Antidiscrimination laws exist not only to remedy situations in which such a significant disadvantage manifests, must also to prevent matters from getting to that point in the first place.
As for the discount -- favorable treament of A means unfavorable treatment of B. While TVD objects to bringing race into the discussion, I find that it focuses the issue rather clearly. "White folks get $20 off" is not something most people ought to feel comfortable defending. Why should "Christians get $20 off" be any different?
Not unconstitutional. Unlawful, yes, but the constitution only limits the government.
It would be unconstitutional if the Department of Motor Vehicles offered cheaper vehicle registration fees to women, or if Bible-quotin' Christians got half off their traffic tickets.
Those are two different points, but they do dovetail into one another, as the Heart of Atlanta Motel case illustrates.
If you're good with a single private shopkeeper refusing to serve Blacks, or Catholics, or gays, or women, then that's your position and I can only ask that you consider the sort of society that the aggregate of that behavior would produce, particularly from the perspective of the person bearing the brunt of that policy. If you say that you're willing to personally accept being shunned by functionally every private business around, on the basis of some arbitrary reason, well, that's your position. I frankly doubt you really would, but gratefully, chances are very slim that you'd ever have to put that ideology to the test.
And you're content to leave it that way? Really? If you were on the receiving end of that treatment, you'd shrug your shoulders and move on to some other town? What's your plan going to be when that other town is just like the first one? And the third and fourth and fifth and sixth towns are, too?
I don't think anyone would accept the mantle of pariah gladly, nor should we ask people to bear such an onus based on immutable personal characteristics.
Discrimination against Christians is and ought to be just as objectionable as discrimination against non-Christians.
Discrimination in favor of, say, atheists, is and ought to be just as objectionable as discrimination in favor of Christians.
If we're going to take antidiscrimination laws seriously, they should be interpreted and enforced evenhandedly. The law has identified particular characteristics of people and prohibited discrimination on the basis of those characteristics. Religion is one of those characteristics.
But discrimination on other grounds is not reached by antidiscrimination law. The food truck you're describing sounds like it's designed to encourage people to follow the twitter feed -- in other words, it's advertising, pure and simple; an encouragement for customers to continue buying from the truck. The "inside connection" for the inspection sounds fishy and quasi-legal at best, but it's not something that antidiscrimination law would reach.
The objection seems to be aimed at having antidiscrimination laws at all, and those laws embrace race as well as religion.
If you want to argue that the civil rights laws should enforce antidiscrimination on the grounds of race but not on the grounds of religion, that would mean that you've no objection to the government preventing a restaraunt from refusing service to people with dark skin, but you do have a problem with the government prohibiting the same restaraunt from refusing to serve Catholics. Do I understand you correctly?
For purposes of this discussion, it doesn't seem to much matter whether we're talking about the state or the Federal government. Or does it?
I'm seeing a lot of libertarian objections to civil rights laws here. They seem to be taking two tacks.
One is "The civil rights laws are coercive!" So what? A certain level of coercion by the state is necessary for an economy to function. At minimum, there must be courts and police to enforce contracts, and those have to be paid for through taxes. The argument that this is more coercive than is necessary for an economy to function is not one I see being made here.
The second argument is somewhere between "This kind of discrimination is just fine" and "All kinds of discrimination are just fine," presumably because the market will weed this out if it's not what people really want. That's not how markets behave when unregulated; how they really behave is eventually members of the majority group get huge economic advantages over the minority groups. The argument also assumes that people generally have plentiful realistic options if they dislike a particular merchant's discrimination. Maybe that's the case with oil changes in Plano, Texas in 2011 but one of the reasons why that is the case is that the civil rights act crafted a commercial envirionment in which that was so. Turn the clock back in time 60 years, and a different form of arbitrary discrimination, race, would have been in play. A black man in 1951 might not have been able to get an oil change in Plano Texas at all -- or there might have only been one mechanic in town willing to work for a black customer, who charged a premium for his services as a result of having an effective monopoly. Maybe that doesn't happen every time there are no antidiscrimination laws, but it is a reasonably foreseeable result of their removal.
Finally, there seems to be a concern about the Federal government filing criminal cases here. The typical method by which antidiscrimination laws are enforced is private, civil lawsuits. No one goes to prison. Potentially, courts issue injunctions. More often, lawyers litigate for a while and money changes hands before there's ever a verdict. The power of the Federal government that is invoked is judicial, not executive. Maybe that's still a subject of objection for the libertarian purists, but do at least be clear about what's going on.
It's easy to domesticate this sort of discrimination because each individual act is not particularly weighty and as a general rule, we look at the grounds for discrimination in this case (personal religious belief) as something we like and want to protect. That's why this is a particularly insidious case -- the discrimination here is nicely-dressed.
So what? You can only be prosecuted for murder if you get caught. Even then, you might get off on a technicality. That doesn't mean it's okay to murder someone.
So too you can only be sued for discrimination if you get caught. Even then you might prevail for hundreds of reasons unrelated to the merits of the case at trial. But that doesn't mean it's okay to discriminate.
Gonna have to disagree with you here. Let's make the terms of the transaction just a bit more clear:
OIL CHANGE:
BIBLE-QUOTIN' CHRISTIANS PAY ONLY $19.99!
ALL OTHERS, $39.99.
That doesn't look like proselytizing to me. It's disparate treatment based on a suspect class. Violates Title VII. Since he can proselytize in other reasonable ways, does not violate Free Exercise or Free Speech Clauses.
Reciting John 3:16 isn’t like reciting the “There is no god but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet” three times. There isn’t a hook attached, and people from other religions won’t think they’re going to hell for reciting it (except perhaps for any Baptists who recite it in one of those new-fangled translations instead of the original King James version).
I don't understand this argument at all. A Muslim would not find even an insincere recital of John 3:16 to be "without a hook" because to the Muslim, the myth of Jesus' resurrection is heresy just as much as an acknowledgement of Muhammed's status as the last and greatest prophet is heresy to a Christian.
it appears the price of the oil change sans discount is reasonable, i.e., not punitive to those who do not wish to cite the Bible verse. So where’s the offense, other than to one’s personal principle that people should shut up about their religion?
One can discriminate by way of bestowing preferential treatment to a favored group just as effectively as one can discriminate by way of dispensing negative treatment to a disfavored group.
To clarify: I'm not arguing about the Equal Protection Clause here. The Equal Protection Clause applies only to governmental entities, not to private businesses. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (as amended) does apply to private businesses. This is a law passed by Congress, not part of the Constitution.
So TVD raises, at least indirectly, the question of whether applying Title VII in this case would interfere with Mr. Whittington's Free Exercise rights under the First Amendment. A very good question.
But, if we apply the laws that way, we permit the unequal commercial treatment of people in the public based on religion, and eventually we will see pervasive economic differentials in private transactions, like this:
CHEESEBURGER....price for Christians, $3.99.
CHEESEBURGER....not available for Jews or Hindus.
CHEESEBURGER....price for Buddhists, $4.59.
CHEESEBURGER....price for Agnostics, $4.99.
CHEESEBURGER....price for Atheists, $5.99.
ADD BACON...$.50 extra (except for Muslims)
If that were the way things were at every business establishment, everywhere, as a practical matter there would be substantially less freedom of religion because there would be a de facto economic incentive to at least publicly adhere to (in this case) Christianity.
That's why I say enforcing Title VII in this manner promotes individual religious freedom; you have more ability to exercise your own religious choices freely when there is no economic consequence for doing so. I don't think that end result is Whittington's intent because I don't think he's really thought it through, but it is where things wind up if everyone did what he is doing.
I think we're far from a failed state when the effectiveness of our military is an unquestioned given at home and abroad, and within our citizenry we have an ongoing and likely to be efficacious debate about how to use that military consistently within the rule of law.
Tokyo Rose is a good analogy, though -- the difference being one highlighed in Michael Drew's thoughtful comment above -- in WWII, we had a proper declaration of war against the Empire of Japan. Tokyo Rose was working as an agent of the Empire of Japan actively subverting the war effort and so under the law of war (which unquestionably applied given the Congressional declaration of war) was a legitimate target. Anwar Al-Awalki was not at all unlike Tokyo Rose, the difference being the modified legal background to his death at the hands of the American military and quasi-military.
Just so. If we use the intellectual and legal regime of war to address these sorts of issues, then there is not, will never, and ought not to be judicial review of decisions about who, what, where, when, or how particular targets are taken out.
But if the AUMF were a proper declaration of war it would have been titled a "declaration of war" and a specific enemy would have been identified within it. The AUMF comes close to that and we have generally assumed that it is a declaration of war or its functional equivalent.
So given that we are not in a proper war, nor properly at peace, but rather somewhere in between, we need to devise some means of dealing with appropriate checks to prevent abuse of power while still allowing that power to be effectively exercised when appropriate to do so. Schraub's article points me to thinking that neither the criminal law nor the law of war provides satisfactory means of achieving those safeguards.
Perhaps, as you suggest, some form of judicial review is the way to get there -- maybe not like the judicial review involved in getting search warrants, but rather like the wiretapping review done in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
I wrestled with that taxonomy. Since partisans from all sides of the dispute would claim that they are both moral and cautious while their counterparts are not (or more charitably, are less so), some degree of irritation with whatever terms I chose seemed inevitable, so rather than be paralyzed by seeking globally acceptable semantics, I just bit the bullet, picked the words that seemed best, and hit "publish."
There are different degrees of libertarianism, some of which are more compatible with democracy than others. You speak of anarcho-libertarianism, in which there is functionally no government at all.
I suspect that most libertarians would go along with a minimal state, to prevent and punish overt violence, and to enforce private contracts. The primary institutions of such a state would be judicial -- judges hearing disputes and marshalls enforcing the judges' orders -- rather than executive or legislative.
If pressed, many would reluctantly agree that some degree of compulsory taxation would be necessary to empower that minimal state to function effectively. They would seek strong and substantial guarantees that these would be the only things that state would do, and for a lot of them, democratic control over the institutions of that state would be the ultimate effective check on abuse of judicial power.
Ultimately, these democratic libertarians would have to rely on not only their Constitutional safeguards against the creeping expansion of the state but rather on a culture that valued at a premium the state executing the minimum possible amount of power necessary to allow civilization to exist at all. Statist candidates for the office of democratic oversight on the anti-violence and contractual-enforcement duties of the minimal judicial state would not be elected in the first place, if the culture valued preservation of the minimal state.
The thing is, I don't think in the real world, large numbers of people really subscribe to such a cultural norm.
And who burned English translations of the Bible, lest non-clergy read it and decide for themselves what it meant. And who was willing to recognize the divorce from Katherine of Aragon after all.
It's further worth looking in to what More meant when he refered to "conscience" in his motion to dismiss the criminal charges against him. More was very much a Catholic hierarchist and not an individualist as we moderns understand that word.
With that said, yes, he was very much a victim in regards to his trial and execution. Those things should be deplored and none of More's flaws and misdeeds exonerates Henry of the unnecessary judicial murder of a man who had been his friend, a pillar of the legal community, and a valuable member of Henry's government.
Where I come from, reasonable doubt is defined as follows: “It is not a mere possible doubt; because everything relating to human affairs is open to some possible or imaginary doubt. It is that state of the case which, after the entire comparison and consideration of all the evidence, leaves the minds of jurors in that condition that they cannot say they feel an abiding conviction of the truth of the charge.” Cal. Penal Code section 1096. An “abiding conviction” is one that is “settled and fixed” Hopt v. Utah (1887) 120 U.S. 430, 439 and one that is “lasting [and] permanent” People v. Brigham (1979) 25 Cal.3d 283, 290.
What is unsettling about DNA evidence is that where previously, a “settled and fixed” notion now cannot be reasonably left in its “lasting and permanent” state and therefore no longer subject to re-examination, but must instead be questioned. The recent Troy Davis case gives us a powerful, and deeply unsettling, notion of what it means when a court conflates the idea that a notion, having once been settled and fixed, and the idea that a notion is no longer subject to re-examination. Once upon a time (in ancient history, like the 1990's) jurors considered the idea of DNA evidence to be pseudo-scientific gobbledegook unworthy of serious consideration. After years of jurors watching CSI, though, its absence can severely harm a prosecution case in which guilt is seriously disputed.
More succinctly, the universe of facts that we consider “reasonable” to demand be resolved has changed as technology has advanced and the culture has evolved. This is, in a large sense, perfectly okay -- the question is what to do with cases like Troy Davis in which what was once considered “reasonable” evidence of guilt does not satisfy today's standards.
1. Parmagiano reggiano. Il re de formaggia.
2. Roquefort bleu. Mon dieu, c'est bon! (The Italian in me will find similar joy in Gorgonzola.)
3. Crema fresca. Un beso mexicano cremosa. Put it on a quesedilla sometime.
4. Very fresh pecorino. My cousin served it like pie. In Rome we got it with honey.
5. Very fresh bufala mozzarella. White, in its own water. Falls apart if you use strong language in its presence.
6. Curds, typically cheddar but sometimes swiss or jack, again in their own water, must be eaten so fresh they squeak while on the tooth.
I'm unimpressed with the drama inherent in the decision to engage in consensual sex. Maybe from a personal, emotional perspective sex is (for some, hopefully most) a dramatic, rare, and carefully-weighted decision, and from a legal perspective it is an intimate, private, personal sort of decision.
But from a public health perspective, sex is a very common behavior and public policy should be clear-eyed about that. People fcuk. All the time.
On “For God So Loveth Ye That His Servant In Plano, Texas Doth Giveth Ye An Affordable Oil Change”
Antidiscrimination laws exist not only to remedy situations in which such a significant disadvantage manifests, must also to prevent matters from getting to that point in the first place.
"
But it's not a secret phrase. It's John 3:16, a phrase deliberately selected for its particular Christian religious significance.
"
The bucks aren't as big as I'd like, wardsmith, but thanks for the compliment.
Nor does the game require all the dexterity you attribute to me. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 spells it all out rather plainly.
As for the discount -- favorable treament of A means unfavorable treatment of B. While TVD objects to bringing race into the discussion, I find that it focuses the issue rather clearly. "White folks get $20 off" is not something most people ought to feel comfortable defending. Why should "Christians get $20 off" be any different?
"
Not unconstitutional. Unlawful, yes, but the constitution only limits the government.
It would be unconstitutional if the Department of Motor Vehicles offered cheaper vehicle registration fees to women, or if Bible-quotin' Christians got half off their traffic tickets.
"
That's called a Nirvana Dog.
"
Those are two different points, but they do dovetail into one another, as the Heart of Atlanta Motel case illustrates.
If you're good with a single private shopkeeper refusing to serve Blacks, or Catholics, or gays, or women, then that's your position and I can only ask that you consider the sort of society that the aggregate of that behavior would produce, particularly from the perspective of the person bearing the brunt of that policy. If you say that you're willing to personally accept being shunned by functionally every private business around, on the basis of some arbitrary reason, well, that's your position. I frankly doubt you really would, but gratefully, chances are very slim that you'd ever have to put that ideology to the test.
"
And you're content to leave it that way? Really? If you were on the receiving end of that treatment, you'd shrug your shoulders and move on to some other town? What's your plan going to be when that other town is just like the first one? And the third and fourth and fifth and sixth towns are, too?
I don't think anyone would accept the mantle of pariah gladly, nor should we ask people to bear such an onus based on immutable personal characteristics.
"
Discrimination against Christians is and ought to be just as objectionable as discrimination against non-Christians.
Discrimination in favor of, say, atheists, is and ought to be just as objectionable as discrimination in favor of Christians.
If we're going to take antidiscrimination laws seriously, they should be interpreted and enforced evenhandedly. The law has identified particular characteristics of people and prohibited discrimination on the basis of those characteristics. Religion is one of those characteristics.
But discrimination on other grounds is not reached by antidiscrimination law. The food truck you're describing sounds like it's designed to encourage people to follow the twitter feed -- in other words, it's advertising, pure and simple; an encouragement for customers to continue buying from the truck. The "inside connection" for the inspection sounds fishy and quasi-legal at best, but it's not something that antidiscrimination law would reach.
"
The objection seems to be aimed at having antidiscrimination laws at all, and those laws embrace race as well as religion.
If you want to argue that the civil rights laws should enforce antidiscrimination on the grounds of race but not on the grounds of religion, that would mean that you've no objection to the government preventing a restaraunt from refusing service to people with dark skin, but you do have a problem with the government prohibiting the same restaraunt from refusing to serve Catholics. Do I understand you correctly?
For purposes of this discussion, it doesn't seem to much matter whether we're talking about the state or the Federal government. Or does it?
"
I'm seeing a lot of libertarian objections to civil rights laws here. They seem to be taking two tacks.
One is "The civil rights laws are coercive!" So what? A certain level of coercion by the state is necessary for an economy to function. At minimum, there must be courts and police to enforce contracts, and those have to be paid for through taxes. The argument that this is more coercive than is necessary for an economy to function is not one I see being made here.
The second argument is somewhere between "This kind of discrimination is just fine" and "All kinds of discrimination are just fine," presumably because the market will weed this out if it's not what people really want. That's not how markets behave when unregulated; how they really behave is eventually members of the majority group get huge economic advantages over the minority groups. The argument also assumes that people generally have plentiful realistic options if they dislike a particular merchant's discrimination. Maybe that's the case with oil changes in Plano, Texas in 2011 but one of the reasons why that is the case is that the civil rights act crafted a commercial envirionment in which that was so. Turn the clock back in time 60 years, and a different form of arbitrary discrimination, race, would have been in play. A black man in 1951 might not have been able to get an oil change in Plano Texas at all -- or there might have only been one mechanic in town willing to work for a black customer, who charged a premium for his services as a result of having an effective monopoly. Maybe that doesn't happen every time there are no antidiscrimination laws, but it is a reasonably foreseeable result of their removal.
Finally, there seems to be a concern about the Federal government filing criminal cases here. The typical method by which antidiscrimination laws are enforced is private, civil lawsuits. No one goes to prison. Potentially, courts issue injunctions. More often, lawyers litigate for a while and money changes hands before there's ever a verdict. The power of the Federal government that is invoked is judicial, not executive. Maybe that's still a subject of objection for the libertarian purists, but do at least be clear about what's going on.
It's easy to domesticate this sort of discrimination because each individual act is not particularly weighty and as a general rule, we look at the grounds for discrimination in this case (personal religious belief) as something we like and want to protect. That's why this is a particularly insidious case -- the discrimination here is nicely-dressed.
"
So what? You can only be prosecuted for murder if you get caught. Even then, you might get off on a technicality. That doesn't mean it's okay to murder someone.
So too you can only be sued for discrimination if you get caught. Even then you might prevail for hundreds of reasons unrelated to the merits of the case at trial. But that doesn't mean it's okay to discriminate.
"
It [Federal enforcement of Title VII] won't change what they believe, but it will change how folks act.
"
Gonna have to disagree with you here. Let's make the terms of the transaction just a bit more clear:
That doesn't look like proselytizing to me. It's disparate treatment based on a suspect class. Violates Title VII. Since he can proselytize in other reasonable ways, does not violate Free Exercise or Free Speech Clauses.
"
I don't understand this argument at all. A Muslim would not find even an insincere recital of John 3:16 to be "without a hook" because to the Muslim, the myth of Jesus' resurrection is heresy just as much as an acknowledgement of Muhammed's status as the last and greatest prophet is heresy to a Christian.
"
One can discriminate by way of bestowing preferential treatment to a favored group just as effectively as one can discriminate by way of dispensing negative treatment to a disfavored group.
"
To clarify: I'm not arguing about the Equal Protection Clause here. The Equal Protection Clause applies only to governmental entities, not to private businesses. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (as amended) does apply to private businesses. This is a law passed by Congress, not part of the Constitution.
So TVD raises, at least indirectly, the question of whether applying Title VII in this case would interfere with Mr. Whittington's Free Exercise rights under the First Amendment. A very good question.
But, if we apply the laws that way, we permit the unequal commercial treatment of people in the public based on religion, and eventually we will see pervasive economic differentials in private transactions, like this:
If that were the way things were at every business establishment, everywhere, as a practical matter there would be substantially less freedom of religion because there would be a de facto economic incentive to at least publicly adhere to (in this case) Christianity.
That's why I say enforcing Title VII in this manner promotes individual religious freedom; you have more ability to exercise your own religious choices freely when there is no economic consequence for doing so. I don't think that end result is Whittington's intent because I don't think he's really thought it through, but it is where things wind up if everyone did what he is doing.
"
Neither weight nor knowledgeability about trivia are protected classes under Title VII.
On “Anwar Al-Awalki And Analytical Ambiguities”
I think we're far from a failed state when the effectiveness of our military is an unquestioned given at home and abroad, and within our citizenry we have an ongoing and likely to be efficacious debate about how to use that military consistently within the rule of law.
Tokyo Rose is a good analogy, though -- the difference being one highlighed in Michael Drew's thoughtful comment above -- in WWII, we had a proper declaration of war against the Empire of Japan. Tokyo Rose was working as an agent of the Empire of Japan actively subverting the war effort and so under the law of war (which unquestionably applied given the Congressional declaration of war) was a legitimate target. Anwar Al-Awalki was not at all unlike Tokyo Rose, the difference being the modified legal background to his death at the hands of the American military and quasi-military.
"
Just so. If we use the intellectual and legal regime of war to address these sorts of issues, then there is not, will never, and ought not to be judicial review of decisions about who, what, where, when, or how particular targets are taken out.
But if the AUMF were a proper declaration of war it would have been titled a "declaration of war" and a specific enemy would have been identified within it. The AUMF comes close to that and we have generally assumed that it is a declaration of war or its functional equivalent.
So given that we are not in a proper war, nor properly at peace, but rather somewhere in between, we need to devise some means of dealing with appropriate checks to prevent abuse of power while still allowing that power to be effectively exercised when appropriate to do so. Schraub's article points me to thinking that neither the criminal law nor the law of war provides satisfactory means of achieving those safeguards.
Perhaps, as you suggest, some form of judicial review is the way to get there -- maybe not like the judicial review involved in getting search warrants, but rather like the wiretapping review done in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
"
I wrestled with that taxonomy. Since partisans from all sides of the dispute would claim that they are both moral and cautious while their counterparts are not (or more charitably, are less so), some degree of irritation with whatever terms I chose seemed inevitable, so rather than be paralyzed by seeking globally acceptable semantics, I just bit the bullet, picked the words that seemed best, and hit "publish."
On “The case for democracy”
There are different degrees of libertarianism, some of which are more compatible with democracy than others. You speak of anarcho-libertarianism, in which there is functionally no government at all.
I suspect that most libertarians would go along with a minimal state, to prevent and punish overt violence, and to enforce private contracts. The primary institutions of such a state would be judicial -- judges hearing disputes and marshalls enforcing the judges' orders -- rather than executive or legislative.
If pressed, many would reluctantly agree that some degree of compulsory taxation would be necessary to empower that minimal state to function effectively. They would seek strong and substantial guarantees that these would be the only things that state would do, and for a lot of them, democratic control over the institutions of that state would be the ultimate effective check on abuse of judicial power.
Ultimately, these democratic libertarians would have to rely on not only their Constitutional safeguards against the creeping expansion of the state but rather on a culture that valued at a premium the state executing the minimum possible amount of power necessary to allow civilization to exist at all. Statist candidates for the office of democratic oversight on the anti-violence and contractual-enforcement duties of the minimal judicial state would not be elected in the first place, if the culture valued preservation of the minimal state.
The thing is, I don't think in the real world, large numbers of people really subscribe to such a cultural norm.
On “A conversation for the times”
And who burned English translations of the Bible, lest non-clergy read it and decide for themselves what it meant. And who was willing to recognize the divorce from Katherine of Aragon after all.
It's further worth looking in to what More meant when he refered to "conscience" in his motion to dismiss the criminal charges against him. More was very much a Catholic hierarchist and not an individualist as we moderns understand that word.
With that said, yes, he was very much a victim in regards to his trial and execution. Those things should be deplored and none of More's flaws and misdeeds exonerates Henry of the unnecessary judicial murder of a man who had been his friend, a pillar of the legal community, and a valuable member of Henry's government.
On “Occasional Notes: Revisionism”
Where I come from, reasonable doubt is defined as follows: “It is not a mere possible doubt; because everything relating to human affairs is open to some possible or imaginary doubt. It is that state of the case which, after the entire comparison and consideration of all the evidence, leaves the minds of jurors in that condition that they cannot say they feel an abiding conviction of the truth of the charge.” Cal. Penal Code section 1096. An “abiding conviction” is one that is “settled and fixed” Hopt v. Utah (1887) 120 U.S. 430, 439 and one that is “lasting [and] permanent” People v. Brigham (1979) 25 Cal.3d 283, 290.
What is unsettling about DNA evidence is that where previously, a “settled and fixed” notion now cannot be reasonably left in its “lasting and permanent” state and therefore no longer subject to re-examination, but must instead be questioned. The recent Troy Davis case gives us a powerful, and deeply unsettling, notion of what it means when a court conflates the idea that a notion, having once been settled and fixed, and the idea that a notion is no longer subject to re-examination. Once upon a time (in ancient history, like the 1990's) jurors considered the idea of DNA evidence to be pseudo-scientific gobbledegook unworthy of serious consideration. After years of jurors watching CSI, though, its absence can severely harm a prosecution case in which guilt is seriously disputed.
More succinctly, the universe of facts that we consider “reasonable” to demand be resolved has changed as technology has advanced and the culture has evolved. This is, in a large sense, perfectly okay -- the question is what to do with cases like Troy Davis in which what was once considered “reasonable” evidence of guilt does not satisfy today's standards.
On “Celebrating Cheese Week”
1. Parmagiano reggiano. Il re de formaggia.
2. Roquefort bleu. Mon dieu, c'est bon! (The Italian in me will find similar joy in Gorgonzola.)
3. Crema fresca. Un beso mexicano cremosa. Put it on a quesedilla sometime.
4. Very fresh pecorino. My cousin served it like pie. In Rome we got it with honey.
5. Very fresh bufala mozzarella. White, in its own water. Falls apart if you use strong language in its presence.
6. Curds, typically cheddar but sometimes swiss or jack, again in their own water, must be eaten so fresh they squeak while on the tooth.
On “Bachmann, Perry and HPV”
I'm unimpressed with the drama inherent in the decision to engage in consensual sex. Maybe from a personal, emotional perspective sex is (for some, hopefully most) a dramatic, rare, and carefully-weighted decision, and from a legal perspective it is an intimate, private, personal sort of decision.
But from a public health perspective, sex is a very common behavior and public policy should be clear-eyed about that. People fcuk. All the time.