All posts by Phil

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Criminal Intent

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It’s one thing for an editor or columnist to call for censorship of bad or disfavored ideas by rounding up people who hold those ideas. It’s another thing for the attorney general to call it. I wonder if hate crime law is inacted, will it make attempted assault just as harshly punished as assault under some circumstances? Worse than that, the current bill apparently allows the federal prosecutors to try a person twice for a single act of qualifying hatred.

The US Commission on Civil Rights says the bill currently in the Senate “will do little good and a great deal of harm.” In a letter to several senators, the commissioners wrote:

“We regard the broad federalization of crime as a menace to civil liberties,” stated the commissioners. They pointed out that the loophole to “double jeopardy” exists because the authors of the Bill of Rights “never dreamed that federal criminal jurisdiction would be expanded to the point where an astonishing proportion of crimes are now both state and federal offenses.”

Non-fiction

A Bitter Worldview

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James Bowman writes about a book called, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness: “In seeking some scientific sanction for proclaiming his case of jaundice a true and factual picture of the world, the professor has provided us with a good illustration of how bitterness generally is self-generated in a way that real illness can hardly be.”

Goofing, Writing

Listening In Without Asking for Repetition

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Loren Eaton points out a writing exercise suggested by N.D. Wilson, whose blog I’m going to add to the sidebar. “Go to a public place (restaurant, bus-stop, coffee-shop, etc.). Take a notebook. Sit somewhere that gives your ears full auditory range. Listen. Attempt to copy down whatever dialog drifts your way. . . .”

Loren’s real name, by the way, is Nerol Notae (the final letter of both names being silent). Yes, he’s that Nerol Notae! He cleverly disguised it by writing it backwards so he could blog in relative obscurity, but we have found him out. From now on, the famous Nerol Notae will not be able to hide his blog from his many off-Broadway fans, his Fifth Avenue fans, his Champs-Élysées fans, etc. The world had to know sometime, Nerol. Thanks for the fish.

The Press

The Ignorant Call for Censorship

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The Wall Street Journal has a piece reacting to a call from U.S. News and World Report to crack down on hateful speakers who supposedly encourage murders like those of the abortionist, the security guard, and the soldier over the last several weeks.

“If [last week’s] Holocaust Museum slaying of security guard and national hero Stephen Tyrone Johns is not a clarion call for banning hate speech, I don’t know what is. . . .” writes Bonnie Erbe in U.S. News and World Report. In response, James Taranto says,

This is not Islamist Iran or communist Cuba or some tin-pot military dictatorship. Our government does not simply round people up. It cannot deprive people of their liberty without a legal basis to do so, and it has no authority to punish people merely for expressing political views, no matter how odious.

This is not even a close call: The expression of prejudice and hatred is protected by the First Amendment. In America, neo-Nazis have a constitutional right to hold a parade in a neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors (National Socialist Party v. Skokie, 1977). That’s about as hateful as you can get.

I surprised at emotional responses like Erbe’s, and I can only assume she doesn’t know the law or founding principles of our country. Of course, I’m not a legal scholar either, but what kind of philosophy leads one to advocate making hateful ideas a crime? A disjointed one, I’d think, one based in feeling, not truthful reason.

I like the way President Bush said it. Murder for any reason is hateful. There’s no need to specify punishment for some motivations over others.

Reading

But They Might Make Me Read Gatsby

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Patrick Kurp talks about our culture a bit and students and teachers who hate the cultural atmosphere they breathe.

When Bill writes “the Western cultural heritage that we can’t throw away fast enough,” I confess I thought first of the high-school students I worked with on Monday (rather than their intellectual enablers). Their ignorance of our inheritance is exceeded only by their eagerness to avoid it. I eavesdropped on a conversation between a soon-to-graduate senior and a staff member. The girl had spent much of the day making a collage of images of under-dressed females clipped from women’s magazines (image a boy working on the same project). With a straight face she described herself as “a conceptual artist,” and told the teacher she might enroll at a nearby community college but was reluctant because she might have to read The Great Gatsby. “I hear ya,” the teacher said.

I don’t, the blogger opined. I cannot relate.

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Marks of Manhood

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With Father’s Day coming up, I’ll link to an old post from Albert Mohler on the marks of a fully mature man. I like these points on thinking and speaking:

A boy must learn how to translate Christian truth into genuine Christian thinking. He must learn how to defend biblical truth before his peers and in the public square, and he must acquire the ability to extend Christian thinking, based on biblical principles, to every arena of life. . . . A man must be able to speak, to be understood and to communicate in a way that will honor God and convey God’s truth to others

In other words, boys can become men in part by learning how to discuss serious issues with a level head–slow to speak, quick to listen, slow to become angry–taking their dialogue cues from wise men in their family or church instead of certain talk radio pundits. I’ll be addressing that subject in my next book, How to Talk about Important Issues Without Getting Upset.