Miscellany, Dec. 19

Posted on December 19, 2008 by Walter Olson
  • Christopher Hitchens on Rick Warren’s inauguration role. You know you want to read it, so go ahead. Meanwhile, Heather’s piece yesterday on Warren is getting enormous traffic and made Memeorandum.
  • I seldom (okay, almost never) agree with left-leaning blogger Scott Lemieux, but in this case he’s right: there was never the slightest prospect that the California Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage would mean that “any pastor could be considered doing hate speech” for preaching anti-gay views, as Rick Warren claims, let alone that churches would be forced to perform same-sex ceremonies, as other Prop 8 backers claimed. Speech-suppressive precedents to the contrary from Canada and Sweden are meaningless because those countries (alas) don’t have a First Amendment, while we (fortunately) do; relying on that Amendment, our courts have stood firm against attempts to turn “hate speech” into a legal offense. Precedents from the law of discrimination in public accommodations and business contexts (eHarmony, wedding photographers and copy shops), though deplorable from a libertarian standpoint as infringements of free association, won’t be extended to churches because churches aren’t public accommodations or businesses. The California Supreme Court itself made crystal clear that its decision imposed no new legal constraints on churches, and had it somehow reneged on this promise, the U.S. Supreme Court would have enforced the churches’ constitutional rights. The Yes on 8 campaign drew on the talents of some persons well versed in legal matters, who ought to have known that this constant ringing of false alarms was without justification. I think in many cases these persons probably did know, but held their tongues for tactical reasons.
  • Irish intellectual Conor Cruise O’Brien has died at 91; Alex Massie recalls his career. At Reason, Michael Moynihan notes O’Brien’s shifting role with respect to the Northern Ireland Troubles, with their countless atrocities on both Catholic and Protestant sides, in which the writer eventually (to quote the Daily Telegraph) came to serve as “the bête noire of Sinn Fein and the IRA”. Anyone who imagines that the impulse toward tribal violence based on religion lingers on only in faraway locales, and was long ago banished from the more advanced nations of Christendom, probably never spent much time hanging around, say, Boston as recently as the ’80s and ’90s, with its IRA-glorifying murals and Noraid baskets at bars. Moynihan remembers this milieu well.
  • As expected, and predicted in an earlier post, the United Nations General Assembly has now passed another “Defamation of Religion” resolution sponsored mostly by Islamic nations; the vote was 86 in favor, 53 against and 42 abstentions. Such resolutions don’t at present have much legal effect, but proponents could build on them in the future, as by arguing that they evidence an emerging international law norm. Coverage: UPI, Ron Bailey at Reason, Steven Edwards/Calgary Herald, Orac/Respectful Insolence.

About Walter Olson

Fellow at a think tank in the Northeast specializing in law. Websites include overlawyered.com. Former columnist for Reason and Times Online (U.K.), contributor to National Review, etc.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

12 Responses to Miscellany, Dec. 19

  1. J. says:
    December 20, 2008 at 11:49 am

    Hitchens had no problem routinely eviscerating Hillary, who was arguably the real secularist of the campaign. When Team Obama began to win, Hitchens also produced his usual Kelsey Grammar-on-speed rants criticizing Obama’s religious connections, Reverend Wright, Phleger, Biden’s catholicism, the debates at Warren’s xtian warehouse in Saddleback etc. A few months ago, the Sage of Slate offered his unequivocal support for Obama; now he’s fuming against Obama’s choice of Rev. Rick for Inaugurator. Paranoid Schizophrenia, thy name is Hitchens.

  2. Ploni Almoni says:
    December 20, 2008 at 12:01 pm

    “…tribal violence based on religion…”? No, actually it’s “tribal” violence based on nationality, or ethnicity if you prefer. The Catholics and Protestants (i.e., Irishmen and Ulstermen) aren’t fighting over the Real Presence or other theological issues. They’re two nations (“tribes”) fighting for political control. As Walker Connor pointed out in his classic Ethnonationalism, the two sides could be distinguished by their last names about as well as by religion. Similarly with other national conflicts such as the Israeli-Palestinian war. You can’t blame these fights on religion.

  3. mikespeir says:
    December 20, 2008 at 12:04 pm

    I don’t know that Hitchen’s support of Obama during the campaign means Hitchens is thus obliged to bless any and everything Obama might do thereafter.

  4. J. says:
    December 20, 2008 at 1:07 pm

    OK, but given Hitchens’ career as skewer of all things religious, it seems rather naive of him to pen numerous essays critical of the Obama campaign’s theocratic aspects, then flip-flop and support Obama (really, I suspect he was with McCain until Sarah Klondike appeared on the scene–), and then a few weeks later flip-flop and write this piece on Rev. Rick, knowing full-well who and what he had given his blessing to when he rallied for Team BO. As Mr. Secularist, he should have said don’t vote for either like back in Sept or Oct, and just stayed home with his case of Tanqueray or whatever on Vote Farce Day.

  5. Carter says:
    December 20, 2008 at 1:40 pm

    “there was never the slightest prospect that the California Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage would mean that “any pastor could be considered doing hate speech” for preaching anti-gay views”

    Until recently there wasn’t the slightest prospect courts would invent a right to homosexual marriage.

  6. ◄Dave► says:
    December 20, 2008 at 2:24 pm

    You can’t blame these fights on religion.

    Yes I can. I will give you the tribal nature of most human conflicts, including the two you cite. However, the religious shamans stoke these conflicts and keep them going long after the initial grievance should be relegated to history.

    I have a good friend who grew up in an Irish coastal village, a long way from Ulster and any of the strife. Yet, as a child, she was literally terrified to even step on the sidewalk in front of a Protestant church. The children would cross the street to walk down the other side, because the nuns in school had convinced them that god would strike them dead, if the so much as set one foot on a Protestant churches property. Such religious brainwashing runs deep in a tribe. Now, sixty years later and an atheist, she is still a bit suspicious of Protestants. 🙂

    Most Israelis are not practicing Jews, and would love to settle the conflict with the Palestinians; but it is the religious among them that can’t let go of the notion that their god promised them all of Judea as a homeland. Similarly, it is the radical Imams that keep Muslims, who live thousands of miles away from Israel, supporting the Palestinian terrorists, who won’t settle for anything less than wiping Israel off the map. Without that religious support, much of it from Muslims who are not even Arabs, the Palestinians would have compromised with the Israelis long ago. ◄Dave►

  7. Pingback: Secular Right » Ireland, the Middle East and religious strife

  8. Walter Olson says:
    December 20, 2008 at 9:33 pm

    I’ve done a new post prompted by Ploni Almoni’s comment above.

  9. Polichinello says:
    December 21, 2008 at 7:17 pm

    That’s definitely not one of Hitchen’s better pieces. It’s really, at bottom, a mish mash of snarling ad hominems.

    Here’s a howler:
    Speech-suppressive precedents to the contrary from Canada and Sweden are meaningless because those countries (alas) don’t have a First Amendment, while we (fortunately) do…

    Which is why you can run any political ad you want right before the election, right?

    That said, anti-“gay marriage” partisans would be better off laying down their problems in clear unbiblical terms. For example, “gay marriage” would give gay couple full equality with real marriages for adoption, thus harming children. So, all things being equal, a sane adoption agency would be barred from preferring a house with a mother and a father to one with two “mothers” or two “fathers”. Of course, there’s also the expansion of anti-discriminatory actions, as Olson mentioned above (reason enough to stop this idiocy). Then there’s the “gay ghetto” issue, which has proven precedents.

    These arguments still allow for some kind of civil union arrangement so homosexuals will still be free to game insurance companies and government bennies, and divorce lawyers can still make beaucoup bucks detaching Hollywood gays from their latest flavor of the month.

  10. Pingback: United Nations General Assembly Passes Draft resolutions A/C.3/63/L.22 and Rev.1 Regarding Defamation of Religion | Popehat

  11. Pingback: Secular Right » Has Christopher Hitchens Been Duped?

  12. Dave M says:
    December 22, 2008 at 4:11 pm

    As Walker Connor pointed out in his classic Ethnonationalism, the two sides could be distinguished by their last names about as well as by religion.

    As a native of that place, I’d say that Connor was at least to a degree wrong. To take two names in the news: O’Brien and Adams. Going on names alone, which one was the Unionist and which one the Nationalist?

Comments are closed.