I think part of the reason Glenn Beck’s 912 Project opts for the term “values” rather than “virtues” is because virtues take work. They require practice to acquire as habits.
This is not what the 912 Project is for. It is not a group or “movement” of people who have chosen to practice these 12 virtues in order to acquire them as habits. It is not a group that seeks to learn or to embody those virtues at all.
Look at that list again: Honesty, reverence, hope, thrift, humility, charity, sincerity, moderation, hard work, courage, personal responsibility, gratitude.
Does any of that characterize the agenda or the practice or the visible habit of Beck’s tea partying mobs? Were any of these virtues on display in the town-hall disruptions, in the angry marches or the signs carried under Beck’s “912” banner? Was there even a hint that these gatherings were composed of people even slightly interested in such virtues?
This is why Beck’s list of “12 values” can’t withstand comparison to the first similar-seeming list that comes to mind, the Boy Scout Law. The Boy Scouts of America isn’t my favorite organization as I’m not a fan of either homophobia nor vacuous civil religion, but I am a big fan of that Scout Law:
A Scout is: Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
Against such there is no law.
The 12 virtues listed there are at first glance quite similar to Beck’s, but the differences are telling. The Scout Law begins “A Scout is“…
Is verses waving them around like a damn flag. This is the single most telling thing about the culture warriors. They yap, yap, yap about Values…but they don’t ever act like they have any. And there’s a reason for that. Values are to them as weapons to wield against the Faceless Other…not things that actually sustain and guide. Values aren’t a part of your bedrock, they’re rhetorical tools to use as needed and discard like a Kleenex afterward.
Platte County School District 1 trustees voted 4-3 to keep the Anti-Defamation League’s “No Place for Hate” banners down at Wheatland High and West Elementary.
The schools were two of 25 in Colorado and Wyoming taking part in the program.
One of the sponsors listed on the banner is the Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado. Wheatland board members and parents took issue with that, according to the district.
Un…
Joe Fabian, [another] board member, said he believes the Anti-Defamation League is pushing an “agenda that is pro-gay marriage”…
Deux…
…and that the community of Wheatland is not supportive of that.
Trois…
“They wouldn’t want the organization, the Anti-Defamation League, dictating to their children that an alternate lifestyle is a normal lifestyle,” he said.
Quatre…
He implied students who were not supportive of the banner suffered discrimination.
Cinq…
He spoke of a “moral attitude by the community” and indoctrination of students.
Six…
“I don’t believe (homosexuality) is a normal lifestyle…
Sept…
…but I don’t have anything against them,” he said.
First they sold out the gays, and we said nothing because we weren’t gay. Then they sold out the liberals and we said nothing because we weren’t liberals. Then they sold out the progressives and we said nothing because we were moderates. Then they sold out the moderates and we said nothing because we were moderates. Then they started loosing elections…
I have grown up in a home where Martha Stewart Living is one of the most oft-read magazines and, since I was old enough to truly appreciate weddings, have been a faithful purchaser of Martha Stewart Weddings.
Deux…
However, I feel I would be remiss if I did not share my great disappointment with the current issue. As part of the large portion of the population who strongly believes marriage should be between one man and one woman, I was rather taken aback to see a homosexual wedding featured in the Winter 2010 issue.
Trois…
I may not always agree with the lifestyles and life choices made by all the people featured in every publication I read, but I do not appreciate picking up my favorite magazine to see photographs of homosexual couples being affectionate.
Quatre…
For someone who believes that same-sex marriage is wrong, such articles and/or photos are offensive – and something I certainly would never knowingly pay money for.
Cinq…
I understand that one reader’s views, opinions, and purchases can not change the course of an entire magazine. However, I believe that I speak for a majority. A very large majority.
Six…
As marriage amendments protecting marriage as between one man and one woman have been passed across the country, the facts speak for themselves – America as a nation does not support same-sex marriages.
Sept…
Note: I just wanted to clarify that I don’t hate homosexuals. I actually know a couple gay and lesbian people and they’re great folks.
Via Atrios… Digby has a good post up about Hippie Randism and Libertarian Lefties that goes into something I’ve wanted to discuss more. A libertarian isn’t a Randiod and either one of these could occasionally seem to resemble either a conservative or liberal. Or to put it another way, and speaking of Whole Food’s hippy climate change denying champion of absolute corporate deregulation and union busting, just because someone looks and acts like a granola organic liberal progressive New Age self-actualization holistic health guru that doesn’t mean they aren’t a right wing asshole when it comes to the prerogatives of massive corporate money. Here, Digby quotes the Times profile…
In the early eighties, Mackey told a reporter, “The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover.” (That quote, to Mackey’s dismay, won’t go away, either.) His disdain for contemporary unionism is ideological, as well as self-serving. Like many who have come before, he says that it was only when he started a business—when he had to meet payroll and deal with government red tape—that his political and economic views, fed on readings of Friedman, Rand, and the Austrians, veered to the right. But there is also a psychological dimension. It derives in large part from a tendency, common among smart people, to presume that everyone in the world either does or should think as he does—to take for granted that people can (or want to) strike his patented balance of enlightenment and self-interest. It sometimes sounds as if he believed that, if every company had him at the helm, there would be no need for unions or health-care reform, and that therefore every company should have someone like him, and that therefore there should be no unions or health-care reform. In other words, because he runs a business a certain way, others will, can, and should, and so the safeguards that have evolved over the generations to protect against human venality—against, say, greedy, bullying bosses—are no longer necessary. The logic is as sound as the presumption is preposterous.
Digby goes on to say…
He’s a libertarian who identifies culturally with the left. He’s into New Age religion and self-actualization and believes in holistic health practices, clean food etc. But he’s not a left libertarian. These things get confusing, but it’s important to make the distinction.
Basically, this guy is a standard issue right libertarian which means that he is a free market fundamentalist, hates unions, hates government and extols the virtues of the John Galts like himself, although he believes in a sort of corporate paternalism that requires him to look after the parasites (workers) in some rudimentary fashion. He is also a believer in civil liberties and drug legalization. (I assume that since he’s a Paul supporter, he’s also critical of the Fed.) There are quite a few of these folks out there who seem like your liberal next door, more than you might realize. Hollywood, for instance, is full of them. I worked for a few. Many of them even think they’re liberals and will vote for Democrats on social issues. But when it comes to taxing the wealthy and regulating business they might as well be Dick Cheney.
There is, of course, an actual left libertarianism and it is best articulated by Noam Chomsky, not some wealthy twit like Mackey…
It gets confusing, and I suppose it will only get more so as the republican party degenerates further and further into theocracy and outright populist-nationalist lunacy. Others have noted how the 2010 edition of the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference is going to be sponsored in part by the John Birch Society…they of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Was A Communist fame. If this is what the republican party wants to become then don’t be surprised to see people fleeing from it into a lot of factions and libertarianism is a very popular label to wear in some circles. But that’s really all it is in most of them. Just a convenient label the wearer hopes means I’m Really Not A Right Wing Asshole…Honest…
There are Lefty Libertarians. They think government shouldn’t regulate business and shouldn’t regulate morality. There are Right Wing Libertarians. They think government shouldn’t regulate business and states should regulate morality but not the federal government since it had the unmitigated gall to desegregate the schools. And then there are the Randoids. Rand herself and her intellectual spawn Leonard Peikoff absolutely loathed the libertarians. There are mixes and matches (call them mashups if you will…) of all three and then some. There are almost certainly for example, John Birch Libertarians and John Birch Randoids. Probably some of these shop at Whole Foods and look outwardly like hippies.
I like to think of it as that little corner of the Twilight Zone where which way is up depends on which ideology you’ve bought into. The problem with all of these is they have very little interest in how things actually work, and why things can and do fail. It’s all about the ideology. So in one very real sense there isn’t much to practical difference between any of them. But don’t try to tell a Lutheran that they’re more or less like an Episcopalian just with different vestments.
It’s going to be a fun decade, with the republicans leading the way to a political landscape where parties begin are more and more like religious movements, then conversations about how to…you know…actually govern…
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”
He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”
Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.
Wherein The Children Of Rand And The Children Of Marx Commiserate With One Another And Then Have A Round Of Drinks…
Smokin’ hot essay in this month’s GQ by John Ritter on Ayn Rand’s influence on college students, bankers, financiers, chairmen of the Federal Reserve, and other people who need to have their certainties smacked out of them from time to time for the good of the rest of us. I know, because I used to be one of them…
A weirdly specific thing happens with the books of Ayn Rand. It’s not just the what of the books, but when a reader discovers them—almost always during the first or second year of college. Rand grabs a reader at a time of maximum vulnerability and malleability, when he’s getting his first accurate sense of how he measures up in the world in terms of intellect and talent. The longing to regard oneself as misunderstood and underrated can be powerful; the temptation to project oneself as such, irresistible…
Sort of. Not everyone likes thinking of themselves as misunderstood. I sure didn’t. But I never blamed being taken for a weird little geek on being misunderstood because I knew I was one. Being raised in a Baptist household the first person you always blame for just about everything, let alone not fitting in, is yourself.
It was after leaving my church and coming out to myself as gay that I first read Rand. But in retrospect, clearly, all those days spent in church listening to fire and brimstone pulpit thumping had left their mark on me. I craved moral certainty, and admired the firebrand moralist who spoke to those certainties. If I have a weakness to this day that’s it. But at 20 the bible had long since lost its power as a moral instrument. It was still interesting in its echo from a distant time kinda way, but no longer authoritative. I wandered aimlessly in a kind of existential stupor, unwilling to rest my moral values on religious absolutes that I knew perfectly well were nothing more then the bar stool prejudices of various pulpit thumpers, but unable to find another moral compass to guide my way. Reason and morality it seemed, were two different things.
Two books shook me out of my moral fog then, almost one after the other. In retrospect, both were terribly flawed teachers. And yet they left me with concepts I still value to this day. The first was Robert Audrey’s African Genesis. I found a tattered copy of it in a corner of a warehouse I once worked in, wrinkled and discarded, and picking it up and reading the first page of it…
Not in innocence, and not in Asia was mankind born…
…I had to take the thing home. I absolutely devoured it. And from Audry I gleaned the idea that the forces that move within our consciousness actually are understandable and manageable…but only if we seriously study our evolutionary past. To construct workable human societies, and moral codes that actually and really benefit us, we need to undertake an almost brutal, unromantic, understanding of ourselves and that means looking also to the past which brought us forth. Not to do so would be akin to trying to build a bridge with no understanding of the nature of the materials you’re constructing it from…
We are not so unique as we would like to believe. And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.
Yes. Yes. And Yes. I still passionately believe this is true. Let it be said that a lot of naturalists and anthropologists really hate Audrey for his overwrought image of humans as killer apes. But you can discard that part of it…our understanding of the human ancestors is much improved since he wrote that book…and still respect the basic idea. We are, each of us, in body and consciousness, living histories of millions of years of life on earth. To make a better life for ourselves in the here and now, we need to understand that history.
The second book was Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. As John Ritter writes…
The days during which that 19-year-old has Rand’s worldview vectored into his cerebral cortex are feverish and sleepless. Days of beautiful affliction during which the intransigence of others—roommates, a coed the patient has been hitting on, professors, parents, everyone—are shown to be the product of their shortcomings, their idiocy and sublimated envy of the patient’s intelligence and talent… One day you’ve got a bright young kid dutifully connecting the dots of his liberal-arts education; the next, he’s got Roark and Galt in the marrow and has become…an insufferable asshole.
Well…kind of. I never thought of my friends as idiots. But I suspect I did turn into a bit of a jerk because that’s what happens to people when they become True Believers. Suddenly everything made sense! The world was powered by the rational human intellect! Everything that denied the mind was anti-life! Capitalism wasn’t merely the most productive economic system ever invented, it was the only Moral one! To take possession of your own life and live it for the good of your Self was the highest virtue! Here was an ideology that appealed to my inner geek and my inner pulpit thumper both. I am certain there was a period in my life when I couldn’t speak two words without going off about Randian ideology. It’s amazing I still have friends from that period.
People wonder how it is that so many gays become Randians since Rand herself was a vitriolic homophobe. But Rand’s morality of sex, that enjoying sex for its own sake was not only moral, but was morally validated by a couple’s mutual pleasure in each other’s bodies, is very appealing to a people who are taught to feel ashamed of any hint of sexual desire in themselves the moment puberty hits them. I saw Rand’s morality as a reasoned and high minded rejection of the notion of original sin drilled into me all throughout my Baptist childhood, that our bodies, that our feelings of sexual desire, were evidence of humanity’s fallen state. And it seemed to validate any sexual relationship, gay or straight, that sprang from mutual appreciation of the best within each other, body and soul. Rand declared that sexual joy for its own sake, taken between two people who wholeheartedly and completely desire each other was a righteous thing. And a lot of gay people, myself included, said ‘Amen!’
But therein, for me at least, lay the seeds of discontent as well. Rand taught that human emotions were the unconscious sum of the workings of our rational mind. This led her to view homosexuality as the result of bad thinking…faulty premises as she liked to put everything that didn’t fit into her philosophy. It led her acolyte and lover Nathanial Brandon to suggest in one essay that gay men were gay because they’d been subconsciously made afraid of women from being taught to idealize them but not desire them. Huh? As any gay person knows, and especially any gay person who ever tried to psychoanalyze themselves straight, your sexual orientation isn’t something you think yourself into. Or out of. And here was Rand and her "collective" dispensing pop psychology crap about homosexuality that not only gay folk themselves, but actual researchers, had known for decades was claptrap. We don’t think ourselves into our sexual orientations, they just are. But that kind of thinking about human consciousness was anathema to Rand.
How I managed to embrace an ideology that regarded human consciousness as entirely the province of the rational mind after reading and embracing Audrey I cannot explain. But there it was. Eventually the ideas I gleaned from Audrey did come back to me. I think it was while reading a statement of Rand’s that she was neither a supporter nor denier of the theory of evolution. Well of course, because evolution throws a great big monkey wrench into her model of human consciousness which acknowledged only the human capacity for rational thinking. Rand’s human being was every bit the separate creation that Adam was in Genesis. And that is not what a human being is. The moment I read her statement on evolution it got me to thinking about all the other ways I’d had to forgive Rand for making pronouncements about this and that which just seemed…well…stupid.
And that was how I found my way out the door to her church. The one thing I took from her that I still keep close to my heart to this day is the idea that morality must be reason-based. It must withstand the test of truth, conform to the evidence, logically and objectively work to benefit our lives. Oh that Rand herself had held to this idea, when championing her notion that unfettered capitialism is the only moral system.
Unfortunately…for all of us…she didn’t. And neither have her intellectual heirs…
This is because there are boys and girls among us who have never overcome the Randian infection. The Galt speech continues to ring in their ears for years like a maddening tinnitus, turning each of them into what next year’s Physicians’ Desk Reference will (undoubtedly) term an Ayn Rand Asshole (ARA). They constitute a relatively small percentage of Rand readers, these ARAs. But they make their reading count. Thanks to them, the Rand Experience is no longer limited to those who have read the books. It’s metastasized. You, me, all of us, we’re living it. Because it’s the ARA Army of antigovernment-antiregulation puritans who have spent the past three decades gleefully pulling the cooling rods out of the American economy. For a while, it got very big and very hot. Then it popped. And now the rest of us have to spend the next decade scaling the slippery slopes of the huge suppurative crater that was left behind.
Feeling fisted by the Invisible Hand of the Market lo these past fifteen months? Lost a job lately? Or half the value of your 401(k)? Or a home? All three? Been wondering whence the too-long-ascendant political and economic ideas and forces behind Greenspanism, John Thainism, blind Wall Street plunder, bankruptcy, credit-default swaps, Bernie Madoff, and the ensuing Cannibalism in the Streets? Then you, sir, need to give thanks to Ayn Rand Assholes everywhere—as well as the steely loins from which they sprang.
Reading Ritter’s GQ essay gave me a feeling (yes Ayn…a Feeling…) reminiscent of that moment gay folk experience when they discover they’re not the only ones like themselves. Well…if even Alan Greenspan can admit now, while standing there in the center of the wreakage of our ecomony, that perhaps he was wrong about all that deregulation stuff, maybe we’ll see some other big names come out of the closet as ex-Randian. We could be in for lots more fun denunciations of Randian claptrap.
There is a third book I discovered well after Audrey and Rand, which I still hold dear to my heart. Jacob Bronowski’s Science and Human Values. Bronowski clarified for me how knowledge, being a Process of discovery and refinement of models, was also at its core a deeply personal and creative act. He brought me to an understanding I really needed, about how the work of both scientists and artists had the same creative root, thereby bringing my inner techno geek and my inner art geek finally to some degree of peace with one another. But more importantly, he showed me how to get past my need for certainty. There is no perfect God’s eye view to be found, either in the bible or in Atlas Shrugged. Our knowledge exists in an area of imprecision we can never fully eliminate. Call it the Uncertainty Principal or, as Brownoski suggested in The Ascent of Man, the Principal of Tolerance if you like, but there is no God’s eye view. Quantum physics has proven that literally. But that does not mean we can never really know anything. It means we have to always bear in mind that area of uncertianty always tied up in our understandings, and that knowledge is a process of test and refinement, and not a thing we can safely stop questioning. We have to always take care to ask ourselves what we know, and how we know it. Always.
If I had to point to one thing that sums Rand up in her entirety for me it would be this: She wrote in Atlas Shrugged, "I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. FIRE, a dangerous force, tamed at his finger tips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come out from such hours. When a man thinks there is a spot of fire alive in his mind – and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression." Thereby turning cigarettes into a symbol for fans of her and her philosophy. It is a beautiful, eloquant image…the act of thinking, the hand holding fire. In 1974 Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer, quit smoking at that time, and never once for the rest of her life warned her readers about the dangers of cigarettes. When someone gives you, the artist, their love wholeheartedly, you need to love them back.
Pastor Joe Fuiten, who at first seems to be among Washington’s more sane Christian fanatics, concedes that the campaign to reject Referendum 71 has "fallen short of the glory of God." In a statement posted over at the Tacoma News Tribune in response to an editorial (posted in full after the jump), Fuiten blames his former brothers-in-bigotry—Gary Randall and Larry Stickney—for disappointing the Lord and for failing to oppress the gays.
Fuiten dives into a tirade against his former cohort Randall for being exactly what The Stranger exposed Randall to be long ago: a greedy bigot who takes money from naive evangelicals and puts little of their contributions into the campaign. Today, Fuiten writes, "On August 28th, Mr. Randall promised ‘All income is spent directly on printing, mailing, Internet promotion and going forward, media ads and expenses, rather than salaries or consulting fees.’ We were promised ‘Radio ads are running and more are on the way.’ As it turned out, according to the PDC reports, virtually nothing was spent on media ads and precious little on anything else."
What caught my attention reading the right reverend’s rant was he asked something in it I’ve just about Never heard any of these gutter crawling bigots for Jesus ask themselves in the aftermath of any of these anti-gay electoral battles:
Randall claimed the referendum was a miracle from God, but I have to wonder at that. In the Bible, the miracles of the loaves and fishes fed 5,000 with 12 baskets left over. In this "miracle" we didn’t have enough money to fund television ads but the gays had millions.
In the Bible, a miracle raised one who was sick. In this "miracle" our strategy was sick and then died in the election. I suppose such miraculous claims are made to hype up the faithful to work harder and give more. It just seems like the "miracle" that Randall claimed fell a bit short of its biblical counterparts.
Was the referendum an effort blessed by God? Did the Kingdom of God advance because of the effort? I have not heard of people giving their lives to Jesus.
[Emphasis mine…] This is a question I used to hear so often asked by the Baptists I grew up with that seeing it there in that bigot’s rant startled me. I don’t think I’ve ever heard any anti-gay crusader ask that question after gay bashing a few hundred thousand or so of their neighbors at the ballot box. Did people come to Jesus? Were souls saved?
It’s been decades since I’ve heard preachers talk like that. Not just that taking their measure by the goal of winning souls to Christ, but to even question one’s actions in that light in the aftermath of battle…it’s startling in its utter abnormality. I don’t think I’ve ever heard one of these knuckle-draggers question whether or not they did anyone or anything any damn good beyond putting the homos back in their place and seldom even that since The Homosexual Menace usually just dusts itself off and gets right back to attacking the sanctity of marriage and family and morality.
Did we do anyone any damn good? Who’s asking? Yes, it’s true, for the moment same-sex couples aren’t entirely strangers before the law in Washington state. But gay folk and their families…their parents, their sons and daughters, their brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts, and all their friends, and all their loved ones, know that nearly half of the people who bothered to cast a ballot wanted their ring fingers cut off and I have a hunch that making homosexuals into scapegoats for every one of their straight neighbor’s cheap failures of moral character hasn’t done a whole fuck of a lot to bring anyone to Christ.
But it sure has made the sorry lot of you feel so fucking righteous though, hasn’t it? Until all the dust settles and the Homosexual Menace lays quietly on the floor nursing its wounds and you catch a glimpse of something that looks like a human being in it and everything gets quiet for a little while until you can work yourselves back up into a righteous frenzy again, so you don’t have to see that glimpse of something human in the Homosexual Menace again. Did anyone give their life to Jesus? Hahahahaha! Since when did that matter?
I did hear from a non-Christian friend commenting about one of his friends. He wrote, "I noticed the anger building in him, and tried to soften his approach, but he’s fed up. Referendum 71 has turned him against Christians." Neither is a Christian.
Well then I guess they’re not your neighbors then either, are they reverend?
Michael Duvall is a conservative Republican state representative from Orange County, California. While waiting for the start of a legislative hearing in July, the 54-year-old married father of two and family values champion began describing, for the benefit of a colleague seated next to him, his ongoing affairs with two different women. In very graphic detail.
For instance:
She wears little eye-patch underwear. So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And
 so, we had made love Wednesday–a lot! And so she’ll, she’s all, ‘I am going 
up and down the stairs, and you’re dripping out of me!’ So messy!
Oh how lovely. Haven’t I already seen this movie?
As the OC Weekly reports, 
Duvall has "blasted" efforts to promote gay marriage, and got a 100 percent score from the Capitol Resource Institute, which describes its mission as to "educate, advocate, protect, and defend family-friendly policies in the California state legislature". In March, a spokeswoman for the group called Duvall "a consistent trooper for the conservative causes," adding that "for the last two years, he has voted time and time again to protect and preserve family values in California."
See…this kind of thing is funny for a while (oh look at what just popped out of another conservative’s closet…!), but then it gets so soul wearying. I really need to remember that morality and values and honor and decency really do represent more in our lives then convenient hooks to drive the rubes to the polls with…that there is more to the human status then this runt represents.
People need to look…really look…at what’s motivating all those moral crusaders of the right, waving scarecrows bearing their neighbor’s faces. They’re just pushing your buttons because they know it works. And why is that?
In July 2008, hotelier and developer Doug Manchester donated $125,000 to help gather signatures for a proposition that would ban same-sex marriage in California. The early money was crucial to getting the initiative—which ultimately passed—on the ballot. At the time, he told The New York Times that he made the donation because of “my Catholic faith and longtime affiliation with the Catholic Church,” which preferred that marriage remain between a man and a woman. Indeed, the Catholic Church has vehemently opposed gay marriage. Then again, it’s also not too keen on divorce.
On Oct. 9, 2008, Manchester ended 43 years, eight months and nine days of marriage to Elizabeth Manchester by moving out of their La Jolla abode. The couple spent the next several months trying to reach a quiet settlement on how best to distribute millions of dollars in cash and other assets. In July, those talks totally broke down, and Doug started playing financial hardball with Elizabeth, allegedly draining the couple’s shared accounts and stealing her mail…
Let me guess…it was all those same-sex marriages the California supreme court allowed to stand that caused their divorce. Manchester was a critical player in the battle over Proposition 8. Specifically, he provided a big chunk of the cash that helped it get on the ballot…
Developer Doug Manchester and other prominent San Diego County businessmen have given significant financial support to an initiative that would ban same-sex marriage targeted for the November statewide ballot.
Manchester’s $125,000 donation has prompted a gay-rights activist to urge a boycott of the Manchester Grand Hyatt and the Manchester-owned San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina.
In addition to Manchester, Mission Valley developer Terry Caster has donated $162,500; Robert Hoehn, owner of Hoehn Motors in Carlsbad, has given $25,000; and La Jolla businessman Roger Benson has given $50,000, state records show.
Manchester said he was motivated by his strong Catholic faith.
“I personally believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman,” he said.
Donations from San Diego residents make up a significant part of the $1 million raised for the initiative.
That has allowed the campaign to hire professional signature gatherers to help collect the 700,000 signatures needed to qualify the constitutional amendment for the ballot, said Andrew Pugno, an attorney for Protectmarriage.com, which is sponsoring the amendment.
So now this prize bigot, after forcibly divorcing thousands of same sex couples in California, is having himself a messy divorce. Sweet. I hope your wife drags you over a bed of hot nails Doug. I hope she makes your life a living hell. And if you ever find yourself wondering why your private life has become so much fun and games for so many total strangers who don’t know you from Adam, go ask the jackass you see every morning in the bathroom mirror who it was that turned marriage into a scorched earth battleground and see if he doesn’t laugh in your face like I’m laughing in your face.
Jones And Yarhouse: We Will Report The Outcome No Matter How Embarrassing Our Badly Skewed Data Is To The Folks Who Are Paying Us For It
Last week the APA released its report on ex-gay therapy, to a somewhat muted response from the charlatans of the ex-gay political machine. Oh yes…we’re so very happy that the APA acknowledges that a patient’s religious needs must be taken into account, they said, politely skimming over the overwhelming evidence that trying to force gay people into straight jackets harms them deeply. You had to expect they wouldn’t leave it at that.
Now comes the "final" release of the Jones and Yarhouse "study" of ex-gay "therapy"…touted in that well known scientific peer reviewed publication, the Baptist Press…
Sure it does. You read through the brief article for a while and, of course, you see little nuggets like this one pop out at you:
Jones expressed frustration that the APA task force didn’t take their 2007 study seriously.
"They selectively apply rigorous scientific standards," he said…
Yes. Of course. It’s all a consperacy of the scientists to further the militant homosexual agenda. Oh…have I meantioned that Exodus paid Jones and Yarhouse for their labors? Naturally that didn’t affect their scientific rigorousity I’m sure.
Or…not…
While Jones and Yarhouse’s study appears to be very well designed, it quickly falls apart on execution. The sample size was disappointingly small, too small for an effective retrospective study. They told a reporter from Christianity Today that they had hoped to recruit some three hundred participants, but they found “many Exodus ministries mysteriously uncooperative.” They only wound up with 98 at the beginning of the study (72 men and 26 women), a population they describe as “respectably large.” Yet it is half the size of Spitzer’s 2003 study.
Jones and Yarhouse wanted to limit their study’s participants to those who were in their first year of ex-gay ministry. But when they found that they were having trouble getting enough people to participate (they only found 57 subject who met this criteria), they expanded their study to include 41 subjects who had been involved in ex-gay ministries for between one to three years. The participants who had been in ex-gay ministries for less than a year are referred to as “Phase 1″ subpopulation, and the 41 who were added to increase the sample size were labeled the “Phase 2″ subpopulation.
This poses two critically important problems. First, we just saw Jones and Yarhouse explain that the whole reason they did a prospective study was to reduce the faulty memories of “change experiences that happened in their pasts” — errors which can occur when asking people to go back as far as three years to assess their beginning points on the Kinsey and Shively-DeCecco scales. This was the very problem that Jones and Yarhouse hoped to avoid in designing a prospective longitudinal study, but in the end nearly half of their results ended up being based on retrospective responses.
[Emphasis mine] So basically their data was corrupted by the same half-assed sloppiness of the Spitzer study. Oh but wait…it gets better. Again from Burroway…
Whenever a longitudinal study is being conducted over a period of several years, there are always dropouts along the way. This is common and to be expected. That makes it all the more important to begin the study with a large population. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t terribly large to begin with; it started out at less than half the size of Spitzer’s 2003 study. Jones and Yarhouse report that:
Over time, our sample eroded from 98 subjects at our initial Time 1 assessment to 85 at Time 2 and 73 at Time 3, which is a Time 1 to Time 3 retention rate of 74.5%. This retention rate compares favorable to that of the best “gold standard” longitudinal studies. For example, the widely respected and amply funded National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (or Add Health study reported a retention rate from Time 1 to Time 3 of 73% for their enormous sample.
The Add Health Study Jones and Yarhouse cite began with 20,745 in 1996, ending with 15,170 during Wave 3 in 2001-2002. But this retention rate of 73% was spread over some 5-6 years, not the three to four years of Jones and Yarhouse’s study.
What’s more, the Add Health study undertook a rigorous investigation of their dropouts (PDF: 228KB/17 pages) and concluded that the dropouts affected their results by less than 1 percent. Jones and Yarhouse didn’t assess the impact of their dropouts, but they did say this:
We know from direct conversation that a few subjects decided to accept gay identity and did not believe that we would honestly report data on their experience. On the other hand, we know from direct conversations that we lost other subjects who believed themselves healed of all homosexual inclinations and who withdrew from the study because continued participation reminded them of the very negative experiences they had had as homosexuals. Generally speaking, as is typical, we lost subjects for unknown reasons.
Remember, Jones and Yarhouse described those “experiencing difficulty with change would be likely to get frustrated or discouraged early on and drop out of the change process.” And so assessing the dropouts becomes critically important, because unlike the Add Health study, the very reason for dropping out of this study may have direct bearing on both questions the study was designed to address: Do people change, and are they harmed by the process? With as much as a quarter of the initial population dropping out potentially for reasons directly related to the study’s questions, this missing analysis represents a likely critical failure, one which could potentially invalidate the study’s conclusions.
[Emphasis mine] Harm…what harm? We didn’t speak to anyone who was harmed…
But look a tad more closely at what Jones and Yarhouse "know"…
On the other hand, we know from direct conversations that we lost other subjects who believed themselves healed of all homosexual inclinations and who withdrew from the study because continued participation reminded them of the very negative experiences they had had as homosexuals.
Healed. Healed. They believed themselves healed. Not cured. Not changed. But…healed. This is the language of religion, not science. And now you know where Jones and Yarhouse were coming from, and why they were good with allowing data into their study that could only weaken it from a scientific point of view.
It didn’t matter. They needed bodies to get a big enough sample size that they could plausibly go on with it and give the kook pews something they could wave around and claim that scientists were conspiring against them on behalf of the godless homosexual menace. They would have known going into it, that the APA would regard their study as flawed because they engineered the flaws into it themselves. Anyone who was serious about it would have gone back to their funding and told them they couldn’t do it without more first year subjects (a lot more), and more participation from the drop-outs. But they kept on with it anyway. Because knowing whether or not ex-gay therapy works wasn’t the point. Knowing whether or not it harms the very people it purports to help wasn’t the point. Having something to wave back at the APA was the point. That promise that they would report the results whether or not they embarrassed Exodus was as empty as the promise that "change is possible". Neither one had a money back guarantee.
[Update…] Yarhouse is identified Here, as an evangelical psychologist and graduate of Regent University. Regent is Pat Robertson’s baby. This man is as likely to be objective about ex-gay therapy as he is to be a flying pig. Jones is of Wheaton College, which is described by The Princeton Review’s Best 351 Colleges thusly: "If the integration of faith and learning is what you want out of a college, Wheaton is arguably the best school in the nation with a Christ-based worldview." Well this team really looks like a couple of objective researchers to me…
[Update again…] Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin goes another round with this "study"…finds it not too much different from the previous round…
In short, the Jones and Yarhouse study was funded and fully supported by Exodus and conducted by two researchers who were avid supporters of ex-gay ministries. They wanted to study 300 participants, but after more than a year, they could only find 57 willing to participate. They then changed the rules for acceptance in order to increase the total to 98. After following this sample for 4 years, 25 dropped out. Of the remainder, only 11 reported “satisfactory, if not uncomplicated, heterosexual adjustment.” Another 17 decided that a lifetime of celibacy was good enough.
It Would Have Worked Too, If It Wasn’t For You Meddling Kids…
Captain Obvious has a message for all you ATM thieves out there. If you’re planning on planting one of your fake ATM bank card skimming machines inside a hotel lobby, don’t do it at one that’s hosting a hacker’s conference…
As the conference was kicking off a few days ago, attendees noticed that at ATM placed in the Riviera Hotel, which plays host to the annual event, didn’t quite look right, according to a senior conference organizer who identified himself only as Priest. "They looked at the screen where there would normally be a camera," he said. "It was a little bit too dark, so someone shined a flashlight in there and there was a PC."
The Music Industrial Complex…Still Digging Its Way To The Bottom…
Two headlines crossed my screen the other day…one concerning yet another grotesque MAFRIAA file sharing judgment. The other, this little tidbit from SlashDot…
The NY Times has an opinion piece that makes starkly clear the financial decline of the music industry. It’s accompanied by an infographic that cleverly renders the drop-off. The latest culprit accelerating the undoing of the music business is free, legal online music streaming.
"Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna’s 60th birthday. … 13- to 17-year-olds acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent. … [T]he percentage of 14- to 18-year-olds who regularly share files dropped by nearly a third from December 2007 to January 2009. On the other hand, two-thirds of those teens now listen to streaming music ‘regularly’ and nearly a third listen to it every day."
The moron who wrote that Time’s piece, seems to agree with the Music Industrial Complex that the internet is killing the business. Starting off with how the speed at which the industry is falling apart is "utterly breathtaking", he proceeds, as in the quote above, to blame this new fangled thing called streaming music.
First, piracy punched a big hole in it. Now music streaming — music available on demand over the Internet, free and legal — is poised to seal the deal.
Okay…when I was a kid, streaming music was called RADIO. And we listened to it constantly. For…free. Yes it had advertising…but back then it wasn’t the constant barrage of screaming in your face ads that broadcast radio is now. And then, as now, RADIO doesn’t pay per song royalties (at least not here in the U.S.). They pay a flat licensing fee to the big music royalty groups, that’s based on a sampling survey of their programming. Internet streaming radio on the other hand, has to pay Per Song Served. So…yes Mr. New York Times…kids are listening to steaming music for free. That doesn’t mean the Music Industrial Complex isn’t getting any money from it. In fact, they’re getting more Per Song then then get from broadcast radio.
When I was a kid back in the late 60s and early 70s, we listened to tons of music for free…on the RADIO. And what was more, if you had a good tape recorder and a good radio, you could tape the music you were listening to and play it back later, as often as you liked. But back then there was an incentive not to. You could actually buy the songs you really liked for a price most of us kids could afford. This New York Times jackass seems to want everyone to forget that…
This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They’re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.
Even if they choose to buy the music, the industry has handicapped its ability to capitalize on that purchase by allowing all songs to be bought individually, apart from their albums. This once seemed like a blessing. Now it looks more like a curse.
In previous forms, you had to take the bad with the good. You may have only wanted two or three songs, but you had to buy the whole 8-track, cassette or CD to get them. So in a sense, these bad songs help finance the good ones. The resulting revenue provided a cushion for the artists and record companies to take chances and make mistakes. Single song downloads helped to kill that.
Previous Forms. Previous Forms. Previous Forms.
Ahem…
This is a shot I took of myself (before the haircut…) with my 45rpm collection for a post last year. These are Singles. Well…doubles if you counted the B side that nobody ever listened to. That was what you bought back then when you were a kid in the 1960s into the early 70s. Yes…even during the days of the 8 track tapes. Music stores back then usually had a whole wall devoted to the 45 rpm singles, and they were all the top forty tunes, plus a lot of also-rans that sold enough to keep them on the shelves. Singles didn’t kill the music business back then. They brought tons of money into it. That was how teenagers bought music back then. Because that was what we could afford. Teenagers you see, have no money.
Those 8 track tape machines, an early attempt at letting car owners play their own tunes while they drove, were for…car owners. And they were an expensive add-on. And so were the tapes, which often jammed after getting warped while baking inside a car. Kids…that same age group that Mr. New York Times is bellyaching aren’t buying enough albums anymore…didn’t buy 8 track tapes, and only bought an album if it was a particularly favorite group and you had the money. So the Beatles for example, sold tons of albums. But super star bands like the Beatles were the exception. Until the mid 70s, most top-40 hits were singles and they were all available as 45rpm singles.
But the Music Industrial Complex wanted more. So they decided kill the single, to force listeners to buy albums. And in the late 70s it worked pretty much. We boomer children were getting older, had jobs, had money, and albums then weren’t extravagantly expensive compared to singles. You could buy a Led Zepplin album for about 5 to 8 bucks depending on where you shopped. Singles by then were selling for around a buck twenty-five, so if an album was mostly good to listen to, it made more sense to buy the album instead. But soon, many of the top-forty hits couldn’t be found on singles. That was a decision the music companies made, and…surprise, surprise…kids started taping songs and passing them around instead of buying. Music sharing didn’t start with the Internet and this generation of teenagers didn’t invent it.
You really began to see that the greed of the music companies would eventually kill them with the advent of the Compact Disk. Initially their expense was related to the newness of the technology, and its superiority over the vinyl record. But the price never came down and it’s still outrageously high. I remember one day shopping at Tower Records, and seeing a set of new releases of James Bond movie scores (I am a film music buff…). I picked up a few, thinking that my old vinyl LPs were getting a little worn and it would be nice to have fresh, all digital copies. I picked up a copy of Dr. No….From Russia With Love…GoldFinger…Thunderball…Live And Let Die… I had five CDs in hand and was about to walk to the cashier when I realized I was holding, and $22 a pop which was the price then, over one-hundred dollars of CDs in my hands…and there were only five of them. So I put them back.
Eventually I bought them second-hand for a lot less. I was a grown adult then, with a job that let me afford to buy CDs at the grossly inflated price the Music Industrial Complex was charging for them, and I still balked. $110…plus tax…for just five albums? I just couldn’t justify it. What the hell did the music companies think teenagers were going to do when faced with that decision? Let me see… Er…make copies?
The Music Industrial Complex profits from album sales in the 70s, and CD sales in the 90s were driven by the shear size of the baby boomer population. We liked our rock bands. We had jobs in the late 70s, and vinyl LPs were affordable, so the disappearance of the 45rpm single didn’t bother us too much. In the 90s we were buying our old favorite albums all over again in CDs and we had careers by then and we could afford it. But teenagers have no money.
If your business model is based on the impulse buying habits of teenagers, you need to make your product affordable to them. And convenient enough that the impulse to buy won’t flip over to the impulse to…well…borrow a friend’s copy and copy it. You can lecture them all you want about stealing, but when you can’t afford to buy music you copy it and that’s what a teenager is going to do. Ask me how I know. I still have those hours of music tapes I made off the radio. The nice thing about taping music off the radio I discovered back in the early 70s, was you could skip over the commercials.
Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, "We are — we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other …"
At this point, his co-host tried to — in that jokey morning show way — tell Kilmeade he needed to shut up, and quick, for his own sake. But he didn’t get the message, adding, "See, the problem is the Swedes have pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes …. Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society."
You can see the video of it on Salon. I suppose they’ll be touting the benefits of incest on FOX News next. It doesn’t get much purer then that…
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