Local governments shouldn't crack down on Chick-Fil-A

I'll outsource my commentary to Adam Serwer:

Blocking construction of Chik-fil-a restaurants over Cathy's views is a violation of Cathy's First Amendment rights. Boston and Chicago have no more right to stop construction of Chik-fil-As based on an executive's anti-gay views than New York City would have had the right to block construction of an Islamic community center blocks away from Ground Zero. The government blocking a business from opening based on the owner's political views is a clear threat to everyone's freedom of speech—being unpopular doesn't mean you don't have rights. It's only by protecting the rights of those with whose views we find odius that we can hope to secure them for ourselves.

Yup. I'm not going to go out of my way to boycott Chick-Fil-A, because I've never actually had a meal there that I recall. But that's my private choice. A government decision to punish somebody's political or religious beliefs is wrong.

More to the point, it may also get in the way of actually advancing gay rights. One of the counterarguments to gay marriage is that conservative Christians fear they'll be legally required to, essentially, bless such unions. They see rights as a zero-sum affair: If gays win, they lose. That's not the way it has to be, and it's not the way it should be. If Boston and Chicago mayors prove otherwise, that will stiffen religious resistance to civil marriage. Which means that those cities' mayors aren't just wrong, they're also being tactically stupid in the service of scoring political points. That's not really all that principled.

UPDATE: A friend says that the mayors aren't actually threatening to block construction. That's mostly true: Boston's mayor started out in that spot, but backed off. Chicago's mayor is apparently just being blustery, but an alderman there seems to be trying to block stuff nonetheless. I don't blame these men for articulating their values, but government officials should always be leery of being seen as using their official powers to chill speech.

Maybe Noam Scheiber should pipe down

If you're going to adopt modest, smart, common-sense changes to gun ownership rules in this country, there's going to have to be one guiding mantra for liberals: "We're not going to take your guns away. We're not going to take your guns away. We're not going to take your guns away." Repeat.

Why? Because the NRA types out there are sure that every tiny move in the direction of regulation isn't merely a slippery slope, but a cliff over which the government pushing them straight into the jowls of tyranny and other purple-prosey mixed metaphors. The ability to stop psychos from ordering 6,000 rounds of ammunition online, like they're so many baby wipes, depends greatly—entirely—on the ability of advocates for such rules to convince those NRA types that we're not going to take your guns away. 

So while I'm the last guy who would ever tell a journalist to pipe down with his or her opinions because they don't actually help anything get accomplished in the real-world political realm: Maybe Noam Scheiber should pipe down.

One more thought about Jonathan Haidt and 'The Righteous Mind'

There was a moment at the end of our podcast with Jonathan Haidt when I wanted to leap up from my seat indignantly and shout, "You just don't get it sir!" I was restrained by a couple of things A) time constraints and B) the collegiality that is our default mode during these podcasts.

Some background: Haidt is a proponent of the "Moral Foundations Theory," which posits that humans essentially have six areas of morality that they care about. How does this make a difference in our politics? Well, Haidt says that conservatives tend to score highly in caring about all six areas of morality—but that liberals seem to care mostly about three. (Liberals apparently care less about proportionality, purity, and loyalty—and this puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to engaging their fellow citizens and earning their votes)

It was the loyalty part—conservatives care about it, liberals don't—that got me tripped up. I explain why in an early part of the podcast: Because my moral sense tells me that appeals to a national sense of loyalty can often be abused. Just look at what Michele Bachmann has been up to lately.

But toward the end of the podcast, we revisited the idea of loyalty, and Haidt ... well, "sneered" isn't too strong a word: He sneered at that fine old liberal bumper sticker that urges readers to "Support The Troops: Bring Them Home."

Here's what Haidt said:

"If you put that on your car, you're basically admitting you have no clue what it is to support your team when it's fighting an away game. You have no clue what it is to support the troops. You're saying (shifts into simpering voice): 'Well, morality is about protecting people from getting hurt, and I don't want the troops to get hurt, so I want to bring them home.' That just embarrasses your side. And liberals do this on a lot of issues."

Well. To heck with that.

In my lifetime, that "Support The Troops: Bring Them Home" slogan was used mostly in reference to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the years of warfare that followed. Lots of liberals were fine going to war in Afghanistan—we had been attacked on 9/11, after all—but were appalled by the decision to go to war in Iraq. There were several elements to this: Lots of folks doubted that Iraq had WMD weapons at all; others didn't think think the threat rose to the level of requiring armed intervention, but lots of people simply thought it was wrong to simply go start a war and invade a country that hasn't actually hurt you first.

Liberal opposition to the war did have a strong moral element then. It wasn't just "don't hurt people." It was "don't hurt innocent people." "Don't hurt people who haven't hurt us." "Don't hurt people for causes—WMDs—that turn out not to exist."

Most Americans didn't initially agree with liberals. But liberals turned out to be right.

And yet, many liberals also gave serious effort to "supporting the troops." Some of this was leftover from Vietnam, and its residual sense that returning troops had been unfairly treated. Some of it was the recognition that the troops have a job to do, and a boss who gives them orders, that Private John Doe isn't necessarily gung-ho about patrolling Baghdad, but is loyal and serves the country, and that those moral feelings of loyalty deserve—yes!—respect from liberals.

In other words: "Support The Troops: Bring Them Home" represented an often-conscious effort by liberals not to concede recognition of the troops' virtues to conservatives—but to do it within a framework that also holds onto the liberal moral belief that the war itself was wrong: That just because your "team" has taken the field does not always, automatically, make that team right. "Support the troops" and "bring them home" are ideas that are in tension, yes, but for me and millions of others, living with that tension is the morally praiseworthy thing to do.

Haidt's mockery, then, suggests to me that—despite all his research and well-intentioned efforts to hear the best of both sides—what he ultimately believes is that liberals should ignore their own moral judgements and let conservative moral judgements rule our sensibilities.

Again, to heck with that.

I think there are some fine things that liberals can learn from Haidt's research and books. We don't do a very good job understanding conservatives, it's true. Liberal dominance of the academy can lead to skewed research focus and interpretation, yes. It will not hurt us to be more aware of these things.

But if Haidt—a former liberal turned centrist—is concerned about academia's tendency to pathologize conservatism, I think it possible that he's done more or less the same thing in reverse. Liberals must do a better job understanding conservatives, yes. We don't need to become them to become better.

Who is behind the gun violence stalemate?

Craig Whitney's gun-violence op-ed in today's NYT is probably just a little too even-handed. "Unless gun-control advocates and gun-rights supporters stop screaming at each other and look for common ground on how to deal with gun violence, the next massacre is only a matter of time," he writes, and that sounds right. Let's dig out of our polarized mindsets and find some common ground!

Only there's this:

Liberals have to deprive the National Rifle Association of its core argument, that the real aim of all gun control measures is to strip Americans of their right to have and use firearms. Gun-control supporters must make clear that they accept that Americans have had this individual, common-law right since Jamestown and the Plymouth Colony; that this right was recognized in the Second Amendment to the Constitution in 1791; and that the Supreme Court affirmed its constitutionality in 2008. 

Here's the thing: That's pretty much exactly what liberals—those in positions of actual leadership—have done. It's largely a political thing: Democrats figured out in the mid-1990s or so that opposing guns was a sure way to lose votes, so they pretty much stopped opposing guns.

And it hasn't mattered. President Obama is remembered for his "clinging to their guns and their religion" comment, but almost nobody remembers that he also unequivocally stated: “I believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms." The NRA has refused to take "yes" for an answer, instead asserting without evidence that Obama has a "secret plan" to eviscerate the Second Amendment.

While liberals have moved to the right on the issue, so has the NRA. Which keeps even modest, commonsense restrictions off the table: In Pennsylvania, the legislature has worked to undermine rules in Philadelphia and other cities that require gun owners to report "lost" or "stolen" guns—guns that often end up in the hands of criminals and used in crimes. Even that modest requirement of responsibility is considered too steep an infringement on the right to own guns.

Liberals are already at the table of compromise—as Whitney later concedes in the op-ed, but only after advising them to do what they've already done. They just don't have a negotiating partner.

Meanwhile, a 13-year-old boy and his 17-year-old brother were shot to death in Philadelphia last night.

Who loses their freedom over gun violence?

There has been, of course, quite a bit of debate the last few days about gun violence and how to address it. At City Journal, Heather Mac Donald offers one effective solution: Stop and frisk. 

The police are heavily deployed in certain neighborhoods because that’s where incidents like Sunday’s shooting occur. Toddlers and recreational basketball players are not getting shot in the West Village; if they were, the police would be making stops there as well. Once in a high-crime area, the police use every tool they have to send the message that law and order remains in effect. Had the ordinary means of social control—above all, the family—not broken down in those neighborhoods, the police would not need to look out for and intervene in suspicious behavior. If communities don’t control their teenagers, however, the police will have to. And until mothers and fathers start socializing their children so that shooting someone no longer seems a normal response to a dispute, the choice will remain stark: put up with a higher level of stops (which, of course, should be conducted lawfully and respectfully) or with a higher level of shootings. There is, to date, no middle ground.

In fairness to Mac Donald, she doesn't at all mention Friday's Aurora shootings, and probably wrote the piece before the massacre happened.

And yet, there's something telling here.

When gun violence occurs in the inner city--among African Americans--our concerns for Constitutional rights are not as vigorous as they might be. Stop and frisk? It's the only way to preserve safety. It should be done legally of course, but is there anybody who sees the word "legally" here without ironic italics? It's almost always profiling, with almost no real cause to stop, and everybody knows it.

Move that violence to less urban, whiter enclaves--where it's perhaps less frequent but often much more spectacular--and First Principles are asserted with a vengeance. Yes, a dozen people are dead, but Founding Fathers! Second Amendment! Right of Self Defense! And politicians, wary of messing with the NRA, back down.

We are, in short, very willing to infringe on other folks' freedoms in response to gun violence. I somehow doubt we'll be profiling brilliant white loners anytime soon.

Penn State: 'Question What It Is You Revere'

Shortly after I posted about Penn State this morning, Daniel Victor—media maven, Penn State alum, and (from what I know of him) all-around good guy—tweeted:

That's a great point.

Here's the underlying truth for me: I advocate harsh punishment for Penn State largely because I don't actually believe that Paterno, Spanier, etc. were all that unusual in their failure to report Jerry Sandusky. I am terrified by how banal evil can be, how easily bureaucratized and accommodated, and the truth is that I don't fully trust myself to be an exception to this rule. I advocate a harsh punishment because I suspect it will provided a much-needed jolt to the consciences of the vast majority of us who usually go along to get along. The pain of accommodation needs to exceed the the reluctance to rock the boat.

As a young reporter in Lawrence, Kansas, I covered a case where two players on the University of Kansas football team were accused of sexually assaulting a female soccer player, who was from Europe. Uncertain of how to navigate the matter, the player went to her coach, who in turn took her to then-KU football coach Terry Allen, who promised to take care of it.

He made the players run bleachers as punishment. For an alleged sex assault.

Eventually the soccer player figured out what had happened, and went to police. But it was months after the assault, and prosecutors never brought charges. The culture all too easily accommodated sex assault, and Coach Allen wasn't even fired over the incident—he later lost his job because the team kept losing.

This isn't restricted to football. We in Philadelphia have seen, close-up, how the culture of the Catholic Church protected dozens of abusive priests. A "culture of reverence" that allows for abuses isn't just a Penn State thing, it's not just a sports thing—or even a winning sports thing. It's a human thing.

It's why I feel very bad for my Penn State friends today, even though I've made some of them very angry at me. A harsh punishment for the Nittany Lion program will demonstrate a committment to one thing we're supposed to revere—the innocence of children, and our duty to protect them from evil.

Why I'm OK if Penn State football gets eviscerated today

I have several friends who are Penn State alumni--good people who not so long ago revered Joe Paterno, good people who have been devastated by the Jerry Sandusky scandal and everything that has followed. I feel bad for my friends today.

On the other hand, I also hope that today's NCAA sanctions cripple the Penn State football program. 

Penn State defenders point out that if the program is hobbled, it will punish students and a new coaching staff and others who didn't do anything wrong, who didn't let Jerry Sandusky molest children. And they're right.

On the other hand, there's this scene from Sunday's removal of Joe Paterno's statue.

Margaret Walsh knelt in prayer before the stumps of metal that remained, tears streaming down her face. An obstetrician/gynecologist and Penn State alumna who once baby-sat Paterno's children, she had driven nearly six hours from Chesterfield, Va., to pay the statue her respects. 

"Everything is being done so fast," she said. "I pray to God that justice be done and that he be vindicated."

Less obscenely, I'm reminded of this:

Janitors who observed Jerry Sandusky performing a sexual act on a young boy in the Lasch Building showers in 2000 kept quiet out of a fear of Joe Paterno and the power he held at Penn State, according to this morning's Freeh Report. 

Individuals cited in the report as "Janitor A" and "Janitor B" both observed disturbing behavior in Fall 2000, and the report points to Joe Paterno's "excessive influence" in creating a chilling effect for lower-level Penn State employees to report football team misdoings. 

"The University would have closed ranks to protect the football program at all costs," states the report as a characterization of the interview conducted with the janitor last week. The incident "would have been like going against the President of the United States [...] I know Paterno has so much power, if he wanted to get rid of someone, I would have been gone."

The Freeh Report concluded that the football-loving "culture" of the university bore some blame for Sandusky's ability to evade arrest and prosecution for 14 years, and Margaret Walsh's bitter tears suggest that that culture resonates yet. And that culture involves far more people than just the few men who are indicted or lost their jobs over this sad, sorry situation.
So destroy it. Tear that culture out of the ground like a diseased tree and set it on fire so that only ashes are left. Punish Penn State so severely that the janitors know the program isn't bigger than their responsibility to save children. Let Margaret Walsh's tears salt the earth outside the football stadium so that nothing can grow in its place. 


If the culture bears responsibility for molested children, then yes, the culture must be punished. It will be painful, and I do feel terrible for my friends who really bought into the Grand Experiment. But the experiment is a farce and a failure, and an example must be made.

UPDATED: A comment from a friend that originally appeared in this post has been removed.