Item One: Torture is OK with Him. New York Post columnist Arnold Ahlert thinks it's okay to torture Iraqi prisoners, or at least subject them to "sleep and sensory deprivation, and body 'stress positions'." Fine. Let's apply the same standards to arrests of Americans. If Mr. Ahlert is someday (mistakenly?) arrested under suspicion of being a Mafia assassin about to commit another contract killing, let's give our police the authority to subject him to everything he thinks it's okay to subject Iraqis to. Forget Miranda rights, forget representation by an attorney. Presume him guilty, bring out the rubber hose, and beat the crap out of him until we get the "truth" - that is, whatever his "interrogators" demand he say. And when we are exactly like Saddam, what justification will his ilk put forward for why we overthrew Saddam?
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One reason torture is forbidden is that it elicits false confessions, false information that does not advance legitimate purposes. The person tormented just says anything the interrogator wants him or her to say, whether it's true or not, just to get the torment to stop. Sometimes people have no information to give. They know nothing because they were arrested wrongly. Some human-rights groups have suggested that 90% of Iraqis arrested in sweeps early on were arrested wrongly. Ahlert wants us to compound that wrong by tormenting the innocent. What a fine, upstanding American he is, as are all the Post's regular columnists!
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Item 2: Activist Courts. Speaking of Miranda rights (established by the Supreme Court), yesterday the Post bizarrely praised the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision exactly 50 years earlier. In that case, an "activist" court, which the Post would usually rail against, struck down racial segregation of schools in, among others, these ringing words: "'To separate [students] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race,' said the court, 'generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.'" Splendid rhetoric, bad logic.
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Turn it around: did white students feel inferior to black students from whom they were "separate[d] ... solely because of their race"? Of course not. This is the way you 'separate' sense from nonsense: just turn the premise around.
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The Post is all for destroying public schools and moving their resources to private schools, which separate students on multiple bases, not just race but also income, ethnicity, religion, "connections", and intelligence, since private schools can impose entrance requirements of any kind they wish. So the Post says that segregation by race is wrong but segregation by income, religion, family connections, etc., is okay. I don't think so. Either all are necessarily wrong or none is necessarily wrong.
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The Brown decision was based on the premise that "separate is inherently unequal", which is utter drivel. Men's and women's lavatories are separate in this country. Does that make them inherently unequal? Do men feel inferior because they aren't permitted to use ladies' rooms, and ladies' rooms are often much more nicely decorated and maintained? No, we do not. We have 50 separate states. Does New York feel inferior because it is separate from New Jersey? (Perhaps it should, but) No, it does not. There are 193 separate countries on Earth. Does the United States feel inferior to Canada, Mexico, or any of the remaining 190 countries because a border keeps us from free movement into them? No, we do not.
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Separate is NOT inherently unequal, and being separated from others by any criterion does not necessarily induce feelings of inferiority on either side to the boundary.
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The Brown decision was just plain wrong, and we can see now, fifty years later, that its suppositions have been proved wrong. Integrated schools are not necessarily better than de-facto segregated schools, and racial difference in performance on standardized tests continues, despite the best efforts of educators to provide equal education and of testers to create racially-neutral tests. Why that is, we are not yet able (or willing) to say.
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Is it because blacks are intellectually inferior? Or is it because too many black children are raised in a culture of poverty that holds education in contempt and encourages kids from a very early age to disrupt classes, make fun of kids who study, and drop out of "the man's" schools as soon as possible? Inasmuch as that culture is enormously powerful in the black community and parts of the Hispanic community - and is even reflected in the wider culture, which prefers bad grammar in song lyrics and speaks contemptuously of "nerds" and "geeks" - we can't be sure. What we do know for sure is that in subcultures (as among Asians and Jews) that value education and push their children to do their homework, pay attention in class, and recognize that education is the key to a golden future, kids do well even in less-than-exemplary schools.
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Item 3: Gay Marriage in Massachusetts. Yesterday, on the same date, May 17th, as the Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down, the State of Massachusetts began performing same-sex marriages. A historic date indeed.
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Think about it: Massachusetts, the Puritan colony on the bay, that inflicted a fire-and-brimstone version of religion to keep people on the 'straight' and narrow, has legalized the marriage - and, by implication, the marriage bed - of gay men and lesbian women. Amazing, and wondrous.
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On April 1, 1969, I formed Homosexuals Intransigent! as a student organization at the City College of the City University of New York. The following spring, I proposed the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. I have always advocated full legal equality for gay men, including state-sanctioned marriage. Now, a 'scant' 35 years later, we have it, in one of fifty states. One down - or perhaps I should say up - 49 to go!
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:17 PM