Pence and the Skater

A homosexual male figure skater on the American Olympic team made news this week by announcing he wanted nothing to do with Vice President Pence because he thought Pence supported so-called gay conversion therapy, i.e. therapy to change one’s sexual interests from homosexual to heterosexual.   It turned out that Pence said he didn’t, but why should it matter much if he had?  (It is  interesting that many on the left are in the unusual position of claiming that while wanting or pretending to alter one’s demonstrably genetically determined sex is a fine, admirable, and completely doable thing, any attempt to change one’s conjecturally genetically influenced sexual interests is both impossible and a black sin.) While no one should be coerced into entering any therapy, any adult wishing to change something about himself is free to get any sort of therapy he likes from anyone willing to provide it – quacks, charlatans, or otherwise. It is no one’s business including no other homosexual’s business if a homosexual decides to try such therapy. One may think doing so is pointless, futile, or wrong, but in a free country people get to do things others think are pointless, futile, or wrong.  

For centuries in Europe and for many decades after the founding of this country proponents of traditional Christian moral opinions made homosexuality illegal and homosexuals subject to persecution by officials.  The laws were often ignored or enforced only spottily, but the threat always was present.  Some homosexuals  were punished, and many or most had to be careful in public and lost some of  their freedom of association.  American libertarians and many liberals opposed these laws and supported the right of homosexuals for the same reasons  they supported the right of everyone to live peaceably as he chooses without the interference of officials, and eventually the laws were repealed or overturned. There has also been a change in the culture with many and probably most people now believing that condemning homosexuals as sinners or perverts is wrongheaded or even immoral.

While that cultural change is good, there is now a new problem as illustrated by such things as  attempts to outlaw voluntary conversion therapy or force unwilling florists and bakers to participate in same sex weddings.  Many people, homosexual and otherwise, now believe that  their superior moral  understanding  on such things gives them the right to suppress and punish a new class of sinners – those who either favor the traditional Christian belief that homosexuality is sinful or for reasons of  their own find it undesirable or risible.  This is wrong  for the same reasons punishing homosexuals was  wrong. It is also dangerous.  Homosexuals are a very small minority in this country, and there are many millions of traditional people. Political winds and fashions change. Worms turn. It is both right and safer to defend the right of  all people to think and behave peaceably as they like, whether one approves not, than to attempt to force people to conform.  To paraphrase a great man, those who deny tolerance to others, run the risk of not getting it for themselves.  Diversity of every sort is safer when there is not even the possibility of the power of the government being used to enforce conformity. Libertarians know this, and others should learn it. 

The Good, the Bad, and the Really Awful

America is a very diverse country, not in the fatuous, superficial, racial sense of present day political correctness but in terms of the habits, lifestyles, opinions, and weltanschauungen  of its people.  Millions of Americans hold beliefs that millions of other Americans find questionable, false, detestable, or idiotic. Millions of Americans conduct their lives in ways and engage in activities that millions of other Americans see as wrong, counterproductive, immoral, despicable, or even evil. Some differences are ephemeral and reconcilable,  but many are deep, lasting, and intractable. This is nothing new. Nostalgic  references to a time  - whether the turn of the 20^th Century, the Eisenhower years,  or some other good old days  – when things were completely  harmonious and homogeneous  do not  hold up in light of history.  However there are times when the differences lead to more contention, rancor, and conflict than others. We are in one of those times now. 

Libertarians offer a good solution for this. Leave each other alone and allow every person to lead his life as he wishes so long as he commits no crimes against the life or property of anyone else.  In a free society  many people  still would have no use for the beliefs or actions of some of their fellow citizens, but they would not be able to get officials to harm or punish them on account of it. Approval would be optional, but tolerance would be unavoidable.   

This was the principle  the Founding Fathers followed  in separating religion and government.   Jefferson wrote, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God.” Likewise it does me no injury  if my neighbors have sex with one woman, two men, or no one at all, eat kale or Big Macs,  dress  as men, as women, or alternate according to mood,  read porn or devotionals,  save money or spend foolishly,   drink, smoke, consume drugs, or abstain,  like John Wayne, Meryl Streep, both, or neither, own a dozen guns or none, stay in shape or get fat, are hunters  or vegans, drive  F250s or  Priuses,  or like me or decline  to associate or do business with  me with so long as they do  not attempt to have their ways forced others.  If enough people realized that and acted accordingly, our differences and  mutual dislikes would not be the problem and danger they are. (There would still be hard cases, gray areas, and controversies – many about public areas and property.  But we would have a better basis for a civil and liberal society.)

However there is not much evidence these days that a libertarian solution is a likely one, at least in the short term. So it is worth looking at other less desirable ways in which the situation could play out. Perhaps  the worst likely outcome would be for the present condition  to continue or worsen with disparate groups and coalitions struggling to gain control of the federal government to impose their wishes on the entire population,  and either one faction gaining long term control or the abusive power rotating and  the people being yo-yoed  by changes of administration and political fashion.   It is easy to see how continuing on the present trend in either way could produce worse sectionalism, bitterness, and hostility than we have today. In the extreme case of a group in power grossly overstepping,  it could lead to dissolution of the union  or even guerrilla civil war.

Several people have proposed a renewal of federalism as a palliative to ease tensions and  reduce  present day conflicts. In their proposals  the power to decide many contentious political issues would move from the federal government to state or local governments.   If officials in California, New York, Portland, or  Philadelphia wanted to ban guns that look scary to them, dictate what information job seekers could put in resumes, mandate seminars on transitioning  gender for third graders in the public schools, prohibit showering with hot water, or punish people for throwing the residue of an unappetizing dinner in the trash, they could with impunity but  without any possible effect on those outside their jurisdiction.  If officials in Texas, North Carolina, Oklahoma City, or Pensacola wanted to require drilling for oil in city parks, prohibit cross dressing men from using women’s restrooms,  mandate pro-abstinence indoctrination in the public schools, or impose fines on any  able bodied citizens not having adequate  means of self-defense in their homes, they could with impunity but without any possible effect on those outside their jurisdiction. 

This idea has some merit. However it is important to remember that it is still a bad outcome.  Being pushed around by state and local politicians  and bureaucrats  is not intrinsically better  than being pushed around by federal ones. But at least a person could move away.  And it might lower the pressure and help keep the lid from blowing off, at least for a while.

Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise

I love reading Spinoza. He is one of my favorite philosophers. His writings are often profound and meet the basic test of being concerned mainly  with how people should live and behave in the real world, the latter being a hurdle  surprisingly few philosophers clear.  His Ethics is his most famous and influential book and contains many fine insights.  (Of course one cannot take his claim to prove his opinions with mathematical precision seriously, but it is still a very good book.) The less well known Theologico-Political Treatise is also a very important work and one useful for understanding his thoughts and interests. He gave himself a very difficult assignment – defending freedom of thought and conscience, retaining what he sees as the valid ethical imperatives of the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity while criticizing and opposing their mythological and superstitious doctrines and assertions, and being subtle and ambiguous enough to avoid persecution in an age when persecution of deviation from orthodoxy was common. His solution was to declare recognition of  an omnipresent and all powerful supreme being and leading a life of justice and benevolence toward one’s fellow human beings to be the sole content and objective of  true religion  and to label every other religious doctrine and question – including those of the nature and activities of the supreme being, the existence of an afterlife, the specific rituals and dogmas  of every sect and creed, the issue of free will in religious choice, and the authority and accuracy of the Bible – as irrelevant to the objective and hence matters on which each person can  have whatever opinions suit him without effect on his status in terms of following divine law.

He certainly succeeded in being ambiguous. One easily can make a case that by “god” he really meant the universe and its natural laws but could not say so explicitly, but there also are good reasons to think he meant instead a conscious being or some sort of amalgam of the  two.  In most ways neither this nor the other theological arguments matter except for their historical interest. What does are the pleas for tolerance, open mindedness, and acceptance of dissent even in matters people think are most important, the this-worldly focus on living well and justly in accord with reality and one’s better nature, and  the ethical, practical, and psychological insights scattered throughout the book.  As an example of the latter, there is a short passage at the start of one of the chapters in the Treatise where he argues that the wise and good person should seek  his values for themselves and not in any competition with others that is one of the finest statements on ethics I have ever read.

It is a book that is  well worth reading.  

Practical Politics

Conservatives are rightly concerned that governments are punishing  religious people for declining  to sell their goods or services for use in weddings between homosexuals, in clear violation of those religious people’s rights. However, not too long ago governments in many states - often at the insistence of religious conservatives - had laws forbidding homosexual activity, in a clear violation of homosexuals’ rights. Someone defending individual rights consistently would have spoken up against both sets of violations. There are people who did, but they usually are not people of power and influence in society. The more common response was to decry one and accept or even approve of the other, depending on how one  felt about the opinions and actions of those affected, under the assumption that it is all right to use the power of the state to force one’s notions about propriety onto others.

I and many people of liberal opinions believe that assumption is wrong. What I want to show now is that, its wrongness aside, it is also dangerous and often counterproductive. It is natural and unavoidable that people will have widely differing notions about what are the proper ways to live and behave, and that the practices and opinions of some people will be repugnant to others. This produces discord in society, but as long as people respect others’ rights to their lives, lifestyles, and opinions, it does not have to produce strife. (For example, while there is a variety of strongly held opinions on religion in this country, the principle and practice of full freedom of religious opinion for all within a secular republic has led to almost no serious religious conflicts in our history  and avoided the large religious wars, pogroms, and massacres so common in the history of Europe, Asia, and Africa.) Strife does come when people decide to use the power of the state to force others to conform to their desires. Each group of partisans  then likely will feel that if someone’s notions of  proper thought and behavior are going to be forced on society, it surely had better be theirs, and act accordingly.

When this happens, some people will win and get the power of the state  behind them for a while. They will have the satisfaction not only of being able to behave the way they want but also of forbidding others from doing things they disapprove of. The risk is that if the political mechanism exists for them to dictate to others, it exists for others to take control of and use to dictate to them. Political pendulums do swing, and the excesses of one group can increase the resentment and, once control of the government changes, the excesses of the opponents. Assuming that most people are more strongly interesting in being able to do what they want than in being able to dictate what their neighbors do, we have an almost game theoretic solution that  the safe policy is one of mutual tolerance where no group tries  to use the power of the state to force its opinions onto others, and indeed, there is no mechanism within the state for doing so.  Of course there are people more interested in causing others trouble than in seeing to their own business and interests, but these people are, to one degree or another, sociopaths, irrespective of what title or political office they hold.   

Tolerance vs. Approval

One of the worst aspects of the present’s generally low level of political discourse and controversy is the tendency of advocates and propagandists to conflate tolerating a person, activity or belief with approving of that person activity, or belief . It is done by people of various political opinions, and it dangerously ignores or even erodes a basic principle of liberal society – the idea that in a free society tolerance is mandatory while approval is discretionary.

The most important historical application of this principle was in the founding fathers’ treatment of religion.  In many times and places many people, including highly educated people, took their theological doctrines  far more seriously than most people in America  do today. It follows from accepting any one such doctrine as true that all the others are false, and often not merely mistaken  but pernicious, evil, and fraught with the most horrible  long term consequences imaginable for those who believe  them. In much of Europe, Asia, and Africa  this has led to brutal persecutions, wars, pogroms, mass deportations and genocidal massacres.  In the United States (and later in other places where liberal ideas took hold), there was something different –separation of church and state, freedom of opinion, and explicit legal tolerance of all religious sects and  beliefs. There was no attempt to suppress or stamp out strong differences of opinion or create a coerced, phony consensus. You could see your neighbor as a heretic, a cultist, or a heathen and disapprove of him and refuse to associate with him to your heart’s content, but you had to respect his right to his opinion and refrain from trying to force yours on him.  This has worked remarkably well throughout the history of the republic, allowing this to be a country with almost no serious religious conflicts, despite an immense diversity and intensity of religious opinion.

This principle  should be applied to various present day controversies and defended vigorously from both those who refuse to tolerate anything of which they do not approve and those (sometimes the same people on different issues) who demand we be made to approve, or behave as though we approved,  of everything we tolerate. It is essential to a free society.

Advice to Republicans

The coming elections are looking very promising for the Republicans, and that is a good thing. The Obama administration has been a disaster, and a brake on it is much needed. However, with Republicans there is always the fear that they will find a way to blow it. So, I have some advice for them. They need to realize that they do not need to worry about the creationists, the hard core abortion prohibitionists, or the anti-homosexual zealots ( just as the Democrats do not need to worry about the dogmatically religious greens, the crooked trial lawyers, or the dregs of the public employees’ and teachers’ unions). Every vote counts, and they certainly should work to turn out these voters. However, they should not focus their campaigns on them. They already have them.

Instead the Republicans need to realize that the failures, excesses, and power grabs of the Obama administration and the Democrats in the congress have given them a big opportunity to win back the voters they lost during the awful Bush administration and to win over new ones. However, the voters the Republicans need are not going to be won by appeals based on the social issues of the religious right. They are more likely to be repelled. Issues that can work and that Republicans need to campaign on include freedom, real tolerance, Americanism, a foreign policy based on the national interest, a strong national defense, shrinking government to something affordable, reducing deficits, stopping bailouts , and generally respecting the private sphere in each person’s live that is none of the government’s business. This can be a winning approach.

It is also a right approach, elections aside. This nation has an astounding diversity of social practices and lifestyles, many of them quite mutually incompatible. The only way to avoid strife and worse is to take the government out of most social issues thereby preventing any group from imposing its customs and prejudices on others by fiat, just as we have taken it out of religion.