July 25th, 2005
Ask someone who wants to criminalize same-sex marriage how many gay people he knows, and I bet an uncomfortable silence would ensue. Indeed, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, who concurred with the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) that criminalized homosexual sex, never met a homosexual.
With respect to Jews, no one illustrates the point more vividly than Tom Friedman, in his book, From Beirut to Jerusalem (1995): “One day I was waiting to see Salam [a Sunni Muslim living in Lebanon], while he was bawling out some wild-eyed Muslim sheik because his Friday mosque sermons were too hostile to the Lebanese army. As the little sheik with his red-and-white turban and thin beard was leaving Salam’s office, Salam insisted on introducing him to me. He told the sheik that I was a reporter from the New York Times, that I had won a Pulitzer Prize, that I spoke Arabic, and, on top of it all, said Salam, ‘he is Jewish.’ he words hung in the air for a second, before this poor little shiek’s eyes bulged out. I thought his beard might fall off. He’d probably given a few Koran-thumping sermons about the Jews in his day, and I am sure I was the first one he had ever met in the flesh. After a limp handshake he scurried out the door.”
Conversely, when Karol Wojtyła lived in an apartment, his upstairs neighbors and landlord were Jewish. When Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II, he declared the Jewish people “our dearly beloved brothers.”
The moral: When you interact with the Other, when you live together or go to school together or do business together, you begin to see each other as people. Familiarity breeds tolerance, whereas ignorance incubates hate.
But is this really true? Andrew Sullivan articulates the counterargument with eloquence: “It is one of the most foolish clichés of our time that prejudice is always rooted in ignorance, and can usually be overcome by familiarity with the objects of our loathing. The racism of many Southern whites under segregation was not appeased by familiarity with Southern blacks; the virulent loathing of Tutsis by many Hutus was not undermined by living next door to them for centuries. Theirs was a hatred that sprang, for whatever reasons, from experience. It cannot easily be compared with, for example, the resilience of anti-Semitism in Japan, or hostility to immigration in areas where immigrants are unknown, or fear of homosexuals by people who have never knowingly met one.”
Sullivan continues: “Just as there is possessive love and needy love; family love and friendship; romantic love and unrequited love; passion and respect, affection and obsession, so hatred has its shadings. There is hate that fears, and hate that merely feels contempt; there is hate that expresses power, and hate that comes from powerlessness; there is revenge, and there is hate that comes from envy. There is hate that was love, and hate that is a curious expression of love. There is hate of the other, and hate of something that reminds us too much of ourselves. There is the oppressor’s hate, and the victim’s hate. There is hate that burns slowly, and hate that fades. And there is hate that explodes, and hate that never catches fire. The modern words that we have created to describe the varieties of hate—’sexism,’ ‘racism,’ ‘anti-Semitism,’ ‘homophobia’—tell us very little about any of this. They tell us merely the identities of the victims; they don’t reveal the identities of the perpetrators, or what they think, or how they feel. They don’t even tell us how the victims feel. And this simplicity is no accident. Coming from the theories of Marxist and post-Marxist academics, these ‘isms’ are far better at alleging structures of power than at delineating the workings of the individual heart or mind. In fact, these ‘isms’ can exist without mentioning individuals at all.”
July 24th, 2005
I feel the day is incomplete if I haven’t read the New York Times, especially the op-ed page. But I’m bothered that op-eds sometimes appear more because of the writer’s status and less because of the merits of his argument.
Exhibit A: Today’s op-ed by Senator Arlen Specter may include bits of news, but it is not newsworthy—especially for the Sunday paper and especially with a kicker like “I am confident that we [the United States Senate] can meet our responsibilities.”
As it happens, David Shipely, the op-ed editor (by the way, why isn’t this position on the masthead?) would seem to agree. “Does it help to be famous” in order to get published, he asked in February 2004?
Not really. In fact, the bar of acceptance gets nudged a little higher for people who have the means to get their message out in other ways—elected officials, heads of state, corporate titans. It’s incumbent on them to say something forthright and unexpected. Op-ed real estate is too valuable to be taken up with press releases.
A similar situation occured this past April, when I sent the Times a letter to the editor regarding its editorial on pharmacists who refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions. It may very well be that my words simply didn’t merit publication—although Steve Chapman made the same point in his syndicated column a few days later—but I suspect that it was passed over for the press release-letter by Senators Santorum and Kerry.
Addendum (7/26/2005): I sent the above thoughts to the Times’s Public Editor, and received the following reply from his assistant today:
Thanks for writing and sharing your thoughts. Mr. Calame is very interested in how letters and op-ed pieces are selected for publication, and may write about it in a future column or on his Web journal. So we will keep your comments on file for his possible future use.
July 24th, 2005
Ayn Rand held that “the purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.” Dr. Leon Kass seems to embrace the antithetical view.
As James Stacey Taylor writes in a review of Kass’s book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (Encounter, 2002): “[F]or Kass, a life with human dignity is one that is ‘lived always with and against necessity, struggling to meet it, not to eliminate it.’ It thus appears that Kass’s objection to gene therapy lies in its possibility to secure for ‘a painless, suffering-free’ existence for people. Similarly, his objection to voluntary, active euthanasia is that it is more dignified to face one’s ‘troubles and pains.’”
Kass is right that struggle is important. Grunt work is crucial to character. But let us never conflate, say, learning long division before using a calculator with perpetuating a life wracked by anguish. The former has a time and place, even in adulthood. The latter—whether hypertension or hypochondria, scleroderma or stress—is always and forever unwelcome.
It is appalling that a human being as erudite as Kass has the gall to tell another human being in pain that his suffering is dignified. It is unconscionable that this PhD and MD chairs the President’s Council on Bioethics.
July 19th, 2005
1. Dinesh D’Souza, The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno-Affluence (New York: Touchstone, 2001 [2000]), p. 127.
Who has done more to eradicate poverty and suffering in the Third World, Bill Gates or Mother Teresa? To the extent that he has placed the power of information technology at the disposal of millions of people, the obvious answer is Gates.
2. “Poverty: Frequently Asked Questions,” Capitalism.org.
Who is the poor man better off under: Mother Teresa or Bill Gates? A Mother Teresa . . . hands them bowls of slop every day, so they can barely exist . . . [A] . . . Bill Gates . . . creates a fortune for himself by helping others to create fortunes for themselves . . . Where the first feeds [people] for a day, the second helps [people] feed themselves.
3. David Kelley, “Kelley on [sic] Reflects on Stossel’s Greed,” Navigator (Objectivist Center), February 1998.
Michael Milken was a greater benefactor of mankind than Mother Teresa.
July 18th, 2005
Last month Rep. Robin Hayes, vicechair of the House subcommittee on terrorism, declared that Saddam Hussein was “very much involved in 9/11.” Hayes claimed that he has access to evidence few others do. Told no investigation has ever implicated Baghdad in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the congressman responded, “I’m sorry, but you must have looked in the wrong places.”
Let’s take another look. Shortly after 9/11, a U.S. official leaked to the Associated Press that “the United States has received information from a foreign intelligence service that Mohamed Atta,” the ringleader of the 9/11 gang, “met earlier this year in Europe with an Iraqi intelligence agent.” As the story unfolded over the next month, the world learned that in early April 2001, Atta had allegedly rendezvoused with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, a vice consul in Iraq’s embassy in Prague but actually a spymaster. The meeting would have been Atta’s second time in the Czech capital in less than a year, having passed through the city’s airport en route from Germany to New Jersey in June 2000, and was the sole evidence tying Saddam to 9/11.
On one hand, the Czech domestic intelligence service, who by virtue of proximity had the best data, held that the rendezvous happened. It was certainly plausible, since before communist Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, Iraq had been a major buyer of Czechoslovak arms. Additionally, according to Richard Perle, then the chair of the Defense Policy Board, an influential advisory group to the Pentagon, operations like 9/11 “are not planned in caves; they’re planned in offices by people who have secretaries and support staffs and research and communications and technology.” Finally, as James Woolsey, who visited England to investigate the case on behalf of the Justice Department, contends, even with all the ambiguity, the evidence was “about as clear as these things get.”
On the other hand, counters Daniel Benjamin, the director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 1998-1999, it is “very difficult to hide serious ties” between a regime and a terrorist client. For in collaborating, “they negotiate over targets, finances, materiel, and tactics.” Similarly, the apparatuses of bureaucracy—including employees who will swap secrets for cash—afford ample opportunity for spying on governments. This is why state sponsors, like Libya vis-à-vis the 1998 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, and Iran vis-à-vis the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers, have historically left ample trails.
And yet the only Iraqi trail pertaining to 9/11 was one meeting in Prague, during a month for which neither the F.B.I. nor C.I.A. could uncover any visa, airline or financial records showing that Mohamed Atta had left or reentered the U.S. (Their research placed him in Florida two days before the meeting.) Second, all the evidence rested on the uncorroborated allegation of a single informant, who could produce neither any audio nor visual recordings. Third, no one could verify what Atta and Ani had discussed—for instance, whether Atta requested help or updated Ani on his progress. Accordingly, as Cheney told Tim Russert in September 2003. “[W]e’ve never been able to . . . confirm[] [the meeting] or discredit[] it. We just don’t know.”
Of course, circumstantiality is not a basis—or even a partial basis, really—for taking a country to war. After all, the burden of proof always falls on he who asserts a positive. In the 16 months between 9/11 and the Iraq war, despite considerable efforts, hawks failed to meet this burden. Consequently, neither of the administration’s two most publicized arguments for the war—the State of the Union address (1/28/03) and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. Security Council (2/5/03)—even mentioned Prague. And lest we misconstrue the subtext, on January 31—seven weeks before the war began—Newsweek asked the President specifically about a 9/11 connection to Iraq, to which Bush replied, “I cannot make that claim.” Eight months later, in September 2003, Bush repeated, “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.”
Moreover, in July 2003, U.S. troops arrested Ani in Iraq. The Iraqi denied ever meeting Atta, a denial that officials found credible. Also in July, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence declassified the much-delayed report of their Joint Inquiry into 9/11. Tellingly, nowhere in 858 pages does the report mention Iraq’s purported involvement in our day of infamy. Finally, a year later, the 9/11 Commission Report concluded that “[t]he available evidence does not support the original Czech report of an Atta-Ani meeting.” The report added that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh both denied that any Atta-Ani meeting occurred.
Still, Rep. Hayes persists. The “evidence is clear,” he told CNN. In fact, it is illusory. And at a time when the American people increasingly mistrust journalists for their reliance on anonymous sources, isn’t it time we turn the same scrutiny to politicians who rely on anonymous evidence?
Unpublished Notes
In a 10,500-word article in a recent issue of the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn charge those who dismiss the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship as having “an acute case of denial”: “We know from these IIS documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden’s request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a “trusted confidante” of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.”
But ex post facto evidence cannot be a casus belli.
“[T]he Free World is not interested in epistemological debates over what constitutes a connection. We are not engaged in a court case, or a classroom debate. We are fighting a war.” [1]
[1] Claudia Rosett, “Saddam and al Qaeda,” Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2005.
July 17th, 2005
1. Doug Clifton, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
[T]wo stories of profound importance languish in our hands. The public would be well served to know them, but both are based on documents leaked to us by people who would face deep trouble for having leaked them. Publishing the stories would almost certainly lead to a leak investigation and the ultimate choice: talk or go to jail.
Because talking isn’t an option and jail is too high a price to pay, these two stories will go untold for now.
Read more from Editor and Publisher and the New York Times.
2. The Washington Post:
Time reporters have said that at least two sources have told them they would no longer provide information because the company turned over [Cooper's] documents.
Addendum (7/23/2005): Pearlstine confirms, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that Time reporters have received e-mails from sources saying they no longer trust the magazine.
Addendum (10/1/2005): Jim Kelly, Time’s managing editor, tells the New York Times, “Looking at what we’ve managed to publish since [Cooper testified], it is very hard for me to point to any damage that was done to Time magazine with its sources.”
July 15th, 2005
On July 6, having received an hour earlier, “in somewhat dramatic fashion . . . an express personal release from my source,” Matt Cooper agreed to testify. But as the New York Times reports, that source—Karl Rove—never gave Cooper the release himself. Rather, the release resulted from a “frenzied series of phone calls initiated that morning” by Cooper’s lawyer, Richard Sauber, to Karl Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, and which involved the special prosecutor.
Here’s what happened (with additional reporting from Editor and Publisher). On his way back from Alaska to Washington on the night of July 5, Sauber passed through Chicago at 6 a.m., where he picked up the Times and the Wall Street Journal. Back on the phone, he read an article in the Journal that quoted Luskin as saying, “Mr. Rove hasn’t asked any reporter to treat him as a confidential source in the matter. So if Matt Cooper is going to jail to protect a source, it’s not Karl he’s protecting.”
Sauber immediately called Cooper from the plane, and they agreed to ask Luskin for a specific release from Rove. “I think we should take a shot,” Cooper recalled. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s an invitation.’”
When he landed in Washington, Sauber called Luskin, who called back at around 12:30 p.m.—an hour and half before court re-adjourned. Luskin dictated a waiver to Sauber, who then sent it Luskin, who signed and returned it at around 1 p.m.
The new waiver said only that Rove “affirm[ed]” his previous, blanket waiver, but it specified “any conversation he [Rove] may have had with Matthew Cooper of Time magazine during the month of July 2003.”
July 14th, 2005
Cooper and Miller, supported by the New York Times (and probably Time magazine, as opposed to Time Inc.), argue that the subpoena requiring them to reveal their confidential sources is unjust. Therefore, in the spirit of civil disobedience, they chose to defy the law and to suffer incarceration.
Of course, the full extension of this reasoning, as Michael Kinsley explains, means that “almost any law anyone does not care for is up for grabs”: “In societies that are not democracies or lack a legitimate judicial system, nonviolent civil disobedience is an admirably restrained method of attempting political change. In societies where laws are democratically enacted and fairly enforced, for the most part, purposely breaking them needs to be justified by some enormous injustice.”
Kinsley is right that civil disobedience should derive from an “enormous injustice.” Yet there are myriad laws with which we each disagree, and to say that only some merit defiance is not for Kinsley to decree, but for each individual to decide by his own lights—so long as he is willing to face the consequences.
Indeed, what counts as an “enormous injustice”? Surely we can agree that conscription and war qualify. But what about sodomy laws? Eminent domain? Denial of service at a private restaurant because you’re black?
Instead of trying to answer these questions collectively, why not use a straightforward criterion: if one deeply believes that a particular law is deeply immoral, then one should nonviolently fight against it. After all, we should follow the law less because it’s the law than because we believe it’s right.
Does this lead to anarchy? I don’t think so, because if a society is strong enough, is just enough, it will withstand trivial acts of disobedience and rectify those that need rectifying.
Therefore, in her refusal to compromise her principles, I stand with Judy Miller.
July 14th, 2005
“By its very nature, government politicizes everything it touches. Science is no exception. Stem cell research needs neither government money nor politics. It is better is to get the government out and let the private sector continue its good work. Those people calling for increased funding could take out their checkbooks and support it. Those who oppose embryonic stem cell research would not be forced to pay for it.”
This is the moral argument against government funding of stem-cell research. But what about the practical ones in favor of such funding? Here are the two I’m wrestling with, along with counterarguments.
1. Government does so much today that it has no business doing, and since this isn’t likely to change appreciably anytime soon, isn’t it better that at least some of our taxes go toward life-giving measures like stem cell research now?
Counterargument: Once government takes an industry into its tentacles, rarely, if ever, does it release it.
2. Isn’t the state the only resource today that can underwrite significant research, a la California’s Proposition 71 ($3 billion over 10 years)? Is stem cell research lucrative enough to draw the top scientists privately?
Counterargument: The Human Genome Project.
Addendum (10/5/2005): Ronald Bailey documents the private sector’s abundant efforts thus far.
July 14th, 2005
Was Plame, in fact, undercover when she was outed?
Novak says the C.I.A. told him “the exposure of her name might cause ‘difficulties’ if she travels abroad,” but that “[i]t was well-known around Washington that Wilson’s wife worked for the C.I.A. . . . Her name, Valerie Plame, was no secret either, appearing in Wilson’s Who Who’s in America entry.”
Hitchens sneers that she “shuttle[d] dangerously ‘undercover’ between Georgetown and Virginia.”
Clifford May lets slip that he knew her name and identity before Novak’s column outing her: “I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.”
On the other hand, Tim Noah uses a “simple test: did her friends and neighbors know she worked for the C.I.A.? They did not. Ergo, she was undercover.”
Addendum (7/17/2005): Joe Wilson admits, “My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.”
Addendum (7/21/2005): Yet it’s not that cut and dry, as Time magazine reports in two articles this week:
[A]s recently as the late 1990s she was working as a nonofficial cover (NOC) officer, one of a select group of operatives within the CIA who are placed in neutral-seeming environments abroad and collect secrets, knowing that the U.S. government will disavow any connection with them should they be caught. NOC officers cost millions of dollars to train and support. As a result of the leak, Plame is no longer able to work undercover.
[W]hile she may no longer have been a clandestine operative [at the time of the leak], she was still under protected status. . . . In the wake of the disclosure, foreign intelligence services were known to have retraced her steps and contacts to discover more about how the CIA operates in their countries.
Addendum (7/24/2005): Or is it, as the New York Times reports?
[Some] former C.I.A. officers say that by 2003 Ms. Wilson’s cover was already thin. Any serious inquiry would have revealed that Brewster Jennings [& Associates, the Boston shell company the C.I.A. set up] was little more than a mailbox. . . . Ms. Wilson . . . had been working for some time at agency headquarters in Langley, Va. And her marriage to a senior American diplomat, Mr. Wilson, ended any pretense of having no government ties.”At that point, she looks, walks and quacks like an overt agency employee,” said Fred Rustmann, a C.I.A. officer from 1966 to 1990, who supervised Ms. Wilson early in her career and calls her “one of the best, an excellent officer.”
Addendum (7/28/2005): Slate explains the different levels of cover in the C.I.A.
July 10th, 2005
Until Joe Wilson’s op-ed appeared on July 6, 2003, the White House had doggedly defended the president’s claim, in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Iraq “recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Not even the announcement, five weeks later, by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency that this claim was based on fake documents prompted any retraction. Instead, only after Wilson went public did C.I.A. Director George Tenet, just days later, concede that the uranium reference “should never have been included in the text written for the president.”
Rich:
The pettiness of this retribution [the leaking of the identity of Wilson’s wife] shows just how successfully Mr. Wilson hit the administration’s jugular: his revelation threatened the legitimacy of the war on which both the president’s reputation and reelection campaign had been staked. . . . That the Bush administration would risk breaking the law with an act as self-destructive to American interests as revealing a C.I.A. officer’s identity smacks of desperation.
Addendum (10/2/2005): The Post elaborates:
The campaign to discredit Wilson’s accusations came at a critical moment in the Bush presidency. It occurred a few months after the United States invaded Iraq and at a time when Bush, Cheney and the entire administration were under extraordinary pressure to back up their prewar allegations that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and was working on a nuclear weapons program. The Niger claim was central to the White House’s rationale for war, and Wilson was on a one-man crusade to disprove it. Early on, his actions caught the eye of the vice president’s office, which was often the emotional and intellectual force pushing the United States to war based on fears of potential weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Cheney and Libby were intimately involved in building the case for the war, which included warnings that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing nuclear weapons.
July 7th, 2005
The Los Angeles Times compiles a helpful Q&A (as does the Washington Post). From the Times:
Q: Administration officials signed agreements saying that reporters were free to reveal their identities. Despite that, why won’t reporters name their sources?
A: Miller, Cooper, and other reporters say such “blanket waivers” are not truly voluntary. Officials may have signed them fearing that, if they didn’t, they could be punished or fall under suspicion. Cooper and other journalists said they would talk about their sources only after being convinced that the officials’ willingness to be identified was voluntary, not coerced.
Addendum (7/9/2005): In Matt Cooper’s words:
I am with Judy that these government-issued waivers that the prosecutor has been handing out are not worth the paper they’re written on. . . . It’s coercive. It cannot be considered voluntary.
For C00per, a voluntary waiver must be “specific, personal and unambiguous.”
Addendum (7/15/2005): Floyd Abrams describes the government-issued waivers as “preprinted forms from the Department of Justice that people were instructed to sign by their superiors.”
Another question arises: If Fitzgerald knows who the government officials are, why does he need to question Miller and Cooper?
Answer: To corroborate information he has gathered during his investigation. As a general rule, prosecutors say they would never rely solely on notes taken by someone without also interviewing the note-taker.
July 6th, 2005
1. Judy Miller’s going to jail while Matt Cooper will testify.
2. Cooper and Miller now face four instead the original 18 months of jail, since (1) civil contempt is meant to be coercive rather than punitive, and (2) only four months remain in the term of the current grand jury investigating the case.
3. The real SOB is the leaker or leakers. “Last night I hugged my son goodbye and told him it might be a long time before I see him again,” Cooper told the court. Fortunately, just before today’s hearing, he received, “in somewhat dramatic fashion,” a direct personal communication from his source freeing Cooper from his commitment to keep the source’s identity secret.
July 5th, 2005
Many of us would say that we believe in a philosophy of live and let live. Most of us, however, probably aren’t awakened at 3 a.m. on consecutive weeknights by johns leaving a brothel in the apartment next door. Most of us probably don’t happen upon the sale of cocaine in our driveway.
Indeed, it’s one thing to support decriminalizing prostitution and drugs from an ivory tower. But now that I’ve graduated college, and am living on my own, I wonder if the ban on these so-called victimless crimes is, in fact, reasonable?
A libertarian would argue that what’s immoral should not necessarily be illegal. Paying for sex and getting high may be self-destructive, but both are voluntary choices.
To put it another way, freedom is not coextensive with virtue; vices should not be crimes. In fact, vice often permeates a free society, which imposes on each individual the responsibility to tolerate objectionable behavior. Moreover, who’s sleeping with whom and who’s using what neither harms me nor infringes my rights.
Critics respond that the everyday consequences of decriminalization outweigh abstract notions of unfettered liberty. For instance, after promising riches to young women, pimps keep them tethered to the netherworld through blackmail, inflating their back pay, and even old-fashioned coercion. With respect to drugs, toking up marijuana is allegedly a gateway to shooting up heroin.
These concerns are real, yet they only tell half the truth. In short, the concerns largely arise not because of the crimes themselves, but because of the laws that criminalize the said acts.
It’s less complicated than it sounds.
For instance, contrast black markets, under which prostitution and illegal drug use occur, with free markets. Owing to the dearth of competition and the risk of being busted or extorted, black markets are more expensive and more dangerous than free markets. While black markets incubate graft and omertas, free markets encourage written contracts and public scrutiny. While justice in the black market comes at the barrel of a gun, justice in the free market comes in a courtroom.
Specifically, under current law, both prostitutes and clients lack any legal recourse—if, say, she passes onto him a sexually transmitted disease or if he physically abuses her. Similarly, try getting a refund from a dealer who sold you schwag instead of something hydroponic. Decriminalization would make fraud legally enforceable and shine some much-needed sunlight into these no-man’s-lands.
Indeed, if we were to treat sex and drugs as we do booze, then many hookers and pushers would go legit or go out of business. Instead of employing backseats and back alleys, they could conduct their affairs in offices—in fear not of the FBI but of the IRS.
Furthermore, under current law, two-thirds of the federal government’s budget for the war on drugs goes to incarceration rather than treatment. Surely, however, nonviolent users would be better served by spending time with physicians and psychiatrists than doing time with rapists and robbers. In fact, studies show that prison does little to fight addiction, whereas rehabilitation helps the individual to break his dependency—and thus check the aforementioned gateway.
The world’s oldest trade and perhaps its most profitable one have always outwitted attempts at suppression; no amount of legislation has, or will, defeat man’s yen for pleasure. We would do better as a people and a polity if we recognized this stubborn fact.
July 4th, 2005
Like Dinesh D’Souza, I’ve long thought that Martin Luther King Jr.—given his “I Have a Dream” speech, “that one day my four little children will grow up in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”—would have opposed affirmative action. After all, a colorblind society should reject color-based policies.
But as Eric Foner shows in an essay for Slate from 1996, King most definitely would have supported the hand up:
In Why We Can’t Wait, published in 1963 as the movement to dismantle segregation reached its peak, King observed that many white supporters of civil rights “recoil in horror” from suggestions that blacks deserved not merely colorblind equality but “compensatory consideration.” But, he pointed out, “special measures for the deprived” were a well-established principle of American politics. The GI Bill of Rights offered all sorts of privileges to veterans. Blacks, given their long “siege of denial,” were even more deserving than soldiers of “special, compensatory measures.”King said much the same thing in his last book. Where Do We Go From Here was published in 1967, and in the intervening four years, King’s optimism had given way to foreboding prompted by the emergence of a white backlash and the realization that combating the economic plight of black America would prove far more difficult than eliminating segregation. He called for a series of programs, including full employment and a guaranteed annual income, to uplift the poor of all races. But he saw no contradiction between measures aimed at fighting poverty in general and others that accorded blacks “special treatment” because of the unique injustices they had suffered. “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years,” he wrote, “must now do something special for him.”
Further, to compare Jim Crow to affirmative action is wrong and offensive:
Segregation was not simply a matter of racial classification (or “thinking by race,” as Justice Antonin Scalia has written) but part of a complex system of racial subordination whose political, economic, and social elements all reinforced one another. The slogan of the 1963 March on Washington was not colorblind laws but “Jobs and Freedom,” and the movement’s ultimate goal, King insisted, was to “make freedom real and substantive” for black Americans by absorbing them “into the mainstream of American life.”This goal remains as elusive today as it was during King’s lifetime. King’s real heirs are those who, like him, see affirmative action not as a panacea or an end in itself, but as one of many ways to reduce the gap between blacks and the rest of American society bequeathed to us by history.
Where does this leave me? I still oppose affirmative action, since explicitly taking account of race perpetuates racism, but it’s no longer a hot-button issue for me.
Posted by Jonathan Rick in 
Before entering the digital space…
I flacked for the American Conservative Union and the Cato Institute, and reported for Time magazine and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.