Cutting Themselves off at the Knees

I ran into several unrelated stories over the course of reading the paper earlier today and in the process of making my usual rounds on the internet. Despite their having nothing to do with one another, each one provided an excellent example of someone fighting for a valid cause so poorly that he completely undercut himself. I will point each of these out and very briefly comment on each.

Pothead Faces Bad Trip

In yesterday's New York Times, I saw an article titled, "This Johnny Appleseed is Wanted by the Law" about one Marc Emery, who is on a crusade to make marijuana legal by making it easy for others to break American drug laws. Note the glaring failure to understand Ayn Rand's political philosophy on the part of Emery.

Mr. Emery describes himself as "a responsible libertarian, not a hedonist," who extols the virtues of capitalism, low taxes, small government and the right of citizens to bear arms.

He said he grew up a social democrat, influenced by his father, who was active in trade union work. But he said his life changed in 1979 when he began reading the works of Ayn Rand, who championed individual freedom and capitalism.

"The right to be free, the right to own the fruits of your mind and effort now all made sense," he recalled. Only a few months after discovering Rand, his girlfriend at the time offered him a joint and he smoked marijuana for the first time.

It was an epiphany," he said. "I had a sixth sense added to my five senses. The silence sounded different, smells were more nuanced and the brightness of the moon made it look bigger and more substantial in the sky."

The combination of Rand's philosophy and the marijuana set him on a course of advocacy in which, he said, "I decided to dedicate my whole life to repudiate the state."

Credit the Times with at least reporting that Emery hatched his plan under the influence of marijuana! But should we expect a reporter to be familiar enough with Ayn Rand to be able to correct Emery? I would say no, at least on the level of understanding what Emery clearly should have: that Rand held government necessary for capitalism. But the Times isn't entirely in the clear, either. At one point, Emery favors, "small government". But only seven sentences later, the Times reports that he has dedicated his "whole life to repudiate the state". Well, which is it? Is it too much to ask for a reporter to nail someone to the wall when he plainly contradicts himself?

While Rand held that marijuana should be legalized, she also held that rule of law was more important. Had Emery really understood Rand, he would have perhaps provoked a test case by breaking a drug law, worked for changing drug laws through legal means, or maybe even realized that there is a lot more to life than getting high. In any case, he has helped weaken respect for the rule of law, propagated an incorrect understanding of a philosophy he claims to support, damaged his own pet cause of drug legalization, and now faces extradition and jail time.

Well done, Shaggy!

Prager Argues from Superceded Texts

Dennis Prager, who has in less than a week gone from not even being on my radar to becoming apparently omnipresent, appears in an LA Times column I'm sure he didn't title, "Why God hates terrorists more than gamblers". Prager starts out by taking his fellow Jews and Christians to task for not having a more intelligent take on morality than simply asserting that all sins are equal. Instead, Prager attempts to condemn terrorism on the basis that it is what he calls the "greatest sin" -- misusing God's name. In doing so makes the following statement.

Apparently fear or ethnic and religious solidarity prevents many religious Muslim leaders from confronting the damage Muslim terrorists are doing to Islam's name, Allah's name and God-based morality generally. But for those of us who take God and goodness seriously, the world is witnessing the greatest sin on a scale unknown since the early Middle Ages.

While I appreciate that Prager is attempting to rally his fellow Jews, Christians, and Moslems against terrorism, his approach is fundamentally flawed.

Has he really successfully argued against Islamic terrorism? More importantly, can he? According to Islam, Christianity and Judaism have been superceded by the final revelations of Islam. On what basis is he to quibble? His appeal to faith, then, has -- "logically", as he might put it -- placed the onus of moral condemnation of terrorism into the hands of the Imams, and out of his own. The Imams who do not support terrorism outright might still claim that God regards anything being done -- like waging a war -- that limits the spread of Islam to be wrong. In fact, they might say that God regards any member of the other two faiths as blasphemers simply for turning away from the truth of Islam. I'm hardly a scholar of Islam, but isn't that a favorite excuse for terrorism already? And didn't Osama bin Laden already "invite" us to convert, leaving us with no excuse for remaining infidels?

And this is merely the tip of the iceberg. For the sake of argument, I leave aside the whole issue of whether faith is a valid means of knowledge. All attempts to convince others to act a certain way based on something held true on faith will simply fall on the deaf ears of those who do not accept the same things on faith. Aside from the fact that this is why religious wars happen, the Islamic objection I gave above is just one example of how this approach can backfire.

The way to rally people against terrorism is to condemn it as the act of murder that it is and to refuse to tolerate it, while at the same time pointing out -- to those who regard their continued existence on earth as important -- that tolerance of same is suicidal. It is this secular argument against killing people over religious differences that is, at root, the basis for the religious tolerance shown among the various Christian sects. For the Moslems to be integrated into Western society, they will have to accept it as well.

Democrats Bray Uncontrollably at Roberts

Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News writes the following in a piece about the Democrats' hysterical opposition to Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.

Neither Clinton nor Schumer even mildly rebuked a group that is part of their party's base. It took Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter, the pro-choice GOP chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to blow the whistle. He called the ad "blatantly untrue and unfair" and said it was hurting the pro-choice cause. It was then withdrawn.

But the damage remains to the sponsor, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and, more important, to the quisling Dems. Their silence puts them in lockstep with the demagogues driving the party over the ideological cliff. Instead of speaking up for decency and integrity, they chose appeasement, if not agreement. Shame.

Can one look at the left as it is today and see anything decent left from its glory days in the civil rights era? What do the Democrats stand for? As far as I can tell, they are merely against Bush and the Republican Party, and are so blinded by rage in their opposition as to render it ineffective, if not actually helpful!

So they're going to the barricades over a relatively moderate candidate? Will they try to filibuster him? The Dems have lost tons of moral credibility already, thanks to NARAL, and I hope they aren't going to follow this up by throwing out what little political power they have left. Will they be able to do anything if Bush next chooses a very conservative nominee that they really should oppose?

With an opposition party like this, who needs single-party rule?

We have just seen three examples of how not to fight for values: by sacrificing the fundamental (rule of law) for the derivative (the right to use drugs); by appealing to faith rather than to reason; and by fighting a person (Bush) rather than upholding a principle (the right of a woman to her own body). In each instance, there was a willful act of evasion, an attempt to pretend that certain incovenient facts didn't stand between the person and his goal.

To grab for the brass ring, it helps to keep one's eyes open.

-- CAV