APOLARITY

I think it’s safe to say that the first Expert Witness for the defense¹, Professor Kenneth Miller², is not doing any favors for his cause. Under cross-examination by Plaintiff’s lawyer David Boies, he’s been fumbling all over himself. He’s admitted that he didn’t research the marginalization of gays and lesbians, he’s said that the majority of the articles he’s been brought in to comment on were provided by his counsel, he’s stated that DOMA and DADT are discriminatory, and he’s being confronted with his own writings which discuss the fact that ballot initiatives can be used to further inequality and discrimination.

Here’s a quick example from today’s liveblogging (the grammar’s a little rough, but you can get the gist):

Boies (Plaintiff’s lawyer): Reads from another article. “Popular view that courts should be lenient in judicial review for initiatives is 180 degrees off. … “When courts review initiatives, need to be more vigilant, not less.” “Courts are the only institutional filter, the check of first and last resort” in imitative process. Courts project against “majoritarian” rule. Did you believe this when you wrote it?

Prof. Kenneth Miller: It’s compound statement. Which part?

B: All of it. You wrote it!

M: I did not agree with all of it.

B: You don’t say here that you are exploring the issue. You don’t say maybe this is right and maybe you don’t know?

M: Maybe I should have written it differently. Maybe courts should look at initiatives in the same way as laws passed by legislature.

Also see How a Bad Expert Witness Can Ruin A Case. Quote:

But it really goes further than [the fact that Prof. Miller is a net loss for the defendants]. When an attorney puts on an “expert” who has so little background in the subject area, it tells the Court that this is a) the best they could find and b) probably the level of all of their witnesses. A bad expert can taint the whole case, the reputation of the attorneys, and the odds of winning. Combining the fact that they could only find two expert witnesses, the fact that this one did so poorly, and the fact that cross-examination did little to touch the plaintiff’s experts, the defense has a bit of work ahead of them.

—

¹(so, the groups trying to uphold the constitutionality of Proposition 8′s ban on same-sex marriage in California)
²Not the biologist. This is Kenneth P. Miller, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

(Image via Charles, a commenter at the trial tracker)

The education and empowerment of women throughout the world cannot fail to result in a more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all.

- Aung San Suu Kyi, rightful leader of Burma, quoted in Greg Mortenson’s Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan (currently reading – thanks, Bat!)

Also via Mortenson:

If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.

- African proverb

a.k.a. Links for the week.

I haven’t figured out a good workflow, a way to publish and comment on the things that I read and that are important to me. I’m still working out the kinks.

Here’s what I’ve been focused on lately:

The Proposition 8 Trial

As I wrote earlier, I’ve been very interested in the federal trial over the unconstitutionality of Prop. 8. It seems important and potentially ground-breaking. The courtroom provides an ideal environment for the societal and cultural stigmas surrounding homosexuality, the economic and social factors involved in the push for marriage equality, the role of religion in the democratic process, the nature of civil rights, the makeup of how a group of people is granted protected status, and other such issues to be discussed calmly, rationally, and with the input of experts.

But so anyway, here are some links, analyses, summaries, that have caught my attention lately, for what they’re worth.

• Prop. 8 Trial First Week Roundup – an AFER (American Foundation for Equal Rights, one of the organizations bringing the court case against California’s Proposition 8 ) summary of the trial’s first week of arguments and witnesses.
• “Home Court Advantage” and Determining Scrutiny, both from Prop 8 Trial Tracker, are helpful explanations of the process by which the case will be decided, and which side will be deemed to have the burden of proof.
• An Explosive Afternoon: LDS Church – It’s fascinating the length, time, and manpower the Mormons put into the passage of Prop. 8.
• Chinese Christians Are the Focus of Same-Sex Marriage Case – NYT article on one of the official proponents (one of the five people who officially filed Prop. 8), Hak-Shing William Tam, and his testimony this week. His testimony went a long way toward illustrating the animus involved in the push to pass the measure. Mr. Tam was more than willing to propagate falsehoods (read: lies) linking gay people to all sorts of societal ills: pedophilia, incest, molestation, prostitution, and recruiting children.
• An Odd Couple Defends Couples That Some (Oddly) Find Odd – NYT op-ed about the “odd couple” of the two lawyers arguing the case. An interesting comment regarding President Obama’s reluctance to support marriage equality:

Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn’t realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable. Once it’s done, you can’t remember what all the fuss was about.

• Why I’m Joining the Fight for Marriage Equality – well-written Fox News (!) piece with another conservative perspective on marriage equality.

Miscellaneous

• How to live to be 100+ – TED talk covering research on “Blue Zones”, areas of the world where people frequently live active lives into their 90s and 100s.
• EVIL little cameras – from Metafilter, an interesting collection of articles about a new type of camera (Electronic Viewfinder, Interchangeable Lenses) which has the quality of a dSLR in a compact size.

Personal

I’ve been making tasty concoctions.

• (faux-) Bailey’s Irish Cream – for the instant coffee, I used Starbucks Via. It turned out great.
• Hot pepper infused vodka – I used two green jalapeños, one red jalapeño, and a habanero, with a half-bottle of vodka. It smells delicious – I have tasted it but not yet made a drink with it. It’s going to be quite a kick in bloody marys!

This is getting to be too much for one post (and I’m running out of time for now). I’ll put the next installment in a post of its own.

Shalom,

Adrenalin Tim

As I write, at the end of the first long season of Revolution, the Negro is not unmindful of or indifferent to the progress that has already been made. He notes with approval the radical change in the administration’s approach to civil rights, and the small but visible gains being made on various fronts across the country. If he is still saying “Not enough”, it is because he does not feel that he should be expected to be grateful for the halting and inadequate attempts of his society to catch up with the basic rights he ought to have inherited automatically, centuries ago, by virtue of his membership in the human family and his American birthright.
- Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait, from Chapter 2: “The Sword that Heals”

Returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

- “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate(…)

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

-  “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

“All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”

- Why We Can’t Wait

Haiti | To Hell With Altruistic Capitalism – Kester Brewin on the deeper, systemic issues that allow the horror of what’s happened in Haiti, as well as some musings on a critique of capitalism in view of Jesus’ teachings.

And it is particularly pertinent in the aftermath of the horror of the earthquake in Haiti. We see the politicians on both sides of the atlantic with their bleeding-heart messages about the disaster…. when in reality the West has f*cked Haiti over time and time again – preventing proper development, forcing the poor into cities and sweatshops to create cheap clothing for the US, suffering coups supported by the CIA… and now told that they deserved this earthquake because they sold their souls to the devil when they bought themselves out of slavery from France.

Please, please give generously to help Haiti get back on its feet. But in a week or so when the story has gone from our screens, let’s not forget them, and let’s try to get the systemic issues sorted out. They need debt forgiven. They need minimum wage agreements. They need symmetric fair trade agreements. They need to be given a fair chance, especially by the US.

As I say in the post on what looks like being a great conference, Oscar Wilde had it right when he said that the worst slave owners were the ones who were kind to their slaves. Why? Because they prolonged the horrors of an abusive system. And yes, that, on the grand scale, is what altruistic capitalism looks like.

If you want to help in the short term, here’s some good advice for choosing how to maximize the impact of your dollars by choosing the best NGO. (We went with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières.)

The court challenge to California’s state referendum disallowing same-sex marriage began Monday. I’ve been wanting to write about it and to share links, but my perfectionism has fueled my procrastination. There’s a lot of information, and I want to distill the most relevant, most salient, most persuasive, most informative data for those who cannot absorb, or are not interested in absorbing, as much information as I have.

Let’s do it this way: if you only click one link, watch Rachel Maddow reporting on the trial. She captures the background details that make this case historically significant, and interviews the lawyers working to overturn Proposition 8.

This New Yorker article is my next recommendation. It’s somewhat long, but gives a fairly comprehensive view of the context in which Perry v. Schwarzenegger is coming about, the strategies involved in building the case & choosing the plaintiffs, what the various parties will need to demonstrate in order to win, and the possible end game of a Supreme Court decision, given the assumption that the loser of the trial will appeal to higher courts.

Other noteworthy things about the trial:

• The two main attorneys for the plaintiff (those seeking to overturn the ban on same-sex marriage) are Ted Olson and David Boies, two top lawyers known for being “conservative” and “liberal” respectively. They most famously opposed each other in 2000′s Bush v. Gore. Olson was Solicitor General under G.W. Bush. If you’re curious as to how a renowned “conservative” attorney comes to be supporting gay rights, check out his article (the current cover of Newsweek), The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage. Quote:

Many of my fellow conservatives have an almost knee-jerk hostility toward gay marriage. This does not make sense, because same-sex unions promote the values conservatives prize. Marriage is one of the basic building blocks of our neighborhoods and our nation. At its best, it is a stable bond between two individuals who work to create a loving household and a social and economic partnership. We encourage couples to marry because the commitments they make to one another provide benefits not only to themselves but also to their families and communities. Marriage requires thinking beyond one’s own needs. It transforms two individuals into a union based on shared aspirations, and in doing so establishes a formal investment in the well-being of society. The fact that individuals who happen to be gay want to share in this vital social institution is evidence that conservative ideals enjoy widespread acceptance. Conservatives should celebrate this, rather than lament it.

Legalizing same-sex marriage would also be a recognition of basic American principles, and would represent the culmination of our nation’s commitment to equal rights. It is, some have said, the last major civil-rights milestone yet to be surpassed in our two-century struggle to attain the goals we set for this nation at its formation.

This bedrock American principle of equality is central to the political and legal convictions of Republicans, Democrats, liberals, and conservatives alike.

• As to the trial itself, here is Ted Olson’s opening statement. It’s worth reading as to the scope of where the plaintiff’s arguments are headed.
• One of the earlier witnesses was Professor Nancy Cott, Trumball Professor of American History at Harvard, author of 8 books including Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. As an expert witness on the history of marriage in the U.S., her perspective was very interesting in demonstrating the evolution of “the institution of marriage”. A sample, from the liveblogging at Prop 8 Trial Tracker:

[In the early 20th century] Marriage fell into the common law view of “coverture” which was the French that meant she was covered by her husband’s life. She lost her individuality, hence becoming Mrs. John Doe. This was the marital bargain to which both spouses consented.

The point is that this was a mutually agreed upon separation of labor. Men were deemed to be providers; women, the weaker sex, were deemed to need protection. Hence there was a division of labor. All socially conventional according to the times.

(…)

By the 1970s, with the women’s rights revolution, the Supreme Court stepped in and the states had to stay out of assigning spousal roles according to gender. Now, both spouses are required to support one another, but no longer by specific gender assignment. In other words, the law is now gender neutral.

The more that this has become gender neutral and the more society has evolved, the more same-sex marriage makes sense. Now, the coverture doctrine is dead. The state no longer assigns gender roles in marriage. Couples may choose to take on those roles, but its not up to the state any more.

That’s all for now. I’ll try to do better at excerpting news, quotes and links as I come across them, rather than holding off for an all-in-one that no one will care to read.

This is important. This is big. I feel like I’m watching the moral arc of history swinging toward justice, in the words of MLK. This has the potential to be a groundbreaking case. This could be Brown v. Board of Education; this could be Loving v. Virginia.

May justice prevail.

Wow. This video is hauntingly, staggeringly beautiful. Do yourself a favor and watch it full-screen.

Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world – (song is Please don’t go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

(Found via Vimeo’s 25 favorite videos of 2009.)

Have people around you who are as a garden – or as music on the waters in the evening, when the day is turning into memories. Choose the good solitude, the free, playful, light solitude that gives you, too, the right to remain good in some sense.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

In response to yesterday’s quote of the day:

“But only a Christian can be a good atheist.”

-Jürgen Moltmann

Ernst Bloch apparently liked that. He used both statements as a subtitle of his book Atheism in Christianity.

My friend Peter has just created a Yahoo group – Crosscurrents21 – to explore and discuss the intersection of religious and atheistic thought, in a spirit of dialogue rather than debate.

Possibly, the more atheists and theists talk to each other, rather than “at” each other or about each other, the more they might discover fundamental commonality on some level that can be discerned as universally human.

Take a look, and feel free to join if you are interested.