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Toleration, respect, and bigotry

Ari Kohen on an Althouse/Loury bloggingheads discussion of opposition to SSM on religious grounds:

Religions aren’t monolithic; if people really are involved in deep spiritual reflection on the matter of homosexuality, then they will surely be able to find an interpretation of their religious texts that allows for the kind of evolution that President Obama described. This doesn’t mean I’m not serious about practicing Judaism; it means I’m serious about finding a way to reconcile my belief in the teachings of Judaism with my belief that people should be treated equally. But, obviously, one must actually have both of these beliefs.

What do we call someone who either fails to consider the alternative teaching of his or her religion or rejects that teaching because it doesn’t lead to continued condemnation of gays and lesbians, someone — in other words — who doesn’t actually have both a religious belief and a belief in equality?

With apoligies to Loury and Althouse, I think I have to call it bigotry.

Indeed. A couple of further thoughts:

This is the kind of discussion in which the differences between religious toleration and respect are noteworthy. A bare-bones sort of religious toleration simply demands that religious views are permitted. Obviously, this is and has been met, and scaremongering that a world in which SSM is legally permitted will not threaten this. A somewhat more robust (and, I think, misguided) conception of religious toleration, which Loury and Althouse could, arguably, be interpreted as advancing, suggests that what should be legally protected in the name of toleration should also be social protected, presumably for similar reasons.

This mode of thinking is, I think, at odds with an important form of religious respect. Either version of toleration is often at odds with a robust conception of respect. Where toleration treats the actual content and process of formation as a sort of black box, religious respect treats the claim that religion is, in fact, a meaningful and potentially successful source of actual religious values. Respect means pointing out failure, as Kohen does in his post. The failure of religion as a foundation for morality is obviously not universal, as many people use religious logic to come to the conclusion that gay people should be treated fairly. But respect can’t simply mean accepting, at face value, every claim made. That wouldn’t be a respectful way to treat a five year old.

Finally, it needs to be said more often and more loudly that the case that opposing the legalization of same sec marriage is, in fact, a form of intolerant religious bigotry. There exist many religious gay people (and religious communities that accept them) who believe that a) same sex partners are capable of the same deep and permanent connection that opposite sex couples are, and b) there is substantial religious and social value in understanding and recognizing those relationships as marriage. In advocating that the state exclude same sex couples from marriage, the religious freedom of these peoples and communities isn’t respected.

Much of what Loury says in the clip about not writing off people who are a bit slower to shake their long-held prejudices rings true to me. But there is a difference between saying “Joe holds a view that is bigoted” and “Joe is an entirely horrible, monstrous person”. Loury conflates the two, but he needn’t and shouldn’t.

Responses to sex trafficking

Elevating a comment from the Erik’s post:

 

The scholarship on sex trafficking portrays a much more complex picture of the sex industry. Pointing to this complexity is not a rationalization of human rights abuses. But it is necessary both for understanding what the problem of the sex industry is (presumably there are lots of very different sex industries, but this is an oversimplification), and for recognizing the humanity of the people within it.

This is very, very true. I would also add that Augustin’s worry about the ideological foundations of ‘rescuers’ is a reasonable one. There’s a good long history of moral panics over sexual slavery producing action and responses in response that do very little to address the actual problem but produce other, less than ideal outcomes. Worrying about the ideology behind the rescue is valuable even if the act of rescue itself remains a net positive.

100 years ago our country was in the throes of a moral panic about “white slavery,” which was largely (but not entirely) fictional and deeply bound up with a host of anxieties associated with white middle class masculine identity at the time. In particular it was bound up with anxieties about immigrants, and could be read as a precursor to the dramatic and draconian immigration restrictions that would arrive in the coming years. From a popular tract at the time, Ernest Bell (Secretary of the Illinois Vigilence Association) described the crisis in exactly these terms:

Unless we make energetic and successful war upon the red light districts and all that pertains to them, we shall have Oriental brothel slavery thrust upon us from China and Japan, and Parisian white slavery, with all its unnatural and abominable practices, established among us by French traders. Jew traders, too, will people our “levees” with Polish Jewesses and any others who make money for them. Shall we defend our American civilization, or lower our flag to the most despicable foreigners—French, Irish, Italians, Jews and Mongolians? (source)

The attempted rescue was a piece of legislation called the White-Slave Traffic Act, popularly known as the Mann act. This piece of legislation didn’t do much to actually rescue or prevent slavery, but it turned out to be a handy tool for the legal persecution of prominent black men whose status allowed them the ability to openly defy the sexual racial order of the day.

But things are different today, of course. For one thing, the trafficking in sexual slaves is an actual, real phenomenon. But there are still similarities worth noting. For one, the problem is exaggerated. I’ve talked to a number of students who think victims of sex trafficking is essentially synonymous with ‘modern slavery’. But it’s a trivial very small part of the larger problem of slavery, comprising 2-3% of the world’s slave population. Furthermore, it’s drawn the attention of the world of both NGOs and States in a way that no other form of slavery has. But the international effort to fight sex trafficking has resulting in significant state action, namely, the Trafficking Protocol to the UN convention on organized crime, signed by Clinton in 2000 and ratified by the Senate in 2005. It is often praised by its advocates as a blow against ‘slavery’, despite explicitly ignoring 97% of the world’s slaves. Another salient feature of the trafficking protocol is the (intentional) conflation of trafficked persons and smuggled persons. In other words, the enthusiasm for doing ‘something’ about sex trafficking was in large part co-opted by another goal shared by states but often contrary to the interests of human freedom; the ongoing sisyphean effort to “secure” borders against unwanted migrants. One can grant broad legitimacy to this desire without conceding that it lacks the moral imperative of fighting sex trafficking.

In part because the principle legal instrument to fight sex trafficking was co-opted by a desire to secure borders, the line between trafficked women and smuggled unauthorized migrant, already blurred in practice by unscrupulous smugglers (who owe their lucrative trade to the desire ‘control’ borders), is now blurred in theory and law as well. The result is a good deal of the agency of impoverished migrant women gets erased in the process.

While individual acts of rescue are (usually) a net good, it would be a mistake to infer that that goodness renders the ideological motivations and general attitude behind rescue unworthy of critical examination. In general, this issue is sufficiently and thoroughly fraught with complications; the kind of confident moral outrage about the right way to think about these things (and I think Agustin and many of her critics in the thread below are potentially guilty here) is almost certainly misplaced.

Recommended reading: Hathaway, The Human Rights Quagmire of “Human Trafficking”; Quirk, The Anti-Slavery project, ch. 8. On White Slavery and the Mann act, I recommend Grittner’s White Slavery: Myth Ideology and American Law.

Marriage Equality in Washington

After the tragic about-face that killed it at the last minute in Maryland, it’s hard to be optimistic. Still, chances are now looking respectable. That the votes are there in the House seems clear; the Senate is where the challenge lies. As of now there are 23 Y and 20 N along with 6 undecided, so we only need two. Here’s a profile of the six people currently standing in the way of my home state becoming the 8th state (er, I mean 7th, I was counting DC) to join the right side of history.

There’s certainly a fair amount of potential here. I’ve been led to believe that Fain has state-wide ambition at age 31; a no vote will tarnish his emerging reputation as a moderate Republican. Hill could probably use a gentle push from the corporate bohemoth in his district (and his former employer), Microsoft’s open support for both civil unions and anti-discrimination certainly played a positive role in both those recent battles (and lead to a local deranged lunatic who fancies himself a player in the religious right to hilariously attempt to spearhead a boycott of Microsoft). But beyond that, a yes vote would certainly contribute to Hill’s chances of keeping his job; his district is increasingly liberal, particularly on social issues such as this. (Liberal Democrats represent this district in the house; they both got more votes than he did in 2010, a year that saw him retain (win) his seat with a slim margin, despite the favorable conditions for Republicans.)

I’m more optimistic about the two Republicans than I am about the four Democrats, all of whom are members of the so-called “roadkill caucus” that played a major role in squandering the State Democratic party’s 4 year window of supermajorities from 2006-2010. Haugen may be the best bet; she voted for civil unions (after waivering publicly) in 2009. As Eli Sanders notes, her current stated position isn’t a coherent reason to vote against the bill, as the issue is very likely to be on the 2012 ballot should it pass the legislature this year. I’ve heard her interviewed a few times, on this and other issues, and I’m not quite sure how to put this diplomatically–let’s just say often struggles to make sense in her public statements and explanations of her own position. She seems to vacillate between claiming she always votes for what she thinks is right, and she always votes for the position of 50% +1 of her constituents, and not seeming to recognize any possible contradiction. Still, she speaks compassionately and emotionally about gay rights, and seems potentially persuadable. She’s choking up a bit here as some of the good people of the 10th district press her on the issue. Whether her view that her district opposes marriage equality is sound is not entirely clear to me; it’s a R-leaning swing district, but the most current polling I’m aware of shows 55% planning to vote yes on a hypothetical referendum on marriage equality, with only 38 planning to vote no. If that holds, I’d wager the tally in her district would be very close to 50-50.

Strange libertarian argument of the day

This post, in which Andrew Cohen attempts to make a libertarian case for requiring licences to raise children, is apparently not meant as a parody. This argument pairs nicely, I think, with Murray Rothbard’s argument that parents should be free to starve their children to death if they wish (but not to assault them! Because that’s a distinction with tremendous moral importance!). I think the most succinct way to think about libertarian’s problem with children is this: Two of the central commitments of libertarianism are anti-statism and an a strong focus on individual rights, understood in strictly ‘negative’ terms. There’s more tension between these two commitments than most libertarians care to admit, but children expose in a precise and ruthless way. If you lead with anti-statism, you end up in danger of Rothbard’s vile madness; if you lead with individual rights protection, you risk Cohen’s path, in which case real and actual dangers of tyranny, which libertarians should be particularly attuned to, are casually theorized away. It is certainly true that just about any individualistic, rights-based theory has a very difficult time with children, but libertarianism in particular has a tendency to collapse spectacularly in the face of children.

In comments, Jacob Levy makes the argument that the real culprit here is so-called ‘ideal theory’ in which some constraints are treated as fixed, and others are assumed away. This is certainly true, and it bears a family resemblance to outlandish, ahistorical and transparently awful and/or appalling policy proposals from left-liberal philosophers  like Peter Singer and Philip Van Parijs (such as financial compensation for those who can’t find a marriage partner and maximum voting ages, in the case of the latter, and the permissibility of euthanasia for certain infants, in the case of the former).  On the other hand, I suspect there’s a distinction worth making between ‘really bad ideas that come excessively abstract thinking’ and ‘really bad ideas that come from excessively abstract thinking and badly violate an alleged core principle.’ It’s particularly striking that the thing that gets uncritically idealized by Cohen is state capacity, in an area where the reasons to be skeptical about state capacity are particularly and obviously strong.