Sick Transit

Weird happenings are afoot at the Supreme Court: a 5-4 decision on a liberal/conservative split… with Scalia as the swing vote.

A man accused of drug dealing in Missouri tried to hire a lawyer from California, and the court refused the attorney permission to practice in Missouri (generally granted as a matter of routine) because of an alleged rule violation (which was later determined to be a non-issue). The man was convicted, and the Court (the four liberals plus Scalia in the majority) held that he was automatically entitled to a retrial because his right to counsel was violated, regardless of whether or not he could demonstrate that the lawyer he wanted would have been better than the one he ended up with.

I’m not sure how I feel about the merits of the case, but I do find it interesting that Scalia swung pro-defense on a rights issue that primarily affects the well-to-do. Most right-to-counsel cases are about public defenders and alleged ineffective assistance; this case involved the right to have the specific lawyer of one’s choice. While that is undoubtedly an important constitutional right, it is primarily an issue for people who can afford to be picky about their attorneys.

Howard Friedman’s blog has been a great source of material lately. Today, it’s the riders to a Scottish University’s recognition of a Wiccan student group:

At Wiccan events, participants may not utter incantations or spells that might harm others, raise spirits or to call up dark forces, or engage in ritual nudity.

Makes you wonder if the college administrators were reading Scary Go Round.

I took a class in college on ‘The Supreme Court & Freedom of Religion’ (with Dean John Sexton of NYU Law School, now President of the University). My views on church and state were more accommodationist at the time than they are now (a function of the religious beliefs I held, and perhaps also of Dean Sexton’s unabashed liberal and pro-religion bias).

However, I still have a difficult time, as I did then, with the idea that the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses are necessarily in tension. I believe that there has to be a range of ‘permissible but not required’ accommodation, within which democratic processes can operate. All too often, however, our current jurisprudence leaves us in a state where government–most often school districts–must decide between potentially violating the Establishment Clause, and potentially violating the Free Exercise or Freedom of Speech clauses.

Via Religion Clause, this case is a good example:

The class valedictorian departed from her prepared speech that had been approved by administrators and began reading from a version that contained religious and Biblical references. Administrators cut off the microphone.
…
Administrators had earlier reviewed Brittany McComb’s speech and cut out six references to God or Christ, two biblical references, and a detailed reference to Christ’s crucifixion. The high school’s policy does not permit the school to censor religious references by speakers who have been chosen “on the basis of genuinely neutral, evenhanded criteria.” However, school district lawyer Bill Hoffman said that while the regulation allows students to talk about religion, they cannot cross over into the realm of preaching or proselytizing. School officials said that permitting McComb to continue would have amounted to school sponsored proselytizing.

My first reaction was that the school’s actions were blatantly unconstitutional; they were engaging in viewpoint discrimination. And yet, the Supreme Court has held that voluntary, student-led prayer at official school events is impermissible; and understandably so, since the school is responsible for the program of an official school event. But what if the school doesn’t schedule a prayer as part of the graduation ceremonies, but the valedictorian includes a prayer in his or her address? What if the school officials know about this in advance, or perhaps even encourage it? Drawing the line is difficult.

That’s why I think the courts need to pull back. The real key to avoiding religious entanglement in schools is not trying to strip out religion–which will always provoke a backlash–but requiring strict religious neutrality. You want to have prayers before the football game? Fine. As long as you let the Muslims, Wiccans, and Atheists pray, chant, speechify, or whatever they want to do before the game as well. Nothing gets the Baptists to shut up quicker than the idea that they might have to give equal time to the Wiccans.

PZ Myers quotes a paragraph of Coulter that shocked me far more than the infamous 9/11 widows remark:

[Evolutionists are] almost always biologists—the “science” with the greatest preponderance of women. The distaff MIT “scientist” who fled the room in response to Larry Summers’s remarks was, of course, a biologist. While I’m sure there have been groundbreaking discoveries about the internal digestive system of the earthworm, biologists are barely even scientists anymore. They’re classifiers, list-makers, like librarians with their Dewey decimal system.

The level of sexist stereotyping going on here is astronomical. (Biologists = librarians = women whose mission is to be the guardians and high priestesses of great male learning.) I am no longer surprised by Coulter lashing out–without any sense of proportion or decency–at anyone who disagrees with her. But I wondered why an obviously strong and succesful woman would resort to such sexist argumentation.

Then again, Coulter makes her living by parroting the talking points of the (male-dominated) right-wing political machine. So maybe when she implies that women’s only intellectual task is to mindlessly regurgitate male doctrine, she’s not that far off from thinking about herself after all.

P.S. Read PZ’s whole post for some wonderful ripostes to Ms. Coulter.

I have to wonder whether this is faked, but it’s too funny not to post:

(Link via the Panda)

I hate to burst Glenn Reynolds’ bubble (well, not really), but the low social status of child care is nothing new. Parents who could afford it have long outsourced the care of their children to their social inferiors. Among those who cared for their own progeny, child care was generally the responsibility of women, the social inferiors of men in a patriarchal society. The main cause behind the increasing age of first parenthood, and the decreasing birth rate, is the increase in the social status and independence of women over the last forty years. (Or, given the importance of contraception to feminism, perhaps cause and effect are intermingled.)

Reynolds does have an interesting point, however, when he talks about the decreasing autonomy of children. He quotes Caitlin Flanagan:

By the time I was five, I was allowed to wander away from the house as long as I didn’t cross any big streets. I had the run of the neighborhood at six. . . . A nine-year-old could be trusted with a key; a nine-year-old knew how to work a telephone if anything went wrong.

I lived in Seville, Spain from the time I was six until I was twelve, and so my experience was closer to what you would have found in the United States a generation earlier. At seven I would walk to the bakery a couple of blocks away, to buy a loaf of bread; at nine I was allowed to walk to church (a mile away) by myself.

I don’t know if Seville was actually safer than an American suburb, or it simply had different social conventions. I think one thing that might have made it safer was the sense of community. One of my mom’s favorite anecdotes (I have no recollection of the experience) ocurred when I was six. I was walking along the street several yards ahead of her; I tripped and fell, and a woman across the street was over by me, helping me up, before my mom could even get to me.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled about how Americans are now less rooted in local communities, civic organizations, etc. People are good-hearted, and if they saw a kid alone and needing help, I’m sure they would step in and help. But it would be seen as an aberration, a failure of the parents’ responsibility; whereas in Seville, taking care of children on the street was everyone’s responsibility.

I also wonder how much of the change over the last few decades is due to greater risk-averseness and awareness of dangers. When I lived in New York, friends who had grown up in Queens spoke about freely roaming their neighborhoods as kids in the 70’s. New York in the 70’s was not a nice place. Were the kids really safer then, or are parents just more paranoid now?

It seems like an odd statement, but parenting has become more child-centric. There’s a lot more sense that children should be shielded from hardship, mischance, and unpleasantness. This has led to some wonderful improvements in parenting–the social unacceptability, not just of corporal punishment, but also of yelling and insults to children–but also a reduction in kids’ autonomy.

Ultimately, I think that greater protectiveness of children is part of the social trend towards less acceptance of violence and conflict, and a more proactive attitude towards protecting the weak; in other words, what Mark Steyn might call the ‘feminization’ of the West. Unlike Steyn, I welcome that trend. But protection and autonomy are difficult values to balance, and I don’t think we’ve found that balance in our treatment of children.

Via Religion Clause, a very interesting church/state case in Texas:

Their attorney says that the pair thought they had revealed their sins to Watermark’s pastor confidentially and that their behavior should not be made public.
…
In this case, the man refused the private interventions and said he was quitting the church, church officials said. But Watermark’s bylaws say a member “may not resign from membership in an attempt to avoid such care and correction.” Watermark’s next step would have been to send more than a dozen letters to people who know “John Doe” – half to Watermark members and half to members of other churches who know and have worked with him.

That’s when the lawsuit was filed.

“The basis of the lawsuit was the church wanted to go outside of the church and the community at large, including potentially even their employers,” said Jeff Tillotson, attorney for the man and woman.

This case is interesting both from a legal and religious perspective.

Legally, I think the question is whether the church has the right to send the letters in the first place. The plaintiff’s resignation is actually irrelevant to that question; there is no legal obligation to submit to church discipline, whether or not you are a member of the church. (Of course, the church is also free to kick you out if you don’t submit. But for this church, that’s apparently not enough.)

IANAL, but I can see two possible grounds why the letters might be illegal: libel, or invasion of privacy. Truth is a defense to libel, and the plaintiff does not seem to be denying the truth of the allegations. Invasion of privacy, OTOH, is probably a stronger claim (under grounds of public disclosure). As far as I know, however, neither claim would justify a prior restraint. (In other words, the court could punish the church after the fact, but could not prevent them from sending the letters in the first place.) Another possible complaint would be breach of fiduciary duty, but the courts have generally shied away from assigning a fiduciary duty to clergy, since it would involve defining the clergy’s responsibilities in a way which might be incompatible with church doctrine.

Religiously, the ‘Roach Motel’ aspect of this is very disturbing; as the plaintiff’s lawyer said: “The typical notion of a Dallasite is that if you don’t like a church, you can just leave, and that’s that is [sic] apparently not shared by some of these churches.”

As an ex-Jehovah’s Witness, the Pastor’s comment was particularly creepy to me:

Church officials say they are only following a process of church discipline outlined in the Gospel of Matthew and written into the church’s bylaws.

“Basically, we’re being sued because we’re seeking to love ‘John Doe’ in accordance with the principles outlined by God’s word,” said the pastor, the Rev. Todd Wagner.

The notion that ‘love’ means imposing your morality on someone who disagrees with it is a disgusting and dehumanizing concept. While this instance may not be as severe as the Witnesses’ practice of “disfellowshipping“, they’re both instance of the same controlling, self-righteous mindset.

Joshua Bloch of Google Research writes an interesting post about how a subtle bug lay latent in binary search for decades, ready to be discovered as data-processing grew ever larger:

Specifically, it fails if the sum of low and high is greater than the maximum positive int value (2³¹ - 1). … This bug can manifest itself for arrays whose length (in elements) is 2³⁰ or greater (roughly a billion elements). This was inconceivable back in the ’80s, when Programming Pearls was written, but it is common these days at Google and other places.

For the non-programmers out there, binary search is one of the most basic of algorithms, learned by every first-year computer science student. The lesson Bloch draws from this is important for every professional programmer to learn:

We programmers need all the help we can get, and we should never assume otherwise. Careful design is great. Testing is great. Formal methods are great. Code reviews are great. Static analysis is great. But none of these things alone are sufficient to eliminate bugs: They will always be with us. A bug can exist for half a century despite our best efforts to exterminate it. We must program carefully, defensively, and remain ever vigilant.

That’s why programming needs to continue to move towards strong typing, declared contracts, static analysis, etc. The fact that web sites are still usually written in Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc.–all weakly typed languages–is a damned shame.

Meia and I saw an all-female production of King John last night at CHAC. I have to disagree with The Stranger and say that Amy Thone (King John) was atrocious. Conveying emotion and character through the awkward (to the modern tongue) language of Shakespeare is a challenge, and she simply was not up to it. Her intonation was all over the place, with either little relation to the words she was speaking, or else an almost comedic exaggeration. (Imagine “France!” yelled in roughly the same tone as “Khan!”, “Hubert, Hubert, Hubert” analogously to “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha”, or “My mother dead” with longer pauses than William Shatner’s.)

I don’t mean to bash mercilessly on Ms Thone; she displayed excellent range and ability and would likely do very well in a role with more natural language. She should stay away from Shakespeare for a while, however.

Despite that, the remainder of the production was quite good. Ki Gottberg (author of the brilliant Compendium of Nastiness) stole the show as Constance, not avoiding the inevitable domineering-mother aspect of the role, but beautifully bringing out its tragedy as well. Betsy Schwartz as Arthur did an excellent job of playing the innocent swept up in forces beyond his control, and Tracy Repep made the most of Blanche’s soliloquy.

The show closes today, with a sold-out matinee. This was the first production of the new company Upstart Crow, and I look forward to their next project.