Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

The Calligraphic Art of Azra Aghighi Bakhshayeshi – The Tehran Times

Posted on July 5, 2014 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

The Tehran Times has a beautiful gallery up of calligraphic art, which I know next to nothing about, except that I think it’s beautiful. Here are a couple:

You should check out the rest for yourself.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Iran | Comments Off

Not Much Time Remains

Posted on July 4, 2014 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I am posting this week’s Sa’di Says, “Not Much Time Remains,” in memory of my friend Adam Schonbrun, who died in February:

I know life leaves me with each breath I take,
and these last fifty years I’ve been asleep.
Not much time remains. How, in what’s left,
can I make up for all I haven’t done?
The man who chooses not to start his work
will die when God beats the drum of his death,
and he will die in shame, his heart empty.

A couple of years ago, when I turned fifty, I suddenly realized the truth of something a writer with whom I was friendly told me when he was in his fifties and I still had a decade and a half to go. “Once you hit a half century,” he said, “the next twenty years of your life somehow seem a whole lot shorter than the previous twenty. If you don’t start doing what you really want to do, it’ll be too late before you know it.”

He spoke from experience. He had only recently emerged from a long and profoundly unhappy marriage, which he had always talked about as a kind of voluntary imprisonment. I didn’t then, and I don’t now, know the details—except that he was careful not to suggest that his wife was solely to blame. What I do know is that everything about him seemed to change once their divorce was final. The way he dressed, the way he talked, the way he chose to spend his time—all of it, I don’t know how else to describe it, suddenly filled with light.

It would be easy to attribute these changes to the fact that my friend had fallen in love. In the pop-culture movie version of his life, no doubt, that’s how the director would frame it. Important as that new love was to him, however, to focus on it alone would be to miss the fact that he had, at last, begun devoting himself to the writing he’d felt he was always meant to do. Not that he hadn’t been writing before. He’d published books and written articles, and he’d enjoyed it, but that work had become at some point more about his career than his passion. Choosing this work, claiming it as that which truly fulfilled him, laid the foundation of all the other changes that followed.

What Sa’di says in the lines I have translated is absolutely true. Whether or not you choose to begin the work you are called to do, you will die, and to die having chosen in the negative will be to die in shame–because it will mean you have chosen not to risk failure. Or, perhaps more to the point, you will have chosen not to risk being seen in the act of failing. At its core, after all, that’s what shame is: the desire to keep hidden the failings we believe constitute our deepest, truest selves. For at the heart of shame is not just fear of the world’s negative judgment, but the conviction that the world–having seen, having known, your failings–will conclude that you might as well not have existed in the first place, that existence was more than you really deserved.

Adam Schonbrun and I met when we were in eighth grade at the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County, and our decades-long friendship was nothing if not rocky. The details of that rockiness are unimportant. What matters is that I miss my friend, and that, in missing him, I am reminded of what made him such a compelling presence, not just in my life, but in the life of anyone who knew him: the single-minded commitment that he made to the work he felt himself called to do, being a poet. I do not mean by this to dismiss or trivialize the value of who he was as a father, a brother, an uncle, a husband, a teacher, or a friend, but the degree to which he was able to give himself wholeheartedly to those roles–at least this is how it always seemed to me–was a direct result of giving himself first and foremost to the making of the poems through which he found and out of which he spoke the meaning of his life.

I do not think that Adam died in shame; nor do I think he died with his heart empty. On the contrary, I think his heart was full. I hope people are able to say that about me when my time comes.

Cross-posted.

Posted in Writing | Comments Off

Conservative blog recommendation?

Posted on July 2, 2014 by Ampersand

Since I no longer contribute to the comments at Ethics Alarms, I’m hoping to find a replacement. Could anyone recommend a conservative blog with a good comments section to me?

What I’d like is a comments section where:

1) People who don’t agree with the blog’s views are treated respectfully.
2) Detailed back-and-forth discussions of issues are welcome.
3) The comments are neither too busy nor too empty for reasonable conversation to happen. (Blog comments that run into multi hundreds of comments are too busy to be good for the kind of discussion I prefer.)

For that matter, if anyone wants to recommend any other blogs worth reading – liberal, conservative, knitting-based, whatever – that would be fine too.

Posted in Whatever | 16 Comments

All The Snarkiest Quotes From The Judge’s Ruling Overturning Kentucky’s Gay Marriage Ban

Posted on July 2, 2014 by Ampersand

Judge John G. Heyburn II, a Bush appointee, rules that Kentucky’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. This is, I believe, the first such ruling in a southern state. The ruling is stayed until the Sixth Circuit weighs in.

You can read Judge Heyburn’s surprisingly snarky ruling here, but if you don’t want to read the whole thing, here are the fun bits:

The Court will begin with Defendant’s only asserted justification for Kentucky’s laws prohibiting same-sex marriage: “encouraging, promoting, and supporting the formation of relationships that have the natural ability to procreate.” Perhaps recognizing that procreation-based arguments have not succeeded in this Court, nor any other court post-Windsor, Defendant adds a disingenuous twist to the argument: traditional marriages contribute to a stable birth rate which, in turn, ensures the state’s long-term economic stability.

These arguments are not those of serious people. Though it seems almost unnecessary to explain, here are the reasons why. Even assuming the state has a legitimate interest in promoting procreation, the Court fails to see, and Defendant never explains, how the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage has any effect whatsoever on procreation among heterosexual spouses. Excluding same-sex couples from marriage does not change the number of heterosexual couples who choose to get married, the number who choose to have children, or the number of children they have. […]

The state’s attempts to connect the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage to its interest in economic stability and in “ensuring humanity’s continued existence” are at best illogical and even bewildering. These arguments fail for the precise reasons that Defendant’s procreation argument fails.

Numerous courts have repeatedly debunked all other reasons for enacting such laws. The Court can think of no other conceivable legitimate reason for Kentucky’s laws excluding same-sex couples from marriage. […]

…that Kentucky’s laws do not deny licenses to other non-procreative couples reveals the true hypocrisy of the procreation-based argument. […]

More importantly, the imperfect line-drawing argument assumes incorrectly that the Court bases its ruling on a comparison between same-sex couples and other non-procreative couples. On the contrary, this Court bases its ruling primarily upon the utter lack of logical relation between the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriages and any conceivable legitimate state interest. Any relationship between Kentucky’s ban on same-sex marriage and its interest in procreation and long-term economic stability “is so attenuated as to render the distinction arbitrary or irrational.” […]

Those opposed by and large simply believe that the state has the right to adopt a particular religious or traditional view of marriage regardless of how it may affect gay and lesbian persons. But, as this Court has respectfully explained, in America even sincere and long-held religious views do not trump the constitutional rights of those who happen to have been out-voted.

Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 3 Comments

Is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act Unconstitutional?

Posted on July 1, 2014 by Ampersand

Sasha Volokh brings up the question with a quote from Justice Stevens’ concurrence in City of Boerne v. Flores. ((I say “from,” but technically, the quote isn’t “from” Stevens’ concurrence – it is his entire concurrence.))

In my opinion, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) is a “law respecting an establishment of religion” that violates the First Amendment to the Constitution.

If the historic landmark on the hill in Boerne happened to be a museum or an art gallery owned by an atheist, it would not be eligible for an exemption from the city ordinances that forbid an enlargement of the structure. Because the landmark is owned by the Catholic Church, it is claimed that RFRA gives its owner a federal statutory entitlement to an exemption from a generally applicable, neutral civil law. Whether the Church would actually prevail under the statute or not, the statute has provided the Church with a legal weapon that no atheist or agnostic can obtain. This governmental preference for religion, as opposed to irreligion, is forbidden by the First Amendment. Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38, 52—55 (1985).

I haven’t thought about the matter before, but this argument seems legitimate.

Sasha points out that if so, “the solution isn’t necessarily to invalidate RFRA. It could be to extend RFRA to apply to deeply held secular convictions, as Justice Harlan suggested in his concurrence in the result in Welsh v. United States (1970).”

Here’s a position paper on the RFRA from the Secular Coalition For America.

Posted in Anti-atheism, Atheism, Supreme Court Issues | 34 Comments

Supreme Court Rules For Coporations In Hobby Lobby

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Ampersand

You can read the ruling in pdf form here, and Ginsburg’s mammoth, strongly-worded dissent here. Sarah Kliff sums up the ruling in three sentences:

1. A federal law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was written to protect individuals’ religious freedoms — and on Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that, under RFRA, corporations count as people: their religious freedoms also get protection.
2. The requirement to cover contraception violated RFRA because it mandated that businesses “engage in conduct that seriously violates their sincere religious belief that life begins at conception.”
3. If the federal government wanted to increase access to birth control — which they argued was the point of this requirement — the Court thinks it could do it in ways that didn’t violate religious freedom, like taking on the task of distributing contraceptives itself.

Technically speaking, this decision applies only to “closely-held” corporations (which are about 90% of all American corporations – effectively, any corp that isn’t publicly traded on the stock market), and only to cases involving religious objections to contraception.

However, this decision could vastly expand the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) by providing a precedent for future lawsuits by corporations who (for example) feel religiously burdened by providing health care coverage to the spouses and children of gay employees rush to sue, or corporations run by Jehovah’s Witnesses who don’t want to offer blood transfusions in health coverage. Indeed, Ted Cruz today gleefully predicted that there will be “hundreds” of RFRA cases seeking to build on this decision.

Notably, Justice Alito, writing for the majority, claimed that this decision won’t impact female employees of Hobby Lobby because the Federal Government could extend the same “accommodation” to Hobby Lobby that it has offered to religious non-profits like Little Sisters of the Poor. However, that accommodation – which asks corporations to sign a statement letting the government know that they won’t be providing contraceptive coverage – has been sued by religious conservatives, who say signing such a form contradicts their religious beliefs – and Alito’s decision vastly increases their chance of winning. At least one Judge, in light of the Hobby Lobby decision, sees the wind blowing that way:

Acting swiftly in the wake of the Court’s ruling on Monday, and relying directly upon that decision, the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday blocked all enforcement (pdf link) of the mandate against an Alabama Catholic TV network, a non-profit entity. The concurring opinion of the Court of Appeals, written by Circuit Judge William H. Pryor Jr., argued that the accommodation… is itself likely to be struck down.

The Friendly Atheist has a round-up of reactions from atheist and humanist organizations. A typical example:

Amanda Metskas, President of the Secular Coalition for America, said today’s decision by the court will allow employers to impose their religious beliefs on their employees and interfere with the employees’ personal health care decisions.

“This is a sad day for anyone who believes in true religious freedom. With this decision the Supreme Court set a terrible precedent for religious interference in individual choice,” Metskas said. “This decision allows for-profit business owners to impose their religious preferences and practices on their employees, leaving the religious freedom of millions of Americans at the mercy of their individual employers.“

I highly recommend Scott Lemieux’s critique of the opinion, and also Ian Millhiser’s.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, In the news, Supreme Court Issues | 91 Comments

My Companion’s Scent Seeped into Me

Posted on June 27, 2014 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

This week’s “Sa’di Says” is a brief poem from one of the introductory sections of Golestan:

I held in my bath a perfumed piece of clay
that came to me from a beloved’s hand.
I asked it, “Are you musk or ambergris?
Like fine wine, your smell intoxicates me.”

“I was,” it said, “a loathsome lump of clay
till someone set me down beside a rose.
Then my companion’s scent seeped into me.
Otherwise, I am only the earth that I am.

In context, Sa’di is talking about how the praise of the ruler for whom he wrote Golestan will only serve to increase the quality of the verses within the text, but these lines in particular have always conjured for me a truth about human relationships and how the “scent” of those we love inevitably seeps into us, becoming part of who we are, and making us better than we might otherwise have been. Lately, these lines have been making me think of the girl who was my best friend in high school: Adrienne. I don’t remember how Adrienne and I became friends, only that I very quickly came to depend on her presence in my life as part of what made living meaningful.

Like I said, I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but once we started talking, we didn’t stop, and soon I was walking or biking the few miles to her house, sometimes on Shabbos afternoons, just to hang out and sometimes to stay for dinner. I remember a narrow room with a piano and, I think, a mirror on the door, and a day bed where we sat while I poured my heart out about everything, or almost everything, that was going on in my life. I like to think that I was as good a friend to Adrienne as she was to me, but the fact is that I don’t know. I was a desperately needy kid (about which more below), and, in opening herself and her home to me (with her parents’ permission, of course), Adrienne gave me a safe space in which to be needy and to accept the succor and support of her friendship. Whether or not I gave back to her in kind, I cannot say.

When I think now about how different Adrienne and I were, it’s even more remarkable to me that we became as close as we did. Adrienne and her family lived in the next town over from mine, in a house with a manicured lawn, surrounded by other houses with similar lawns, among people who, to me, might as well have stepped out of an episode of Happy Days, except that they were middle and upper-middle class Jewish families living in the suburbs of Long Island, not the Cunninghams. I, on the other hand, was the oldest of four children being raised by a single, mother in the mid–1970s, a time when that family status still carried some significant stigma. My life outside of the yeshiva day school where Adrienne and I formed our friendship bore little resemblance to the relatively safe and privileged lives she and most of our classmates led. My friends drank and did drugs, cut school and failed classes, clashed over infractions, minor and major, with the neighborhood parents and with the cops and, in general, got themselves into (sometimes serious) trouble.

Very little of my life, in other words–and I have left out quite a few details here–fit neatly into Adrienne’s world, and very little of her life fit neatly into mine. Nonetheless, we became friends and that friendship continued after we graduated from high school and went off to different colleges. We saw each other when we could, but what I most remember were the phone conversations, one of them in particular. I was alone in my dorm room and I just felt empty. So I called Adrienne and we talked for a long time. When we were ready to hang up, I felt so much better that I said, “I love you, you know.” In my memory, I say these words with the kind of joking affection friends often use with each other, and I did not expect Adrienne to answer. To my surprise, though, she did. “I love you, too,” she said, and I could tell from her tone that she meant it, really meant it.

I was speechless. In that moment, I understood that I didn’t just love Adrienne, I was in love with her, and I wanted, I needed, for her to love me back. Every time I tried to get her to talk about it, however, she refused; and then, she met the man who is now her husband. I remember when she told me she was going to marry him. I was angry and I was jealous; I felt betrayed and I felt cheated. How could she decide that I was not the man for her without giving me a chance to be her man? I started behaving like a petulant child, refusing to ask how her fiance was when I spoke to her, refusing to say anything more than Is Adrienne there? if he answered the phone when I called. I arrived at their wedding too late to witness the marriage vows, and I walked out of the reception less than halfway through without saying goodbye. After that, Adrienne and I didn’t speak for ten years. When we did, it was because she reached out to me.

Continue reading →

Posted in Iran, Writing | 7 Comments

Harvard Law Review Counsel Censors Footnote in Harvard Law Review Article on Censorship

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Ampersand

In comments, Gin and Whiskey pointed out this gem from a Harvard Law Review article about censorship, “The Brave New World of Social Media Censorship.”

Note 8:
…see also Svetlana Mintcheva, post to Free Expression Network (Feb. 7, 2010) (in author’s files) (describing decision by domain Network Solutions to eject The File Room censorship archive because of a Nan Goldin photograph; the photograph in question shows two little girls playing; one is naked and her vulva can be seen. A link to the photograph on the File Room website has been deleted from this footnote, over the strenuous objection of the author, on the advice of counsel for the Harvard Law Review. Author’s note: that a link to an innocent photograph by one of the country’s major artists should be censored is evidence of both the danger and the absurdity of confusing images of children’s bodies with child pornography).

Posted in Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc. | 4 Comments

Geroge Will’s Preposterous Rape Math

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Ampersand

$george-will-bad-math$

One way unserious people tire you out is by taking 15 minutes to write something unserious. It takes you four hours to undo their ignorance. —Ta-Nehisi Coates

In an amazingly bad column about campus rape, George Will discusses some statistics that the White House included in a recent report: (( The report was “Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action.” ))

The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent.

In a later defense of his column, Will doubled down on Perry’s math:

I cited one of the calculations based on it that Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has performed {link}. So, I think your complaint is with the conclusion that arithmetic dictates, based on the administration’s statistic. The inescapable conclusion is that another administration statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college is insupportable and might call for tempering your rhetoric about “the scourge of sexual assault.”

George Will defends his column based on the math. So it’s notable that Will’s math is wrong.

Will writes “One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported.” Both statistics can be found on page 14 ((Or page 18, if you go by the pdf page numbers rather than the page numbers printed at the bottom.)) of the White House’s report on sexual assault on campus (pdf link), although they appear three paragraphs apart.

What Will neglects to tell his readers is that the “20%” and “12%” statistics come from different studies, and the two studies don’t define “sexual assault” the same way. The “20%” statistic, ((It’s actually 19%, not 20%.)) from a study published in the Journal of American College Health, ((“College Women’s Experiences with Physically Forced, Alcohol- or Other Drug-Enabled, and Drug-Facilitated Sexual Assault Before and Since Entering College,” Journal of American College Health, Volume 57, Issue 6, May-June 2009. A detailed report from this study can be read here (pdf).)) includes both rape and sexual battery, and both attempted and completed assaults. In contrast, the “12%” statistic, from a study published by the National Crime Victim Research and Treatment Center, ((“Drug-facilitated, Incapacitated, and Forcible Rape: A National Study,” 2007. pdf link.)) refers only to completed rapes.

That means the mathematical comparison Will makes is apples and oranges. The 20% statistic counts “A B C and D,” while the 12% statistic is looking only at “D.” What Will’s math does, when you boil it down, is point out that “A + B + C + D” is higher than “D,” and then claims that makes the statistics “preposterous.” Well, no, the statistics aren’t preposterous – George Will’s math is.

Furthermore, the “98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State” figure Will uses as a basis of comparison (which comes from Mark Perry’s AIE blogpost) enormously undercounts sexual assaults reported by Ohio State students, because it only counts reported rapes that took place either on-campus or at a few select off-campus locations (such as an off-campus building run by the university or a recognized student organization). Notably, private residences are not included. ((My source for this is a source Perry used: Ohio State University’s “2013 Annual Campus Security Report & Annual Fire Safety Report.” (Pdf link.) The relevant info is found on page 46 as the pdf program counts pages.))

But according to the Journal of American College Health study, 61-63% of sexual assaults took place off campus, most commonly in a private residence. Other studies have found similar numbers (for instance, this government study found that 66% of rapes of college women took place off campus). So it’s likely that most sexual assaults in the “20%” statistic wouldn’t be included in George Will’s “98 reported rapes” figure, even if they were reported to police. ((We also know from news reports that the Ohio campus cops sometimes declare reported rapes “unfounded.” I can’t tell if these “unfounded” reports are included in Will’s “98 reported rapes” number or not.))

See also: Christie Wilcox at Discover Magazine makes some similar points, and tries to recreate George Will’s math using less dubious numbers.

P.S. I focus on the numbers in this post because I think this aspect has been undercovered. But there are many, many, many other blogs out there that have criticized Will’s awful column along other lines. To scratch the surface:

The conversation we need about our sexual culture – The Washington Post
George Will and Sexual Assault | Ordinary Times
Willful Offense | Ordinary Times
George Will defies description, and a holder of a “coveted status” responds
I was raped, and I stayed silent about my "coveted status."
A College Rape Survivor Responds To George Will’s "Coveted Status" Remarks | Blog | Media Matters for America
George Will’s distasteful conclusions about sexual assault – The Washington Post
George Will: Being a victim of sexual assault is a “coveted status that confers privileges” – Salon.com
ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES: Being A Victim: A Coveted Status. Or So Writes George Will.
How Twitter voted #survivorprivilege off the island

And – to be fair – a good post by Conor Friedersdorf showing that many of the critiques of Will’s column have misread what Will was saying. But even read properly, Will’s column was pretty awful.

Posted in Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 11 Comments