Day: February 22, 2001

Forcing Kids to Pledge Allegiance to the State

It’s kind of amazing that the idea of forcing kids to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance keeps coming up, but it does. Virginia state SEnator Warren Barry wants to make Virginia one of 22 states that require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, even though such laws are clearly unconstitutional.

In the 1930s and 1940s an enormous controversy erupted in the United States when children who were Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to recite the Pledge. They maintained that reciting the Pledge violated a religious injunction not to worship false Gods. The anger toward the Jehovah’s Witnesses were so great there were numerous incidents of violence where believers were beaten by mobs.

In 1940 the Supreme Court originally ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses could be forced to recite the Pledge, only to reverse itself in 1943 and rule that students could opt out of the Pledge requirement for religious or philosophical reasons. Still the desire to force children to Pledge their allegiance to the state is a powerful idea that won’t die.

Barry is an ex-Marine officer who was infuriated to se children in a Virginia school goofing off and ignoring the morning recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Barry told Scripps HOward that he was so angry he wanted to send the kids to a Marine boot camp to instill the proper patriotism (quite a strange way to reinforce the Pledge’s message of “liberty and justice for all.”) Instead he introduced his bill that in his words “mandate[s] respect for the flag.”

When the Virginia Senate modified his bill to allow for religious and philosophical exemptions, he quickly withdrew it calling those who had changed his bill “pinkos.” That’s an odd statement considering that the Pledge itself was written by socialist Francis Bellamy best known, aside for the Pledge of Allegiance, for his utopian socialist novels such as Looking Backward.

Only in the United States would a conservative Republican be stridently pushing for American children to recite a statist loyalty oath written by a 19th century socialist.

Source:

Virginia state senator presses pledge requirement. Jessica Wehrman, Scripps Howard News Service, February 18, 2001.

It Takes Tolerance to Listen to a Really Bad Speech

Ugh. Being bored and sick last night, I figured what the heck — I’d tune into the end of the Grammy awards to see Eminem perform with Elton John. A lot of people I know were upset at the idea that Eminem might win the award for best album. My response to that worry was that there’s only one thing you ever have to know about the Grammy awards — these folks once awarded Milli Vanilli a Best New Artist award. ‘Nuff said.

Anyway, before Eminem performed Recording Academy President and CEO Michael Greene came out and gave a brief little sermon about how art always shocks, our parents hated Elvis, blah, blah, blah. I almost expected him to add that if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing lyrics like contemporary rap stars. Among other things, Greene said,

People are mad, and people are talking. And that’s a good thing because it’s through dialogue and debate that social discovery can occur.

Listen, music has always been the voice of rebellion — it’s a mirror of our culture, sometimes reflecting a dark and disturbing underbelly obscured from the view of most people of privilege, a militarized zone which is chronicled by the CNN of the inner city — rap and hip-hop music. We can’t edit out the art that makes us uncomfortable. That’s what our parents tried to do to Elvis, the Stones and the Beatles.

…Accept the fact that musicians, movie stars and athletes are not perfect, they make mistakes and can’t always be counted on to be role models. Art incites, entices, it awes, and angers, it takes all its various incarnations to maintain the balance, vitality and authenticity of the artistic process. Let’s not forget that sometimes it takes tolerance to teach tolerance.

What an absurd claim about art. Certainly no government official should prevent Eminem from making his music or stop Hollywood from making films in which the brains of a living human being are eaten (as is done in the movie Hannibal), but to say that essentially anything constitutes art is simply wrong.

Do we really need people like Eminem to provoke discussion? I think not. Under this sort of definition, Fred Phelps is a performance artist rather than a hateful bigot. I’m waiting for one of these Hollywood liberals to defend cross burning as artistic expression.

I think The Onion best caught the absurdity of such rhetoric with its classic story, ACLU Defends Nazis’ Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters. In a free society we shouldn’t look to the state to censor distasteful works, but neither should we expect that cultural elites will embrace as art anything that sells millions of copies simply by appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Decoding of Human Genome Unlikely to Make Creationism Go Away

Arthur Caplan claims that the decoding of the human genome should settle the debate over evolution vs. creationism once and for all. That, however, is exceedingly unlikely to happen.

The main problem is that Caplan seems to think there is such a thing as “scientific creationism” but every version of creationism I’ve seen is most decidedly not scientific. Which is not to say that creationism is necessarily false, but that most formulations of it are beyond the realm of science to evaluate.

Take, for example, the critic of evolution Philip Johnson who is quoted by Focus on the Family as saying the evidence is completely against natural selection. In fact the creationists quoted by FOF consider the fact that primates, rats and humans share common genes to be proof of special creation rather than evolution from common ancestors.

But to return to Johnson’s views, in his book Darwin on Trial Johnson argues that the problem at the core of evolution is the widespread acceptance among scientists of what Johnson calls “doctrinaire naturalism.” Johnson essentially argues that scientists simply leave God out of the universe by definition by assuming that any given observed phenomenon occurs through naturalistic processes.

Take something as important as the orbits that planets take around the Sun. Prior to Isaac Newton there were lots of speculations on what caused planets to maintain their orbits including a theist answer — God intervened to make sure planets maintained their orbit and didn’t crash into each other. Newton and other scientists, however, looked for a completely naturalistic cause and Newton was the first person to prove that elliptical orbits of planetary objects was explained by the inverse square law of gravitation.

Johnson essentially argues that by constantly looking for only naturalistic explanations for phenomenon such as the orbit of planets, scientists write God out of the picture without giving him a chance. This is to some extent true, but it’s hard to imagine how to create a theistic science that would involve God unpredictably intervening in the universe. In fact Johnson retreats at this point and has yet to give an adequate explanation of what he would put in place of naturalistic explanations.

The decoding of the human genome will settle nothing as far as the creationism debate goes since it merely adds the longstanding accumulated evidence of the similar genetic composition of a wide variety of species. Evidence which has already been rejected by creationists as proof of natural selection.

Deja Users Whine Over Google Acquisition

Many years ago, Deja News began archiving all Usenet feeds and making its archive publicly available. Back when Deja first started there was a lot of hype about how valuable owning a complete archive of Usenet would be. In fact Deja was just one of several companies who were talking about building a business on top of Usenet.

To my knowledge Deja never came close to being profitable even though it tried every idea under the sun to turn a profit (they certainly deserve an A for effort). It looked like Deja was going to go under and take their Usenet database with them, when Google announced they were purchasing the Usenet database.

That sounded like a perfect arrangement to me. Unfortunately, a lot of Deja users are whining because Google took part of the Deja archive offline for awhile to better integrate the Usenet archive with Google’s other services. A typical comment is from Deja user Frank Davies,

I used Deja three or more times a day. I’m enraged that it has been taken from me. It’s as if a private firm bought and then closed down all of Manhattan’s public libraries for a few months simply because they wanted to rearrange the bookshelves.

Give me a break. As someone on Slashdot added, maybe he should sue and demand his money back!

Since all Usenet posts are available publicly, there is nothing stopping anyone who wants to create their own searchable archive from doing so, and anybody paying attention would have seen the writing on the wall months ago that Deja’s archive was in serious trouble. For these people to whine that Deja and/or Google owes them something — especially the source code Deja uses for searching Usenet — is ludicrous.

Davies claims that, “We simply cannot lose access to the collected wisdom that is contained in Usenet. It’s an important piece of history that must be preserved.” Well, okay, lets see him put up the money needed to maintain such an archive. The bottom line is that doing so is simply not cheap and rather than blasting Google for coming to Deja’s rescue, they should be glad that somebody’s willing to take a risk of putting up real money for the archive.

BBC Profiles An Opponent of Female Genital Mutilation

The BBC recently ran a profile of Amna Badri, a campaigner against female genital mutilation who herself was a victim of the practice at the age of six in Sudan.

Badri describes her own experience when she and her sister, then only five, were circumcised. Badri and her sister underwent the mildest form of female circumcision in which a part of the clitoris is removed. She describes how she and her sister were teased by other girls who had undergone what is called phoronic circumcision — the clitoris is completely removed and the outer lips of the vagina are sown shut so that only a small area for urination and menstruation is left open.

Badri told the BBC that friends who underwent phoronic circumcision experienced many health problems in later years, as can be imagined, but that for the most part they still supported the procedure,

They had complications starting from when they started their periods. They had a lot of pain because the blood can’t easily get out, also a lot of them had continual abscesses. The most complicated situation is childbirth because they have to be cut open and then they insist on being re-circumcised, stitched up again.

Badri left Sudan to become a political refugee, with her family, in Great Britain in 1997. The BBC reports that she now works with organizations to help women who have been circumcised take advantage of health services, as well as efforts to convince women in Great Britain — where FGM is illegal — not to take their young daughters back to Sudan for the procedure.

Source:

Circumcision: One woman’s story. Cindi John, The BBC, February 18, 2001.