Creation Museum: the Failure of Creationist Astrophysics

Last weekend, I went down to Petersburg, Kentucky with a few people from SSA to visit the Creation Museum. Like a lot of things Answers in Genesis does, the Creation Museum seems to offer surprisingly accurate information at first glance, but once they start trying derive their erroneous conclusions from the evidence, it all goes horribly wrong. Case in point, the planetarium show.

It began as a pretty neat presentation of the various constellations visible from our solar system, as well as the various types of stars in them, showing their different colors and relative sizes. So far, so good. Then the narrator of the show began talking about the different life spans of various types of stars. Red stars are relatively cool and burn their fuel slowly, while blue stars are relatively hot and burn through their fuel quickly. Blue stars, according to the narrator, are “a reminder of our universe’s young age.” Wait... what? Indeed, all blue stars are comparatively young, but in this context “young” potentially means several million years old, and the ones we’ve seen blow up were definitely pretty old when they died. Aside from that, let’s examine the logic of this statement: essentially what the narrator said was that “since some things are young, nothing can be old.” That statement was the first car derailed in the trainwreck to come.

Different types of main-sequence stars. Massive blue stars squander their hydrogen fuel in only a few million years, while tiny red stars can make their fuel last for over a trillion years. More info here.

The focus of the presentation then moved to the planets we've discovered orbiting these other stars. Since large planets with short orbital periods are the easiest to detect, a large number of the planets we've discovered thus far have been so-called "Hot Jupiters" - gas giants roughly the size of Jupiter, or bigger, orbiting absurdly close to their parent star (some of them orbit their star closer than Mercury orbits our Sun). Before Hot Jupiters were discovered, it was thought that they shouldn't exist. The area near a star is too hot for gases to condense and form planets. Clearly, they must be the work of God, right? Well, what the narrator neglected to mention was that planets are now known to migrate early on in solar system formation. Interactions with the dust in the star's accretion disk and with other planets can cause new planets to drastically change their orbits before they reach stable ones. Hot Jupiters must have formed farther away from their stars and then migrated inward.

Hot Jupiters: they're very hot. More info about this picture here.

After finishing up talking about our galaxy, the narrator begins talking about other galaxies. He answers a question frequently asked by people who know what a light-year is: “If the universe is only 6,000 years old, how is it that we can see galaxies millions and even billions of light-years away?” The answer: “gravitational time dilation.” That’s right, an effect of relativity - a theory partly built on the principle that the speed of light in a vacuum is always the same - causes the speed of light in a vacuum to be much faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. That’s how light from distant galaxies is able to reach us in such a short time. Obviously, gravitational time dilation has no effect whatsoever on the speed of light. Gravity warps both space and time in such a way that the speed of light remains the same. Besides, there’s not enough gravity in between galaxies to cause this effect to any appreciable extent anyway. Usually when gravitational time dilation comes up, it’s either in the context of extreme gravity (near a black hole or neutron star) or when we have a need for extremely precise clocks (like we do in GPS satellites).

Contrary to what evolutionists would have you believe, it does not take light a year to travel a Lightyear. The unit is named for the famous space explorer, and vanquisher of Zurg, Buzz Lightyear.

The narrator then pointed out his last bit of evidence for a young universe: spiral arms. The claim was that if spiral galaxies are billions of years old, their spiral arms should have wound up so tightly by now that they would be unrecognizable as arms (since inner stars take less time to go around the galaxy than outer stars). This argument reveals a complete failure on the narrator’s part to understand what spiral arms are. They are not groups of stars that orbit the galaxy along with their constituents, they are self-perpetuating density waves that stars pass through as they orbit the galaxy. The arms maintain themselves in the following way: as stars approach a spiral arm, the extra gravity from the arm causes the stars to speed up; as they begin to leave, they slow down and end up spending a disproportionate amount of time within the arm. The reason why we can see spiral arms so clearly in other galaxies is because of the presence of bright blue stars, newly formed from the comparatively dense interstellar medium in the arms (since blue stars only live for a few million years, they die before they leave the arms). Longer, more detailed explanation here.

Stars go in, stars go out. Astronomers have explained that.

As I got up to leave the planetarium at the end of the show, I immediately regretted not speaking up to correct the errors in the show more audibly. Not only because getting kicked out of the Creation Museum would have been funny, but also because I genuinely think that at least some small fraction of the other people in that planetarium actually wanted to learn about astrophysics, and were deprived of that because of their poor choice (or their parents' poor choice) of venue. If I could have gotten even one of these curious, but misinformed, people to question the creationist narrative and do their own investigation, I would have been much more satisfied with relinquishing my $38 to that museum.

Philosophy of Religion, Part 1: Pascal's Wager and the Ethics of Belief

This is my first blog post in what is probably over a year. Due to work and school, I have not been as active with the group as I would have liked - my work hours conflicted with SSA meeting times during the past winter semester. Now I have much more free time. As I am currently taking a very pertinent spring class - Phil 262, which is "Philosophy of Religion" - I figured that now was as good of a time as any to start blogging again. I aim to write 1 or 2 posts each week, dealing with the subjects presented in class as I encounter them. This week, the topics were "The Ethics of Belief" and "Pascal's Wager."

Belief and Morality

"The Ethics of Belief" was the title of our introductory class. We studied two essays - W. K. Clifford's "Ethics of Belief" and William James' "The Will to Believe." Clifford espouses a view called evidentialism, which, according to our instructor Bill Dunaway, is the prevailing mindset among most philosophers of religion, theist or atheist. Evidentialism itself is not a particularly controversial or surprising view - it is basically the idea that we should strive to believe whatever is best supported by the evidence given to us, and that wherever the evidence is inconclusive, we should refrain from forming beliefs. The justification is, obviously, that if we don't do this, we are at a greater risk of making bad moral judgements and causing harm. Clifford's example is a shipowner who, about to send his ship off to sail, ignores clear evidence that the ship is not seaworthy, instead convincing himself on the basis of wishful thinking that everything will be alright. This makes him guilty of negligence - he formed his beliefs in a bad way, leading to an entirely preventable catastrophe (the ship sinks in the story). The point is that we have an ethical duty to form our beliefs based on evidence. In his own words,

"No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever."

William James would agree with Clifford in many or most situations. Both authors agree that when the evidence tips the scale to one side, we should believe in accordance with the evidence. Both authors also agree that in many cases, at least according to my interpretation, when the evidence is inconclusive, one should refrain from forming beliefs. However, James makes the following criticism: sometimes the situation is such that you are forced to act one way or another, with "momentous" consequences. The prime example being, of course, religion: we must either act like believers or not act like believers, and these actions could have momentous consequences after death. In situations like these, James argues, if the evidence is inconclusive, then we might as well believe whatever makes us happiest. By contrast, evidentialism would ask that you nevertheless try refrain from forming beliefs about the issue, even though you are forced to act one way or another. To this, James replies,

"I myself find it impossible to go with Clifford ... he who says, 'Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!' merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of his desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagine any one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford's exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound."

 Assuming that the evidence in matters of religion is inconclusive, Clifford would seem to advocate agnosticism, while James would advocate "believe which side you like best." This dovetails into questions of voluntarism in matters of belief, and whether or not believing without evidence is intrinsically unethical. Those topics could be a blog post all by itself (which maybe I will write someday). Since I want to get to Pascal's Wager, I'll briefly conclude the discussion. Because I think that the actual evidence in matters of religion is more than enough to tip the scales, the above controversy is not all that relevant to the actual debate about whether God exists (James, after all, agrees that when the evidence does strongly favor one side, we are obligated to believe with it). As a first lecture, I thought that the "Ethics of Belief" was a good primer for the rest of the semester, as it served to remind us what sorts of things are good reasons to form beliefs, and where the grey areas lie.

Pascal's Wager

If you are reading this, I assume that you know what Pascal's wager is, so I will save some space and not restate it. If you want to read a good summary of the wager and objections to it, here is a link to the relevant article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which was our primary reading assignment. The class itself was a bit disappointing: instead of heated debate, we spent most of the time learning the meaning and mechanics of expected value. But toward the end of class, we actually did discuss the wager, a discussion that we will conclude next week.

The Argument from Superdominance

Although I had previously known what the wager was, I learned that it in fact has two forms (well, three, because that's how Pascal presented it, but I don't see why the second and third differ in any meaningful way). The second/third form is the classic form, normally referred to when we talk about "Pascal's Wager" - betting on God yields infinite expected utility, so it is always a wise choice. The first form is called the "Argument from Superdominance." In general, the argument states that if presented with two choices, and that the worst possible outcome of the first choice is at least as good as the best possible outcome of the second choice, then one should always take the first choice. The truth of this should be clear upon reflection. If choice 1 is "believe in God" and choice 2 is "don't believe in God," and the consequences of believing and being wrong would still make you more well off than not believing and being right, then you might as well believe and risk being wrong, no matter how low the probability of being right actually is. This argument works even assuming that God rewards believers with a finite utility, rather than an infinite one, so long as belief always leads to a better outcome, or superdominates, nonbelief.

The second/third versions of Pascal's wager, the most common presentations, presume infinite utility for a correct belief in God, but do not presume that belief superdominates nonbelief, nor do they presume that incorrect nonbelief has an infinitely bad utility (although that is a common variant).

Objections

1. Objections to the superdominance variant

If believing in God actually does superdominate nonbelief in quality of outcome, the first wager is quite compelling. But there is little reason to think that it does. We might diminish the utility of incorrect belief simply by virtue of the fact that it is incorrect (true beliefs are intrinsically desirable). We might boost the utility of correct nonbelief for the same reason. It also seems likely that incorrect religious belief would lead to moral failings from a humanistic perspective, such as the persecution of gays and honest skeptics, the unhealthy repression of sexuality, etc. If some version of belief in God, like Deism, would lead a person to implement humanistic ethics on earth, then it would have a chance at actually superdominating nonbelief - and I would also not be terribly opposed to it (we fight religion primarily on ethical grounds; if we can convert people to humanism, I say let them keep believing in God privately, if it makes them happy. In such a case it would be about as consequential in everyday life as disagreeing about string theory. We currently argue so forcefully for atheism because it seems the best way to make more humanists. Also because we think we're right, but the former reason is more important.)

Now I move on to the classical wager.

2. Pascal's Wager... Invalid?

Before I present what I think are good objections to the classical wager, I want to share a very interesting objection, one which I am not convinced by, but that, as a mathematician, I nevertheless find hilarious. Most objections question premises or relevance; this argument, presented in the Stanford link above, questions the wager's actual logical validity. It goes like this:

• Suppose we grant all of Pascal's premises: the utility of betting on God and being right is infinite, and all other possibilities have some finite utility. We also grant that "betting on God" is rationally the best choice.
• There is a nonzero probability that any action I take - any action at all - may lead eventually to me betting on God.
• But betting on God carries an infinite expected utility. Therefore, any action I take carries an infinite expected utility.
• Therefore, I might as well ignore the wager and go have a drink at the bar, since this has the same expected payoff as anything else I try to do.

According to the Stanford article (which has this discussion in more detail), the argument was met by objections, which were met by counter-objections, etc. The entire exchange is hilarious because of how far removed from reality it quickly becomes. Here is an outline:

• Counter-Argument: Eventually, after taking a countably infinite number of actions, you will wind up betting on God with probability 1. Why not just do this to begin with?
• Counter-counter-argument: Not if you engage in a sequence of actions where the probability that you bet on God diminishes fast enough! For example, 1/4, 1/9, 1/16, ... etc., for then even after countably infinite actions, it is not certain that you will bet on God, though the utility of each action is infinite.
• Counter-counter-counter-argument: Yes, but if you are able to perform the actions uncountably many times, then it is indeed certain that you will bet on God at some point.

This train has long ago passed nonsense station. I offer a simpler objection: if all of your options have infinite expected utility, is it not rational to choose the one that is most likely to actually pay off? That is, just choose the belief option right away, because it's the most likely strategy to succeed. This is why I don't think the above objection works; still, it was a wonderful effort.

The article lists a number of other objections that have been made. I will list some of my favorites.

3.  The reward for correct belief is high, but finite.

In this case, the probability that God exists does matter - if it is small enough, the utility of nonbelief could outweigh that of belief. I think there is a good case that the reward couldn't possibly have infinite utility. After all, it is quite clear that we humans are finite and worldly through and through. We do not have the capacity to experience infinity. Suppose that after death, we are transformed so that we can experience infinity. Would such a vast transformation not destroy everything that makes us human? Perhaps your unbelieving soul does suffer in hell - it would not be you, but rather some other being with the mere vestiges of you. Then when you die on earth, you really are dead.

4. The famous "Many Gods Objection."

When I was making the transition from Christian to Atheist, the last intellectual obstacle I had to overcome was the fear of hell. I was paralyzed in my belief by some version of Pascal's Wager that I had invented for myself. (Only later did I realize that this argument had not only been made before, but also was one of the most famous ever to be made). I overcame my qualms with the many gods objection, which struck me one day as I was watching news of the Middle East. Across the ocean is a whole world where the norm is not Christianity, but Islam. Two contradictory religions - and each could use Pascal's wager just as well as the other. If I had been born into a Muslim world, I would go to Christian hell. Perhaps, being born into a Christian society, I would go to Islamic hell. Who is right? Someone is going to hell either way - it might as well be me, for what is one more lost soul among the billions of people already destined for hell? (If you consider all 100 billion or so humans who have ever lived, I guesstimate that far fewer than 30% were ever Christian - that's a pretty terrible success rate, God).

Theists have tried to defend the wager by noting that some Gods are more likely than others. Perhaps, on the basis of historical evidence, Christianity could be determined more likely than Islam. The problem is that, as the Stanford article pointed out, a major criterion for likelihood is simplicity. In that regard, a deistic God with no connection to worldly religions seems to be far more likely than either the Christian or the Muslim gods - and what reason have we to think that such a God would punish nonbelievers with a hell? None, a priori - hell is a Judeo-Christian notion. The many gods objection continues to be a worthy one.

5. Moral Objections

As my Philosophy instructor pointed out, many theists have trouble with the wager as well. It's not a good reason to believe in God because it's not for the right reasons - religion is reduced to little more than a self-interested game, rather than a joyous appreciation of God's intrinsic goodness. As Patrick points out, the argument is coercive, and could be used to make a gullible person to believe almost anything. If we have very good reasons for not believing in God, then I think that the moral objection is entirely sufficient to kill Pascal's Wager as a living argument, even if we still assign a small but nonzero probability to God's existence.

Conclusion

There are other objections that I might cover, such as the idea that we can't simply choose to believe something, or of assigning zero probability to God's existence, but this post is getting long-winded. Most of my posts will not be this long. I was trying to cover the material of two classes. In the future I may limit myself to one class per blog post.

I wish that the class would go more in-depth into some of the subjects covered; however, as there is a lot of philosophy of religion - several thousand years' worth - and only a semester to discuss it, I understand why the course is more of a survey than a detailed analysis. As an atheist who has wrestled with questions of religion for years, I have seen most of the arguments before, in one form or another. However, I am looking forward to seeing how "sophisticated" philosophers approach the arguments. My knowledge of religion came from a haphazard internet education, which I have been trying to rise above. Frankly, most message board arguments that I see, both for and against God, are terribly simplistic and misguided. As Daniel Dennet said, "There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view I hold dear." The internet is useful as a grindstone on which to sharpen your bullshit detector. But if you want to do great philosophy, read the great philosophers.

Creation Museum (Part 1): What is Evil?

On Saturday (04 May 2013) I went with a small group of our members on a trip to go visit the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.  The museum itself was interesting, if only for how vacuous its content was, not to mention their dishonest portrayal of scientific theories and observations.  I will go into that in later posts with some help from others that attended with me; there are plenty of details that warrant mention, and we need to collaborate a bit to describe everything to you.

What I would like to briefly tell about, however, are three statements made during a "question and answer" session (in quotes because he asked questions, and he gave answers; and I never got to ask how freshwater and saltwater creatures could both survive the Flood, so drat) that we attended at the end of our visit that made me actually afraid of Answers in Genesis and their employees.

The first statement was regarding Genesis 2:16-17, in which God promises Adam that he will kill him in the day that he eats from the Tree of Knowledge.  Our presenter stated that God would have been completely right to kill Adam (for, again, eating fruit), but that he chose not to, because not only is God completely Holy and Righteous and thus cannot do evil, he is forgiving and gracious.

The second statement that our presenter said was regarding his contraction of leukemia, and how he had faced the question (like most people do when they are very sick like that) of "Why me?"  And as most Christians phrase it: "Why me, God?"  And indeed why me: he was a devout Christian, why did he get cancer?  Well according to our speaker (and at least he prefaced this by saying it would probably smudge our opinion of him, as impossible as that may seem in my case but as completely correct as he was all the same), he got cancer because he deserved it.  In fact, everyone who gets cancer deserves it.  Everything bad that happens comes about because we are sinners and because we deserve it.

The third statement that he made followed very closely to the second; if there was so much suffering in the world, why doesn't God stop that?  Why is there evil if God is all-powerful and all-good?  His response to this problem of evil was to simply ask to atheists: "What is evil?"  And when none of us spoke up to challenge him (and risk outing ourselves in that group, to you sir?), he gloated and said "See?  They can't even answer that question."

I thought afterward about what would have happened if I had spoken up and suggested that human suffering could constitute a basis for defining evil.  It didn't take me long to reflect on how useless that would have been, though.  There I would have been, telling someone who had just said that God is justified in causing suffering – that humans deserved suffering – that suffering was evil.  Of course he wouldn't buy it, he would just regress to his earlier point, and I would have to sit there embarrassed that I tried to converse with him.

Several people have told me since (with good reason) that we either wasted our money in attending the museum, both from the viewpoint that we are now $38 less well-off each (we paid also for a planetarium show that was, in my opinion, very neat, aside from the ridiculous lies about "secular" models of the universe), and also the viewpoint that these people just made $38 for each of us.  I would say that while it's maybe not worth the cost, it's an interesting and humorous experience.  It was quite a sight to behold, a "monument to scientific illiteracy," as professor of geology, paleontology, and evolution at UC Berkeley, Jerry Lipps, once put it.  That had some value to it.

This is something though that I've had a couple of days to mull over, and I would like to provide a word of caution to people who are considering going on this trip.  And it is the same word of caution that I would say to people that try to argue against God by using the existence of evil, thinking that you will be able to shame everyone into keeping silent about that implication: some have no shame.

I do not think that I need to explain why a single arbiter of moral values uproots the concept of morality in the first place, why whim cannot be allowed in moral law.  I do not think I need to explain why we should fervently reject the concept of deserved suffering, of sin, especially when it is administered under the fairy tale shadow of past genocidal reciprocation.  I do not think I need to explain why the carnal termination and degradation of human experience is immoral, perhaps the best definition of immoral.

What is evil?  If it comes up again in our group to attend the Creation Museum as a field trip, I will remember my experience during that talk, and that even before consideration of the lies in that place, even before consideration of how they shame scientists, even before consideration of their racist and sexist undertones, even before consideration of their statements that rejection of scripture leads to moral relativism, even before consideration of the organization's blatant goal to uneducate the masses, I have an answer (albeit non-exhaustive) to that question: Answers in Genesis.  And that's where my $38 is going.

Do Most Experts Believe in Global Warming?

James Taylor from the Heartland Institute has recently written in Forbes about a new peer-reviewed study that he says demonstrates no:

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

 I personally find it hilarious that Taylor led in with that idiom: Don't look now.  It's almost as if he didn't want us to go read the paper.  This is from the abstract:

This paper examines the framings and identity work associated with professionals’ discursive construction of climate change science, their legitimation of themselves as experts on ‘the truth’, and their attitudes towards regulatory measures.

Well that doesn't sound like an opinion survey. Why would you want to know about professionals' legitimation of themselves as experts if you just want their opinion? Why are you surveying people who might not be experts on climate science anyway? I don't go to my dentist to get his opinion on my house's electrical wiring.

The abstract concludes:

By linking notions of the science or science fiction of climate change to the assessment of the adequacy of global and local policies and of potential organizational responses, we contribute to the understanding of ‘defensive institutional work’ by professionals within petroleum companies, related industries, government regulators, and their professional association.

This isn't an opinion poll.  The authors clearly state that they're trying to elaborate on defensive institutional work by professionals in various industries or agencies; if I may phrase it this way, it's a psychological analysis, not a polling.

Need some convincing still that this is not a poll? From their methodology section (my italics):

Since 1999, climate change had been debated among professionals in APEGA in over 150 articles and letters to the editor that had appeared in the association’s monthly publication The PEGG. [...] Given this debate, APEGA initiated a broad survey of its 40,000 members (as of 2007) concerning their beliefs about climate change, sources of knowledge, and opinions about the appropriate roles for individuals, industry, APEGA, and government. The first author was engaged by APEGA to develop the survey and analyze the results. The survey questionnaire contained closed- and open-ended questions and was published in The PEGG and on the website in October 2007. A total of 1077 completed surveys were received and 12 respondents emailed or mailed in additional comments.

There are two reasons in this paragraph why there's no need to go further:

1) Taylor's claims can be dismissed just on the very basis that the results from this survey were not random; there is absolutely no way to account for non-response bias.  This is a huge failing from an opinion polling POV – you cannot be certain that you have a representative sample if you have a fully open survey, because it may very well be that those who have one viewpoint are much more vocal about it than those that have a different viewpoint.  Perceived threat to status quo, perceived importance, perceived self-interest, etc.: each of these can influence whether a person will respond to a survey, and can all be influenced by ideology.

In defense of the study, the survey methodology may not be very relevant for their purposes.  If they want to do a psychological analysis of sorts on each of the subpopulations, then so long as they have enough from each group to generalize to the subgroups as well (not quite guaranteed by the open survey format, still), they can probably do their analysis.  It's like me wanting to find out how the Westboro Baptist Church members frame religious questions; they're a very small minority, but I don't need to interview them as a proportional subset of a much larger group of people.

2) This survey was conducted only on a very narrow sub-population of professionals, members of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta. This group very likely has a negligible number of climate scientists in its membership, and is very disproportionately populated by scientists that work with one of the most active anti-climate-science industries on the planet, the fossil fuel industry.

We can see from the responses from all of the sub-groups too that these people are not experts in matters of climate science:

"Absolutely! 1000%. [The Kyoto Protocol] is the only effective way to curb pollutions[...]"

"If you think about it, global warming is what brought us out of the Ice Age."

"It is a mistake to think that human activity can change this… It would be like an ant in a bowling ball who thinks it can have a significant influence the roll of the ball."

Quoting the paper: "They are most likely to speak against climate science as being science fiction, ‘manipulated and fraudulent’. They are least likely to believe that the scientific debate is settled, that IPCC modeling is accurate, and oppose all regulation ‘based on the incorrect assumption that greenhouse gases cause climate change’."

"This present hysteria on 'global warming' is purely political and has little to do with real science."

"Kyoto is simply designed to transfer large sums of money from the wallets of citizens of mostly Caucasian countries to the Swiss bank accounts of third world dictators."

"This is obviously a left wing/liberal survey… You folks were probably calling out the sky is falling when Ozone was the latest left wing craze [this was a real issue BTW]… The earth ‘weather’ has always been changing. Now you want to blame me and my gas furnace, big house, two cars, etc. Well get over it."

"It is only reasonable to assume that we are changing our environment and climate, all you have to do is look out your window to see it."

 These aren't statements from people who are climate experts. These are the statements of non-experts, or ideologues, or both.

If James Taylor wants to tout around the views of non-experts as evidence that global warming is not real, then by all means he may dig his grave (maybe he can join Rush Limbaugh, who also recently saw it fit to reward a 13-year-old caller for his library "research" demonstrating that global warming is a scam; the kid, of course, did not give any of this evidence he supposedly found while he was on the line).  We'll still hold on to actual peer-reviewed opinion polling of actual experts, such as Doran et al 2009 and Anderegg et al 2010, or maybe even take in mind analysis done on papers from the Web of Science by James Powell.  For those that are not so fecklessly reckless as Taylor is though, be sure to learn from his mistakes. I would personally recommend, for starters, reading the sources you cite.

Shenanigans from the DOJ

Everyone right now should know that the Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of Section 3 in the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

What most people probably know is that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has refused to defend the law in court, and that the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG), from the House of Representatives, has stepped in to defend the law.

What fewer people probably know is that after the District Court ruled that the law was unconstitutional, and that the executive government had to pay the tax refund (some $363,000) to the plaintiff, the DOJ decided to file as an aggrieved party to the Supreme Court.  In other words, the DOJ will not obey the stay order, and is filing as an appellant... for a decision they agree with.  As the lawyer for BLAG put so nicely:

"You will see the most anomalous motion to dismiss in the history of litigation: A motion to dismiss, filed by the United States, asking the court not to dismiss."

What everybody is dying to know: why the hell did the DOJ file at all?

There were several statements made in the oral arguments (transcript here) that try to shed light onto the DOJ's line of reasoning.  The first was part of an explanation proffered by Justice Alito:

"JUSTICE ALITO: Well, the Solicitor General's standing argument is very abstract. But here is one possible way of understanding it, perhaps the Solicitor General will disavow it, but it would go like this: The President's position in this case is that he is going to continue to enforce DOMA, engage in conduct that he believes is unconstitutional, until this Court tells him to stop. 

The judgment of the Second Circuit told the Executive Branch to comply with the Equal Protection Clause immediately. The President disagrees with the temporal aspect of that, so the Executive is aggrieved in the sense that the Executive is ordered to do something prior to the point when the Executive believes it should do that thing. 

Now, wouldn't that be sufficient to make -­ to create injury in the Executive and render the Executive an aggrieved party?"

The first thing we might notice from this statement is a confirmation that the DOJ will continue to enforce Section 3 of DOMA. Again, they agree with the decision to make them stop. So, why in the world has the executive branch decided to continue to enforce? Apparently it's because of 'respect' for the lawmakers that passed it:

MR. SRINIVASAN: Well, there are — there are a number of considerations that could factor into it, Justice Ginsburg. You're right that either of those scenarios is possible. The reason that the Government appealed in this case is because the President made the determination that this statute would continue to be enforced, and that was out of respect for the Congress that enacted the law and the President who signed it, and out of respect for the role of the judiciary in saying what the law is.

WHAT?!?  But no, this is true, we see the same thing from the summary of the DOJ's appeal from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals:

While the government concurs substantively with the district court’s conclusion that Section 3 is unconstitutional, the President has directed federal agencies to continue to enforce DOMA “unless and until . . . the judicial branch renders a definitive verdict against the law’s constitutionality.” Holder Letter at 5. As the Attorney General has explained, “this course of action respects the actions of the prior Congress that enacted DOMA, and it recognizes the judiciary as the final arbiter of the constitutional claims raised.” Ibid.

This seems a bit too stupid.  A bit too ridiculous of a reason why they will continue to enforce when they actually agree they should not be enforcing.  And apparently the DOJ thinks that it has the right to file based on an aggrieved status predicated by this order to follow the constitution when it "wishes" to do otherwise (enforce the law).

There is one possible ulterior motive.  The District Court ruled the law unconstitutional, but there are two ways to do that: "facially," an "as–applied."  The difference between the two is that if a law is unconstitutional facially, it is unconstitutional all of the time and thus struck down.  If it is unconstitutional as applied, then the decision only fixes the situation for the immediate plaintiff.

The District Court ruled the law unconstitutional as applied to the plaintiff, as stated in the decision.  This means that there was no federal imperative for enforcement of the law to cease.  BLAG would have, and of course did, appealed the decision to a higher court.

The implications of the scope of the lower court's decision really help to shed light on a particularly ominous possibility: BLAG's standing in the case was in question.  At higher court levels, their standing is less clear, and indeed even in the Supreme Court, there were arguments over their own standing to defend the law.  If BLAG had failed to demonstrate standing in either the Second Circuit or in the Supreme Court, this case would end without a ruling of facial unconstitutionality.

This is why the federal government is stepping in with this completely bullshit argument about wanting to enforce the law, out of respect of the passing Congress and signing President, until Congress passed a law to override DOMA or a court ruled it unconstitutional in all cases.  They may yet have a case of grievance from the requirement to pay the tax refund anyway (which they are actually quite happy to pay, since again they agree with the ruling).  This petition was filed before the case made it to the Second Circuit, and it is not quite clear from the Second Circuit's decision that the law was determined unconstitutional facially.  The court may very well have decided as if to uphold the determination made at the District Court level.

If BLAG's standing is rejected in the Supreme Court, this decision of as–applied unconstitutionality will very likely stand, and DOMA will remain.  It will remain until Congress passes a law overriding it, or until a federal court rules it unconstitutional facially.  But, if the DOJ can maintain standing, then there will be a defendant in the case still, and the Supreme Court can rule on the merits of DOMA and very likely rule it unconstitutional facially.

So yes, this is complete shenanigans from the DOJ, to find a loophole to actually end this law outright.  But it just might be ridiculous enough to work.

The conscientious approach

On November 2nd, 2011, the Michigan Senate passed a bill they called 'Matt's Safe School Law,' which outlined general procedures that schools had to undertake to implement anti-bullying procedures, and which included a gem of a caveat that made the entire bill not only moot toward the goal of decreasing bullying, but expressly complicit in its propagation:

(8) This section does not abridge the rights under the First Amendment of the constitution of the United States or under article I of the state constitution of 1963 of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil's parent or guardian. This section does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil's parent or guardian.

That same day, the bill was received by the House, was referred to the Committee on Education, and quickly proceeded to go die in a hole in that committee.

The bill stirred up quite a bit of controversy in its passage, and for good reason of course: permitting bullying on religious grounds is dangerous to students and antithetical to anti-bullying measurers.  This disgusting appeal to 'moral conviction' - a conviction of the type any such actions would certainly not be - was 'smoothed over' as part of a 'compromise' between Republicans and Democrats in the House version of the bill, HB 4163 (which eventually became law).  In actuality what happened was the text was completely excised, and any suggestion that this could ever have been a point of compromise implicitly allows the possibility that such text is OK in our law, and that will. not. do.

In what can only be described as ineffable belligerence to the public's outrage in late 2011 over that bill's close allowance for a cop-out for bullies by religious 'freedom,' the Senate is prepared to pass yet again a bill that would permit any health care provider or health care payer (see the bill for a working definition) to assert a matter of 'conscience' or religious objection to any health care service that they very well please, excluding in some cases:

for any health care payer:  

- health care services that have already been administered

for any health care provider:

- health care services deemed 'regular' or a 'substantial portion' of normal course of duties for their position

- health care services for which they are expressly contracted to perform (so, you can't just get a job at an abortion clinic and obstruct its operations by claiming an objection - you got the job for that purpose)

- health care services deemed necessary by an attending physician to avoid permanent physical harm

- health care services required to respond to a public health emergency

- health care services for which there are no other health care providers available to perform, but only in the first instance if the request for accommodation was made at the same time a patient needed the service

- situations where the request is made in the presence of a patient that needs the care (which is an extraordinary statement toward the apathy this bill has for patients, who have not a vested interest in being convenienced by the knowledge that their attendees are hunky-dory with their treatments, but rather in not being inconvenienced to receive that treatment in the first place).

This is just vague enough to work.  There is no specification in the bill as to what qualifies as 'regular' practice for a job position - is it once a week?  Twice a week?  Once a day?  Who determines that, the employer or the government?

There is virtually no limit on health care services that a health care payer may object to - this, above all else, most obviously flies in the face of the birth control requirement from the ACA, which only has lenience for expressly religious employers.  The challenges this law will face in court if it is passed could very well end up costing our state a great deal of money, just to have these sections struck down as subordinate to federal law.

Perhaps even more dangerously, an employer may refuse to contract a health payment plan that pays for blood transfusions (Jehovah's Witnesses will sure love this), or stemcell treatments, or perhaps organ transplants or skin grafts or hormonal treatments or vaccines or various forms of abortions, and so on so long as they can find a religious justification for their desires.  I of course have to allow the complaint that there aren't any insurance plans that would expressly disallow these types of procedures - maybe except for minimal coverage cases intended to be used by those not inclined or able to spend a lot of money, I would indeed sure hope that such exclusive plans are not offered to be contracted, because like with the bullying example it's antithetical to the very goal of health care.

Astoundingly enough too, the supposedly pro-business backers of this bill (I only base this off of their party affiliations) included clauses that disallowed employers from screening prospective employees on whether they would claim objection of conscience in situations, and also from 'discriminating' against employees that claimed objection of conscience.  Excuse me, but I'm still a student and have not been a worker for very long periods of time; have I had this idea all wrong?  Maybe I have been lied to all of this time, that for every other single occupation on the face of the planet (barring perhaps politics, which is unsurprisingly the landfill from which this trash legislation originated), if you do not perform the duties of your job, you are fired.  Yes, the story has been told to me in so few words.

The echoes of the senate of 2011 ring very strongly in this bill.  The old 'Matt's Safe School Law' draft pushed first in the Senate had the common courtesy to see itself out the door.  If there is a modicom of sanity in the Michigan House (perhaps even in the Senate, since the bill has not technically been voted out of it yet!), this one will quickly follow suit.  Our state cannot afford such another disgrace as this bill, and it surely will not be disgraced under the banner of moral - and ack, religious - 'conscience.'

Anti-Discrimination Policy: Update

In a post about a month ago I explained the situation regarding the registered status of a religious student organization on campus, the Asian InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (AIVCF).  The group had written into its student organization constitution a requirement that officers in their organization submit a statement of faith, effectively excluding a number of people from being able to lead their student organization (but which would also give them the ability to guarantee that their group functions toward their stated goals).  The University saw such a requirement as a breach of the Anti-Discrimination Policy, particularly (again, I think, though don't know the specifics) this section:

"The University is committed to compliance with all applicable laws regarding non-discrimination.  Furthermore, it shall strive to build a diverse community in which opportunity is equal for all persons regardless of race, sex, color, religion, creed, national origin or ancestry, age, marital status, handicap, or Vietnam-era veteran status.  It shall exert its leadership for the achievement of this goal by all parties which it recognizes or with which students or employees of the University are involved."

Quite belatedly I have now revisited their Facebook page to see if there has been an update on the issue; the University and AIVCF had met on February 4th to discuss the matter, and according to AIVCF a ruling has been put forth (my emphasis):

Coming out of those meetings, the University ultimately decided to make an exception to their policy and offer us fully restored student organization status.

Ah, 'exception.'  That's a fun word to hear from groups whose national leaders were earlier throwing around cries of discrimination.  This will surely leave a bitter taste in the mouths of at least several of our own members, who also recognize the malarkey around such accusations.