Politics Archive

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Thoughts on the Removal of the Okalahoma Ten Commandments Monument - From Cowboy Churches to Silly Memes

Ten Commandments Monument RemovalIt's been a few weeks now since the monument of the Ten Commandments at the Oklahoma Capitol has been removed. But a story that just made the headlines here locally has reminded me of it, Local pastor plans to deliver Commandments on horseback. That's right. A pastor from Wichita Falls, John Riggs, upset by the Supreme Court decision that the statue must be removed, is going to personally deliver a hand-held sized granite tablet to the governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, who herself opposed the removal of the monument. Apparently, Riggs thinks that Christianity is under attack in the U.S., that "The ACLU is trying to wipe it out." Riggs "never thought we would have to defend our Christianity, especially here in the Heartland. It's a sad day in America." Yes - it's terribly sad when the Supreme Court upholds the First Amendment's establishment clause, and doesn't let politicians impose their religious beliefs on their entire constituency.

In another article, Cowboy Church takes 10 Commandments to Capitol by horse, Riggs further explained his motivation.

We're going back to the grassroots, because it's not easy, but we want people to know we need to go back and not forward. Go back to things we've left behind, which is primarily one nation under God.

I understand nostalgia, but one thing our country doesn't need to do is go backwards, turning back all the progress that's been made. When the country was founded, women couldn't vote, while black people could be owned as property. After the Civil War, at least slavery was illegal, but Jim Crow laws kept black people disenfranchised for generations. It wasn't until the '50s and '60s that the Civil Rights Movement finally got these laws overturned. Universal women's suffrage wasn't enacted in the U.S. until 1919 - over a century after the ratification of the Constitution. And it's only been this very year that marriage equality has been extended to homosexual couples. And that's not even addressing issues like poverty rate, violent crime, literacy, or any other host of factors that show that the modern day U.S. is a much better time to be alive for most Americans. Progress isn't always inevitable or smooth, and there are troubling trends right now that do need to be addressed (like income & wealth inequality), but at least that progress has happened.

Well, Briggs and the others traveling with him plan to make it to Oklahoma some time tomorrow. We'll see if they make any more headlines.

Related to this monument removal, I saw a really bad 'meme'* the other day on Facebook. I now forgot whose Facebook feed I saw it on, but I came across it again on Ed Brayton's Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Here it is:

Stupid Meme

That image would have it seem that in the name of secularism, the U.S. is destroying religious iconography in exactly the same way as radical Islamists are destroying iconography from other religions. What that meme conveniently leaves out is the same scene from just a bit later:

Ten Commandments Monument Removal

Those damn destructive secularists seem to be taking awfully good care of that religious monument. And according to the New York Times article from which that picture was taken, the monument is currently standing, intact, just a few blocks away.

The meme also leaves out the history of this particular monument. It wasn't installed until 2012**, when the lawmakers of Oklahoma already knew it was controversial and that they'd likely face legal challenges. It's not some timeless artifact, but a very recent breach of the separation of church and state.

Anyway, I'm glad the monument was removed from public property, and I'm glad it was done in such a way that the people who like the monument can save it and put it up somewhere else, as long as that somewhere else is private property, not government property.

Thumbnail Image Source: UlizaLinks.co.ke


*The scare quotes around meme are because I prefer the original definition of the term coined by Dawkins.

**Actually, the monument being removed is a replacement, installed in 2014, after the original was destroyed when a man crashed his car into it. Of course, it should go without saying that even though I disapproved of the monument in the first place, I strenuously disapproved of somebody intentionally destroying it.

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Yet Another Look at Ben Carson's Views on Evolution - His Creation vs. Evolution Speech

Ben CarsonI've been writing about Ben Carson quite a bit recently (you can see all my Carson entries here), including a few entries specifically devoted to his stance on evolution. In a recent entry, Ben Carson Being Noticed by Popular Science Writers, I embedded a video that showed Carson giving a speech on Creationism vs. Evolution. In an addendum to that entry, I added some commentary that I think is deserving of being expanded into a full entry.

First, here's the video. Note that this was posted on YouTube by the Adventist News Network, not an opponent of Carson's. As bad as the video makes Carson look, the Adventist News Network wasn't intentionally trying to embarrass him.

My previous entries dealing with Carson's views on evolution had been based on short interviews or comments he's made, but those don't illustrate the depth of his ignorance and arrogance like this video. This was a 40 minute speech, a prepared speech that he had time to research, where he knew the topic ahead of time. This was not an off the cuff remark, or an answer to an interview question he wasn't expecting. This was a neurosurgeon, with the respect that goes along with that profession, giving a presentation to an entire crowd of people. And this speech is what he came up with.

His misunderstandings and ignorance of evolution are absolutely appalling, worse than I would expect from a high school biology student. So many of his misconceptions could have been cleared up just by reading a popular introduction to evolution, like Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True, or Donald Prothero's Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. If he was too cheap to buy a book, he could have gone to the Internet and sites like The TalkOrigins Archive. His misunderstandings of astronomy and cosmology were equally egregious, not to mention his mangling of a few other topics he brought up (including a topic I'm very surprised he mangled - memory). And that's not even getting into his implications that the Adversary (aka the Devil) is responsible for the idea of evolution.

I'm tempted to go into a point by point refutation of Carson, but there are so many falsehoods and misunderstandings, it would make this post extremely long, and that's not really what I want to focus on (update - I actually did go through nearly point by point in the entry, A Response to Ben Carson's Creation vs. Evolution Video). Rather, I'll direct readers to Jerry Coyne's entry, Ben Carson on evolution: an ignorant (or duplicitous) Presidential candidate, which addresses many of Carson's claims about evolution, and Lawrence Krauss's article in the New Yorker, Ben Carson's Scientific Ignorance, which addresses many of Carson's claims about cosmology and the Big Bang. And just for good measure, I'll also direct readers to the Talk Origins Index to Creationist Claims, which covers a huge amount of common creationist claims, not just those put forth by Carson in this somewhat recent speech.

Now, as I've said before, this level of ignorance in itself is enough to disqualify Carson from any serious consideration for the presidency*. I expect presidential candidates to have good enough educations to have basic scientific literacy. I'd similarly reject a presidential candidate who thought the Sun orbited the Earth, or really, who couldn't correctly answer every question in the NSF's scientific literacy survey. The president may not have to understand quantum mechanics, but they should know high school level science.

What makes this particular example so bad is Carson's extreme arrogance, and his inability to realistically analyze his own shortcomings. Like I said above, this wasn't an off the cuff response. This was a prepared speech that he had time to research. But he obviously either didn't do any research at all, or researched so poorly that he never corrected his own misconceptions. Even the parts where he mentions talking to scientists make you question his honesty or his intelligence, because there are answers to the questions he supposedly asked. So Carson either didn't talk to scientists, didn't understand their responses, or went in with a closed mind and wasn't engaged in an honest open dialog. I mean, for goodness sake, he thinks evolution predicts eyeballs must have poofed into existence with no precursors (a claim easily put to rest just by looking at living organisms), and that fossil shells on mountaintops are evidence of a global flood (has he never heard of plate tectonics?).

Most of us are ignorant about a whole range of issues, but we don't go around giving speeches about those issues. Yet Carson, despite his dreadful ignorance on evolution and cosmology, was still arrogant enough to give a 40 minute speech to an audience who trusted that he was knowledgeable on these topics. It just boggles the mind that Carson felt he was qualified to speak on topics about which he is so obviously completely ignorant. The fact that he was arrogant enough to do so, and that he was so clueless that he couldn't recognize his own incompetence, makes him completely unfit for consideration for the presidency.


* This type of ignorance is forgivable in most people as long as they're willing to learn about it once you point out their misunderstandings. Maybe they weren't the best of students when they were younger, maybe they'd been misled by authority figures over the evolution/creationism controversy, maybe their schools didn't cover evolution well for political/religious reasons. There are a whole host of reasons that most people might not understand evolution. However, I have higher expectations of presidential candidates than I do of 'most people'.

Friday, October 2, 2015

Ben Carson Being Noticed by Popular Science Writers

Ben CarsonI've been pointing out Ben Carson's anti-intellectual stances in regards to science for a while, now (you can see all my Carson entries here). But just recently, he seems to have caught the attention of many popular science writers. This seems to have a lot to do with a recent YouTube video, which I've embedded below. More specifically, it seems to have a lot to do wtih a Buzzfeed article commenting on the video, Ben Carson: Big Bang A Fairy Tale, Theory Of Evolution Encouraged By The Devil. The video is a speech Carson gave back in 2011, but which was just uploaded this year. It was posted by Adventist News Network, who pretty much agreed with everything Carson was saying. In other words - as bad as the video makes Carson look, they weren't intentionally trying to embarrass him.

I've seen a spate of articles and blog entries about Carson recently that seem to coincide with that Buzzfeed piece. The most prominent article was in The New Yorker, and was written by Lawrence Krauss, Ben Carson's Scientific Ignorance. Being a physicist and cosmologist himself, Krauss commented mostly on Carson's mangling of the Big Bang theory and the history of the universe. Here's what Krauss had to say after quoting a particularly bad series of statements by Carson.

It is hard to find a single detailed claim in his diatribe that is physically sensible or that reflects accurate knowledge about science. His central claim--that the second law of thermodynamics rules out order forming in the universe after the Big Bang--is a frequent misstatement made by creationists who want to appear scientifically literate. In reality, it is completely false.

Krauss went on to address many of Carson's erroneous statements, giving real explanations for many of Carson's misunderstandings. Towards the end of the article, Krauss moved past simply correcting Carson, and presented some commentary that I agree with completely:

It is one thing to simply assert that you don't choose to believe the science, in spite of a mountain of data supporting it. It's another to mask your ignorance in such a disingenuous way, by using pseudo-scientific, emotion-laden arguments and trading on your professional credentials. Surely this quality, which reflects either self-delusion or, worse still, a willingness to intentionally deceive others, is of great concern when someone is vying for control of the nuclear red button.


On his website, Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne wrote his own entry on Carson, Ben Carson on evolution: an ignorant (or duplicitous) Presidential candidate. Coyne himself is a biologist, and so the bulk of his article was devoted to correcting Carson's untrue remarks on evolution. He did offer a bit of commentary, though such as his introductory paragraph.

I don't care how good a surgeon Ben Carson was (and he was reportedly a terrific one), he's still pig-ignorant when it comes to evolution, geology, and cosmology. And that ignorance--regardless of whether he doesn't know the facts, knows them but eludes them and is lying for Jesus, or truly believes that the facts support creation ex nihilo--makes him unqualified to be President. For the first possibility means he's uninformed (especially as a doctor); the second means he's dishonest; and the third means he's blinded to reality by his fundamentalist faith, Seventh Day Adventism.


Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy also got in on the act, writing Ben Carson: Evolution is Satanic and the Big Bang Is a Fairy Tale. Here was the introduction to his article.

At one point in time, GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson may have been best known as an excellent, even groundbreaking, neurosurgeon. In recent years, though, he's done everything he can to throw that reputation away.

Plait had references to a lot of Carson's statements, not just the 2011 speech, as well as a lot of information refuting Carson's claims. Of course, being the Bad Astronomy website, Plait focused on the Big Bang, but he also spent a bit of time on evolution. After explaining how he tries to be polite when dealing with rank and file creationists, Plait went on to say this.

I take a different stance when it's a politician who espouses these views, especially when he's running for the highest office in America. If someone wants to run this country, then he better show that he has a solid grasp on reality. Dismissing and actively denigrating strongly understood science--whether it's astronomy, biology, or climatology--is at the very least cause to dump him.


Although he can be a bit brash for many readers, I'll also mention P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula, who wrote You don't have to be smart to be an MD. He wasn't insulting medical doctors in general, but making the valid point that expertise in one field, even particularly noteworthy expertise like Carson's in pediatric neurosurgery, doesn't translate to expertise in other fields. Here were Myers' closing remarks.

Being a neurosurgeon doesn't preclude being knowledgeable, but clearly we have to overcome this bias of using an MD degree as a proxy for intelligence. / Fortunately, Ben Carson is working hard to demolish that preconception.


I know I've been writing quite a bit about Ben Carson recently. But now it seems that notable science writers are starting to pay more attention to him, as well. So, if you want to see what other people have to say about the man, as well as corrections to his mangling of science by people actually in the fields he's criticizing, go read those articles.

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Added 2015-10-02: I finally took the time to watch that whole video embedded in this post, and not just rely on the excerpts that other people have provided. Wow. And I do mean wow. I'd read short interviews of Carson's beliefs on evolution, and some of the comments he's made, but they don't illustrate the depth of his ignorance and arrogance like this video. This was a 40 minute speech, a prepared speech that he had time to research, where he knew the topic ahead of time. This was not an off the cuff remark, or an answer to an interview question he wasn't expecting. This was a neurosurgeon, with the respect that goes along with that profession, giving a presentation to an entire crowd of people. And this speech is what he came up with.

His misunderstandings and ignorance of evolution are absolutely appalling, worse than I would expect from a high school biology student. So many of his misconceptions could have been cleared up just by reading a popular introduction to evolution, like Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True, or Donald Prothero's Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. If he was too cheap to buy a book, he could have gone to the Internet and sites like The TalkOrigins Archive. His misunderstandings of astronomy and cosmology were equally egregious, not to mention his mangling of a few other topics he brought up.

Now, this type of ignorance on its own is forgivable in most people (though I would expect a surgeon who had to study biology to be a bit more knowledgeable, and I'd certainly expect presidential candidates to have good enough educations to understand basic science). What makes it so bad in Carson's case is that despite his dreadful ignorance, he was still arrogant enough to give a 40 minute speech to an audience who trusted that he was knowledgeable on the topic. That attitude on Carson's part is the worst part of this. Most people are ignorant about a whole range of issues, but we don't go around giving speeches about those issues. And if we were invited to talk about something we didn't know about, we'd at least do some research on it. It just boggles the mind that Carson felt he was qualified to speak on a topic about which he is so obviously completely ignorant.

Friday, September 25, 2015

The Ben Carson Index

Ben CarsonI've written quite a bit about Ben Carson on this site. It started off when he was much less well known, and was invited to be give the commencement speech at the local university, but with his rise in political popularity, it has expanded into two in-depth series and several more individual entries. So, to give one location with links to all of my Ben Carson entries, I've created this index. If I post more about him, I'll try to remember to add a link here.


Individual Entries

Here are individual entries, in chronological order.


First Series - A Critical Examination of Ben Carson

This was my first attempt at an in-depth investigation of Carson's political positions. I tried to be fair by looking at a 'snapshot' of the articles on his own homepage at the time, rather than focus on issues where I knew I disagreed with him. But, because he's written so many op-eds for the Washington Times, and this series only looked at a small part of the totality of his writing, it didn't necessarily address the most important issues, which is a big part of the reason for the second series below. Still, there are some pretty good entries in this series.


Second Series - Ben Carson on the Issues

This second series looked mostly at the issues on Carson's own campaign website in the section, Ben on the Issues. I figured that was a good way to pick the issues he himself found most important to discuss, without anyone being able to accuse me of cherry-picking Carson's worst stances. However, there were two major issues that Carson failed to address on his website, which I thought were important enough to add to the series - Climate Change and Marriage Equality. Note that the first entry covers so many individual issues because they're each covered only briefly, while the rest of the series addresses the issues a little more fully.

 

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Ben Carson - On the Issues, Part VI - Marriage Equality

Ben CarsonThis entry is part of a series looking at Ben Carson's stance on political issues. For this series, I'm mostly looking at the issues identified on Carson's own website in the section, Ben on the Issues. I figured that was a good way to pick the issues he himself found most important to discuss, without anyone being able to accuse me of cherry-picking Carson's worst stances. An index of all the issues can be found on the first post in the series, Ben Carson - On the Issues, Part I.

This entry, the last of the series, addresses Carson's stance on marriage equality. This wasn't covered on Carson's website, but I consider it a very important contemporary topic, so I figured it was worth discussing.

There's a group called the National Organization for Marriage. Much like other misleadingly named groups like the American Family Association, they're not really in support of marriage as a whole, but in only one narrowly defined definition, trying to restrict the rights of gay people from being able to marry. They have a marriage pledge that they've asked presidential candidates to sign, and Carson is one of the candidates who's signed it.

Here are the first and second positions from the pledge.

One, support a federal constitutional amendment that protects marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Two, oppose and work to overturn any Supreme Court decision that illegitimately finds a constitutional "right" to the redefinition of marriage. This includes nominating to the U.S. Supreme Court and federal bench judges who are committed to restraint and applying the original meaning of the Constitution, and appointing an attorney general similarly committed.

I wrote about marriage equality years ago when I was still a Christian, in Legality of Homosexual Marriage. I cringe now at some of the things I wrote, but even back then, I recognized that it was not the government's place to try to legislate morality, nor to impose sectarian religious definitions of marriage on the American people as a whole. I even specifically addressed the possibility of a Constitutional amendment, since then president Bush had recently raised the issue.

The amendments in the Bill of Rights were passed to protect people's personal freedoms. All of the subsequent amendments to the Constitution, except for one, have been passed to give additional rights and freedoms, or as changes to the structure of the government. The exception, the 18th Amendment, Prohibition, was repealed [13] years later by the 21st amendment because it didn't work. The Constitution should not be used to take away freedom, it should be used to guarantee rights. If a constitutional amendment is going to be passed regarding gay marriage, it should only be used to protect it, not to make it illegal.

Thankfully, per the recent Supreme Court decision, the Court's interpretation of the 14th Amendment does guarantee that right to all people, heterosexual and homosexual alike, so an amendment guaranteeing people's freedom to marry is unnecessary. But people like Ben Carson and this National Organization for Marriage want to pass a new Constitutional amendment and fight against this recent ruling, all to deny a fundamental right to people. That's simply horrendous.

At a recent rally, Carson briefly discussed issues related to marriage equality. You can listen to these remarks yourself on MSNBC, Ben Carson speaks out on Kim Davis controversy, starting at about 42 seconds in, but I've done my best to transcribe his remarks below.

One of the things that came up this week of course, Miss Davis, down in Kentucky, who had to go to jail which was I think inappropriate. There were other things that could have been done. That was probably not the right one. Because the Supreme Court had not overstepped its boundaries and done what they did at the time that she took that job. So the circumstances changed. And all she was asking is that her name not be put on the documents. She was not trying to obstruct anybody from doing anything other than that.

I've already discussed Kim Davis in the appropriately titled entry, A Few Thoughts on Kim Davis. Davis was refusing to do her job as an elected official, plain and simple. Public officials don't get to choose to enforce only the laws that were in effect at the time they started working. Just imagine if police officers attempted similar justifications. If, after the Supreme Court decision, Davis felt that she could no longer perform her duties, then she should have resigned (had she been a normal employee and not elected, she could have simply been fired).

The federal judge in this case, David Bunning, gave Davis plenty of opportunity to comply with the ruling before jailing her. To quote a Washington Post article, Kim Davis is off to jail for refusing to do her job, he even offered her a last minute deal "to 'purge' her contempt of court by allowing her deputies to sign same-sex marriage licenses in her place." She refused the offer (at least before going to jail). It was her refusal to comply with court rulings, and the fact that she blocked any compromises that would have allowed others in the office to issue marriage licenses, that got her thrown in jail for contempt of court. And frankly, when a person tries to use their government position to impose their own personal religious convictions and oppress other citizens, I don't feel much sympathy for that person spending a few days in jail.

I also take issue with Carson's wording of the Supreme Court 'overstepping' its boundaries. This type of interpretation is exactly what the Supreme Court is supposed to do. Congress and Senate pass laws, but if those laws violate the Constitution, then it's up to the Supreme Court to strike those laws down. It doesn't even matter if the laws were passed by a public referendum and have majority public support - laws that violate the Constitution are still illegal. In this case, the Court found that these laws violated the 14th Amendment, and ruled accordingly. If Carson and his ilk don't like this ruling, they should be (and like I wrote above, they are) trying to pass a new Amendment to overturn the 14th and restrict people's rights. But when he talks about the Supreme court 'overstepping' its boundaries simply for doing its job, it doesn't leave me very impressed with his understanding of civics.

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So, that wraps up this series. I've learned my lesson, though, and won't say this is the last time I'll discuss Carson. If he stays high in the polls, I'm sure I'll be motivated to write more about him. Someone with views and positions as bad as Carson's deserves to have those positions called out.

Image Source for Ben Carson: Christian Post, Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

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