All Thoughts Being Equal

Exercising freedom of conscience: A virtuous act for any American or Christian Dear sir, The First Amendment to the Constitution seems clear to me: civil protest and peaceful assembly are basic American liberties. They are also Christian liberties, which also seems obvious to me given the history of the Christian religion; but as I am not a Christian, perhaps I am wrong about that. Though I may not be a Christian, I still respect the many Christians over America's history who have stood their ground against the government---facing public ridicule, arrest, even physical injury or death---because of their beliefs. Specific examples that come to my mind are abolitionists, suffrage and civil rights proponents, and conscientious objectors. Moreover, I firmly believe that Americans or Christians have the right to assemble and protest against abortion or extending marriage beyond certain traditional interpretations, even if I just as firmly believe that the govern...

Follow-up to: Diagnosis of an overwhelming fear, pt. 1 ; Adventures in bad statistics, Big Gay edition I. So there's a video going around. A woman dresses pretty generically—jeans, a black crew-neck shirt—and walks around New York City... and experiences "over 100" instances of street harassment in 10 hours over a few days. I have a few problems with this methodology. On the one hand, it's great that people are documenting this sort of everyday experience: one's personal life history doesn't translate well over the Internet, so any little bit helps. On the other hand... The big problem is with the editing. Out of nine major online media sites who reported this— CNN , USA Today , Business Insider , New York Post , Vox , Slate , Huffington Post , Salon , and Jezebel —none of them caught this on the first go around. Then Slate and Salon realized something was up: it's almost all black and Latino men. Yikes. The Jezebel writer had this commentary i...

I. In a discussion on Facebook tangentially related to my last blog post (insofar as it was about how political views aren't rational for a lot of people), my friend Briana made the following comment: I've never seen it [politics] as rational... there is an ideal that it can be, but I've never seen it in practice. Otherwise, we'd have started culling our own populations by now. I objected pithily that we don't need to cull humans because humans are capable of using birth control (including the decision not to reproduce), to which she elaborated: No, we cull other animals because we don't mind killing them from a moral standpoint (i.e. we are less repulsed emotionally). If we did mind as much as we do for ourselves, we'd find other ways to manage their populations like we do for ourselves. Culling is the rational choice (most economical, quickest and easiest). Finding other ways to appeal to our personal security that are less effective, ta...

In a previous post I outlined an economic definition of human rights and used that to briefly analyze the current struggle between social conservatives and the LGBT community. Now I want to flip the script and examine the moral choices around society's bottom rungs.