African American beliefs and gay rights

The Maryland House of Delegates has essentially killed a gay marriage bill. And, it's largely due to black opposition, aside from the expected GOP opposition.

When California passed the anti-gay marriage issue Proposition 8 a couple of years ago, beyond the big dollar spending of the Mormon church, there was a question as to whether African-American voting patterns may have tipped a close election.

I know the issue of African American voting trends and possible influence was a HUGE item of discussion after California passed Prop. 8. Some liberals wanted to dismiss discussion of the issue out of hand. One blog I recall Pam's House Blend, headed by black lesbian Pam Spaulding, but with numerous guest had posts trying to tamp down discussion.

I found the post Pam herself had about black voting patterns and Prop. 8.

Pam herself essentially tries to separate black voters from their greater religiosity, which the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force also did.

And, that doesn't fly in my world. Either her, or the task force's study.

That would be like saying white voters oppose an election initiative that restricts abortion because they're less religious.

And, there's this blog post, where Pam quotes extensively from a black woman (but not explicitly identified as gay) divinity student, who claims white in the gay rights movement are putting blacks at the back of the bus. She quotes the Rev. Irene Monroe:

But when critiquing the dominant white LGBTQ community's ongoing efforts to gain marriage equality and its treatment of blacks as their second-class allies in the struggle a reality check happens - both straight and queer African American communities bond together against their strategy for marriage equality.

I don't know if Monroe is 90, 60, 30 or 10 percent correct on her assessment. But, I do know it's anecdotal.

That said, I'll give Pam partial credit back for noting the NAACP took a No. on 8 position, and for this one on the Maryland bill. However, that post is almost entirely news-style, with little commentary or analysis.

But, with the Maryland House of Delegates killing a gay marriage bill due in part to the opposition of black legislators and black churches, it HAS TO BE brought up:

The difference apparently was the opposition from predominantly black churches, as well as from the Maryland Catholic Conference. Democrats hold a 98-43 advantage over Republicans in the House, but a third (34) of the Democrats belong to the legislative black caucus. With all but one Republican opposing the bill, the bill needed support from the black caucus to get the 71 votes required for passage. In the two weeks before floor debate, at least two members of the black caucus made public switches from co-sponsoring the bill to opposing it.

"The black churches -- since I've been here -- have never asked us for anything, that I can recall. They are asking now, 'Don't use the word marriage,'" Del. Cheryl Glenn, a member of the black caucus, said during floor debate. She said "my faith tells me" to vote against it.

The opposition from black churches, particularly those in Prince George's County, became so significant that The Washington Post devoted a March 8 story to the issue.

Especially when at least one black in the Maryland legislature is ignorant, whehter deliberately or not, about gay history.

Like Del. Emmett Burns:

Del. Emmett Burns, a member of the black caucus and an outspoken opponent of the bill, said he was called the "n-word" for his stance. He also said he was offended by comparisons between the civil rights movement and the "gay marriage" movement.

"Show me your Selma, Alabama," he said during debate. "... violates natural law. It always denies a child either a father or a mother. It promotes the homosexual lifestyle. It turns a moral wrong into a civil right. ... children will be taught that the homosexual lifestyle is on par with the heterosexual lifestyle."

Not heard of the Stonewall riots? Or Matthew Shepard?

Or there's Pastor Robert Anderson Jr.

A prominent Southern Baptist pastor, Robert Anderson Jr., pastor of Colonial Baptist Church in Randallstown, Md., told Baptist Press in February that he, too, found comparisons between civil rights and "gay marriage" offensive.

"We didn't choose to be born black. To be black or African American is not sin," Anderson told Baptist Press. "The fact that we fought for civil rights, we were just fighting for justice for any man, any woman -- regardless of their skin color. ... To try to create a system and special laws for a group of citizens that are living in immorality and wanting to force all of us to embrace that as if it is morally equivalent, that is wrong."

Given that, outside of situational homosexuality in prison, in the old West, or Greek pederasty, lifelong orientation-based homosexuality doesn't appear to be choice-based, you're clueless. Deliberately clueless.

And disgusting.

Beyond that, I'll admit that I am a deliberate contrarian at times, and noting issues like this fits my persona.

But, as I blogged more than a year and a half ago, I'm not the only person by any means to pick up on this.

Even blacks who aren't currently religious, i.e., NONEs, as comments in this Ed Brayton post note, are more likely than white counterparts to be inimical to gay rights. It appears, especially in the case of one black commenter who noted she was largely raised by a grandmother, that black "churchiness" may have made a multi-generational pass-through.

Ignoring this issue won't lessen its reality or make it go away.

Beyond her own post on Prop. 8 and voting patters, we also have, by another blogger that was part of her group blog and maybe still is a post like this, also beating down discussion of the issue, and as a straight white person, apparently engaged in concern trolling, too.

As for the source of my comment about Pam's House Blend, and a white liberal concern troller like Radical Russ, who had the particular blog post just above?

A person like Radical Russ exemplies part of the problem, to which you are a contributor, namely, the idea that white liberals, whether gay or straight, simply cannot speak on this issue because we have no "standing." I reject that.

I reject that idea, and I reject that type of concern trolling. That's why I call myself a skeptical left liberal.

Back to Pam's House Blend. Again, not by her, but another blogger of her group, a post that wants to cut off discussion just doesn't cut it. Pam herself, from what I can see on the issue, has blogged little about it; her blog on the Maryland bill is primarily straight news, a little analysis, and no commentary.

Otherwise, referencing anecdotal stories from or about individual black voters, gay or straight, as Pam does, doesn't erase the statistical evidence on the Ed Brayton post.

And, it's not just blacks and gay rights. There's black atheists, like Infidel Guy. But, other than him, those with a "name" are few and far between, likely for similar reasons, from what I've seen online.

Update: A couple of other issues.

First, per one commenter at Ed's blog, you can't, without losing logical coherency, cite your expertise in statistics to show that ethnicity was not a huge factor while "controlling out" religiosity, and then reject exit polling on Prop. 8 without providing statistically valid reasons for doing so. Pam did the same. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force study she cited basically did the same.

Second, contra that same commenter on Ed's blog, you cannot, IMO "control out" religion in such a case, since we have plenty of demographic research showing blacks are more religious than whites and this is an issue with religious overtones. If we were talking about a bond issue for a new elementary school, religiosity could indeed be "controlled out" on black-white differences, but it can't here.

But, I'm not going back to Ed's block to argue with someone who starts "all-caps" responding to me, then, when I ask him to chill a bit, does it even worse in a response six times as long.

I will, though, shortly work this into a new blog post following up on that idea.

Since, even with religiosity "controlled out" there was a 5.5 percent difference in ethnicity on Prop. 8 support (though "s" doesn't do a more specific black-white breakout) I think I can venture that without "controlling out" religious belief, the black-white gap on Prop. 8 is around 10 percent.

Sorry, "s," Pam, "Radical Russ," etc. You're wrong.

The Dark Side of the Internet — and social media

Now, I'm not a Luddite, either neo or paleo.

But, I'm also not a Kurzweilian, either, expecting technology to get us all living to 300 with Viagra-free perfect sexual activity. (And, that’s happening in just 30 years, says Kurzweil, with Time magazine dumb enough to give him its cover on that subject.)

So, while I appreciate making online friends, applying for jobs online, learning new things online, shopping online and more ...

I won't ignore that there IS a dark side to the Internet, even if not all of it is Orwellian. (Note: This may become a series — part 2 is here.)

Or, there's flip sides to coins, at least. And, the dark sides may be less harmful and more pedestrian than anything else. And, are in part "dark sides" only in comparison to a relentless, nearly fact-free boosterism of Internet utopians like Clay Shirky.

Take online shopping.

The flip side? Online ads becoming ever more pervasive. Online violations of private information growing and becoming more aggressive. And, in light of that, let me repeat my assertion that "Brave New World" is equally seminal as "1984,"if not more so.

And, I’m not alone in that.

“Is the Internet Changing the Way We Think?”, edited by John Brockman, the founder of the online science-and-technology site Edge.org, discusses a lot of these issues, as this Wall Street Journal review notes.

Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher, argues that the Internet isn't changing the way we think; it is exacerbating the deceptively simple challenge of "attention management." "Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life," he argues. The way we use the Internet today represents "not only an organized attack on the space of consciousness per se but also a mild form of depersonalization. . . . I call it public dreaming."

These are not the laments of technophobes. MIT professor Rodney Brooks, an expert on robotics, worries that the Internet "is stealing our attention. It competes for it with everything else we do." Neuroscientist Brian Knutson imagines a near future in which "the Internet may impose a 'survival of the focused,' in which individuals gifted with some natural ability to stay on target, or who are hopped up on enough stimulants, forge ahead while the rest of us flail helpless in a Web-based attentional vortex." …
The substitution of the virtual for the real is another common theme. Paleontologist Scott Sampson worries about "the loss of intimate experience with the natural world." And computer scientist Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, says that the Internet has "become gripped by reality-denying ideology." Several of the book's contributors, particularly artists and architects, make solid arguments for the importance of unmediated experiences to the creative process. …

(Update: At the same time, Lanier is himself some sort of tech-neolib, who is dumb enough, naive enough, or on the take enough to assume that Big Data will give you or I micropayments for using its services.)

Beyond worrying about the Internet, at least one person in the book tells us not to overrate it:

The neuroscientist Joshua Greene suggests, in a blunt but apt metaphor, that the Internet, for all its revolutionary pretense, is "nothing more, and nothing less, than a very useful, and very dumb, butler.

Clay Shirky, below, can't fit "butler" or "robot" in his cyber-utopianism. I'll get to that later.

Meanwhile, there's the dark side of Twitter.

Lee Siegel immediately notes one issue:

Just a few years ago, all anyone could talk about was how to make the Internet more free. Now all anyone can talk about is how to control it.

it's a good start to his review of Evgeny Morozov's “The Net Delusion.”

He shows how American naivete and chauvinism have mixed to worship at the altar of Twitter:

He quotes the political blogger Andrew Sullivan, who proclaimed after protesters took to the streets in Tehran that “the revolution will be Twittered.” The revolution never happened, and the futilely tweeting protesters were broken with an iron hand. But Sullivan was hardly the only one to ignore the Iranian context. Clay Shirky, the media’s favorite quotable expert on all things Internet-related, effused: “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”

Frank Rich knows the truth.

The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.

Rich also implies that American teevee, as opposed to the effectively banned-from-America Al Jazeera, relies on foreign Tweeters out of collective corporate laziness:

That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience.

Meanwhile, the Internet in America is not that ethical:

As Morozov points out, don’t expect corporations like Google to liberate anyone anytime soon. Google did business in China for four years before economic conditions and censorship demands — not human rights concerns — forced it out. And it is telling that both Twitter and Facebook have refused to join the Global Network Initiative, a pact that Morozov describes as “an industrywide pledge . . . to behave in accordance with the laws and standards covering the right to freedom of expression and privacy embedded in internationally recognized documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

So, let’s not expect the Internet to radically change the ethos of American business.

To some degree, I suspect early expectations of the Internet were in part a mix of American naivete, salvific technologism and American exceptionalism that all overlapped, and are now facing reality.

Yet more on the dark side of the Net from the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, reviewing Clay Shirky's new book, as well as Morozov's.

This is a great overview of a variety of books, some claiming this is the best of times for human psychology and more, some saying the brain in some ways just can't keep pace, and some saying its six of one, a half dozen of the other.

(A)mong the new books about the Internet (there are three types): call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers.

In the first category? A book by new media fluffer Clay Shirky and an essay Pop Ev Psycher (yes, you are) John Tooby, both make ignorant claims about the early egalitarianism and humanism of the printing press, among other things.

Shirky’s and Tooby’s version of Never-Betterism has its excitements, but the history it uses seems to have been taken from the back of a cereal box. The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.

I'll pass on both. As for Shirky, if he can't get the founding instrument of media, and its early influence on society, right, how can we trust his pronunciamentos on media today? Of course, we can't.

Meanwhile, Shirky's naive wiki-touting gets demolished:

In a practical, immediate way, one sees the limits of the so-called “extended mind” clearly in the mob-made Wikipedia, the perfect product of that new vast, supersized cognition: when there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there’s widespread disagreement on values or facts, as with, say, the origins of capitalism, it’s fine, too; you get both sides. The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information. Creationists crowd cyberspace every bit as effectively as evolutionists, and extend their minds just as fully. Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that.

Gopnik then tackels the "Better-Nevers" In brief:

The books by the Better-Nevers are more moving than those by the Never-Betters for the same reason that Thomas Gray was at his best in that graveyard: loss is always the great poetic subject.

He doesn't review Morozov, but his book would probably fall halfway here, halfway in the Better-Waser group, which says the Net isn't a utopia, but we've heard similar complaints about other technology.

Chris Lehmann has a similar review of Shirky, with some Morozov, at The Nation.

Lehmann labels Shirky as not only a hand-waving utopian optimist, but a vignette-as-authoritarian writer of the same ilk as Malcolm Gladwell. It’s also clear that Shirky has more than a touch of the economic libertarian in him, deriding, or seeming to, much of the liberal-developed social contract of the last century or so in the U.S and elsewhere in the western world.

Meanwhile, a leaked e-mail from HBGary, one of the companies that wanted to spy on “Anonymous” and online supporters of it and Julian Assange, shows it has plans to ramp up corporate online sockpuppetry to a whole new level. So much for Shirky's alleged Internet egalitarianism.

Via Jim Lippard, here's a dystopian take on Morozov as being over-dystopian.

The main takeaway I get from this review of Morozov is that the reviewer thinks he's being too dismissive of the possibility of the Internet transforming democratic action.

I disagree. I think, at least in the democratic U.S., governments have found new stasis or equilibrium, a la the "hype cycle" graphic Lippard mentioned.

Above the level of a small-town city council, do governments even take notice of e-mail action alert e-mails any more? Do you think they do? Do you, like me, assume they don't, and so participate in fewer such campaigns?

Or, are you a bit more skeptical of human psychology than that, even? Do you believe the ease of an e-mail alert is a salve for the conscience, an easy "indulgence" similar to buying carbon credits rather than taking real action against global warming? (See here for my thoughts on carbon credit indulgences.)

I do.

In other words, does the Internet have a tendency to foster "slacktivism"? Yes. Is that better than nothing at all? Yes. How much better will decide whether you lean toward Morozov or Shirky.

Now, I don't claim to have the answers for something more than that, but, I do think that's another fact that Net utopians don't address. In short, Shirky's utopianism about the Net is matched, possibly, by a utopianism about human nature.

But, at the same time, we don't need to go abroad, or leave the land of democracy, to talk about governments abusing the Internet

I mentioned HB Gary above. We don't even need to do that.

Under the Bush Administration (and perhaps still ongoing with Team Obama), the FBI spied on, harassed, and even arrested on flimsy charges individuals involved in peace/antiwar groups. How much of that was enabled by electronic snooping, or even electronic sockpuppetry?

And, let's not forget the Patriot Act itself and the Internet spying it allows.

For Shirky to write his utopian BS without even discussing that? Unconscionable. If the mainstream media did something like that, he'd be vomiting all over the Internet.

Anyway, the reality is that 20 years from now, much of the Net will be Russian, Chinese and Nigeria spammers talking to each other anyway.

So, the portion of the Net that’s not foreign money spammers 20 years from now will be Big Biz PR spammers. Or, speaking of Russia and China, more and more of it will be cyberwarfare.

Update: Add alleged skeptic, but real pseudoskeptic, Michael Shermer, to the list of cyberutopians. He's so bad he believes Ray Kurzweiil's prediction that the Singularity will arrive by 2030.

Planes, cars, nukes, fossil fuels

William Saletan of Slate has an excellent article, in the wake of Japan's nuclear concerns, about how nuclear power is saving lives every day compared to fossil fuels.

Fukushima's radiation releases put into context.

The details?

If Japan, the United States, or Europe retreats from nuclear power in the face of the current panic, the most likely alternative energy source is fossil fuel. And by any measure, fossil fuel is more dangerous. The sole fatal nuclear power accident of the last 40 years, Chernobyl, directly killed 31 people. By comparison, Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute calculates that from 1969 to 2000, more than 20,000 people died in severe accidents in the oil supply chain (PDF). More than 15,000 people died in severe accidents in the coal supply chain—11,000 in China alone. The rate of direct fatalities per unit of energy production is 18 times worse for oil than it is for nuclear power.

Even if you count all the deaths plausibly related to Chernobyl—9,000 to 33,000 over a 70-year period—that number is dwarfed by the death rate from burning fossil fuels. The OECD's 2008 Environmental Outlook calculates that fine-particle outdoor air pollution caused nearly 1 million premature deaths in the year 2000, and 30 percent of this was energy-related. You'd need 500 Chernobyls to match that level of annual carnage. But outside Chernobyl, we've had zero fatal nuclear power accidents.

So, there's your price tag.

This put me in mind of the difference between air travel and driving. All the statistics show air travel is safer, but people don't believe it, by and large.

Why not?

Airplane accidents, when fatal, kill dozens if not hundreds at once time, and kill people from around the country if not the world, while a car accident kills a couple of people, usually local to the accident area.

At least in the western world, I suspect something similar is at play. And, it's fueled, pun intended, but some environmental groups who simply refuse to consider nuclear as part of the anti-climate change equation. It's also fueled by "War on Terror" frothers who can't think straight on breeder-type reactors.

NO to war in Libya

Ross Douthat is totally right on this. From boozy left-liberals with neo-con blood (Christopher Hitchens) through interventionist neo-lib ex-presidents (Bill Clinton) to neo-con warmongers (Bill Kristol) we do NOT need to invade Libya.

It’s a testament to the resilience of American power that we’re hearing these kind of arguments so soon after the bloodiest years of the Iraq war. It’s also a testament to the achievements of the American military: absent the successes of the 2007 troop surge, we’d probably be too busy extricating ourselves from a war-torn Iraq to even contemplate another military intervention in a Muslim nation.

But that resilience and those achievements may have set a trap for us, by encouraging the American leadership class to draw relatively narrow lessons from the Iraq war — lessons that only apply to wars premised on faulty W.M.D. intelligence, or wars led by Donald Rumsfeld.

In reality, there are lessons from our years of failure in Iraq that can be applied to an air war over Libya as easily as to a full-scale invasion or counterinsurgency. Indeed, they can be applied to any intervention — however limited its aims, multilateral its means, and competent its commanders.

One is that the United States shouldn’t go to war unless it has a plan not only for the initial military action, but also for the day afterward, and the day after that. Another is that the United States shouldn’t go to war without a detailed understanding of the country we’re entering, and the forces we’re likely to empower.

And, that's the biggest thing, or things, in that last graf.

We don't have a post no-fly plan. We don't understand Libyan tribalisms all that well. And, beyond the no-fly zone, what forces will we use? Iraq forces for a fourth tour of duty?

Premature to jump to Tiger conclusions?

Bob Harig's story title says that, but, he does anyway.

Between "max-size" baseball Hall of Fame writers and Tiger whores, ESPN sure has "favorite suck-up" writers in abundance.

Anyway, back to Tiger. The fact that he's changing putters again says the title's right and Harig's wrong. Meanwhile, another ESPN writer, Gene Wojciechowski, is touting that Tiger could be peaking for The Masters.

Puhleeze. If Tiger's struggling enough with the flatstick to again make a mid-tourney change, he's not putting well enough for Augusta's greens.

P.J. Crowley — reason 1,012 not to vote for Obama

The now-former State Department spokesman has stepped down been fired by President Obama for his comments last week about the conditions of Bradley Manning's detention as "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid."

Glenn Greenwald has more.

I'll keep an eye on the Internets for Obamiacs to come out of the woodwork to defend him. Because they will.