dobson has to worry about it too much. Moving on, here's the heart of Dobson's contention:
"Why will gay marriage set the table for polygamy? Because there is no place to stop once that Rubicon has been crossed. Historically, the definition of marriage has rested on a foundation of tradition, legal precedent, theology and the overwhelming support of the people. After the introduction of marriage between homosexuals, however, it will be supported by nothing more substantial than the opinion of a single judge or by a black-robed panel of justices. After they have reached their dubious decisions, the family will consist of little more than someone’s interpretation of “rights.” Given that unstable legal climate, it is certain that some self-possessed judge, somewhere, will soon rule that three men or three women can marry."
There are two reasons why this argument does not hold water. First, it has always been the case that any judge anywhere may suddenly decide that laws preventing polygamy are unconstitutional. The idea that the legalization of gay marriage will create an "unstable environment" that necessarily makes it more likely that a court will rule in favor of polygamy is an unsupportable presumption. Second, Dobson's argument only makes sense if it is the case that the legal definition of marriage has in the past been absolutely stable and unchanging. In fact, marriage has changed over time. Only forty-two years ago, the state of Virginia was still attempting to prevent couples with slightly different skin colors from marrying. Further back in the past, when a woman married, she lost most or her rights before the law.
Finally, Dobson rounds out this particular indictment of the effects of the campaign for gay marriage with a stunning charge: "Most gays and lesbians do not want to marry each other. That would entangle them in all sorts of legal constraints. Who needs a lifetime commitment to one person? The intention here is to create an entirely different legal structure."
Dobson's suggestion is that the movement to legalize gay marriage is, in its entirety, a cynical and disingenuous endeavour. The suggestion is that the millions of gay couples in America now seeking to marry are actually engaged in a giant conspiracy. And apparently, it's also a secret conspiracy, because Dobson fails to provide a single example of an advocate for gay marriage admitting that his or her real agenda is anything other than obtaining the right to marry the partner of his or her choice.
Doctor Dobson repeatedly reminds us that he and his followers do not wish to be seen as "hate-mongers and bigots." In that case I feel sorry for them, because hate-mongers and bigots is what they are.
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